Page 262 - TheRedSon_PrintInterior_430pp_5.5x8.5_9-22-2019_v1

naked as her legs, terminating in crooked, skeletal hands.
Her head was deathly yellow and hollow, and her eyes shone
like open graves.
“There stands the enemy of all enemies,” my mother
whispered. “You will come to know her and her works. She
already knows you well.”
As I recounted my first glimpse of the Dead Queen, I
hadn’t noticed the white waters rising above my waist.
Unseen currents tugged at me, and I heard a summons spill
from the rotting lips of my greatest enemy. “I would speak
with you, artist.”
After being pulled beneath the white waters and feeling
that I had sunk to an impossible depth for such a small
stream, my hands found the bank and I pulled myself back
onto dry land. The world beyond the waters seemed too
bright, yet the darkness of the benighted woods had not
lifted, as per the hour’s dictate. The trees seemed locked into
their soils like saprophyte statues, the moon appeared rusted
to the night, the darkness fell empty and dead from the open
grave of the sky. Everything had changed, yet everything
remained the same. I wasn’t even wet. More than likely, I
had been abducted into a deeper stratum of the Deadworld—
its calcified spirit—where the pretense of a living breathing
world was neither asked nor supplied.
Before me stood a nearly solid wall of dead trees, behind
which lingered equally dead earth. The land was entirely
denuded of thickets, and no animals stirred. The trees were
uncommonly tall, standing stronger and fiercer than any dead
thing had a right to. They were completely without blemish,
apparently unbothered by both insect and beast during the
entirety of their lives and deaths.
I approached the barrier without hesitation or caution.
This was a special place to the Queen of the Deadworld,
so I would not waste time thinking I could prepare for what
was ahead. I could feel an unclean power leaking out from
the line of trees, pooling around the weakest parts of me,
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