Page 69 of Of Skulls Of Shackles

“You gave me the answer, my queen,” she said. “I know how things have always been, and there is no healing to be gained from that. I have chosen which side of the sword to topple down. Nothing waits for me in what has always been.”

Wise.Brave. Bold.“I will do everything I can.”

“I know that too,” she whispered. “What first?”

The king shouted threats. Doors opened at random in the buckling walls, a sign of his undoing. There was more to come. “A reversal in fullness, Princess. Protocol eight.”

ChapterFifteen

A puzzle, truly

Some hours ago, I had summoned Sign, Seal, and Deliver. They had heightened the king’s fear and pushed him closer to the memory of the protocol that broke him.

Since his union, love had interfered in King Raise’s purpose, yet I wondered if Princess Raise had not accidentally fixed that already by helping her king withraisingmatters. Otherwise would not ancients have filled princes with the power to control their king time and again?

We had been distracted by the warping, believing love to be the culprit.

Perhaps it was.

But a broken king could not help me to save a world and every creature within. Once King Raise was shackled to my queendom, then I would have greater control over this stairway territory. Perhaps that was all the cure needed.

I rested my hands on the stone wall and pulsed my power into his kingdom. The same strategy had revealed the map of King Change’s haunted forest and where he hid.

Strangely, doing so revealed nothing at all about this territory other than the sheer expanse of it. There was no lattice of power uncovered, nor weaknesses highlighted.

“Hours, and nothing,” fretted the princess. “We are halfway through the day.”

So we were. Because I no longer believed the answer resided in torturing the king again. We had to do the opposite. We had to counter what had been broken, yet how could that be achieved?

I circled the table, and pawns stepped back.

The king tracked me with frenzied eyes.

“Princes were filled with ancient power to restrain you and enforce protocol eight,” I murmured.

Pawns hung their heads.

I had been right to call them because they had carried immense guilt from that interaction with their king. That guilt had driven them to uphold his purpose so strongly that they began to isolate from monsterdom too. That guilt was some of this problem. “If pawns were filled with ancient power,” I mused, “then a king should be.”

King Raise began to struggle again in earnest. Yes, I had felt the ancient ring in my words too. Surprisingly, I had felt little madness since descending into this kingdom, and I could not say why that may be.

I splayed my hands over King Raise’s blank face and pushed my power within him. He arched off the table, and I cringed against the knowledge of what he would feel. My power was as mud filling his lungs and organs. I was setting him in stone, pushing his blood out so my dark brand of monsterdom might erase everything he was.

He would become my vessel for a time as pawns had become a vessel for ancients.

I knew this because the king did not resist me. He could not. He had been seized from doing so by forces that monsters did not truly understand. By ancients.

And so the path forward formed.

I filled him with ancient power, and he struggled and thrashed and arched and moaned in body but not in magic.

Until he did not. King Raise surrendered in body.

Then, quite simply, I saw the map of his territoryand power. Unlike King Change’s kingdom,thisking kept the secrets of his kingdom within.I staggered at the utter mess inside King Raise. The tragic, broken mess. “Broken indeed, and no connection between.”

Bile rose in my throat.

“My queen,” whispered Sign. “Have you discovered somewhat of something?”

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