06-27-2021, 10:00 PM
tantalize
These things they will never be
I'm so used to being wrong
So put me where I belongThings had been perfect.
Until they were not.
Offspring had stepped down, she gave birth to her son, and they lived happily ever after. A family unit for once in her life. Something solid, something real. She tried to do better than she had before, to make up for the mistakes she had made in the past. It was easy with him at her side, easier when she fell asleep nestled into his smoldering skin as if she had been made to fit there. But one day he started to drift. Started to grow more and more distant, as if something was taking him away. Something that had far more pull than her. He had always blamed the weight of the crown for the heaviness he wore on his shoulders but it became clear to her that something else hung there as well. Life seemed to catch up to Offspring, seemed to steal him away from her. Until one day she woke up and he was simply gone.
She had never found his body but she knew, being a creature of fire and brimstone herself.
She knew when his flame had snuffed out from this existence.
Liz tried to tell herself that maybe he would be back, maybe in this world of magic he had been sent somewhere else. Maybe he wasn’t dead.
She had thought her heart broken when Lion had assaulted her and destroyed whatever love that had once been between them. This though... Nothing could be compared to this pain. This time her heart had completely shattered and she knew it would never heal again.
So she failed him, the perfect (and only) son who looked like an exact replica of the lover she had lost. Just as she couldn’t bring herself to look at the daughters who reminded her of Lion, she couldn’t stand to look upon Obscene and constantly see Offspring's face looking back at her. It was an old habit, an easy one to pick back up, when she began to withdraw deeper into the jungle. There had been a thought to return to Nerine but she didn’t want to face Nayl, hadn’t wanted to see anyone and didn’t want anyone to see her. What would they think to see the once proud Khaleesi fallen once more, how the loss of him had destroyed her so utterly.
Tantalize had always been the jungle's creature and that is where she returned, remembering the old ways of the Amazons and easily evading those that might have sought her out. She kept to the darkness, kept to the tangled depths that only those with experience in trekking through such thick and dangerous undergrowth could manage. She faded from the living world and waited for age to take her just as it had him.
For some reason she had a stubborn will to live.
Drifting for years, a wild and feral thing, seemingly forgotten to the residents of Tephra as if she had never been there at all. Until today, when one who also was taught the ways of the jungle (taught by her) pushes past the foliage with a smoky horn, passion flowers entangled in her dark hair. Faint dappled spots on her neck that match the predator ones on herself. Slowly her golden eyes look up and find a similar pair staring back to her. In a voice that shows years of disuse, she manages that faint smile on her dark lips and ruffles the dark unkempt feathers at her side. “Daughter.” She greets, gazing at her warily but somewhat pleased. Pleased that the ways of the Amazon had not been forgotten and that she had taught her so well. “I wondered when one of you would find me.”