Perhaps the greatest anomaly was that the Empress had been ruined, felled, and destroyed by something so insignificant.

What was loss, in the brambles and thorns of life? Hadn’t they all experienced failure, over and over again, varnished and coated in the lacquer of dust, cinders, and ash? Hadn’t they all tasted the piquant, rancorous brine of a damned sea, where victories were dashed, eradicated, and annihilated moments after their war trumpets and drums? Hadn’t they all faltered, stumbled, fallen to the last vestiges of earth and begged for absolution, deliverance, liberation from their pain, their agony? Hadn’t they all scraped their knees across rubble, sand, and glass, striving for solutions, machinations, and calculations when hope was lost? It was how they conquered collapse, defeat, oblivion, that etched, sculpted, and molded their characters, their strength, their valor. They’d be remembered by their debacles, disasters, and catastrophes, and the way they reshaped their stones, their embers – if they could stoke them back into infernos by the press of conviction, by the sweltering of persistence, by the brazen, bold, creeds. How many times had Lena struggled to breathe in the suffocating agony of violence, strung and stung by her vile embraces? She’d quelled and brewed in the anarchy of her own soul, but instead of blaming, shaming, or sobbing, she’d restored her armaments; confidence, compassion and composure, fitted whims back into her shield, and sheathed her sword. To lose, to fall, didn’t make them lesser beings – just another soul melded into the fortuitous balance of existence, rooted sentience. But when the fairy monarch’s eyes stared, fixated, upon the whimpering malice, upon the absconded menace, she saw no restoration, no attempt at renewal. Was this how Psyche combatted her mistakes, her errors, by shaking, shirking, responsibility, and wallowing, withering, planting seeds of disrepair and dissolution, waiting to drag others into her siren wails and supplications? Was this how she strived to remain, a legend sown into fiasco, rather than asp venom, snake vitriol, coiled schemes and ruses? Was this what she showed to the world now, despair, depression, tiring melancholy? Was she so blinded by ruin, incapable of seeing the sun, the moon, the stars, the monsters, the heathens, becoming another one bleeding, ending, forgotten in the rocks and pebbles? The resolute, adamant gaze of the sylph bore deeply upon the former Queen’s, uttered truth, veracity, and candor through lilting tunes, not dulcet, not silken, but sharp, blunt, reality simmering into the columns of cracked monoliths. They always had a choice. It was how they took, grasped, or clenched the opportunities. “Not if you’re unwilling.”

Intrepid, brave, and valiant, she pressed into the chaos and came out whole, riveting, elegant, refined, alluring – struggling to beguile wisdom into seemingly deaf ears, too far gone to relent, to admit, to agree, that through the seasons, the ages, the grieving for her defeat should have ended. The forthright clamor of her wounds stirred again, as tenacious, steadfast, and unwavering from the first days of her arrival into the Edge, damaged, but blessed. “I don’t ask you to lead again. I don’t ask you to hold a throne.” She paused, carved and whittled her phrases back across the surface again, polished the armor of her ethereal veneer, of potency strangled, then reinvigorated through time, adamant, passionate, and merciful. “I implore you to see beyond failure.” There was more to the kingdoms, the castles, the palisades, the realms, than the reaches of conquering or dividing, of consuming and devouring, of lacing and layering the earth with poison or vexation, or even combing over decaying wiles, lands sullied by one’s own hands, horns and hearts broken. “The rest of the world has – and will leave you behind if you allow it.”