She is not sure if this is the outlet she is searching for, and she has taken a few days to consider it. It has been years since she had any real interest in the politics of Beqanna—even her participation in the melding of the kingdoms after the Catastrophe had been half-hearted, and it had faded further ever since. Over the past long years she has found other ways to entertain herself, and her time as queen of the Dale seemed dull in comparison, so much so that Carnage is what still stands out to her the most from that time period.

She doesn’t this time around to be much different, though the recent changes in Beqanna had at least managed to catch her attention. After spending a few weeks getting to know the Pampas terrain, and taking notice of the fact that no one else seemed interested in taking the helm, she finally let herself pay attention to the idea that she had felt taking root.

Being a queen again did not interest her. Despite the way others coveted the title, she knew it was little more than a word, one that others soon forgot. If anyone remembers her, she doubts it will ever be as a queen.

But a counsel of sorts, that could work.

She tries to ignore the way her mind of course leaps to Atrox first—the only one that she trusted with the entirety of her being. It seems unlikely that he would be interested, his heart still entombed beneath the soil of a kingdom that will never return, and she isn’t even sure if she could work up the nerve to ask him. He would support her, that much she is sure of, and that would be enough.

Agetta is the next logical choice, someone that she has known for an eternity, with a decorated history and experience with ruling. That still left a potentially vacant position, though, and as she stands amidst the myriad of colorful flowers, she finds herself wondering how they—she has already foolishly assumed Agetta will say yes—will go about filling it.

This is not the first time Beqanna has been torn asunder, and likely not the last, yet the specific memory it evokes is always the same. The disasters may all be different, and they all altered the land in their own way, but there is only one such Catastrophe that left a mark on her.

She remembers she had been dead—no afterlife in existence, just her and the dark, and a yawning emptiness. That kind of dead had felt like a dreamless sleep, the kind where she wasn’t aware she was asleep until she would awaken. But it wasn’t the gentle awakening that came with the golden glow of a rising sun, or the smell of dew-laced grass. Instead it was jarring, the seas shaking and the earth splitting and crumbling, and suddenly she was being jerked back into a living body that had been resting at the bottom of the sea. There was nothing peaceful in the way she had awoken on a battered shoreline with seaweed tangled in her hair and water still aching in her lungs, or the unsettling feeling of a heart that had been long-dead at last beating again.

There was nothing peaceful about awakening to a world that had been turned upside down, both the valley and the dale gone, and fractured pieces of her heart going with them.

This time, she is alive to watch as the world falls apart around her, and for a moment she perhaps is a bit too slow in moving away from it. A long-time lover of chaos, she would have gladly stood in the midst of the violent winds and watched as Hyaline’s mountains are leveled—she has always been a willing participant in her own heartbreak, and would be only fitting that she should watch as the first home she dared to find any kind of attachment to since the valley fell victim to the same fate.

But something had stirred her into action, perhaps Atrox’s voice or the sight of everyone else fleeing. Touching him, she had transported the two of them to the safety of the forest, leaving behind the dust of the only home the two of them had known together.

She is restless, though, the blood rushing in her veins with the frenetic kind of energy that danger always seemed to inspire. The forest feels claustrophobic, the trees too close together, and she hates the way the blinding brightness of her aura casts light in places meant to be dark. A familiar knot of tension builds in her chest, and the darkness that had followed her back from the void seems to tighten around it, as if it was trying to provoke some kind of reaction from her. She ignored it, as she always did, but sometimes she wondered what would happen if she didn’t.

Wordlessly, she leaves the rest of them behind, hoping that if she walks long enough this feeling will dissipate.

She walks until she finds the shoreline at the southern edge of the forest, and then she follows it west. Most of Beqanna is flooded, and she tries to ignore the trapped feeling it inspired. She spent too much time over the last few years being stuck somewhere, and the sight of all the water was doing nothing to ease the unsettled feeling.

When she arrives at the Pampas she is, of course, not alone, considering there were so few places for anyone else to go. It surprises her though, the way her jaw tenses and something in her eyes shifts, a flash of annoyance that she is not accustomed to feeling. She makes a motion to retreat back the way she had come, but a flash of familiar white catches her eye, and her steps immediately falter as she comes to a stop. “Agetta?”