you're ripped at every edge, Garbage

[Ryatah]

“What have I become, my sweetest friend?
Everyone I know goes away in the end."

If their histories were displayed before them on a map, they would probably intersect in numerous places. Lovers, enemies, and family members networked across each other like rivers and streams, but still they were complete strangers. She isn’t even sure if his name sounds familiar, because at this point she’s heard almost every name to ever be whispered across these lands, either directly or in passing. It’s come to a point that they are all the same. They are all nameless but glowing (mixtures of red, orange and yellow, so easy to discern against the cold blues, purples and greens of the landscape) images in her mind, their voices the same, their smells the same. But one thing that always stood out to her, and she does not know what it is, and does not know how to place it, is that those that had been here the longest were somehow different. Their ancestry and their stories somehow seeping from their very pores, and she reads them like words on a page.
 
He is different like that, even though she doesn’t recognize him. She doesn’t try, for she is not concerned with who he used to be. They were both far from their old selves now. ”I think at some point we all lived here,” and there is a hint of laughter as the words roll from her tongue, referring to the meadow itself. She isn’t sure if he means Beqanna as a whole or the very fields that they stand in, but either way, almost everyone at some point seemed to find themselves living in the untamed hills and forests. She herself has not lived within the borders of a kingdom since she was Queen a hundred (literal) years ago. ”I still do. Everywhere that I had once called home doesn’t exist anymore.” The Forsaken Valley and the Forbidden Dale – lost to the abyss forever.

 
It’s funny, too, how unkind names are completely normal here. She hears his name, and hardly does she flinch. She had birthed a number of her own children, and while they had all been given what she considered to be thoughtful names, one of her daughters had bore a child of incest and thought the name Wretch to be a proper fit for the otherwise beautiful and sweet filly. There is maybe a part of her mind that wonders the circumstances of his birth, and she wants to tell him that she is sure he is not as his name portrays, but instead she only responds with her own. ”Ryatah.” There is nothing else to go with it, just a hollow name, a single word that is not worthy of an explanation.

RYATAH

you could have it all, my empire of dirt