I was in the darkness, so darkness I became;
She’d tasted contentment, in those last years in the Deserts. She thought she’d put her sins behind her, had pretended she could forget their blood on her hands. She’d been a good queen – she knows this – and she’d had a lover, a solid man who loved her back, and she thought she would die of old age, somewhere in the warm sands, looking out at the oasis.
Of all the ends she’d imagined for herself, waking up in some dystopic future Beqanna had never been one, and now, she thinks, she will never be satisfied.
Not that she deserved such a thing. She knows, deep down, as she reckons with a terrible sort of sanity, that she deserves punishment. She is a murderer, multiple times over. No kingdom fealty, no matter how deep, could erase that.
She listens to him speak of his children. She watches him soften under their memory. She enjoys watching it, in a way – such a straightforward emotion, the love for one’s children.
Well. Maybe not for her.
She bites her tongue at his question. She should have expected it, maybe – this was the formality of kingdom discussions, was it not? Small talk, questions passed between one another? Besides, she was the one who asked, who propped open this door.
“I did,” she says. She thinks of her twins, her first children. She’d loved them the most, she thinks, though a mother shouldn’t say such things. But they – and all the others – are gone now, surely.
“I think,” she says, and her voice is tight, quiet, “that too much time has passed for any of them to still be alive.”
Craft
@[ghaul]