"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
She is not a monster.
She had not meant to hurt the boy.
Surely, she had not. Yes, it had been – it was – a pleasure to burn, but she is not so base as He is. She is no monster, no sadist – things as broken as she cannot be sadists, surely?
(Things as broken as she cannot take pleasure in the way the boy’s skin charred, in the way his nerves lit up like matchsticks.)
It had been a mistake, a slip. It was not a pattern. Patterns mean repetition. She won’t do it again. She doesn’t want to do it again.
(Oh, doesn’t she?)
She is not a monster.
She is not bloodstained (the boy had not bled, after all, only burnt) but she feels that way, like she is marked in a way for them all to see, a scarlet letter drawn across her chest, a proclamation that there is something wild and dark inside her. That the girl who once lay quivering in His lair has since grown fangs.
She feels overly self-conscious, overly aware of how her skin is hot with electricity, how her body aches to run, to burn.
She is a magician in her nascence, realizing there is so much more to her than just the lightning, things both great and terrible.
She is not a monster.
No, but the things that kept her mortal – her lover, her children – are things gone, lost or stolen from her, and she is alone. She is alone with her terrible thoughts and terrible powers, both growing inside her, cancerous, and she wonders if they will overwhelm her, if she will wake up one day and find the loneliness and the powers overflowing, and what will happen then.
She is not a monster.
Ah, but gaze too long into the abyss and the abyss the also gazes back into you.
c o r d i s
she said it was a mistake to let them burn her at the stake
and she learned a lesson back there in the flames
This one is the unknown magician. Even the ravens do not know. They know that the silver girl is different. They know she is strange, powerful, other. They know that Straia will be interested in her, but they cannot put into words quite why.
She is the one made of water and glass, they say. And the ravens have come to know Straia’s mind rather well, and so she goes. She takes to the sky as a raven, because she enjoys the enmity of it. Of course all of Beqanna knows to associate the ravens with the Chamber Queen, but they cannot know if and when she happens to one of the number that constantly flock Beqanna.
Some might scoff at the ravens, think of them as nothing more than worthless carrion birds. But they are clever and cunning, and they are rarely noticed. They could even be crows, and she cannot control crows quite as well. For all anyone knows, that black bird in the tree has nothing to do with her.
Though it probably does.
Do the ravens make her a monster? She makes them out of fire and ice, gives those powers to her kingdom members to wield against others. She provides the opportunity to chaos, for destruction, though her own hands are spotless. She is not bloodstained. She enjoys it, or she is simply ambivalent.
Maybe these things do make her a monster, but she doesn’t think so. She believes they make her strong, make her better. Capable of doing what others are not. Capable of achieving greatness for her kingdom.
She is not a monster. But she is the Raven Queen, and she will never be anything else.
She lands not that far away from the mare, just a raven in the snow covered ground. A speck of insignificant black feathers. She shifts though, not caring who might see or what they might think. Caring what others think is terribly overrated, and she has never bothered with it. The crown of raven feathers sit on her head, but otherwise, she is completely horse. Tri-colored and unkempt, a wild sort of beauty.
The silver mare is something like the ravens described. Their descriptions are eccentric (they really have not mastered names all that well, though they are learning to listen for those strange sounding non-words), but often there is some key truth in them. Though Straia does not know how broken and fragile this mare is, how like glass she is both inside and out. Nor does Straia know how the mare’s conscience rages back and forth like the tides. For now, Straia only sees the silver, but she can understand their choice of description.
“Straia,” she offers, as if it is perfectly normal for a raven to turn into a horse and simply say hello to the nearest creature. And really, in Beqanna, it is.
Even after years spent here (here and there, really, absent wanderings as she and Spyndle came and went like tides, dancing around one another until finally they met and met again until one day they did not), she doesn’t know the land’s politics.
She knows the names, abstractly, as one knows landmarks in their city – chamber, falls, deserts. She can name the place but not their rulers, such things are unimportant to her, do not factor into the whirlwind of her mind.
So she doesn’t know what the raven foretells, when it soars overhead and lands nearby. She watches it idly, the gloss of feathers and the prone sharpness of the beak, until it is no longer a raven and instead is a mare.
Her own silver skin ripples and for a moment black feathers appear there in mimicry. The magic grows, even as her control of it does not. The feathers do not last long; they sink back into her skin as if she is liquid silver.
The raven woman says a name – Straia – and for a moment Cordis remains mute. She does not trust herself, not with memory of the boy fresh in her mind. Not with the unpredictable nature of her magic, feathers coming and going, lightning sitting under her skin like a promise.
Fly away home, she wants to say, but another part of her is curious about the mare.
“Cordis,” she offers back, a hesitancy flavoring her words. She can still feel the feathers under her skin, itching, like the magic had seen something it liked and aches to imitate it.
c o r d i s
she said it was a mistake to let them burn her at the stake
and she learned a lesson back there in the flames
It is impossible not to notice the ripple, that black feathers that appear where silver skin once was. Then they are gone, and the mare is all silver again, though Straia cocks her head just slightly in curiosity at the sight. The ravens were right. This one is interesting.
The mare is quiet for a time, but Straia is patient. For all the destruction she has caused, will still cause, she is very good at waiting for the right time. Certainly, she could storm into another kingdom and raid for the sake of raiding. But eventually, Beqanna would retaliate if she kept that up. Eventually, they would burn her kingdom to the ground.
But the Gates had tried to take from the Chamber, and had, more to the point, annoyed Straia constantly. So she had started with them. Had needed to let her dogs off a leash anyway, needed to let them play. They were tame, certainly, but still wild. Like any predator, they needed to hunt now and again. So the Gates had given her a reason, and had served a purpose. Except for Fiasko. She had no real reason to keep the Queen hostage, except that she could, and so she did. Because that little bit got Beqanna agitated, which was what Straia wanted.
But the dogs were already barking for more. But Straia was waiting. For a reason. For the opportune moment. For something more than the blood lust that drove the rest of her kingdom wild.
Finally, the mare offers a name. Straia nods, a sign she hears it, though she does not bother with pleasantries. None of this, ‘it’s a pleasure to meet you,’ nonsense. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Straia doesn’t know yet. They’ve barely just met. “My ravens tell me you are interesting, though they don’t know why.” She says, her voice smoky, her words blunt. Wasting time is a terrible thing. “Do you know why they might think that?”
She wields no force of destruction other than herself.
This woman is a queen, their raven-touched leader, who commands cities to be burned and the earth sown with salt. Cordis reigns only over herself, and even that she does poorly – she controls the lightning, now, encapsulates it about her skin like she is a goddess thrown down from the heavens, but she has no control over the other magic, the things (raven feathers, perhaps) that flicker across her skin.
She also has only the most frayed control over her darkest heart, the one first forged in His lair and refined by the years, by the cold cycle of loving and leaving (and finally, just leaving and leaving). A blade honed against a whetstone, but it is one she should not yield, for with the blade comes the sentence, the one He first whispered filthy-hot in her ear: it is a pleasure to burn.
To burn things. To burn them.
To act as monsters do.
The ravens tell me you are interesting, says the mare. She wants an explanation. Cordis wonders why the color, why the lightning isn’t enough. Wonders what the ravens know. What they saw.
(What would it have looked like, to them, her crooning her boy close, telling him ‘I have a secret,’ burning him alive.)
(Alive. He is alive. She thinks. Hopes.)
Once, she might have felt fear, felt shame, felt dread – and ah, she does, all these things flood into her like a hot flush of color to the cheeks. But alongside them is another thought: she would burn.
She is not a monster but she has a monster’s confidence that she could destroy this woman, destroy the murder she carries with her – she knows so little of her, but she knows so much about the lightning and the song it sings against her skin.
“Look at me,” she says, “molten silver and laced in lightning. I suppose that’s interesting enough, to a raven.”
she said it was a mistake to let them burn her at the stake
Cordis
(and she learned a lesson back there in the flames)
This mare could destroy Straia, certainly. Any magician could. Though Straia doesn’t know this, doesn’t know this mare is magic through and through. Not that it would have stopped her from coming. Living in fear is not living at all. She will die one day, perhaps. If the Chamber asks it of her, she will give her life for it. If the Chamber still needs her, either the magic of the land will save it’s faithful Queen, or the generosity of the ravens will keep her alive. She does not need it now, not with the Chamber’s immortality in her veins. But they offer their life for hers, every day. They will die and feed their years into their Queen, even when she is no longer queen of anything else.
She will always be the Raven Queen.
Perhaps Beqanna will remember her as a monster. Something beautiful and laced with feathers, but without a heart. Perhaps they will not remember her at all. It doesn’t matter, in the end. So long as they remember the Chamber, she asks for nothing else. So long as they respect the Chamber, be it through fear or simple caution, they can call her whatever name they want.
Maybe she is a monster. Moreso than anyone but herself knows. With her crown and her kingdom, she has a second gift. One she hasn’t shown anyone, one she is reserving for a moment when she needs to stop an army from coming into her kingdom. She practices on the critters that run through the Chamber, constructs ravens just to kill them and then bring them back to life. She can do both, you see. Though if she leaves them dead too long, she has found it is best to leave them dead.
Real monsters are the ones that have died for too long and come back too many times.
The ravens haven’t told her of the boy, though perhaps not because they don’t know. Straia likes to discover some things for herself, and besides, the ravens are smart enough to know that sometimes, it is better for their Queen not to know certain things. If she knew, would this mare let her live? Or would shame drive the mare to kill again? Again and again, until no one knew, or no one was left to know?
“The ravens are smarter than just the surface. Though it is enough to attract their attention, certainly.” Mostly. They didn’t call out every horse with lightning. Only the ones with a streak of dark in their heart. Only the ones that might, one day, decide to burn the world down. “Can you manipulate the lightning in your skin? Make it real?” She assumes yes, but she’ll ask. See what information this mare might share, or not. Cordis doesn’t seem like a talker.
She has no legacy, nothing to echo in the great halls of Beqanna. She is a strange magician, one in her nascence, with nothing pledged to anyone, nothing to give them.
(She is too selfish, anyway. Much too selfish.)
There is a great and tragic love story in her skin, a story of a golden mare leading her to a river, of hazel, of a courtship lasting years before they touched (and oh, the first time they touched the mare was dead before the lightning brought her back). But the love story has been writ, the book closed, Spyndle gone – what’s left in her narrative now is a much darker twist, a sordid tale of a quivering boy, of bodies begging to be burnt.
Of magic itching through her skin like hives, begging to be used, to destroy.
The mare inquires about the lighting, and Cordis’s skin flciekrs in response. Of course it is real, the heat and low buzz is a comfort. But perhaps to the eye it’s nothing but a marking, that can’t feel the way it burns in the marrow of her bones, keeps her alive, keeps her sane.
(Though she’s unsure she wants to be either of those things.)
Instead she breathes, “yes.”
Instead, she exhales a bolt of lightning leaps from her skin before she quite realizes it, leaves a raven dropped dead at their feet.
she said it was a mistake to let them burn her at the stake
Cordis
(and she learned a lesson back there in the flames)
cordis is a DICK. and if you don't want a raven dead obviously ignore that last line <3 but i assumed S would just reanimate it. or cordis will cuz she'll probably feel bad about this in .2 seconds
Love. It is both foreign and not to Straia. She would never follow anyone to the ends of the earth. Not even Weed, though he is the closest she has ever come to love for anyone other than her heart sister, and her son. He could leave, and she would stay. Erebor could die serving the Chamber, and while she would mourn, it would be a worthy death. Oksana. Well, Oksana was different. But even then, her sister came and went, and Straia never followed.
Though she loves the Chamber as others love their soul mates, their other halves. It is the only thing she will die for. Time and time again. Bring her back just to strike her down again. But this will never be a tragic love story. The Chamber will not leave her, and when she dies, it will be glorious. Not necessarily her death itself, but just the simple fact that her body will decay into the Chamber, and even in death she can serve her kingdom well.
Perhaps she is a monster. Twisted and broken, caring more for a piece of land than her own flesh and blood. But of course, they would all understand.
It only takes a breath, one simple word, for the lighting to leap from the mare’s skin, striking a raven to the ground. Straia stares at the lifeless bird for a moment, a smile curving the edges of her lips. She turns her head to Cordis, clearly pleased, not worried about the bird. In another moment, the bird’s little ribcage begins to move again and it’s back on it’s feet, cawing once at the silver mare in protest before taking to the sky.
Truthfully, they are rather used to dying. Their Queen kills them all the time.
“Well well. Aren’t you something? And may I ask what that something is?”
straia
the raven queen of the chamber
I don't mind at all! Everyone should have fun with the ravens It's not like Straia doesn't have more, lol.
It was not supposed to be, the love story that unfolded. Her first words to Spyndle had been ‘I can’t, I can’t,’ as the mare reached out to touch her, inquisitive.
(Spyndle’s last words to her had been ‘I can’t, I can’t,’ before she left, before the word shifted irreparably.)
It was not supposed to be, she told herself at every turn, as they left and found each other again. She was a lighthouse, pulling her in, begging her to wreck upon her shores. She was the lighthouse. Spyndle was the lighthouse. They were both the wrecks. They were both wreckage, loving with such terribly doomed hearts under sickle moons.
It was not supposed to be, and so one day it was not – one day, Spyndle left, took with her the last shred of her heart, and left a lover destroyed.
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, the saying goes.
Yet she was not scorned. What happens is worse than fury – instead there creeps in her blackness, a darkness that she both fears and wants for. The strange liquid darkness of being alone, of a power too great for her to wield, rising to fill the vast cavities of her, the ones they have left.
What’s left is not a woman scorned, but a woman grown dark.
The bird moves again, and Cordis is glad – she’d regretted it the moment she’d done it, but it had been like an exhale, a short expanse of breath and then a bird coming to their feet.
She cannot stop watching the ravens. They move idle around their mistress. Cordis wonders if they would obey her. For a moment she thinks it, thinks come, and for a moment the ravens bulge towards her, torn.
She stops the thought, unnerved, and turns her focus back to the mare, the one whose raven she’d slain.
(Briefly, anyway.)
“I don’t know,” she says. She is honest.
She remembers a conversation then, one from long ago – a mare who took her underwater, who insisted there were powers inside her. She had ignored her then and ignores her now, but the questions rises again, niggles at her brain.
“There was a magician,” she continues, “Evrae. She said I was magic..”
A pause.
“But she was lying.”
she said it was a mistake to let them burn her at the stake
Cordis
(and she learned a lesson back there in the flames)
It's not like Straia doesn't have more, lol.