Craft;

[craft]

I was in the darkness, so darkness I became;

He insists, still, on this fake history that has settled in his mind. She does not understand it (does not accept it), but she stands square before him. She knows, in the back of her mind, that he could hurt her, overpower her. But she has been a queen too long, and she will not yield.
He gives his name – Castile – and it, too, is unfamiliar. Of course it is. And then he says more, and her jaw clenches, because there was a dream, when she saw that black stallion mounting the horizon as the sun burned down around them.
When she saw her son, coming to end her.
But that had been a nightmare – a not-unsurprising one, given that she lives with the fact she abandoned her child in a fit of hated and fear. But she doesn’t confess this to anyone. None of them knew what happened, in the Deserts. She told them the child had been born dead, and spoke nothing else of it.

“Then why didn’t you?” she asks. She is prodding him, she knows, still foolish. Poking the bear, or the dragon.
So stubborn, in her refusal to believe.
“Yet here I am,” she says, “uncrushed.”
Unspoken: here she is, in this world that is a strange distortion of a world she once knew. But here she is, nonetheless.

Craft

@[Castile] i forgot how to write im sorry