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concoction you made out of one of my slaves—what a joke!
It was just a bunch of bones and weeds tied around a dead
woman. Did you know that the woman you decorated once
got herself pregnant, only so she could experience what it
was like to eat her own child as she was giving birth to it?
She only stopped gorging long enough to belch and laugh.
And here’s another bit of trivia about your muse—she
regularly slept where I so often squatted-out the remains
of my many meals! And you think you made some kind of
deep, meaningful art out of her? You really should quit the
art business, Family Man. Your future lies in comedy.
“Oh, and one more thing I forgot to tell you—one last bit
before I conclude my tale. I heal incredibly fast.”
Miss Patience’s claws quickly became unwelcome
tenants within the various rooms of my body, calling forth
no small amount of blood. The cavern wall I flew into was
particularly uncomfortable. I could feel a number of my
weaker bones crack and snap, which is to be expected when
bones pick a fight with stone.
I wasn’t stunned by the impact, but my inaction seemed
to convince my opponent I was a bit more injured than I
really was. In actuality, I was still processing all the queen
had said to me. Could she even be trusted with the contents
of her own story? Did she really know what had actually
happened to her? Or might she be so pure and beautiful a
monster that she lacked even a fiber of reality woven into
her fabric?
For the most part, her beauty lived in her appearance,
if not her appetite—at least not the philosophy behind her
appetite, as she presented it. I speculated that her strict diet
of Darkness-infected meals was the means by which she
acquired her most conspicuous and attractive features, as the
Darkness must have progressively seasoned her soul with
its protean flavors of nightmare and wonder. If my thesis
was correct—and I had no reason to doubt that it was—then
Miss Patience would be better classified as a shadow, rather
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