Page 71 of Of Skulls Of Shackles

His hand was in mine, and as I stumbled up the stairs, the king crawled next to me.

I could not answer him. I could not see that we could make it.

Another staircase.

Another.

“Seven remain,” he said.

My vision was a blur. Sweat trickled over patch and stitch. I could not feel my connection to ancestral mothers, nor a connection to King See or other monsters. In this deep weariness and futile hope, I felt utterly alone. As if I had walked into the haze already.

“You are nearly there,” said King Raise. “Call another, young queen.”

I groaned as I listened to him.

When he whispered to urge me to connect the next stairway, and the next, I listened again.

There was great importance in a foot soldier, I was learning. Here was the most dedicated king. A king determined to do what was asked, no matter his feelings of aptitude.

Here was a king to whisper encouragement to a queen when she needed it.

I adjusted my grip on his hand. “Thank you, sir.”

“Thank you,” he said after a beat. “Now again.”

I did so, but with four stairways to go, I could not feel a scrap of power within me remaining.

My knees shook. But I could not fall to them. There was great significance in staying upright in this battle. Knees were a conquering part of a king and queen’s anatomy.

King Raise was already on both of his.

“Your key, sir,” I croaked. “Give me the keys to your kingdom.”

“My keys?”

He was confused, and in this place there was no trickery, and so I knew his confusion to be real.

There was panic then, because I could not pull us out of this place now. Not due to the incomplete stairways in Raise’s soul, but because my power had run dry. His was locked up in mine.

We were trapped.

I laughed, then, because such ironies must be appreciated in immortality.

My laughter broke off when someone touched my physical body. I could not see them from here, of course. But I could feel that the hand was soft and feminine.

Where my body stood next to the table holding King Raise, his princess had taken my hand. She flipped it, and from the great distance, a thud and scratch echoed to reach me with Raise’s soul.

A weight landed in my hand, a cool weight. Heavy. Coarse.Stone.

“Stone key,” I said.

“What do you mean?” asked the crawling king.

But I would not tell him that his princess had held the key to his kingdom, nor would I punish her for lying to me about her ignorance over such a key. She had not lied as such, after all. Her exact words had been “He has never spoken a word of this.” And he had not, I garnered, if protocol eight had robbed him of the knowledge and the princess had stumbled across such a key in later centuries. In any case, Princess Raise had just submitted to my queendom forevermore. A princess who was somewhat of a king had fallen to her knees. I had not anticipated both would need to be conquered. If not for their weakness in love, I might not have succeeded.

Warmth and darkness rushed into me, the embrace of a summer evening, and a whooshing rush indeed. Fresh power. Fresh ancientness. Understanding of a king.

I tipped my head back at the roar of power in my veins and my sigh vibrated the world, stretching at my stitches and surely every creature and thing everywhere.

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