She knows too well what it feels like to be a ghost.
She has been a ghost, literally. She has been dead and lost in that eternal expanse of nothing, like an empty, dreamless sleep, more than once. She remembers that disorienting feeling of her heart suddenly jump-starting in her chest, that startling feeling of what blood rushing through dead veins felt like. Even when life had been breathed back into her after the catastrophe, she doesn’t remember struggling to fit back in. It was like waking up, and Skellig was there, and they picked up where they left off, even though their world had been destroyed.
But coming back here after being away for so long – to new lands and new faces and new magic – was somehow more alienating than returning after being dead. Everyone was a stranger, and she did not understand why the land was entirely changed, and why these kingdoms had strange names and so many generations had passed that she did not recognize a single name.
Being a ghost while being alive was far worse than being dead, she decided.
“I know that feeling,” is how she answers, with a small smile, but there is no sorrow to be heard. She has long since shook away the unease at being back. She has had years to develop a new normal – which was, of course, far from normal. “It gets easier, and there’s more familiar faces floating around than you’d think.” It doesn’t occur to her that her and Agetta might have a different idea of familiar faces. Agetta had always lived in the Gates, and save for when she was briefly queen of the Dale, Ryatah had always made her home in the Valley. Their circles mixed about as well as oil and water, but for now that is lost on her. “I’ve been living in Tephra. It’s nice enough, I suppose.” She does not elaborate that she is hardly there, that mainly it is used as a safe place to birth her children and raise them until they are old enough to not be entirely defenseless. Her political side had all but disappeared, and there wasn’t much in this new Beqanna that could stir it to the surface. “The magic is different, too. There’s….more of it. And it’s everywhere.”
@[Agetta]
so basically what she's saying in that last line is, "these damn millennials."