Queen's Light

"Thine Own Self"

She wore a key over her heart, and a dagger beneath her corset.

Are you truly a queen of 'kindness' or is this all just to make you feel better for your wrongdoings in the past?

Her dagger now lay across her lap. She was in her underclothes, her dress and corset having been torn off and thrown to the side.

There was no 'feeling better'. Conri didn't know. She couldn't.

Rhiannon hadn't had the guts to tell them.

A shadow passed over her vision. She jerked her head up, but nothing was amiss. Everything in her chambers was exactly as it had been before she'd left it.

Her next breath came shakily. She knew what was coming.

"She is right, you know..."

The whisper that echoed from miles away.

"You, the false queen..."

She knew.

"A slimy, evil cockroach..."

This wasn't new.

"You thought you could be rid of me?"

She never had been.

A slim shadow peeled itself from the inky darkness of her window. "That knight doesn't seem to like you very much right now, does she?"

Rhiannon's chest caved in. "It's all right," she said. Her voice sounded meek, cowering, a mouse before a lion. "Conri...doesn't know me very well."

The shadow moved around the bedpost, its form curling and whispering like smoke. "That isn't her problem, though, is it?"

"I knew you would come back." A lump in her throat. Fire in her eyes. Water down her face.

A malicious murmur emanated from the blackened humanoid mass, its own haunted version of a laugh. "Come back?"

It came to a halt just before her, reached out with a ghostly hand, and tilted her chin upwards.

The dark smoke seemed to dissipate as the figure came into focus. It was her own face, with sharper cheekbones and scowling brows and a devious curl to its lip. What Rhiannon would have seen had she looked into the mirror as Vicar of Death.

"Oh," it whispered with its twisted mouth. "I thought you knew."

It leaned closer, shadows still swirling about its form, until its nose could almost touch hers.

"I never left."

Rhiannon gasped as the shadows coalesced with a sinister laugh. The laugh echoed in her skull as the billowing flood of darkness shot itself forward, burrowing into her chest and needling her heart.

The candlelight flickered back to life. Rhiannon was panting, cold sweats dotting her brow and plastering her hair to her neck. She looked down. Her dagger had been split in half, its hilt and blade lying in two separate pieces.

"If you ride out again, I'm not sure that same woman will ride back..."

She didn't have to go off to battle to become someone different. She'd become someone different when the royal crown was first placed upon her head. The Vicar of Death had never gone away.

Conri was right. She had been running a redemption campaign since the beginning of her rule. Queen Rhiannon the Kind was fictional, but the other misfits knew not to what extent.

Neither, it seemed, did she. The remorse she felt for her past—was it real? Or was she forcing herself to imagine sorrow over a past she had no guilt for? Who was she—kind or brutal? Gentle or cruel? Queen or dictator?

Her hand strayed to her throat, where the key still sat. It was well past midnight, but there was something she needed to do. Quickly, she stood, letting the broken pieces of her dagger clatter to the floor. She snatched her dressing gown from its hook on the wall by the door to her bedroom, slipping it on and racing to exit her chambers.

She needed to find Charles.

(Yes, yes, another rp Malgeres but they're fun and I'm not sorry)