[open] i want the world in my hands

[Straia]

sometimes we want what we want --
    -- even if we know it’s going to kill us.

How strange to be back in lands that are so familiar and yet so very different. The meadow is much the same, and yet she knows that it had come and gone from Beqanna in the reckoning (something she would proudly claim some responsibility). Why Beqanna had made her into something more was a mystery except that Straia imagined she provided some sort of a balance. Many of the dead had returned, but a few stick out in her mind more clearly. As she can feel the land, she can feel them, can sense their otherness and she can sense her own.

In some way Straia feels as alien to herself as the lands of Beqanna are to her now. Only a few things remain unchanged, such as the beating of a heart beneath her feet. Once it was only the heart of the Chamber - Atrox’s heart - that she heard. Now it was the heart of Beqanna, tied to her own, feeding her some second life. There was a cost to the power, she knew, but she had always been willing to pay the price for power.

First her father, then her sister, and then many innocent lives including her daughter’s (not that Weaver wouldn’t have just come back, but still, Straia would gamble with her own children). Eventually she lost the crown as well, though that was something she had never planned to keep. A crown was a thing to have only for so long and then a thing to move on from. Her ambitions for the Chamber had been fulfilled, and so, she had left it in different hands without fuss.

But once you taste that power, once you taste a crown, the desire never truly goes away.

Without the Chamber, Straia finds herself in the meadow, figuring it to be as good a place to start as any. The day is icy, a bitter wind clawing at her long mane and tail. Her hair has always been wild, tangled and long down the side of her neck, though she is strikingly beautiful in her wildness. It is the type of wild beauty that is cultivated and purposeful, two seemingly at odd notions and yet not, when you think about it. Nature was a wild thing and yet beautifully cultivated, was it not?

Beqanna has not yet asked her to pay whatever price it would extract, and so Straia revels in simply being alive again. A raven perches on her shoulder, beady eyes watching the horses around. Straia knows them all in some fundamental way, but she does not know them. They are strangers, as she would expect, who likely do not know her either. They would though, she has no doubt. Oh, they would.

There was no time like the present to meet a few of them.

-- straia

the raven queen