Entwined we will both die, so stay away and stay alive.

[Straia]

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

It is days before Yadigar surfaces. She could heal him. Could heal the exhaustion and whatever wounds he might have sustained easily enough, as could Ana, but she does not. It seems better to let him sleep, to let time pass where he does not remember and does not feel. She could take away those things too, but to do so...it was both a kindness and not. To lose your past, even when you are not proud of it, causes a different set of hurts to find you.

Perhaps she would offer it, but it would only ever be an offer. Straia would never inflict it upon the boy without him understanding the cost. After all, all magic has a price.

Straia appears a few feet before him, when she senses his panic. Awake, fully now, it would seem. As always, her head is high and her eyes are calculating and cool, but there is something like compassion in them. It is a hard compassion, for she knows nothing else, but it is compassion nonetheless. It is perhaps something vastly different than the compassion Yadigar has known from his own father. ”You did only what you were forced to do. There was no lasting damage done.”

Taiga and Nerine burned, but these were things easily fixed. None of the children were hurt beyond repair, so far as she knew, though she had not kept tabs on what happened to those in Taiga and Loess so well as she had Nerine. Though Ghaul’s fate, at least, had been easy enough to discern when her magic was no longer occupied. ”I know you blame yourself and what I say makes no difference. Still, I will tell you anyway, that you should not.” She hadn’t bothered to figure out the exact magic wrought upon it, but still, anyone with half a brain could have seen it snap at the end of the battle, timed about when Ghaul must have fallen. It wasn’t hard to figure out what something had been done to the child. A thing Straia would not repeat. For all her faults, she is not always unkind.

-- straia

the raven queen