sometimes we want what we want --
-- even if we know it’s going to kill us.
Wait for the opportune moment.
Well, this seemed exactly like an opportune moment. Straia hadn’t died, not exactly, but she’d faded into oblivion, which as it turns out, is death for a magician. At one point she’d been living in her mountains, lamenting the loss of the Chamber, and the next her mountains had become the afterlife and the loss of the Chamber was irrelevant. Funny how the world worked, and funnier still that she didn’t much care. She’d simply waited, as she has always done, for the opportune moment.
The veil thins around her, poked and prodded at by too many horses with lost loved ones. Love. It wasn’t as though she’d never felt love, but she’d never understood the need that it caused. Something primal and crazy and raw, something consuming and driving and all powerful. Straia had loved her father, but that didn’t stop her from overthrowing him. She’d loved her sister, though she’d never been very good at being one. She’d loved Weed, and he’d come and gone just like real weeds do; there one moment and lost to the wind the next. She’d never pined for him in his absence, never worried he might not come back. Eventually, he did not come back, and she’d never even bothered to find him in the afterlife.
Something around her changes though, the veil cresting past thin into something more like a bubble, something ready to
pop at the touch of a finger. A raven appears and she sends it forward, searching for the exit, for the
pop. It does not take her bird long to find it as the dead are so very aware, as they are already rushing.
Straia cheats, of course, taking to the sky and finding herself on the beach in mere moments. This was a place she had never bothered to frequent, but all the same it is familiar. A small herd of horses is still on the beach - running away, perhaps, or doing whatever, for she pays them little mind. There are only two that catch her attention. Power thrums through her, morphed and changed, stronger than when she’d left.
Straia can feel the ground beneath her, the way it shifts and sighs beneath the other horses, the latent power of the rotting bones. There’s something deeper in it than her connection to the fire raven that circles above her, something ancient and primordial. She can feel Beqanna deeply, her triumphs and her sorrows, her heart and her blood.
A familiar face crackles with lightning, shifting into a lion before her. Straia remembers they once fought on opposite sides of a war, but she knows little else about the mare, certainly not her name. Only the old Jungle tattoo, that red flower blooming across her chest, gives away where the mare once called home. Before the other mare can pounce, quite literally, Straia flicks her aside, stretching magical fingers. It is so very
easy. Too easy. Far easier than it ever had been before.
Funny indeed.
The stallion, still crumpled on the ground, bleeds life in a way she cannot see but feel. In this strange limbo, with the veil torn and the balance askew, she isn’t sure if he can actually die, but it seems like a kindness to try and put him out of his misery. For a moment, his chest will feel as if birds flutter beneath it, wings pounding against his breastbone. It is that feeling of anxiety that you cannot shake, birds trapped in a cage. It is only a moment though, a breath, and then his heart simply stops.
Once, she’d have to squeeze, had to exert effort to stop a heart. Now...now it simply stops, and she leaves him to his fate. Better to be dead, to join the legion of ghosts tearing through the veil, than to be trampled by them. Straia does not look back, but instead leads the way into Beqanna, into a land she does not know and yet a land she
knows. Beqanna’s life courses in her veins, their heartbeats drumming to the same beat.
The Chamber may not be here anymore, but oh, she is home.
-- straia
the raven queen
