Nayl would not have minded beginning anew with different faces, different mindsets, but her heart beats for the sisterhood. It is all she has ever known, ever loved, and even as its walls crashed down she still held tightly onto the hope that the sisterhood would rise again.
It has, to her joy, but not in the way she had hoped.
The taste of the coast and the women is bitter in her mouth, but she never says this aloud. It could be read between the lines of her occasional trips away from them. Her loyalty has never wavered until now but she hesitates to accept it, to realize that perhaps this change was the beginning of something greater for her. This could be an opportunity to create a legacy instead of follow a leader she doesn’t yet trust like a lamb. But she doesn’t entertain the idea, not now when her heart is jumping back and forth uncertainly.
Djinni, who had been at the initial meeting in the coast, has different scents clinging to her coat. For a fleeting moment Nayl questions whether she is loyal to the Amazons but realizes how unimportant it is, not when her own mind is crisscrossing down different paths. She sighs. ”I’ve never seen sand until the coast,” but she knows that it isn’t the sand dampened by an ocean that Djinni is referring to, ”You were from the Desert?” She asks with a curious tilt of her head, unveiling her orange-gold eyes from underneath her forelock. ”I had never been there.” Regret suddenly grips her, as though ruined by not having traveled Beqanna before everything was destroyed.
”A lesson,” she repeats, nearly scoffing the mere idea of it. ”Perhaps some deserve the lesson and punishment, but not everyone.” She did nothing. She was born the way she was and attained something more after surviving some odd quest that remains muddled in her memory. Is it a crime to have been planted with these in the womb, to have worked for what she was? A puff of air escapes her in mild distaste. ”My mind was safe from prying,” she remembers the strong, defensive wall that encompassed her every thought. She had been safe, her ideas secluded. Now, however, she is exposed. ”I feel vulnerable now.” A shudder claws down her spine but she remains composed and continues with a fondness touching her voice. ”I was also able to bring anything to life – any inanimate object. It was a fun thing to do to pass time,” an airy chuckle tumbles from her lips like the rising tides of their coast. ”And you? What did Beqanna take from you?” The land took who they are, took their identities.
Her heart patters against her chest in anger, but her face never betrays her sense of loss and frustration.
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