"What are you queen of?" he asks, and for a moment, she has no answer. There is something lurking there at the edge of her mind, but it stays hidden in the recesses of her memory. But then a figure emerges through the fog, a sometimes black, sometimes winged, always powerful male with a horn jutting from between his cunning eyes. Eight is his name, and once upon a time, they had ruled the most fearsome kingdom in all of Beqanna. The Valley rings through her mind, the very name dragging the corners of her rotten mouth up into something of a grin. Born a princess of The Gates, she had quickly found herself blooming in the darkness of The Valley fog.

"The Valley. I rule The Valley along side Eight, the powerful magician." she says, the lilt to her voice confident in a way only a queen can be. The young stallion before her doesn't seem ignorant, but the fact that he does not seem to know her, The Raptor Queen of the Valley, does give her pause. "Are you new to these lands?" she asks into his mind, considering him with a reptilian tilt of her head. Feathers fall around her as her wings wilt, but she does not notice. Nor does she notice the skin melting from her slender shoulders, or the graveworms that play within the tunnels of her muscle and sinew.

Up above them, the clouds gather. The moon is quickly losing the battle in the sky, though for now it bathes them in that bright blue-white. As it shines, she rots, her mind gone to decades past. The moon in her curse. Born in the light, but bloomed in the dark, she is a cursed flower now.

She doesn't blink as she watches him, doesn't breath either. The living dead have no use of such trivial things.

with love,
topsail

High above and at the very top of the ridge line, the sky begins to change. First, pink bleeds into blue to create purple, then orange and yellow appear to backlight the clouds. The moon battles on, trying hard to maintain its control but the sun is a valiant warrior. The cool tones of the moon and the night are no match for the power of the sunshine. Though it all begins gradually, barely even noticeably, it does not take long for the moon to fall prey to the whims of the sun. It creeps downward below the opposite horizon, yielding for now but with a promise of return.

At the first ray of light, she begins to transform. The graveworms retreat back to the cavernous spaces between her muscle and sinew. Her split skin slithers and crawls, stitching itself back together seamlessly. The downy feathers of her wings sprout along the bony appendages, filling in gaps and leaving them just as voluminous as before. And most importantly, her mind settles. With a gasp she is thrust back into the here and now, and what had once seemed so real is cast back into her memories from days gone by.

Her lids flutter over her blue eyes, and it takes her a moment to gather herself. With a start she sees the bewildered colt before her, his brows raised and caution practically oozing from his skin. She can't say she blames him, if that creepy crawly feeling she has in her own bones is any indication. With a shake of her pretty head to ease the tension, she offers him a smile, though it is small and tight. "No plans to speak of. My time has never really been my own, so I'm not sure what to do with myself." she says, her voice much gentler now than it was before. "So where do you call home? Myself, I was born a princess of The Gates. My father was noble, but a terrible ruler. Much too soft. I found The Valley more to my taste..." Another smile, an another attempt to ward off whatever cursed magic had fallen over her tonight.

with love,
topsail