[private] Straia;

[Straia]

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

A Cheshire grin curves her lips at his response, the realization clear in the hesitation of his words, in the way he opens and closes his mouth before beginning again. Evil. What a funny designation. Does evil long to protect? Does it love? Does it care? She does not see evil before her, but simply a stallion with ambition, with a hunger that some will simply never understand. It is a hunger she knows all too well, the sort of hunger that itches deep against your bones, the kind of itch you can never scratch. Instead you keep going, keep scratching, keeping digging away as if you may find the source.

Here’s the secret, there is no source. Hunger like that cannot be satisfied. It is innate, it is consuming, and it is the beginning of true power. Not magic, but that hunger, that need.

She was powerful long before she was magical. Magic was reward.

“I can’t imagine you with a family that needed protection. If they needed it, you would have failed them already. To teach them to fend for themselves and to allow them to do so is success.” She has no idea where her children have gone. They have all flown the coup, as children do, leaving Beqanna in the wake of the Reckoning to seek other lives. She misses them, of course, as all mothers miss their children, but she does not worry for them. That is the difference. She loves them enough to let them fly.

Her grins turns to something else as he signs his life away in blood. It is ferocious, wild, and gleeful. She is something fearsome and beautiful in that moment, something alive and ready. The raven on her back, an impossibly silent statue through so much of this (ah, the wonders of magic), flaps it’s wings and disappears into the sky as if to seek something. He is a set of eyes for her, a scout to give her the lay of a land she know longer knows. “Come, show me where you call home and fill me in on the current politics. I am a bit behind.”

-- straia

the raven queen

@[Castile]