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I cannot run from my family
They're hiding inside of me,
corpses on ice
Come in if you like
but just don't tell my family
They'd never forgive me,
they'd say that I'm crazy
But they would say anything if it would
- Amanda Palmer
(i)
She carries with her, always, the teachings that they left her with.
From her aunts, she learned her silken arts.
From her mother, she learned the ways of the hunt.
From her mentor, she learned to be a swift and agile fighter.
From her father, she learned much of crafting, alchemy, machinery and civil engineering.
From her step-mother, she learned much miscellaneous lore about the deeper secrets of the world.
From her sibling draped in white, she learned little more than a few elementary parrying stances – there was not really the time, the space or the opportunity for anything else beyond that.
(ii)
She carries with her, always, the weight of who they tried to be.
From her aunts, she learned the value of excellence, of the respect that could only be, if not won, then demanded by honing her skills to the utmost and the satisfaction that comes from such mastery. That, and the absolute, certain fact that there was nowhere in all this whole wide world where she could possibly hope to belong or be accepted – not even in what was supposed to have the den of her own tribe.
From her mother, she learned the importance of making her own way, of charting her own path, even when it means standing apart from others.
From her mentor, she learned to be a survivor, to see the vicissitudes of the world they are without embellishment, and to face them well prepared.
From her father, she learned…
From him-
From her step-mother, she learned to carry suffering and disgrace with dignity and elegance, and to let sorrow be her teacher when it could not be avoided.
From her sibling draped in white, she learned that even the wisest can be fatally mistaken.
(iii)
She carries with her, always, the weight of what they could not help but be.
From her father, she learned, in fact, to be a useless, impotent, clumsy fool who brings ruin to everything she touches, someone who cannot save or protect anyone at all no matter how much she might refuse to accept the inevitable.
It was from him she leaned to disappoint all those who’d place their hopes in her, to lead those who’d flock to her to their doom;
It was from him that she learned the taste of utter impotence.
It was because of his countless empty promises that she never promised anything to anyone at all.
It was the sight of the many carts hitched to his wagon hurtling down a cliff that lead her to decline any position of leadership that she’d ever been offered, renouncing his throne as much as her mother’s.
It was the memory of him breaking under the responsibilities he’d taken upon himself that bore down upon her when she could barely stand under the weight of her own sins.
It was because of him that she was forever cursed to stand apart even from those she longed to be close to, no matter how much she might try to be otherwise.
It was from him that she learned that even gods can fall.
From her aunts, she learned that she was doomed to be forever despised, coveted or feared on account of power she never asked for. She learned that no one would ever see her in full, only deciding which parts of her to acknowledge depending on what was currently the most convenient to them.
If she succeeded, then she’d be a Weaver to them, and nothing but a Weaver, no matter how much she might keep stubbornly persisting in adding ‘in part’ or ‘among other things’;
If she failed, well, then that was just exactly what they would have expected of one of those wretched Pale Beings.
From her mother, she learned the weight of obligation and the bitterness of sacrifice, and what it is to owe a debt that one cannot possibly repay –
Though it was on all accounts rare event that the community of the Distant Village was supposed to prevent, it happened sometimes in Deepnest that individuals of certain kindreds didn’t take the proper precautions and ended up being eaten by their own newly hatched brood; She had always counted herself as an unofficial member of their number, even back when her mother was still technically breathing.
From her mother, she takes that same bitter curse of barrenness and along with it the burning wish that she could have been sired by the late king of Deepnest – but given that she wasn’t, it might have been for the best that her accursed should line to end with her.
From her mentor, she learned just how pointless it was to struggle against the inevitable, how meaningless it was to belabor lost causes, what is to be damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Fight or don’t fight, retreat or confront, it’s all the same either way; All things must accept an end.
What she didn’t learn from her is to bear this knowledge with grace; All her mentor’s wisdom was not enough to expunge both her parents’ terminal hubris.
Wherever the Hive Queen is now, she must be so disappointed.
From her step-mother, she had learned to escape into the sweet relief of apathy, seclusion and detachment; How much easier it all gets with time, once your hands have thoroughly dirtied and you know for a fact that you are ruined beyond all help. It was from her that she had learned to send others to their doom without nary a flinch.
From her sibling draped in white, she should have learned that even one’s noblest, most sincere desires to be what is needed can become the instrument of one’s undoing, but of course she failed to grasp this before it was far too late, or to realize what was going to happen – maybe she hadn’t wanted to piece it together.
Could she claim to be ignorant when she had helped to assemble the trap with her own silk and her own claws? Who’d buy it?
She knew she wouldn’t have.
She’d wanted so much to believe that it would just work.
Last but not least, from her grandmother-
(for that she was, as much as she might be trying to distance herself by insisting on referring to her only as ‘the Monarch’. Time and again, she had been told that the resemblance was quite plain, bare to all, clear to see for those with the skill to discern it – preeminent in her so-called thinly veiled beastly words, in the wide swipe of both their talons, so much alike, though the trait must have skipped at least her mother’s generation, and most of all in the stubborn, wounded pride that would neither allow them to stay put obediently inside their respective cages, nor would it let either of them suffer the other to go free.)
-from her grandmother, she had learned to recognize the ugliness of her own utterly rotten nature; It was only after their meeting and devastation that ensued in its aftermath that she came to know her own wretchedness in full.
(iv)
Her captors had been told to go fetch her from ‘the Kingdom of the White Wyrm’, and she supposed that it may be fair to refer to it as such still, if only the sense that a White Wyrm was its the founder;
But the Kingdom of Hallownest actually had a second king in its time; One she would not suffer to be absent from the chronicles.
It had seemed such a small, unassuming creature, so much so that even she had, at first, misjudged the tiny shadow as a mere weakling –
but not long after, she had found herself standing guard in front of that temple, soundly impressed with the sheer strength of that diminutive warrior, though she had never been one to be awed easily, even less so after all the long years.
She had wondered then, how might a future poet have framed the scene, if any should survive to tell the tale?
The cruel, stone-faced queen-in-all-but-name, about to send a brave knight on a deadly quest, to mastermind the wicked plan and give the black order, as much as her grimly resigned, stoic champion may have volunteered of its own accord? She might not have hatched the inception of the plot, but their father was dead as door-nail then, and must have considered this a long shot at best; He could no longer compel anyone to do anything.
Or would the painters rather depict a princess in her darkest hour, suddenly rescued by a long fated hero at just the right time?
The advisor, confidant and ruler of a neighboring realm, about to possibly lay down her life for an allied king’s daring, stars-defying venture, though they should have known full-well that it would consume them both?
Or simply a long-lost little sister just about to relieved from a long, solitary vigil by her stalwart older sibling, appearing unexpected and unlooked for from nowhere again all odds?
That brave little shadow would have owed the lot of them absolutely nothing.
Hallownest was just a moderately interesting ruin to it, no different from the next one over;
None among her family had guided, nurtured or protected it as a family should.
She herself would have cut it down without a moment’s hesitation if it had not so tenaciously outlasted the quickness of her blade.
It could have washed its claws of them, and no one would have had the faintest right to blame it in the least.
And yet, it chose to burden itself with the fate of what she had then thought of as her entire world.
Of its own free will, somehow, and knowing that its sole reward might be death, or else, an age of torment.
As one who had felt the burdensome weight of heavy expectations and duties from the very instant of her birth, the thought that someone would choose to take that upon itself when it had every right and opportunity to simply walk away struck her with the deepest awe.
Not only had it gone and claimed that mark which she had refused to touch for hundreds upon hundreds of years, the sigil of a house to which it should have belonged to from birth, it also bore the mark of the Hunters’ caste, the Nailmasters’ symbol, a sacred artifact of the Moths, spells taken from an entire clan’s worth of largely deceased Snail Shamans and the evidence of having been baptized in shadow in the manner of the Ancient Civilization, lost before time immemorial…
(That tattered old mothwing cloak, too.)
It was as if it had gone looking for all those who had none left to carry on their legacy so that it might shoulder that in their stead.
But of course, its situation had been different:
She had been saddled with these pronouncements of destiny before she even had a chance to form any opinion of who she might be or what she might want to do with her life, so of course they were as a chain to her; And unlike their birth-cursed sibling, she’d had the option of at least attempting to defy them.
Not so for that little wanderer:
No one had ever expected anything from it at all.
It had been discarded, left to wander the world as an eternal vagabond with no idea of where it might possibly have come from and nary a glimpse of anything remotely like itself.
It, too, knew what it was to never belong anywhere, but not from a multitude of conflicting ties, but from the complete and utter lack of them.
If it was her yoke to be far too many things at once and nothing quite in full, its lot had been to not be anything at all, not god nor bug nor beast, with no markers of clan, rank or gender even any discernible scent.
If she had been in equal parts feared and lusted after for her manifest strength, inescapably affixed with eyes both leery and leering, it been completely dismissed and left for dead for its supposed weakness – pointedly glanced away from, or not reflected in anybody’s sights to begin with.
A nameless thing, rather than a creature affixed with a title too heavy with other people’s promise.
Of course it had jumped at the chance to have a task, a mission and a purpose, to claim the titles it had once been denied… too eagerly, maybe.
It did not appear to have be... marked... like their shared sibling and herself, even if a touch of its parents’ light lingered inevitably in its visage, as in the vines creeping around the columns of their palace, there was a speck of color still on the sad tatters of its wing membranes, even after the void was finished with it;
Even so, it could still have been a Higher Being – instead, it had been left as some sort of indistinct, runty stunted thing; It could have been a royal child; Instead it grew up as a dirty, tattered urchin abandoned in the wilds.
If things had been otherwise, it might perhaps have ended up joining the knighthood, content to let all that heir business fall to its more achromatic sibling, but even if had it ended up departing on its long journey anyway, compelled purely by its wanderlust, inquisitiveness and sense of adventure rather than necessity, it would likely have done so as a juvenile or young adult, not as a new-hatched child, and it would likely have left with a full set of lovingly crafted equipment, much as the set she was wont to carry, not just a single cracked old nail. It would have been used to sleeping in a proper bed, as she was, rather than accounting the ornate benches of Hallownest a veritable luxury compared to whatever crevices and rocks it had been curling up under in the wastelands. It would have been tutored by the best of the best – instead, most of its considerable skill was plainly discernible as entirely self-taught, though she noticed from the difference between their first clash and the second that it must have belatedly undergone some formal training in both sorcery and arms sometime after its arrival in Hallownest, likely in preparation for its grand task – and of course, it would have been granted a proper title, maybe something like ‘Bluewyrm’, or something else entirely, who could truly say?
That other world she’d pictured could never come to be, not any more than the one where she would have been half horseshoe crab rather than half wyrm, and died long, long ago, of old age, in the arms of her first long-term mate, leaving behind scores of descendants, some of which might have been ruling over a prosperous, plague-free version of Deepnest to this very day, one where the Weavers (perhaps come as immigrants or explorers rather than desperate refugees) would have blended with the rest of the population – and even if she’d still have gotten grief for being a half-spawn, at least it would have been a different half she could be proud of.
She might have found some kinship or community with the small handful of half-Weaver, half-Deepling children whom she vaguely recalled being around in her youth.
– her warmest thanks and regards both to Her Radiance and Our Holy Mother of Divine Silk for making all this forever impossible! Praise be!
The people they might have been would never be more than figments of imagination – would they even be the same, in any meaningful sense? Would it not be an alltogether different creature without the dark? Would she not be a different person without the light?
Even so, she could only hope that she’s done her part to remedy at least a little of the injustice by belatedly bestowing the little Ghost with an appellation of its own, suited, perhaps, to the being they were now, thus perhaps sharing some that same mercy that Vespa had once granted to her.
But if one good thing had come out of all this wretched mess, even the thinnest silver lining, so much as a single redeeming feature, then it would be that the two of them had ended up being siblings in this dimmest of worlds, and that they had encountered each other, despite all the odds against it;
So often she had wished for the faint shine emanating from her face to disappear; But looking back now, it might have been the main reason why the diminutive warrior had pursued her when it first spotted her that time in Greenpath; It must have been the first time in its long wanderings that it had ever come across another sharing something of that trait.
It knew not what it meant.
Perhaps it was hoping that she would finally be able to tell it.
It had not known then, not anything, not even that it might well have chosen to erase its memory deliberately by wandering into the desolation at the edge of the world.
If not for their meeting, it too may have gone and done something foolish without thinking it through or reflecting on what was driving it to that end – it might not even have remembered the origin of its desire, or known to name it as a desire at all.
It may have gone to waste merely postponing the inevitable, and to any onlookers, this might may have seemed like it was simply following its ‘programming’ – it wouldn’t even have been afforded the dignity of having it attributed to ‘instinct’, as it was thought to be wiped clean of even those most basic drives...
Instead, it would go in pursuit of the ugly truth and tear away the veil of its blissful ignorance.
It would come to be king, for all that it was an unceremonious makeshift wartime coronation.
To take on such responsibility willingly…
Some might say, like its father before it.
Hah. She’d once thought even the part of heir apparent so distasteful that she thought the only reason anyone would take such a role willingly would be if they hid some greedy, scheming, egocentric sort of reason for it…
The only sort of reasons that her aunts seemed to believe ‘her kind’ to be remotely capable of.
They’d never said it to her, of course, or as if they were talking about her;
They always said it about those people, but she’s not one of those people right?
She’s one of them. Right? Right? Prove it. Prove it now.
‘Prove it or be kicked to the curb’, they did not say, but it was really rather implicit.
At least, the malleable clay of a child’s heart could easily have misunderstood it that way.
After all, if she were truly one of them, why would she have to prove it?
Besides, she did have eyes in her face, even if she was four of them short by their accounting.
Her face did glow. Though her shell was sturdier than most, she’d gotten herself nicked often enough, on the hunt, or while practicing with her first needles – not yet the combat kind – often enough to notice that the insides of her digits were all pristine alabaster beneath the dark of her chitinous plates.
It would be useless to deny it.
What was she supposed to think?
Were they expecting her to pretend she didn’t notice just how quickly she might easily fall from their favor?
When she’d refused to come with them – saying not a word of Hallownest at all, but rather imploring them not to forsake the natives of Deepnest who had taken them in their time of need, nor to make vain the sacrifice of their queen, they had told her that it was her who had made the trade vain, and that she’d better hurry up and ‘go back with her own’.
None too subtle insinuations had been made that she must surely be plotting to usurp, now that a certain Wyrm was nowhere to be found –
It was implied between the lines she must have been plotting this already when she had she refused the throne of Deepnest with some finely varnished talk of how her mother would always be the queen through her eternal vigil, so that she might join it to her father’s territory in order to get a hold of both.
At that point, one of the oldest crones of the Weaver’s Den had piped up and proclaimed that she should not be expecting them to attend if she meant to march to Kingdom’s Edge and make herself a coronation feast out of her sire’s carrion now that the rest of him had finally joined the heap long overdue, before adding that the new queen of Hallownest would surely come to find her bounty rather rotten and festered in time – the old Weaver would expect nothing less from the daughter of one who would eat his young in all ways but the literal one, (and what could one possibly answer to that? He very much did do that.) but if she was itching so much to gorge herself upon the entrails of her pale kin, she’d find much fresher, richer, fatter, juicier prey in the direction they were headed in.
Not one to suffer such an insult unchallenged, she had sworn on her mother’s life then and there than she would never touch that blasted mark, unless it were to prevent it from falling into unworthy hands.
She did not even wish to contemplate the possibility that the Grand Mother might have learned of her existence from those very returnees who’d departed for their old home after the resurgence of the infection…
Did they think to tighten their progenitor’s bonds, only to find themselves snared instead, or had they come to miss their gilded cages?
Many of them had lost their own long yearned-for children to the pestilence of mind. That, more that anything, was what fueled the vicious bitterness of their departure.
Had some of them sold of her out out of scorn, because she had refused to come with them all those years ago?
There was no reason to assume that, of course.
Such information might just as well have been extracted under torture, if it was not obtained by other means altogether. She’d seen the kinds of savage breakings that the Mother Superior was wont to visit upon even on the most fanatical of her devotees.
Now that she was older… and especially now that she had seen where they all had come from, she honestly felt sorry for them, much as she did for her youngest ‘aunt’ of sorts.
They had known nothing else. They’d know nothing but deceptions, manipulations and schemes, and the eldest ones among them might have participated in a few of those themselves, paying cruelty onto cruelty, paying cruelty onto anyone who might be forced to buy it, really, just to feel a tiny bit of dignity and autonomy after being strangled for so long in a web of control.
Old defensive habits could be hard to fend off, even when one fully understood the issue with them and intended fully to leave them behind.
Besides, she could hardly claim that she’d never felt the temptation.
Not any more.
Not after she had come to Pharloom.
When she’d first ascended to the Cradle, she had found those cages and seen nothing but red.
Had those others died here, in this very hall, after so bitter a parting?
Her mother’s kin that she grew up, who taught her her arts, whose dwelling she had come to, time and time again, for her lessons?
Who had taught her the language of this land, without which the knowledge of which her trek would surely have proven yet more unpleasant than it already had?
She recalled the Weaver’s Den before it was abandoned, filled with people, at work on the floors, on the walls, hanging from the ceilings, hours spent sitting with the others, hard at work spinning, joined in song-
Had they cursed her, in their last moments, because she had denied them the use of her accursed blood, so dearly bought with the life of their sister and queen?
They weren’t always good to her, but they were still her family.
And that topmost layer of cages, whose plaques were near enough for her to read…
They spoke of others hunted down for just the faintest drop of Weaver ancestry. ‘Weaver in eighth part’ as if no other part mattered.
That rubbed at another, diametrically opposed wound, no less salted and inflamed now.
Is this what the wretched creature meant to do with her? Did she expect her to sing her praises obediently like a caged maskfly?
The nerve.
In that instant, she wanted to avenge herself upon the Threaded Monarch with such complete and utter brutality that it outright scared her.
She was so out of it when she came clambering back down that she did not even notice the conspicuous absence of the supposed body of a certain silk-spun child.
Of course, there was some part of her that knew well that if she had she declared her challenge then, she might have proven herself to be everything her aunts had desired: A Weaver Queen, greater and grander than all before her, worth the price to buy her.
That would have shown them. That would have shut them all right up, if they had be around to see it, and even if were to persist in their yapping, she would have had the means to make them shut up-
See how they like it.
It wouldn’t be so bad to be the queen -
Which only served to convince her then that there that there could never be salvation for her.
Oh, she’d keep going, even knowing this.
She’d push forward, as she always did; First, she’d entertained some hopes;
Soon, she hoped only to plug the holes in the wreckage she had left in her path -
And through that, too, she knew.
An ugly truth of her very own, one that even the desolate plains beyond the Howling Cliffs would not cleanse her of.
Who would seek this, but one who did nor feel the weight of responsibility at all?
Who but one who found the fear of their fellow-creatures to be something to relish in rather than cause for shame, who cared nothing for being set apart from them, but rather dismissed them as wriggling things of dust far beneath, whose steely pride would shield them from ever admitting error so that they might sleep soundly even after bathing in the blood of conquest and oppression every day.
The sort who would, in fact, consider it ‘below their station’ to ensure the safe delivery of urgently needed supplies.
One who’d see whatever accident of their birth had given her strength not as a heavy mantle, daunting expectation or a dreadful curse, but as license and entitlement to do as she pleased and arrogate to herself whatever she could get her talons into – Territory. Status. Wealth. Power. Adulation.
The location of her lair was far from the only reason that they called the ruler of this place ‘The One Atop’.
That is what she was.
The one at the top of the pecking order. The biggest, baddest lobster in the pond. The one who gets to eat first.
Is that not what it meant to be strong?
To be powerful, to seek power?
And what exactly had she been doing ever since her arrival in this strange country, if not collect power – tools, techniques, skills, material resources, raw glowing wads of it, gluttonously gulped.
What else would one want it for?
The answer, of course, turned out to be in everything she’d done and everything she’d been before she had been dragged here by those who would presume to tell her who she can and cannot be, who she’s supposed to be, and what she’s supposed to call her home.
All these blasted ruins looked so much like the Weaver’s Den back home, she’d felt almost like she was that little girl again, though the days of her childhood were long past.
Everyone this country with any ounce of magical knowledge looked at her exactly like they did, for the exact same reason. Thanks to the exact same creature.
She could almost have come to forget that she would come home from her weaving lessons, to those who were actually glad to see her, nay, that even in that Den, there had been some who stayed to fight for their new home, or refused to leave her without parting gifts meant to ensure her protection.
Home, of course, had been a couple of different places all throughout the years; Of them all, only the Distant Village still stood in any capacity, and even then, it was heavily depopulated compared to what it once was.
She’d rarely come to visit as of late.
She had not relished the sight in seeing it all come apart.
She’d scarcely visited or spoken to anyone at all.
Until she had come to this country… not to its mages, seers or its ruins, but to those like Shakra, Sherma, Flick or the residents of Bellhart, she’d barely noticed how she’d almost forgotten how nice it felt to be thanked, to see one’s actions have a tangible positive impact…
If anything had kept her from getting swallowed up, it was them.
Reminders that others could look at her and see anything other than her.
Desperate to prove false that beckoning voice calling her to the peak, she had instead turned all this vast land into the mirror image of the bone-filled crypt beneath her father’s house.
There might not be a single fiber in her being that can be trusted.
And still, some of her friends kept their faith in her.
Seemed to somehow see something good, against all odds.
Something worth having faith in.
There were those who had seen something good in her father, too.
Her aunts (as well as many of the more knowledgeable individuals throughout present-day Pharloom) would probably have called the likes of the Five Great Knights or the advisors who ended up as the two volunteer Dreamers to be deluded, ignorant thralls who fell hook line and sinker for his crude, superficial disguise -
A ‘disguise’, if it were, which he had in large parts bequeathed to her.
Her short stature, her soft voice that had never quite fit in with the work-songs of the other Weavers.
Must one who would call her a friend without knowing in fullness of her origins then be thought deceived in equal parts?
She did not ask such a question of her aunts, of course.
She’d been too scared of the answer, or rather, of how she might already know it, and she had not yet the skill in rhetoric to deliver a scathing rebuke.
‘Oh, but you see’, they might say, ‘He was still the King, he still sought deference, did he not?’
They did not say such things of their own queen, though the Beast was scarcely less revered.
As a little girl, she had often seen the petitioners bowing low when they would approach her mother on her high seat;
But her they saw as a person, someone who’d earned and deserved that reverence, whom they chose to follow of their own will. Their queen was counted as one of her own, not as some alien monstrosity whose every action and intention could only ever be suspect.
For better or worse, the would-be princess had spent much time surrounded by those with strength, by warriors, hunters and leader types of all imaginable stripes; She had grown up learning the ins and outs of three very different royal courts.
She could excuse her mother, of course, by supposing that she had only taken a monarch’s mantle out of necessity; From what little Beast’s daughter had been told of her time before their arrival in Deepnest, her band of rebel Weavers had lost its old leader and the initial replacement had soon proved none too competent. Somebody needed to step up. Likewise, the Deepnest would lose its king later on; as his wife, the Queen of Beasts would already have been familiar with the business of running the place, and her strength and competence was trusted. She had her spot on merit, and by the loyalty of the people.
Her mentor, meanwhile, has simply inherited her position from the previous Hive Queen, who had carefully groomed, trained and prepared her from birth to one day take her role. In a way, she filled a specific task or role necessary to the Hive just like any other Bee.
And the White Lady was plainly Queen Consort; After her mate’s disappearance, she had gone back to whence she came, in many ways rather worse off for having joined with him in his ventures.
With her father, however, there was no wriggling out of it:
He had sought out his throne, chosen it.
He founded his kingdom, built it from the ground up. He had waltzed into what used to be a slippery humid cavern filled with little but stalactites and various mindless skittering things, and let there be light. City lights. Artificial lights. En-lightenment.
He had spoken of bold visions and grand designs, of ideals and eternity, of higher thought and purpose, of shelter from the harshness of the wild – ‘Come down to the city, and all questions will be answered. All wished will be granted! Plenty and protection for all!’
Why?
Deception?
Nobody’s that altruistic.
...oh, she knew why.
She couldn’t have known back then, when she was younger, when she still stood dwarfed by the vaster experience of her elders, before she’d known where they’d come from, before she’d experienced collapse and calamity for herself.
Then of course she had gone and outlasted next to everything she’d ever known and gone for long in the same tired circles until they seemed to have lost even the faintest semblance of meaning, a lost straggler from some bygone time, somehow left behind and forgotten here, after all else had gone.
Wyrms were considered very nearly gone from the world even at the time that he had founded his kingdom – one other he encountered, according to one of the tales she’d heard from his knights, about a rare time when he’d gone out to the battlefield with them, but that was not a pleasant meeting from the sound of it, none more pleasant than her own encounter with the Widow – and it was long before her time.
He had nothing left but himself, even more so than she did right now;
But the one thing he must have had… the one thing she had was that blasted, accursed power that everyone always wants to get a hold of. She could take the briefest moment to perform what, to her, was a simple, casual task and be met with people falling over themselves in gratitude, or huddling behind her for protection.
She wasn’t one of them, she could never be one of them, but they would let her stay, even if they did not understand just what they’d let into their settlements. They would be glad to see her. They’d make a place for her. They’d refrain from asking too many questions as long as she made their problems go away, and she might play, for a short while, at being one of them.
No, even if it were her lot to always stand apart from them, she could at least protect them. She could be of some use. It would make a difference whether she was there or not.
In a way she had not changed much from the little girl that decided to chase away the pests from the Distant Village’s granary.
She had no idea if her father had ever been a child in any meaningful sense or if young wyrms were wont to play with any kinds of toys, but if they did, she wouldn’t be surprised if he’d been the type to bring all the nicest toys or make a sport of making up the most exciting games for the others to play so that they’d join in.
She’d bet he thought that if he used his powers to give his would-be followers everything they wanted, to grant their every wish and answer all their questions, they would stick with him and give him something to exist for, and he could have a place with them, even if he could not be one of them.
Fool. The mushrooms only put up with him cause they thought it might be useful to them if he could see the future. Those nobles in the city were just looking to get more and more wealth out of him. Half those scholars were just looking for proximity to power. He could’ve stood to tell them ‘no’ more often; Given the chance, they would’ve harvested him for parts like those in the gilded citadel did with their own convenient fount of vicarious might.
At least the Pale King had been missed by some, even by those he’d failed to protect.
She doubted that there was so much as a single creature in Pharloom who was going to be even the least bit sad on account of the Mother Superior – you’d be hard-pressed to find even those who could find mirth in her slow, agonizing demise, though many would have wished such death upon her - She’d wrecked too much on her way out to leave room for much rejoicing.
Some had loved him.
The princess wasn’t quite sure if she would count herself among them.
When she revealed their relation to his successor, she had referred to him only as a ‘source of strength’.
She’d had the wisdom to recognize that one of the chief victims at the receiving end of his errors wouldn’t care to hear his praises sung; Besides what would it mean to claim to love him?
Could one separate him from power? From dominion?
From his sins and his follies?
Loving him had never turned out so great for anyone.
It had not done any favors to his spouse, not to his closest friend, nor to his most illustrious disciple, and certainly nor to his eldest child;
There were too many far too obvious objections to the notion –
It was a vulnerable position to put oneself in, not all too defensible, like baring one’s throat – every instinct in her body resisted.
Many had missed him when he was gone.
He must have felt his end approaching, one way or another, when he’d sent his knights to man their posts in protection of the city, with one taken aside as guard for his queen and another to the village near the resting grounds.
His daughter – his one surviving child, so far as he knew – happened to be in Deepnest at the time, probably not by coincidence.
He told his retainers to evacuate, choosing to make his last stand with only his automatons for company. Perhaps even he had grown sick of the sacrifices by the end.
At last, it is told, or supposed, that even the finest of his golems were overcome by the hordes of infected beasts that would continue to lumber around the ancient basin for centuries to come – sounds of fighting were heard coming from the top floor. It may well have reached the throne room.
One could only speculate, as no one had returned from within the palace to tell the tale.
What few witnesses there had been had only witnessed the debacle from afar or arrived later to try to reconstruct the events in their aftermath.
What was known beyond all doubt, however, was that some point, something happened, and no trace of that palace or its master was ever seen again.
No more orders or communiques, not even an uncertain sign or a message in a dream.
- but this did precious little to quell the hopes for his return.
What other hopes were left?
He might have sent them away, but not long after, she’d found a group of them huddled around the tithing fountain, familiar faces she had grown up around, servants and courtiers, officials, all huddled together in a sad heap, waiting and praying.
She’d come across many of them still living when she came to survey the remnants of the palace grounds; She had implored them then to get to safer ground while they still could, offering even to help them fight their way out… but she stopped short of outright telling them what to do.
Had she given an order, they would have followed her at once, as their revered princess… but that would have been dangerously close to taking his place.
She tried to break to them the possibility that he might not come back, but she did not assert it as a certainty… first of all, because she really didn’t know, not then, not for certain, not until it became clear that the blessings he’d put on the land had stopped being extended to new arrivals – there would be no expanded thought for those just-barely-sentient new arrivals to the sewers, nor long life for any travelers come down from the surface, her later mates included.
- besides, she knew that, had she dared to utter the words ‘The King is dead’, there would have been a real possibility that someone might start crying ‘Long live the queen!’, and queen she must be, then, unless she should wish to crush the last hopes in their expectant eyes.
She begged them to just please go, to please save themselves, but as long as she didn’t push or press them, they’d just keep assuring her that nothing could break their faith in her esteemed father.
The ones that didn’t fall to the infection, either from within or by the claw of afflicted creatures without, met their end when the lighthouse mechanism in the Abyss finally failed and allowed the tides of of that dark sea to seep upwards, to structures built far too close to its rightful shores, leeching and draining all it touched.
The savior they had likely prayed for until their very last moments was quite likely dead as a doornail by then, not hearing anything at all, unless it were from the next world;
A tragic tale of loyalty and devotion, they might have accounted if there had been all too much of Hallownest left to speak of by then.
Idiotic thralls snared in a web so tight its threads still held fast when its master wasn’t even there to devour them anymore, the Weavers might have deemed them, if the majority of them had not long since departed by that point.
And her mothers’ warriors… well, they may have chided their weakness, but perhaps found something worth a grudging respect in their devotion; There was no way to know now, with most of them fallen now to the festering madness.
And herself?
She would not call such an end glorious or noble, though something in her stung at the thought of dismissing them or denying any meaning to their choice.
She had grown up with many of these people and found many of them solid and dependable, true in their service and dedication not just to anyone person or figurehead, but to the realm at large.
She was… in truth… too much one of them to discount it.
It was her kingdom, for better or for worse, whatever it faults.
But she wouldn’t have said so then, whatever the truth of her heart –
Not a very defensible position.
Easier to dismiss that backwater… to dismiss her home, the only world she’d ever known, as just his fallen domain.
Better to think it was all malicious tricks, at least that way, someone was in control.
But that was just as nonsensical really, as expecting him to have all the answers.
Whether one were to paint him as an all-powerful villain or an all-powerful hero, both would sidestep the reality that he simply wasn’t all-powerful at all.
It would be so much easier, if he were simply rotten.
Then he would deserve it.
Then she might avoid ruin if only she could sidestep or suppress that rot within;
If he was not –
If it was possible to act with one’s best intentions, according to the best of one’s knowledge, and still fail –
In the end, the real problem with him, the real tenderness and soreness around that part of her heart, was not that he had power or that the sought it, but that his power wasn’t enough, and that his attempts to grasp it ended in failure and ruin.
It’s that he was power-less in the end.
That he failed.
That he crashed and burned, while she’d had the privilege of watching him unravel from a front row seat.
He could seem so detached, so cold, so thoroughly dispassionate, sometimes, but in the end, he wasn’t. Not really. Not at all. He’d cared.
He had been hopelessly, irrevocably attached;
Not just to his child, or to the magnificent works of his claws, but to his desperate, scurrying underlings who’d looked to him to have the solution.
He’d cared so much that the fall of the kingdom took him right down with it; Building his realm had already been something like his last hope, after a long journey of his own that may have reached back so deeply into time that it was hard to fathom, and then he lost that, too.
It was a dangerous thing, to put something of one’s own heart outside oneself, to let it be bound fast to things, people or places, to anything that can be touched by time, or come to disappoint you, or betray you even – it was dangerous for anyone, but perhaps all the more so for an immortal.
Yet still he had cared… and she’d seen what came of that.
Unfortunately (or mercifully, perhaps?) she too, had come to care, about what happens to Pharloom and its citizens, as much as she might have closed off her heart after several lifetimes of watching everything she’d ever known go up in flames.
Thus did the question answer itself:
Whatever its vicissitudes, whatever its temptations and the ugly realities of it as a business…
Without power, you can do nothing.
That is why he sought it, with such desperation, in the end;
That is why his successor sought it, so that it might accomplish what he could not.
An impossible thing, foolish to even attempt… until suddenly, it wasn’t impossible.
That is why she, too, had gone and meddled with that darkness.
(vi)
But to claim that mark, or to fill that throne, wasn’t even the bravest thing the little Ghost had done, and neither was the Old Light’s defeat.
So far as she was concerned, what had marked it as truly exceptional, is that it would have dared to turn it’s mind-reading doodad upon its own reflection.
For so long as she could recall, she had always been terrified of what was inside of her.
Of what might be laid bare, if she did not take great care to ensure to never expose it.
So who could possibly have stirred greater admiration in her than one with the strength to look inside itself, even knowing that it might find nothing waiting but a yawning bottomless chasm of empty darkness?
For this alone, she might have envied it even more than for its wings or its seemingly effortless gentleness.
It had looked within, and there, it had found darkness indeed, but not as might have been thought, or feared.
A sacred, spacious darkness from which all things arise.
Something like potential.
A holy, cleansing sort of destruction that paved the way for new growth.
What would she find inside of herself?
It wasn’t finding nothing that she would be afraid of.
It was finding something.
A particular something.
She was afraid of finding light.
‘Afraid’ wasn’t even the right word – she wasn’t anxious or tense in anticipation.
She wasn’t frantic.
She’d accepted it, conceded it – on an intellectual level, at least.
She knew it was probably there.
She just didn’t want it bared.
Didn’t want it touched, or roused, or fed.
She’d thought that maybe the barb would hurt less if it came from her own mouth, so she’d know it’s coming.
She already knew- she knew- she understood-
So why must she be so exposed?
She might claim that she didn’t want it.
She could certainly cite the excuse that she’d never asked for it.
But this would be a lie, a manifest hypocrisy.
She wouldn’t give up an advantage or a protection – not in a world like this.
She wouldn’t hesitate to use it, if cornered, or if faced with an atrocity that needs a stop put to it.
Perhaps, she’d be in here –
More than just a mirage…
At last, made manifest.
Her whom they were all claimed to see in her:
The self that is ‘the strong person’. The leader. The queen.
One to flock to, one to fear, one to have faith in.
The self she couldn’t trust.
Many things she had been.
Many facets, many sides, many roles, many masks –
But that one, she had always denied.
For fear of what shape she might take.
For fear that she would drown out all else –
That she would be exactly what might be expected.
But if she was going to be serious about following in her sibling’s footsteps and adding ‘shaman’ to the long list of her attributes, she’d better get plucking on those strings of hers.
Nothing good could come from dabbling in the calling of spirits if one was yet to face what lay in the depths of one’s own spirit.
With bated breath, she listened, for the song hidden within her own heart.
Braced for whatever may come.
Once one realizes what one is capable of, what may be possible, within one’s grasp, there can be no going back;
Not doing it was never an option.
She would see, and she would know, and live with it ever after.
Along with all the other weights she would carry forever.
If there was going to be light here, then let there be light.
Her purely-functional plucking had now reached the point where she could afford to unfocus her eyes for a moment, to let the effect sink into her, soul resonating, calling to its likeness.
It wasn’t the kind of skill she’d thought to learn, before this day.
She could have taken harping lessons at the palace, of the perfectly non-magical sort, but while she could appreciate the creation of beauty in passing, it held less obvious usefulness than other skills available for the learning, and while her own tribe hailed from this distant land of song, her voice never quite fit in with the others.
In the Village, they had dances – dances of wild abandon, long frenzied rites that few outsiders could have stood to continue on with to the end, the sort that she rather didn’t have enough legs for.
Points of pride there were other than either with the Weavers or in the palace, she’d been told that the correct sequence of the step wasn’t the point, the feeling was –
The sense of exertion in one’s limbs.
She could possibly have out-danced them all, without ever attaining the intended effect, and worse, she could have gotten excited. Riled up.
If she let herself get into anything she would not be satisfied until the skill was perfected.
The one dance she had mastered was that of the bees, a complex, orderly affair, not merely recreation, but an elaborate, ritualized means of conveying complex information, with clear, defined rules. That was something one could master, and perfect.
Instead of bothering with some ornate instrument, her adolescent self had concerned herself with contriving some tool that could substitute for her inability to produce much in terms of buzzing sounds. Even without wings, even as a supposed guest of honor, she’d insisted, when her training schedule permitted it, to take part in the chores including patrols and the tasks of gathering, of both of which the dancing was a part, so, to fulfill that duty, she’d overcome that aversion, but only within the bounds of that task.
No instruments required for that, in any case,
and a skill such as this –
Something far too dainty, delicate, something you could picture as having been innocent once upon a while.
She had never been innocent from the moment she had hatched.
Marked with strength.
Born in chains.
Oh. It was working.
Notes digging into the substance of her heart.
Chords vibrating through her soul.
Melodies cutting deep, pulling, plucking, resonating-
Calling forth one’s own heartbeat, synchronizing, bringing into conscious awareness, dreadfully aware, in fact, of the most minute processes of life, all the fibers of the flesh, and of the heaviness soaked into the tissues, lodged deep inside the flesh, and from it, to fainter, more metaphysical things-
The stinging shards of pains, the dry salt, the deep-lodged lumps,
of tears never wept, held back, forced down, encrusted sediments like geological layers.
The long years spent watching, waiting, desperately hoping-
Praying, without ever knowing to whom, when there was no one left.
No one who would not relish in her destruction, if it would have been accounted worth noticing at all.
The baseline of misery tuned out to focus on the motions.
Actionable – methodical – seek and destroy.
Endure.
Like an endless rain of ash.
Like a faint melody, lingering in the wind –
A song that told the tales of a warrior queen from a distant land.
She would have expected something like a sadistic, beckoning voice.
Some malignant, second self lurking within, with desires and priorities very different from her own –
Something cold, sublime and alien –
Instead, she was met with her own reflection.
Her counterpart before her was arrayed in white, but she wasn’t met with the sight of puffy sleeves or gaudy golden ornaments.
It was an actual gown she owned when she was a young woman, a gift from the White Lady, granted with the intention to make her feel included – she recalled that she greatly appreciated this at the time. How they’d all matched – she rarely ever matched anywhere.
Besides, she had not seen it at any different from wearing the garb of Deepnest when she was staying there…
Until she’d made the error of showing up like this for her lessons in the Weaver’s den – she had been delayed for long-forgotten, utterly trivial reason that had prevented her timely departure and had not given much conscious thought to her getup at all so much it had been the concern not to waste or disrespect the precious time of her masters or miss out on their valuable teachings.
She could fix it if she tore it or got stains on it. It shouldn’t have been important.
But the moment they saw her… the instant she came into the great common hall where there were always at least a few sister-spiders hard at work…
That lead to a scene that would make the trivial detail leave a lasting imprint on her memory.
It is not that they outright scolded or demanded; That, she could have blown off, or argued against, or otherwise brought to an end with a well-calculated show of strength.
It would have been much harder, for the far less experienced person she was then, to blow off what came to her in the guise of concern: ‘Oh poor dear, what have they done to you-”
It was assumed at once… with all the unquestioned, reality-overriding might of a forcible assertion, that the folk at the palace must have put her in that gown against her will; As if she ever would have put up with that. As if she’d ever bow to anyone whom she did not actually respect.
Several of them skittered down to surround her, taking for granted that the weaving lessons could not possibly begin until the sartorial emergency in their midst was remedied.
The possibility that she’d chosen this – that the legacy of the hallowed kingdom was part of her as much as theirs – did not even cross their minds, or, if it did, she was being granted some leeway and indulgence with the reminder of their insistence that it better not be true.
She’d wanted to hope that they were simply looking out for her, in their own way, that they sought to protect her from the indignities they had faced. She was after all the daughter of their dearly departed sister and queen, and many among their number had been robbed of the opportunity to have offspring of their own, so that they’d doted on her in a somewhat vicarious fashion, when consoling themselves with silken charms did not quite cut it. If only they could have seen that the White Lady’s intention behind her gift had not been too different from that behind their objections to it – but of course they didn’t. She could understand now, just how badly they’d been burned. She could not fail then, to catch the implications as they ran their mouths, egging each other on in a circle of agreement:
‘That lot must always put their damnable mark on anything… predictable. So very predictable. ’
In her heart, she’d wished so much they’d just stop talking about ‘that lot’.
Her lot – they might deny it, she could not.
The more they had spoken of it in this manner, the more it seemed to her like a sin she’d better to cop to, as if to atone for the ‘crude disguise’ that her father had ever-so conveniently passed onto her.
They could not deny it either, for by that point, they always spooled up her work separately to the side, and told her often to put a bit more soul into it – it fetched quite a price with shamans and wizards, though they would usually keep most of it back for use in their own projects.
Once, she’d seen one of the dandies from the city sporting a mildly glowing robe, must have paid exorbitant sums to have it made out of what would otherwise be considered a prized high-grade magical reagent.
More than once, the occasional spool of it had made its way into her father’s workshop, which he’d pointed out to her with a trace of faint amusement. He intended it as praise, seeing as he’d been working on some grand project and quite willing to fork over top geo for the good stuff, and this was presented to him as ‘a little something special’ for several times the usual price.
Only when the shipment arrived had he recognized a likeness of his own light on it, and remarked that he apparently had even more skilled a daughter than he already thought.
Only that it wasn’t her skill alone – one might almost think that her entire existence was nought but a convenient scheme to sell him back his own light at a markup, so that they might extract some of his kingdom’s fabled wealth from his royal coffers. But of course the possible oddity of this would go over his head – the artisans of the kingdom often used some bits of the spines off of his long-discarded form to temper their weapons. He’d probably have done the same in their place, as unable as he was to resist any sort of material with interesting properties. He’d likely have infused some of his light into their ore for them, if any had dared to simply ask him politely.
He was possessed of a near-endless fount, after all.
It might be wondered if the color scheme of the White Palace was not merely a concession to practicality, especially considering his tendency to plan with regards to the far-off future; With both him and the Lady simply… existing at its general vicinity, it would have been hard to keep it any other color – his actual personal preference may have been closer to the duller silvers and blues in which he’d kept the city.
The one in Pharloom, one could not help but note, seemed rather fond of all things brass and gold, ostentatious uppity twat that she was - though one could not doubt that every single beautiful thing in her possession was either stolen in her conquests, or else, designed entirely by the Architects or earlier Weaver artisans, most of which she had brought to grisly ends, and yet rather ironic once it all became a part of her grand, gilded cage, naught but a great vault to hold the kingdom’s dubious wealth, until the tenacious old hag had choked them all in their sleep, making even the state apparatus contrived to contain her into yet another conquest appropriated for her use.
She had not come home that day dressed in gold.
Yet she might as well have, for all that anyone was willing to see:
‘I bet he wouldn’t have been this bold while sister Herrah was still around!’
She wished she could be seen as something other than the result of some damnable pact – that was rather why she had doffed the name she had been granted at birth.
‘It’s bad enough that he took her from us!’
That, too, didn’t mesh with her sense of reality – the voice of her heart piped up like a sharp thorn: She recalled her mother as a strong, resolute person who stood by her choices and would not have let anyone bully her into anything that was not in alignment with her own desires. There’s a reason she had been in charge of the pack in her time;
At least she thought she recalled her mother that way – the memory had gotten thinner and blurrier with each year, so could she truly speak with certainty?
‘Bad enough that she had to… endure that disgusting Wyrm…’
She’d heard quite a lot of talk about the great repulsiveness of wyrms over the years.
Straight to her face, even. They thought little of it.
Leaving aside the issue of the particular wyrm down in the palace, what had she done?
But of course they did not think they were speaking about her, after all:
‘Those creatures better not forget that you are a Weaver!’
The creature had not forgotten that. Why did they think she was here to study their techniques?
Was it even worth muttering ‘..in part’ at this point?
Spoken here and now, it couldn’t have been taken for a declaration of allegiance, of choosing sides.
She didn’t want to choose sides. She couldn’t have chosen sides, even if she had wanted to.
She was both! Irrevocably. Intimately.
Why couldn’t she just be both, and belong in both places?
Simple dreams then, before the infection returned and everything was consigned to the rot and the flames.
Silly dreams, like a little girl’s wish for wings to fly.
“Yet you stand here now, with wings of your own.” spoke the one in the white gown, recalling the hunter’s attention to the soft down that filled her cloak now.
When the apparition spoke, it was not with a voice belonging to the Beast of Pharloom – it was wholly her own voice, entirely her own, free of any adulterants, as if speaking from the deepest, most solid, most core part of herself, from her heart, from her gut, from her feet on the ground.
The authority she spoke with came from that certainty alone;
Her light was but the light of truth, her purity was merely one of will.
There she was: Leader of rebels, filler of competence vacuums, and yes, granter of wishes and generous funder of public fucking infrastructure.
Her who had encountered the of hapless, huddled masses on her path, and tarried in her pursuits so that she might haul them all up the mountain path still living, her who’d put herself in charge of fortifying their positions, solving their problems, of demanding an answer from whoever had allowed this mess under their watch, and assembled the plot to depose her once it was clear that no one else was going to take responsibility. She’d had her own reasons as well, but the path to her freedom had rather aligned with theirs, and she knew they should have better odds of reaching it together.
There was no need to ask the other whether or not she had any interest in ruling Pharloom in the long-term, however – not because it would never possibly have occurred to her to rule anything at all, but simply because this wasn’t her home.
The gown she had chosen to appear in for this occasion told plainly of where she thought her home was, as much as the hunter’s own cloak.
It would turn out that Monarch and her minion the Widow had both been rather wrong about where that was.
“As you already know, I am you – so I can only tell you what you already know in your heart.”, the queen declared, seizing the hunter by the shoulder with one of her claws to compel her to face her.
“You already know that the light you came here to seek is your light. Not the Pale Monarch’s, nor even your father’s. Yours. No one else’s.” she declared, without the faintest trace of doubt or hesitancy in her voice.
“You know already that mother wanted to give that light to you, because she wanted you to have it, so you could do with it what you want, without expecting anything in return.”
But while she didn’t waver, there wasn’t a touch of bravado, either. No frantic insistence, no protesting too much, just simple solidity.
“You already know what your mentor once told you: That this light, like any other fount of strength, is not something to be feared, but something that will one day give you the means to defend yourself and those you care about against those who would trifle with you. You know she gave you a blade uniquely fashioned to suit your particular needs.”
And the queen pulled, from beneath her robe, something shining, something whose soft glow might be seen escaping from in-between her digits, not quite yet in solid shape.
“Think about it well now, so that this time, you know exactly what you’ll be accepting when you claim this, and what it is that you will be taking in hand, lest you claim you were deceived again, or worse yet, deceive yourself. It’s crucial that you understand this full.
You’re no ignorant girl now. You’ve seen the full extent of their deeds, and stood in something very much like their shoes. So look within and ask yourself. Your father and your stepmother. Those who left this for you… Those who wanted you to have this… Do you hate them? Do you condemn them? Are they monsters?”
At this point, it was merely a question of a sober, dispassionate assessment:
“No. They were imperfect. They committed errors. They made miscalculations based on incomplete knowledge – but they were trying to do the right thing. To protect those they care about, who’d depend upon them. They were doing the best they could, as limited beings.“
“Then so were you.”
-that wasn’t-
-it wouldn’t-
No. Actually, she could not argue with this. She could not find within herself a counterargument that she would accept, that would come from sharp logic rather than from half-formed, long-carried imprints of dubious, indistinct origins.
The other one must have known this too:
“Here’s your memory.” she said, holding out the shining thing, now taking on the distinct, remembered shape she had once glimpsed long ago in the Queen’s Gardens. “Go forth then. Create. Make something out of nothing. Form its likeness from your thread, and let there be light.”
(vii)
She carries with her, always, the weight of who they chose to be.
From her aunts, she learns the make of countless tools and techniques, to master every aspect and facet of her own power to the fullest; From then she learned manifold ways to wield it, though its ultimate progenitor had only ever used it to strangle, trap and chain. She carries fragments of them with her now – The rage of apostates and the melodies of fanatics, the techniques of guardians and the tools of schemers, the strikes of desperate outcasts and one cousin’s mournful song. From them she learned just how easy it is for hurt people to hurt others in turn, and the bitterly earned wisdom that comes from that understanding.
From her mother, she learned the meaning of unconditional love, and of the difference that even the tiniest, briefest glimmer of it can bring to the world.
From her mentor, she learned to turn her uniqueness into strength, to strike back against those who would use her or fear her for things beyond her control.
From her father, she learned the value of utilitarianism, duty and dedication, of having the stomach to do what needs to be done even if it means tarnishing whatever pretty illusions she might hold of herself – and from him, she learned to see and seek potential, power and knowledge wherever she might find them, to use all means at her disposal, no matter how off-putting or disturbing.
From her step-mother, she learned that you don’t have to be exactly like another in order to be loved by them, and that the light and power that marked them both was not, in the beginning, a rotten thing – it’s rather more what one makes of it, about the uses it is put to. From her, she learned than even one who has sinned can still be loved.
From her sibling draped in white, she learned the importance of valuing life in all its forms, and how one’s will and determination can make a difference even in the most hopeless of situations.
From her grandmother, she learned the value of wisdom and self-reflection, if only by the negative example of what happens in its absence. The qualities she had passed down to her many children were so very much like sharp blades: Stubbornness, willfulness, defiance, sophistication, pride, authority, power, strength, appetite, even powerful attachment – all things that prove invaluable in the right place, but that will inevitably wreak destruction if the wielder fails to control them or to temper them with wisdom.
As tools put to greater purpose, they are indispensable; Pursued unthinkingly for no sake but their own, they leave one trapped in an empty, lonely existence, repeating the same mistakes again and again until their consequences finally prove one’s undoing.
Then, finally, from her sibling draped in black, she learned the value of hope, and of the boundless strength that can be found in wading through the darkest depths and facing what lies within oneself.