Rise of a Queen

Chapter 48

I am the connection between both timelines, originally from Dustin's and currently from Toby's. I was always searching for Dustin's heart after he lost it in the wake of Katrina's brutal murder, but perhaps his heart was never meant to be hers.

If I truly was from Dustin's world initially, could it be possible that he and I ... were always meant to be together? Surely it is too profound to assume that two people could be solely created for one another despite how time is altered and reality disassembled?

All of my visions of Dustin depicted him as a madman, a mindless monster who greedily engorged the hearts – the lives – of others. The beast warned that my dreams of Dustin would come to pass and no matter how many times I told the beast I would protect Dustin, the beast was always quite insistent that Dustin's fate could not be tampered.

But despite everything Dustin has been through – being tortured, killed, brought back, imprisoned, beaten, and forced to watch the vicious slaughter of the people he loved most – Dustin has not become the savage monster my visions depicted. He has come close but he never made the final transition.

Could it be that Dustin's fate of becoming that monster was a product of a world where we had not met? In the reality where I had not been stolen, was Dustin's fate far less monstrous because of my existence? That would explain why the beast's warnings never came to pass, because I was the reason Dustin never transformed into the monster so many people told me he would undoubtedly become.

Then came the meeting between myself and the beast in which he declared that Dustin's heart had been returned ... this announcement came only seconds after Dustin and I shared our first kiss. The point in which two timelines finally became one. The beast said he could never find Dustin's heart, that he needed me to finally retrieve it. Because I am Dustin's heart, I am the reason the beast could never find it ... because I was so very far away from Dustin, in a different world entirely.

And when Dustin sent me back to live with my father and brother, the beast was belligerently enraged at losing Dustin's heart. I had been sent back to the world in which I did not belong, and so the timelines were once again forcibly ripped apart. And that distance between worlds rippled through time.

It was at that moment when everything started to go horribly wrong and it caused Dustin's death. Like the great explosion that once started all of creation, Dustin's death was a product of two worlds aggressively becoming one.

Lumiere once told me I was vital to saving the Tribe because I was untainted and not stained like the rest of them. How could I have missed the importance of his inception? Of course I was untainted. When calamity and blood spilled over the compound, I had already been whisked away in a bassinet of safety and comfort. I watched that corruption of Tribal land from afar, from the protection of my house where I listened to news reporters tell tale of a group that was rising in the south as a progressively problematic pack of savage wolves. I remember the exact day when I first heard of this band of barbarians that none could tame.

A group of barbarians I should have been a part of.

All of this, everything that has happened, was set in motion when my mother ran from her world and took me with her. Every bad thing that has happened thus far – every bad thing that is soon to happen – is due to my presence in two fluctuating worlds that were battling for control. It is my fault, all of it is my fault-

"That is enough." A gentle voice stated.

Suddenly, my sight cleared and the bright lights that had been previously blinding me, faded into a dull glow that was much more tolerable. Sensation snapped back into my body and every inch of myself burst out of its coma.