CASIMIRA
dragon-shifting daughter of ashhal and ryatah
She has never considered herself much of a leader, and especially not a queen. She had watched Breach lead Hyaline, and then Mazikeen, but she had never had much interest in it herself. Even though at the time Hyaline had felt like more of a home than Tephra, she still felt like an outsider—something she is learning perhaps she will always feel, and that instead of trying to amend that she needs to learn to work around it. That she cannot continue to wait for everything to fall into place, because it may not ever happen. Choosing to lead Tephra was not a choice she would have made without Savior, and while she is sure there is someone far more fitting than her, it was too late to turn back now.
Outsider or not, she was now their queen, and all she could do was hope that when she surely stumbled she would not take the entire kingdom with her.
“Things do seem rather quiet,” she muses thoughtfully after he says it, a new thread of worry creeping into her mind. She should have noticed that without him pointing it out—that there was supposedly a new kingdom beneath the sea, that a land of ruins had recently been uncovered. Changing of lands and kingdoms, if history was to show for anything, almost always meant some kind of political unrest. Shifting her eyes back to his, she returns his tight smile with a small one of her own. “I should probably get back, actually.” After a moment of hesitation she reaches out to brush her nose lightly against his shoulder, and says gently, “I’ll be sure to come to Hyaline more often. The kingdoms should remain as allies anyway.”
Ignoring the ache building in her chest, she leaves him, Hyaline, and the memory of her mother behind, for now, and returns to Tephra.