So you wanna play with magic? ALL KINGDOM

[Kreios]

kreios don't you tame your demons, but always keep them on a leash I am not busy wen they call – when am I ever busy? – but I answer readily. I know what has been going on out in the dunes, and when there are two strangers standing at there oasis instead of the golden queen that has ruled my entire life, I know that our new rulers have been chosen. I recognize Pevensie, but not the black mare with the jewels below her eyes. She is the one to talk, and I settle myself at a comfortable distance and listen. The first horse to reply is a stallion I believe I’ve seen once or twice. Romek, he tells us his name is, and I nod to him from my position. Father would be glad for more stallion in the Desert. The next is the other queen, little Pevensie. She has never looked as though she belongs in the Desert, but she has been a figure I remember from early times, so she must find it a suitable home. “You say they approached you,” I say, because that has been spinning in my mind since the stranger had first said it, “But what did you tell them?” I think that this is important to know. I remember the little bay foal but this black woman is a stranger. I do not think the gods care about color, and I wonder why they have also chosen to alter the color of her fur. That, I decide, is something that my father would not ask. Men don’t ask such pointless questions, I hear him say, and I put it from my mind. “I’m Kreios,” I tell them after realizing that perhaps that should have come first. I do not feel the need to tell them who I am – the world knows I am my father’s disappointment. I am equally as large as the old black titan, and while I lack Vanquish’s dragon wings and wear my mother’s spots rather than my father’s dark mantle, there is no other couple in Beqanna capable of making creatures quite as recognizable as Lyric and Vanquish did with myself and my siblings. The arrival of two strangers has me turning to look. One is an old stallion and the other a young mare. She is lovely and the way that she has sand spinning about her feet entrances me. Rather would cuff me on the side of the head, I realize, and look away from Adrie and back at the queens. They have mentioned Lucrezia but I have not yet seen her. The odd sphinx seems like something that Father would have done, to make up for my lack of skill, and I wonder if perhaps he has used his time in the afterlife to convince the gods that I am a failure as well. “We should probably fight the evil,” I say aloud, though I feel the very opposite. Father would fight the evil, Father would do it. “But where is it?”