Rise of a Queen

Chapter 48

Against all odds ... my eyes opened.

But I could not see and I could not feel. There was no sensation, no indication that my body was still present. Everything was still, everything was numb. My mind meandered through a haze, deep in my subconscious where a labyrinth of connecting thoughts overlapped into a cascade of relentless static. A single color, stark white, surrounded me, all encompassing. So very different from the dark realm I just escaped.

I remember his face, I remember those flames. His throne and his court, a kingdom of bones and a population of skeletons as barren as he. That darkness, so much darkness. He claimed it to be mine ... how could it be mine?

It must mean ...

I am the beast. But how?

So many times I met him, always in my head. And during our interactions, no matter which hallucination he brought forth to antagonize me, he was always so focused on me. Only me. His cryptic speech and merciless games were always intended for me, never for the poor souls he extorted.

When I first met the beast, he arrived on a motorcycle and blatantly warned of Dustin's demise via gory renditions of Dustin strapped to a thorny throne and a stopwatch counting down. At the time, I was absolutely clueless. But after all I have been through, that lone meeting should have been enough to warn me of what was to come.

The second time, Toby appeared crying tears of blood and blaming me for not saving him. I can still remember the vividly appalling hole where his heart should have been, left vacant when Dustin feasted on the stolen organ. Tears of crimson; from that moment on, everywhere I looked there were tears of crimson. My dream version of Toby warned me of Dustin's games and instability, he warned me of upcoming and inevitable death. But now I see the truth.

Everything that happened, from the moment I met Dustin in that alley, was from my own doing. If what the beast said is true, my life has been a mistake. I was never meant to live in that house, on that street, in that town. My timeline was wrong, a discrepancy in the grand design. So when I was reintroduced to the life I should have lived, the universe raced to catch up and set in motion a devastating edit to mend what would have been if I had never been stolen.

One universe collided with another, and it was cataclysmic.

Meeting the beast for the third time began with Dustin still eating my brother's heart, a symbolic reference of my rightful existence destroying the fabricated one assigned to me when my mother fled. One life was consuming the other, ingesting my past and absorbing my future. This was the same meeting in which the beast showed he was more than a mere figment of my imagination when he left deep scratches along my stomach. I was mortified by the realization that the beast was real, but that was not why he did it. He did not want to scare me.

His intention was to prove that we are one in the same. Much like how the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all separate beings but they are the same entity, the same presence. The beast was able to hurt me, because we share a body; he was able to force me into his realm, because we share a mind.

Our fourth meeting began with the beast accusing me of killing my brother, but perhaps his meaning was not quite so literal. Toby came from the version of my life I never should have experienced. So by returning to the world I was originally and rightfully from, I had killed off the life – and all its inhabitants – that I wasn't meant to have.

And the hearts ... Dustin's and Toby's, and mine. The beast was so intent of devouring hearts, but that too was a symbol.

For me.

That is what all of this is about. There were two separate timelines.

In one, I was born and raised into the world of crime and my actions left a positive impact on that world. In the other, I was born and raised into the world of law and my actions left a negative impact on that world. From the very beginning, the world knew I did not belong with my father and brother, and that is why I was hated and why my family was decimated by sickness. That world was sick, that timeline was terminal.