Straia;

[Straia]

sometimes we want what we want --
    -- even if we know it’s going to kill us.

He leads her to Loess, and as she expected it is just a land. It is not the Chamber. It is not even the Valley or the Dale or any of the lands she’d tried to destroy. This Beqanna is lesser than the one she knew, different, still teeming with magic but in such a way as to not feel memorable. It had once been memorable, it had once been vast and different and full of magic that you could taste it in the air. She knows that she is very much a part of the reason the Reckoning happened. Those living are far less likely to know this, though, save for the few that had been around during her time.

Her eyes skim the land, and he seems to know that it will not impress her, though he doesn’t fully understand why. “No,” she says. “It not like kingdoms I knew, but not because it is different. No, because it is so very much the same as everything else now. The kingdoms of my time were alive.” It was not his fault, of course, that he could not have what she once did. It is her fault, if anything, and she feels a pang of remorse.

The Chamber. How she would forever miss it.

She eases into the hot spring as he talks, enjoying this little luxury given that this, at least, the Chamber had not offered to her. She misses the pine forests of her home though, the squirrels that had been her friends before she’d become what she is now. Her mind listens to the politics, though some part of it wanders to the life she once lived. It is an easy, secondary nature now to catalogue the happenings of kingdoms. When he finishes, she focuses on him with the lazy nature of a predator. “You already know your first move. Take Taiga. It is not yet yours. Then tell me, what is you want for Loess, for yourself?”

She had dreamed of power for the Chamber, power through fear. There was a goal, there was an end, there was something to accomplish. It had taken time, as all things take time. She had waited for the moment to overthrow her father, who let the Chamber languish and suffer. She had waited, recruiting and rebuilding from the ashes until the Chamber was strong enough to sustain what she would ask of her subjects. And then they became monsters, slipping in through the shadows and instilling fear, creating chaos, becoming something so terrifying that either you joined or you fought against. There was no in between.

Then he asks a different question, and she regards him for a moment. “You do not,” she says finally. “In one way or another, death will find you.” She had slipped into oblivion and crawled back out again, but still, she knew death. Her Chamber was gone, and there was a death in that. Her children were gone, and there was a death in that. The afterlife clung to her, even now, though she knew how to live with it.

-- straia

the raven queen