It was difficult, the differences in dealing with her twins versus dealing with her first living child. Rein was so calm, collected, cool, temperamental much like his father and much like herself as she was beginning to find out. But for some reason, she found it hard to deal with Kiada and Kianzo. They were so similar, and yet so different. Like their appearances, they were sun and moon. Kianzo, loud and brash, straight to the point. Kiada, calm and collected, sweet no matter what. At least as far as she’s seen. The Thief didn’t quite know what Kiada was like outside of being under a motherly watch. Was she as brash and loud as Kianzo when he wasn’t around? Did she aspire to be so much more than what she was? She remembered once telling Rein that her mother was a Queen and how her father was a warrior, some sort of nobody and it ended up putting her through years of torment and hell for it. But would her twins have to deal with the same thing? Their father is a King and here she is a thief, truly a nobody in her eyes.

She strived, but strived in the wrong areas. She strived, but she strived with the wrong idea of intentions. She strived to be so much more than she was, as she always had, and she ended up here. Still no one after so many attempts. Perhaps it would never change.

And so the Thief found herself wandering among her thoughts toward the misty tropical land of the Isles. She hadn’t returned here since the fight, when she had been suffering the lasting effects of the Green Labyrinth Lung – a horrible disease that Tembovu had seemingly thrown in her face that perhaps if she had followed him to the Edge that she wouldn’t have suffered – that she wouldn’t have mistaken him among her sightless eyes as the man of her nightmares. How many times would he continually force her to follow him, guide under him, be put through so much mental turmoil to simply be a follower when she was trying her damnedest at being a leader. And nobody had seen it before her.

Perhaps she was a fool for thinking she could become somebody.

She stood beside the water’s edge, head lowered toward the small river that ran rampant between the dottings of islands that laid out the new addition to Helovia. She looked upon herself in her reflection, a sad woman with goals unachieved and unachievable, with bright blue eyes slowly losing their spark as she contemplated what she was really doing here in Helovia aside from populating it with faux love.

"Talk."

I’ve become a simple souvenir of someone’s kill

And like the sea—

I’m constantly changing from calm to ill.

Rexanna