The ravens. They were everywhere in the Chamber. Sometimes Iris could swear their eyes looked like her mother’s, like somehow Straia has been able to reach across the afterlife and still touch the land of the living. Perhaps she could with the power Beqanna had given her, magic that belonged to the heart of Beqanna herself. Was there a  tether between her mother’s tree and her mother. Was her lingering, not as a ghost that Iris could communicate with - at least, not in any way she’d yet figured out - but in some other way? Iris felt watched, which was both a good thing and unnerving all at once. Iris had a good relationship with her mother, who was never overbearing but rather sought to teach her children not to need her at all.

At the same time though, it made her feel like a child, wondering if her mother would be proud of the mare she had become. Probably, for Straia asked for little of her children besides their own independence and their own sense of power, both of which Iris had in spades. Still, she was not her mother, and she wasn’t sure she would ever live up the legacy that Straia left behind. Did her mother want such a thing? Was her mother even watching her, or was she just watching the Chamber itself? After all, her mother had lived and bled and died for this land.

Iris weaves her way through the pine forest, a place that has strangely felt like home to her since she stepped foot in the newly resurrected Chamber, but that is becoming more familiar with each passing day. The voices of the ghosts here are her constant companions, and she recognizes them by sound and they no longer need to give them her names. They whisper secrets at her, tugging at her attention, but today she wants to visit the burning tree. It had been nothing but a charred thing, a remnant of its former glory, until Iris had gone to the Mountain to claim her mother’s magic entity. Now it burned brightly, a never ending fire so long as the entity remained here. Strange that magic that belonged here could be moved, and yet it could.

Iris apparently is not alone in her plans today, though she imagines the girl is not here for the same reasons. Iris wants to see whether or not she can somehow communicate with her mother here. She wants to see if her mother is in fact watching them though the beady black eyes of the ravens here, a few of which she can see perched in trees nearby. Some watch the two girls, some watch the fire, and some are clearly looking for their next meal. But it seems that, at least for right now, Iris would not be trying to talk to her dead (probably dead, it was hard to be certain) mother.

Instead she catches the girl’s musing. Though she had not been here for it, Straia had given Iris plenty of history lessons, and so she is not entirely ignorant. ”Once the lands of Beqanna were magical. Each kingdom had its own magic - magic that could not be stolen or traded or given away. The Chamber had an ever burning pine tree that, for the price of a little blood, would tell you the future,” Iris says as she strolls lazily toward the filly, coming to stop near the tree. “Beqanna took all of her magic back though, for the horses of Beqanna had gotten too out of control. They had to earn magic back, but the lands were forever changed. They no longer had their own magic, but one day Beqanna brought back a few of its dead and they were given extraordinary power. The magic left in the lands is the remnant of their power. The tree burns now because of my mother’s magic, so long as her entity stays within this kingdom. It grants those who seek it their own small power and offers some measure of prophecy, though I gather it’s not quite the same as it once was.”