Craft;

[craft]

I was in the darkness, so darkness I became;

He speaks of answers, and it is perhaps one of the first commonalities she recognizes, or acknowledges, between them. She, too, looks for answers, though hers are of a different sort.
(What happened to her? Why can’t she find her way back to the Deserts?)
(Are the Deserts real, anymore?)
She could give him answers, though. A taste of the history she knows, and with enough honesty, it would give him the pieces that would no doubt allow him to male sense of what had happened. But she does not. She is not often honest about what transpired between her and her ill-begot son, the one she hurt, the one she left for dead.
Craft, their benevolent queen. How little they speak of her sins.
(For yes, the dark son she abandoned was a secret. What was not secret was that Craft had blood on her hands long before that.)
“I was a powerful queen,” she says. She hates the past tense of it. Was. What is she now? She doesn’t know.
“Power begets enemies.”

Part of her hates him for his next question, echoing what she has thought, over and over again. She keeps holding out some stupid silver of hope, as if one day she’ll find the right turn and simply stumble back into the Deserts, will they where rejoice for their lost queen.
There is still no explanation for what happened. Why one day she was watching the sunset, and the next she was stumbling in the meadow, lost and alone.
(Oh, but there was that dream nightmare!)
“I don’t know,” she says, and despite her furor, there is a weakness in the words, a desperation. For all her pride, she would fall to her knees before this man if he could bring her home. She would beg.
There is a moment, then. Craft is divided. She is angry, yes, and still lost, frightened (though she will not show it she will not. And here is this man – this monster – who speaks of her death as if it were a fact. Who stares at her with such a horrible orange eye.
She shouldn’t ask. It was a dream.
She should turn away. What good would it do?
“Castile,” she says. Her throat is dry, like sand. What she would give for an oasis.
“The…thing you saw crush me. What color were its eyes?”

Craft

@[Castile]