There were still days that she felt like a ghost.
There were only so many times she could let herself be broken and remade, only so many times she could seek out those few, rare individuals that knew how to spark that feeling of being alive inside of her, before she accepted that it was just a patched-up bandage. She found old lovers – again, and again, and again – and she let herself be swept up in that darkness and that out of control spiral, but she knew the crash that came after the high would take her deeper than rock bottom.
But she would rather be there, open and bleeding, than to feel like nothing.
She was still lost in this new Beqanna. She didn’t understand them, she didn’t understand their lands, she didn’t understand their wars. And they, in turn, did not understand her. She was unremarkable in comparison to most of them; strikingly white, and frozen in time by her immortality, but otherwise entirely plain. They did not know how strange it was that she could now stare at them with bright, impossibly dark eyes; that once those sockets had been hollowed and scarred, the wounds inflicted by the same dark god that had gifted her these new ones. They didn’t know that she had once been queen, that she had once been almost something, if you could even call it that.
And of course, she doesn’t tell them.
When she comes across the peculiar ravine drug into the ground, she stares at it with a tilted head. The scent that the creature had left behind reminded her of her dragon daughter, Casimira – reptilian and flame-kissed, terrifying and magnificent – and as she was so prone to do, she follows the danger rather than turns from it.
She is greeted by the roaned face of a stranger, and, typical for her, the first thing she notices is that he is handsome. The second, is that she doesn’t know him, which is not surprising. She knew so few of them now. When her pale lips pull into a smile, it is faint but somewhat amused, the lilt of her voice ringing against the stillness of the cold air, “Well. You weren’t what I was expecting to find.” She is perhaps too bold when she approaches him, pressing past the boundary of where most would stop. No matter how many times she has been burnt, she cannot help but to still test the flames, and she holds his gaze with the intensity of her own as she draws up alongside of him. Everything about her could be read as soft and kind, but she was still infinitely reckless, and she looks up at him with a cocked head and a leisurely smile, “I’m Ryatah.”
@[Sabrael]