03-15-2020, 09:02 PM
<center><link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Amiri" rel="stylesheet"><div style="width: 690px; background-image:url('https://dl.dropbox.com/s/l9ogj28v72lior3/Untitled-88%20copy.png?dl=0'); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-color: #4e79e9; background-size: 100%; padding-top: 380px; padding-bottom: 5px;"> <div style="margin-left: 280px; padding-bottom: 110px; text-align: center; font-family: 'Amiri'; font-size: 18px; letter-spacing: 4px; line-height: 17px; color: #fffffa; font-variant: small-caps; text-shadow: 0px 0px 10px #ffe2f7;"><b>I was left <br>to my own devices</b></div> <div style="margin: 75px; padding-left: 30px; padding-right: 30px; background-image:url('https://dl.dropbox.com/s/i7owhmudvkmba6g/darkpurp-40.png?dl=0'); background-repeat: repeat; border-radius: 5px;"> <div style="padding-top: 45px; padding-bottom: 35px; padding-left: 50px; padding-right: 50px; text-align: justify; color: #fff; font-family: 'Amiri'; font-size: 13px; letter-spacing: .5px; line-height: 17px; text-shadow: 1px 1px 3px #4b4b4b;">The vision in her left eye remains clouded, but her right eye narrows as she is forced to focus on the cost of her peace.
Blood has turned the soil as red as the sky overhead, and there are faces that she knows among the staring corpses. Some of them had been enemies. Their defeat was necessary. Others are allies who chose to sacrifice themselves for her cause. For them she mourns. Her grieving is deep, a canyon of emotion and memories with sharp and rocky edges. Yet it is narrow too, a cleft in her heart that she patches over remarkably quickly. She projects them in rapid succession: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, skipping the necessity of time to heal these wounds.
It will catch up with her someday, this abuse of her magic. Lepis is not immortal.
But today is not someday.
Let the stench of bloated bodies teach them what will become of dissenters, so long as Lepis and those she loves remain upwind. Is this all Straia could come up with, Lepis finds herself thinking? Is forcing her to face consequences she has already considered ten thousand times supposed to be a lesson of some sort?
The dun mare smiles contentedly. The emotion is short-lived.
Quashing small rebellions is simple work, but then the Pangeans band together with a pair of dragons and raze Icicle Isle for the second time. The Curse is freed along with the other prisoners, and Lepis is overrun. Torn a dozen different ways by the released chaos, Lepis is forced to divide her attention and loses some holds entirely. One winter morning finds her youngest daughter eating Oceane’s heart. Aten and Izora Lethia, still leading Taiga despite their age go missing, and their bodies wash up on the Ischian shore a month later.
She loses her children (either to betrayal or to death), and then her grandchildren, and one midsummer morning she stands facing what the entirety of Beqanna insists on calling <i>justice</i>.
She is Empress no longer, they tell her. She is not a queen, or a leader, or anything at all. She is just an old dun mare, stripped of her magic and sentenced to life imprisonment on an island outside Nerine.
- - -
In time, even her good eye goes filmy with age. Her legs are stiff, her joints ache, and the weight of her decisions hangs inescapably around her neck. Was it worth it? Lepis hears the question as she stares out at the brightness that she knows to be dawn over the sea. A sigh, long and low, and at last another smile. <span style="color: #fffffa; text-shadow: 0px 0px 9px #ffe2f7;">"The peace?"</span> she speaks to the wind, to Straia. <span style="color: #fffffa; text-shadow: 0px 0px 9px #ffe2f7;">"Perhaps not. But the power? That was. That will always be."</span>
Admitting it aloud is not as terrifying as she’s imagined. Perhaps she should say it more.
</div> </div></div> <div style="text-align: center; color:#cdcdcd; font-family: 'Amiri'; font-size: 8px; letter-spacing: 1px; line-height: 15px; font-variant: small-caps;"><a href="https://www.deviantart.com/neamrel">n</a> | <a href="https://www.deviantart.com/littlewillow-art">l</a></div></center>
Blood has turned the soil as red as the sky overhead, and there are faces that she knows among the staring corpses. Some of them had been enemies. Their defeat was necessary. Others are allies who chose to sacrifice themselves for her cause. For them she mourns. Her grieving is deep, a canyon of emotion and memories with sharp and rocky edges. Yet it is narrow too, a cleft in her heart that she patches over remarkably quickly. She projects them in rapid succession: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, skipping the necessity of time to heal these wounds.
It will catch up with her someday, this abuse of her magic. Lepis is not immortal.
But today is not someday.
Let the stench of bloated bodies teach them what will become of dissenters, so long as Lepis and those she loves remain upwind. Is this all Straia could come up with, Lepis finds herself thinking? Is forcing her to face consequences she has already considered ten thousand times supposed to be a lesson of some sort?
The dun mare smiles contentedly. The emotion is short-lived.
Quashing small rebellions is simple work, but then the Pangeans band together with a pair of dragons and raze Icicle Isle for the second time. The Curse is freed along with the other prisoners, and Lepis is overrun. Torn a dozen different ways by the released chaos, Lepis is forced to divide her attention and loses some holds entirely. One winter morning finds her youngest daughter eating Oceane’s heart. Aten and Izora Lethia, still leading Taiga despite their age go missing, and their bodies wash up on the Ischian shore a month later.
She loses her children (either to betrayal or to death), and then her grandchildren, and one midsummer morning she stands facing what the entirety of Beqanna insists on calling <i>justice</i>.
She is Empress no longer, they tell her. She is not a queen, or a leader, or anything at all. She is just an old dun mare, stripped of her magic and sentenced to life imprisonment on an island outside Nerine.
- - -
In time, even her good eye goes filmy with age. Her legs are stiff, her joints ache, and the weight of her decisions hangs inescapably around her neck. Was it worth it? Lepis hears the question as she stares out at the brightness that she knows to be dawn over the sea. A sigh, long and low, and at last another smile. <span style="color: #fffffa; text-shadow: 0px 0px 9px #ffe2f7;">"The peace?"</span> she speaks to the wind, to Straia. <span style="color: #fffffa; text-shadow: 0px 0px 9px #ffe2f7;">"Perhaps not. But the power? That was. That will always be."</span>
Admitting it aloud is not as terrifying as she’s imagined. Perhaps she should say it more.
</div> </div></div> <div style="text-align: center; color:#cdcdcd; font-family: 'Amiri'; font-size: 8px; letter-spacing: 1px; line-height: 15px; font-variant: small-caps;"><a href="https://www.deviantart.com/neamrel">n</a> | <a href="https://www.deviantart.com/littlewillow-art">l</a></div></center>
