She is dying, of course, but in the same unremarkable way that everyone is dying. Slowly, inching along each day toward that inevitable end (which really, in Beqanna, is not inevitable at all, but rather something fluid and uncertain at best). And so she does not really know what it is she inflicts upon others. Iris knows pain, of course - the pain of cuts and wounds and bruises - though she’s not quite so macabre that she inflicts such on herself outside of the occasional experiment. She knows the pain of the wounds the ghosts used to inflict, long ago when they were her target instead of her ally. Ghosts are not truly the friendly sort, but they have come to a place of peace, maybe even friendship.
She chuckles at his response, a low and amused sound, so much like her mother’s. “I could ask the same question again - what’s that feel like?” The question is rhetorical this time, for she doesn’t really expect an answer. Iris is never quite certain where the line between living and dying might be. She is alive, of course, but she stands with a foot in the world of the dead that will never be free, and so she can only wonder what it might be like to never touch the world of death at all. Does it feel different?
“Of course I do,” she says in that smooth, easy voice of hers. Also like her mother’s, though not exactly. Iris and her mother share many traits, but they are not the same mare. Straia commanded the world of the living. She sought power and fear. Iris has less power and cares less for it, seeking rather to bend the world of the dead to herself without breaking it. She sees no need to break the things around her when they can be shaped and molded. ”They don’t try to kill me, for one. I feel like you of all people ought to know that ghosts are hardly fond of the living.” Some of them were less spiteful than others, but still, they were here because they could embrace neither life nor death fully. “But I get information too. The ghosts know much and they see even more, and they are eager to share with their friends.”
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jamie