The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [116]
“You speak truth, but if I were capable of standing on my own, I would just as soon give my life to teach you such a lesson in the conquest of power. My Watchmaid, however, always stood in the way of that. You see, it is her duty to protect me. But all that will be in the past, and soon...soon, you will be taking her place.”
The Queen took an apprehensive step forward. “What do you mean?”
“I’ve been relieved from the security of my Watchmaid for a little while now,” the stranger said, “and as we speak she is far away. I have released her from her bounden duties to fulfill her longing to become human again, as I have chosen you to succeed her. How does it feel, these final moments as a mortal, to know that you are about to experience the power that I assured would be yours?”
The Queen took another step forward dreadfully. “You lie!”
The stranger inched quietly forward this time in turn, nearer to the Queen but also nearer into the candlelight so as to reveal the clarity of his features. The Queen was swept aghast into a delusional horror upon his sight the moment she beheld him fully, and this horror paralyzed her as soon as it seized her, rendering her unable to take her eyes off him. She had been unmistakably wrong about him...absolutely, terribly wrong...for he not only held the entrusted benefits of a she-demon to work his bidding, but clearly he was a demon himself.
If this was no demon, this was indeed an illusion, a diabolical impression of what the Queen knew to have been a perfectly human outsider, human if not but in appearance alone. He raised the silky thin drapery of the arm of his gown to reveal an attenuated limb and the five pale-grey stringy digits which were fingers protruding outwards from a child-sized hand. They reached into the empty air preceding his face and head, both of which were fleshy and ill-formed and completely absent of hair as they were with wrinkles or any signs of age. The stranger/entity bore no noticeable nose save for two slits of nostrils above a lipless horizontal mouth which parted to speak...but before it spoke, its lifted fingers formed and pointed to draw the Queen’s mesmerized gaze into two enormously widened slants of eyes as black as a nighttime starless sky.
“I speak truth,” the stranger said to her. “And now, the time is ripe for you to know it!”
These words were his last; as soon as he had spoken them to her, impossibly, his flesh began to expand and then collapse into a bony thinness which shrunk into his robe in hastened retreat and disappeared from view. Even his head followed suit, like a turtle retracting into its shell.
And then he was no more.
His robe and gown fell depleted and bodiless to the floor.
Just as suddenly, the bed chamber flooded with the blood-choked outpouring of a woman’s screams.
And an infant’s cries.
***
Four of the Queen’s sentries in alert watch directly outside the door heard the screams. Without hesitation, they scrambled to their Queen’s aid, releasing the bolts to the chamber door and opening it; as they did so their diligence slackened in fearful retrospect of what had become of the last soldiers to defy the powers of the mystical stranger. Still, their allegiance to their Queen was to the point of death, so a change of mind and motive at any point was cast to the Shit Heap of No Return in this kingdom.
By the time they stormed into the bed chamber, their weapons drawn and poised as was their goose flesh and very mortalities, the wails of an infant child were all that remained....
...and all that remained within the room was an infant child. It was unthinkably impossible for a newborn infant to have been in the room at all...to have been there, upon its back and upon the stone cold floor, legs and arms up and flailing and slapping against a foot-long umbilical cord still attached to its belly but oozing and slashing through the air like a slit-away