Page 94 of Of Skulls Of Shackles

“I sense that entering this place will break me.”

“All the better to remake you,” she replied without feeling. Without warmth andwithcold certainty.

Inner growth was cloaked by fear, but I was too frightened to throw off this cloak as hastily as I had thrown off another when consulting kings. “I fathom. Tell me of the haze.”

Adalina said, “’Tis nothing more or less than walking through a fog with no hope of making your destination and no sense of direction. We walked toward the beating of a drum, but the drumming never grew louder. That was our only company.”

“The beating of a drum,” I echoed.

My mother coughed. “Your heartbeat, my Patch.”

Ah.

“If each of you heard my heartbeat in the haze, then what would I hear?” I whispered.

The newly arrived mothers who were conscious, laughed.

“The queen trembles and quakes,” sneered the first I had stitched in place this evening.

The other mothers erupted in a humming chant.

“Until ancient in truth

Tarry not

Linger never

Lest the world becomes forever buried.”

They chanted the excerpt from the poem again.

Then again.

Then again!

My heart galloped to be free. I could not delay. I felt the enormity of that seismic error.

The haze awaited me, and so I set one foot in front of the other, then did so again. “Where is she?”

The words barely escaped my lips.

My mother lifted her hand that was more bone than flesh to point.

I walked stiffly.

I walked with no real thought of entering the haze. I could not contemplate the magnitude of the haze just as I could not contemplate the magnitude of saving of the world. That must be the answer. Only in the haze would I find the answers needed to save or ruin the world.

I was not ready for either.

Could I be ready, though? Was I delaying the inevitable out of a false sense that I could prepare?

“I cannot,” I whispered in horror.

The haze. I had arrived.

The wisps of mist tickled my stitched toes as I wrenched to a halt. Forty-four mothers must watch me now.

The mothers who had made me and now sat in vigil around my tower in this eerie place. There was a point to their presence here, and a necessity. They would protect my queendom once their circle was complete… and perhaps they would be my heartbeat in the haze as I had been theirs.

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