I was in the darkness, so darkness I became;
The first time she’d left a kingdom, it hadn’t been her choice, either.
She barely remembers it – how she was stolen away by her grandmother, a pawn in a game she didn’t then understand. It would set so much in motion, that steal (including Penninah’s own death), and perhaps Craft would have been a different woman, had she been left to be raised in the deserts.
She will never know, of course, because this is the route fate has set her upon. And now she is here, in another strange land, with its strange champion.
She sighs, and tries to pull herself from the sea of what-ifs. It is so easy to drown there.
But his question, then, and she is thrown back in. It wounds, the words, though she does not think their hurt intentional.
“The Deserts is my home,” she says, swallows, “but I am told they are no more.”
A mountain walked or stumbled, and Beqanna was reformed. So why had she, Craft, an anachronistic queen, been returned to it?
She still doesn’t know. You could build worlds of what she doesn’t know.
The rest of his words are kind enough. Craft wonders if she would care, if she were moved again. This place isn’t a home, either.
“Thank you,” she says, and she is honest in this. She appreciates the consideration, even if she cares little about where she winds up.
“Was this place always your home?” she asks him. Part of it is politeness, part is curiosity. Wonders how deep blood-ties run in these new systems.
Craft
@[ghaul]