[private] Straia;

[Straia]

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

She shouldn’t be surprised to know that magic calls to others, that it emanates across space and time and doesn’t simply beckon, but commands attention. It has always commanded hers, after all, called to her even when no magic flowed through her veins. It was not that she needed magic to be powerful – they were two separate things so easily confused, magic and power, want and need – but that she wanted it. Want and need so often feel like the same thing. Straia had been Straia, with the same values and the same goals, long before the Chamber had given her her particular brand of magic. She would still be herself, would still be a fearsome thing, without it. But her magic makes her memorable, turns her into something that commands rather than merely beckons.

Children of chaos always seem to find each other, he says, closer to her now. She takes a step, the distance between them closing in illicit inches, tantalizing breaths, but she is certain to leave just that hint of space between them. Everything is better when it’s denied just slightly. “We only need a match,” she says, skipping some of the details in between. It seems unnecessary to ask if they were going to cause chaos together. They were either going to cause to together or on opposite sides, but the point wasn’t the sides at all, it was simply the chaos.

The embers are already there, she knows. Before, she’d had to create the embers. Before, she was the one who built fear from ashes, who became the subject of rumors that weren’t true but led to brilliant ideas. Once, Straia had not been a murderer, but they all saw her as one and when the time came, she found it shockingly easy. To stop a heart, which should be no small thing, takes only a thought, a breath, and it is done.

She has never looked back at the bodies left in her wake.

Her lips curl into that Cheshire grin as he admits that he made them fear him. He is to Beqanna what she once used to be. Then she’d had a land, she’d had a sound. Now she was a loose cannon, her heart not tied to a place; she had become chaos unrestrained, made into the sort of goddess one often finds trapped in a box. How kind of Rhy, then, to open the box.

Can you imagine…

Of course she can. She knows what comes of becoming what they seek. War, chaos, something beautiful and burned and broken. Fear. Oh, fear is such a powerful thing. Love too. Put them together and you have something unstoppable. It’s possible to be like them but to love still, to care fiercely for the things that matter. Love is what drives them. Love doesn’t have to be a peaceable thing. Love isn’t a peaceable thing, not really. “Oh, I know,” she is half a breath closer now, speaking into his ear. “They will never see you as anything else, so you might as well become what they fear.” A pause, and then, “I can help.”

One match. That’s all it takes.

-- straia

the raven queen

@[Castile]