So this was The Chamber, the place her mother had tried to tear Beqanna apart for. It had almost worked - almost. Iris hadn’t understood at the time why her mother had loved this land so, and part of her still didn’t. It was just a land, though it was an appealing land if nothing else from her first tour. It’s not like anyone lived here at the moment, in this land so long gone from Beqanna, so she hadn’t stopped at the border but rather moved into the forest, the mist clinging to the trees in the early morning. The land was cool and the dead were loud and vibrant here. Many of the ghosts seemed to have lived here once, having decided to stay in their next life for their love of the land. Other’s had been killed here, in senseless wars. They were trapped here, looking for resolution that would never come.

It seems like her kind of place.

The magic of the land that her mother spoke of is long gone. There’s no heartbeat beneath the land now, though Iris can sense a phantom of it. There’s the remnant of her mother’s burning tree, though it no longer burns. It’s just a charred thing, dying but never dead. She sees it as she comes into the center of the kingdom, the ghosts telling her their stories as she goes. Some of the stories she already knows from her mother, stories of the wars she’d created, the heart manipulation she’d gained from the kingdom and used to crush hearts beneath her will. From what the ghosts tell her, her mother was not the worst of those who ruled and called the Chamber home, and Iris finds herself grinning.

Perhaps she’d give this a try. Maybe staying put might be fun for a while.

Her mother had not been the type to lie in wait. She had done everything she could to see her land raised from the dead, though it had not been enough. Instead, the monsters of the world had swallowed her, taken her back into the ground. You’d think for Iris, who stood there as a child and watched it all happen, that it might be traumatic. But Straia didn’t raise children to find anything traumatic, and truthfully, Straia wasn’t the type of mother that one was meant to mourn. Don’t hear that wrong - she was a good mother, the sort that equipped her children to succeed and grow and not need their mother at all. She was highly successful at it, so much so that as Straia was swallowed by the earth her two year old child barely batted an eyelash.

It isn’t long before another finds him, and the dead chitter in her ear about him. He’s been here in times long past it seems, and she realizes then just how many dead Beqanna truly has. There are the ghosts that speak to her, the ones unseen, but there are those that haunt the world of the living as well. They come and go as if life and death do not really matter in this place. Perhaps they do not.

She has no idea of their relationship, nor do the ghosts. Or if they do, they don’t tell her, though she’s pretty sure they would if they had such knowledge. Family ties are not something that the ghosts tend to keep up with however, and she imagines that just doesn’t seem so important from the other side. They’d rather tell the stories of their lifetimes, and those that knew this stallion before her are the most eager. They love to feel as though they are still relevant in the world, and to her, they certainly are.

Her eyes turn to him as he slows, her amber eyes the only resemblance she has to her brown and white mother. Iris looks like her father, whom she never met, and Iris’s twin looks like her mother. ”Only in my mother’s stories,” she says in response, not quite mentioning that she isn’t sure this land would qualify as beautiful. Enthralling, maybe. Intoxicating, maybe. She’s not sure if a land can hold such sway over her, but she’s considering the possibility as she stands here, surrounded by the misty pine forests. It certainly feels like home, like she was born to be here. ”I take it you lived here once?”

Iris did not know the ghosts of the Afterlife. She had no access to that place, only the ability to hear the tales of the dead that did not leave. So many did not, so many clung to this world. And of course, there were those like this stallion who traversed between worlds. Death was no god in Beqanna, hardly capable of containing its own. The lines here were a blurry sort, one that was particularly blurry for a girl like Iris who lived with one foot in life and one in death. Not that she minded - quite the contrary. Iris rather liked it that way.

Iris knows no stories of a Chamber that railed against magic. Her mother’s stories paint a different picture - one of a land with a heartbeat of its own, a tree that burned perpetually and told the future, one that gave her mother much of the power she’d inherited. Iris does not know of the Chamber Tatter had once ruled, and she cannot really imagine a land without magic. Not in this world, not in this Beqanna. Magic ran rampant and the powerless were few, a reversal of the Beqanna that once existed.

He answers, and she wonders if he’s proud of that fact. Maybe back then ruling was something to be proud of, though in her lifetime she’s seen that leadership seems to have become something of a joke. Beqanna had so many lands, always shifting and changing, and those that called the shots shifted and changed even moreso. Though she knows her mother’s tales of ruling as well, and it was something different even then.

“My mother once ruled it as well, though not so long. Straia. Her name was Straia.” She’d left the throne to Killdare, and without her the Chamber had fallen into disrepair, though it hadn’t mattered for Beqanna itself had changed then. It had called magic back to itself, pulled it all into the mountain and wiped the slate clean. ”I’m Iris,” she offers, still imagining she’s talking to a total stranger.