"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
No bunnies?! That may just break Shaytan’s little black heart.
But like all creatures, she will adapt and evolve. And the bunnies will be safe (for now). Don’t worry, little queen, Shaytan doesn’t like squirrels. They taste a little too nutty. And they chitter obnoxiously. She’s likely to go mad with all their noise before she ever catches one. That is, if she isn’t mad already.
Shaytan slowly turns to head to look at the ashen, painted queen. She smiles winningly (as she has always done with adults) at her, because it seems like the proper thing to do, regardless of whomever she is. The truth is that she’d only heard that the Chamber was empty, not who ruled it (and even then, she might be well behind the times). But this mare seems to belong (at least she moves like she does, as if the land is hers), and at the moment, she is the only one that can point Shaytan in the right direction. Does she want to go left or right or up or down or maybe diagonally? And what about circles or diamonds or parallelograms?
You see? Shaytan needs some sort of compass. Not necessarily a moral compass. Just… someone to say hey, don’t do that. Or clean your room! Or forbid her to eat the squirrels.
“Hello Straia… I’m Shaytan. If this is the Chamber, I was thinking of living here. But I didn’t know it looked like this.”
What she means is: She didn’t know there wouldn’t be any place for the bunnies.
Shaytan
and every time she knocks I can't help but let her in
There were other small creatures in the Chamber. Though they tended to be of the rodent variety. Cute ones though, often mice (not those big ugly rates). There was some green beginning to show again. The trees were healing, where they could, and she’d spent some time slamming into the completely dead ones till they toppled down. At least this way new ones could start to grow. It’s a shame she can’t get rid of all the debris, but she has no means for that. So instead she’ll just have to wait for it to decompose and turn to fertilizer, but she tried to help the process as much as she could.
Eventually, the kingdom would be green again, as it was. Eventually, the mice and the moles and the squirrels would all come home too. Eventually, they would rebuild. Both the landscape and the kingdom itself. They already were. It was more active here now than it had been in the last few years of her father’s reign. Perhaps that would be a lesson to her not to overstay her welcome on the throne, but of course, how can she ever begin to know when she’s crossed that line until she’s crossed it? She’ll try though.
”It is the Chamber,” she says to the mare. She can understand the hesitation. It is a bit of a mess around here. The rest of Beqanna seemed to have healed almost completely, whereas the Chamber was left without any magical aid. It would have to fend for itself completely. “It didn’t always look like this. Theoretically it will stop looking like this someday.” She rolls her shoulders in a bit of a shrug, though in truth, there’s a part of her that died when the Chamber burned. She longed to see it as it once was. But there’s also something rewarding in watching it all regrow. And it would.
Oh, they would.
“If you can live with the ash, you are welcome here.”
