03-25-2023, 01:59 PM
feel around until you find where your heart went --
She does not know why she comes to the forest.
She does not know why she seeks out this dark kind of solitude when Beqanna has gifted them again with lands they had thought were long-lost. Perhaps she is afraid; afraid that they will not be as she remembered, afraid that the Chamber will not pulse with the heart she liked to now think she laid some kind of claim to, afraid that the Dale will echo with memories she did not necessarily want to revisit. Afraid that the past coming back to life will make her melancholy for a time that will never return, even if the landscape does.
Or perhaps she is simply not ready to see everyone else revel in the return of the lands they had poured blood, sweat, and tears into, when the Valley is not one of them.
The Dale may have been her crown, but the Valley had been her heart, but she is so accustomed to her heart breaking that it catches her off guard to feel the way the shards of this particular break dig against her chest.
The forest is quiet, though, and though she senses the presence of someone nearby, she does not seek them out.
The darkness—the infinite black that had followed her home from the void, a near tangible shadow that she could feel—began to writhe restlessly, though. Whoever else was in the forest, they had something it wanted. She ignored it, as she so often did. There were days when it was harder to resist than others, days when she found her tongue formed an edge that was not usually there, when her emotions felt pulled taut and on the verge of snapping.
There is no explanation for why the magic in Narya responded to the call to the darkness inside her.
She cannot control it when it finally billows from her, an aura of darkness that douses out the light her ethereal form always casts, a thick wall of smoke-like shadows that obscures her view of whoever the darkness is after. She hears the startled gasp of the other girl, the way she pleads as something seems to tear itself from her. The darkness twists and tightens around something, and when it finally makes its way back to her—hardly at her command, since it never listened—she nearly starts at the strange jolt that travels the length of her spine, ricocheting off every bone and penetrating every vein.
She gasps, and when she exhales the breath that curls into the air in front of her shimmers like stardust.
-- ryatah
tldr: Ryatah's darkness aura convinced Narya's magic to ditch her and go with Ryatah instead.