etro --
in the hushing dusk, under a swollen silver moon,
I came walking with the wind to watch the cactus bloom
The world is not the same.
It has not been the same since Beqanna imploded and drew itself in. Since it spit itself out, reformed and reimagined. But the world is not different because of these things. It is not different because of the years that it took for her to regain her magic that was not magic—that deafening silence that she carried within her—but rather because of what happened in tandem. That boy born of a magician who wove Fear into Etro’s heart. The boy who had sucked in air and left her passed out on the Mountain to find his first kill just a few hours into life, striking Fear into the heart of an innocent women and pulling the life from her.
And she powerless to stop it.
The world is not the same, but she is, in many ways, exactly who she has always been.
She is muddy and unremarkable, her hips sloping at awkward angles, the impossible blending of breeds leading to an impossible tangle of too long limbs and wide chest and plain face. She is neither the metallic beauty of her Akhal Teke mother or the foreboding power of her Percheron father.
She’s just Etro.
She’s just Etro and there are still constellations that spin through her veins. There are galaxies trapped in her mouth, impossible dynasties rising on her tongue and trailing behind her. And there is still him at the center of it all. The impossible monster with crackling lava skin and smoke curling from his nostrils.
He who she had promised she would think of. And she has. Oh, he is often all she thinks about. When she wanders this land that is home but no longer home. The land where her parents do not call out to her and her family does not pass her by and there are no Deserts for her to run to when it all gets too loud.
The only thing that keeps her anchored here at all is the idea of him.
The memory of him.
So when she sees him tonight, so similar after all of these years, she doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe, cannot find the power in her to do anything but stare—eyes widening beneath the matted mess of her forelock, lips parting ever so slightly to draw in a rattled breath. It is impossible, and yet—
And yet it is not, because he is here.
He is here and she does nothing but watch.
-- vanquish and yael's trait-negating desert princess --
@[Kingslay]