Iris
The day is early when Iris makes her way back to the Mountain for a second time, not for her own gain but for the Chamber. Wasn’t that how it always was? Everything for the Chamber. The benefits to herself were secondary, and she imagines that is much how her mother had felt. Though it had been a different world then, with magic flowing in the land itself. There was something empty about the Chamber, she suspected, though Iris would never fully understand what the land was like once. She would never feel the loss of Atrox’s heartbeat beneath her feet, for she only experienced it in stories. She would never understand what the power of the kingdom had been like, what it might be like to be granted magic from the land itself.
Though Iris doesn’t seek power in that way either. She has what she needs and then some. The ghosts come with her today as they always do, some venturing even beyond the bounds of the Chamber to join her on this journey. It is vastly easier for ghosts to trek up the Mountain than it is for her, but she makes the journey without complaint. The ghosts entertain her with stories as they go, though as always some simply complain about being dead or the wrongs done to them in their lives. She passes the time plotting revenge with them, much of which will never actually be enacted but sometimes the idea of it brings its own sort of healing.
The sun climbs higher in the sky, and she is thankful that it is spring. The weather is beautiful and the temperature drops as she climbs higher, but still, much of the day is gone and sweat darkens her already black coat as she finally comes to the top of it. All this for a crown. Perhaps it is a little for her, in the end, since she will be the one to wear it. ”I seek a crown for the Chamber,” she says to the wind, to the ghosts, to the fairies that may or may not actually be listening. “Pine boughs with a constant mist around it, if we can choose.”
The Chamber would like a crown made of pine branches that constantly have mist swirling around.