Biography 3

“A Broken Home”

Snow clung to the edge of the roof like the last unspoken word in a quarrel, and the sky wore a shroud of gray that never lifted. Even the birds had forgotten how to sing here. In the center of the marketplace, among the slush and coal-smoke, she walked—Xandera, draped in blood-red silk that clung to her curvaceous form like mourning incense on wet flesh.

Children didn’t speak to her. Vendors offered only the briefest nods. Yet one boy did.

“Don’t be silly, Miss Xandera. See? I’m smiling.”

He beamed, his dark brown skin stretching into a grin too wide to be real. His eyes, however, betrayed him—deep wells of loss dressed in pretense. She tilted her head in quiet acknowledgment, not correcting him. Her eyes, golden and unblinking, read his soul the way a necromancer reads the last breath from a corpse. And this boy, this brave, broken thing—he was hollowing.

He tugged her sleeve gently, his fingers small and calloused. “Papa’s at it again. I think he missed breakfast.”

The tavern door loomed like a mouth that had swallowed too many men. Inside, the sour tang of rotgut whiskey stung the air. There he was—the father—slumped like a puppet whose strings had long since snapped. Once tall, once noble, now little more than damp ruin in a man’s shape.

Xandera approached him silently. Her heels clicked once against the tavern’s stone, and all else quieted. She placed a dark, gloved hand on his shoulder—adorned in rings shaped like skeletal petals—and moved the bottle away with ritual-like precision.

“It’s time to go home,” she said. Her voice was neither cruel nor kind. It was final.

He stirred, slurring through the haze. “I hate you,” he spat, eyes failing to meet hers.

“I know,” she replied, brushing his chin aside as if his fury were a child’s tantrum. “But your son doesn’t.”

The boy said nothing. He’d seen it before. He moved beside her, not with urgency, but with the exhausted familiarity of someone already carrying too much for his small frame.

“Poor Papa… poor me…” the boy muttered under his breath, his smile fading at last.

“You are not poor,” Xandera said gently. “You are surviving. The others… they are drowning.”

He straightened at that. “Sometimes kids are tougher than grownups,” he said again—this time with a bitter confidence that sounded far too adult for his age.

It had been a year since the boy’s mother had vanished, swept away in the arms of some charming merchant with firelight eyes and promises like polished mirrors. She had gone chasing excitement, escaping the wear of motherhood and a husband whose shoulders had grown too tired to carry dreams.

“She stopped thinking about us,” the boy had once said, as if narrating a book he’d already finished.

The father never did recover. Every drink was a crucifixion. Every glance at the boy a reminder of failure. The few moments of clarity that surfaced came like brief hauntings.

“You enjoy it?” he asked Xandera one night, eyes sunken, voice cracked. “Traveling. Meeting strangers. Leaving… everything you know?”

Her response never changed.

“Sometimes.”

It was true—but never for the reasons they imagined.

He hated her for it. Not for her honesty, but for the reminder that some souls were meant to leave, while others were fated to be left behind. “Why wasn’t our life enough?” he would mumble. “Why’d she go?” But Xandera never answered that question. She knew better than to attempt translating the language of wanderers to those rooted in pain.

He feared one thing above all: that his son would leave too.

And then, one day… the boy’s mother returned.

Tattered. Gaunt. Betrayed by the very man she’d abandoned them for. Her eyes had lost their mischief. Her hands trembled like willow branches in winter wind. The boy saw her first. Ran to her like a heartbeat bursting from stillness. Wrapped his arms around her without a whisper of hesitation.

It was the first time Xandera saw him truly smile.

But the father? He rose like a storm—the smell of liquor still thick on him—and staggered toward her.

The boy stood between them.

“Papa, please,” he begged, tears welling like he’d held them in for years. “She’s back. That’s all that matters… isn’t it?”

And something in the father broke.

His knees gave out. Not in shame, but in surrender. His arms reached around them both. A fractured embrace. A haunted prayer. The boy wept openly now, not from sadness, but from release.

From the far edge of the square, Xandera watched. Her arms folded beneath her bosom, her lips painted the color of dried roses. She stood still—no joy, no regret. Only the solemnity of a priestess watching over the final scene of a funeral rite.

Later, as she prepared to depart the village, the boy followed her through the frost.

“Will you come back someday?” he asked.

She looked down at him, her expression unreadable.

“Perhaps,” she said. “But you have your family now. Guard it well.”

He hesitated, then offered one final proclamation:

“Even if we’re saying goodbye… I’m not gonna cry. Sometimes kids are tougher than grownups.”

She smiled, just slightly. Then turned.

And walked on, heels tapping a dirge into the snow-covered road.

Behind her, the tavern door had closed. Before her, another village awaited. Another broken family. Another child smiling through ruin.

The poets call it wandering. But for Xandera… it was penance.

The First Night Beneath the Stars

Xandera cradled the child in the hollow of her arm, where no warmth beat but a deeper kind of stillness thrived—a sanctum of silence known only to those who had outlived centuries. Around them, the jungle wrapped its limbs in shadow and bioluminescent glow, leaves rustling with the breath of the ancient and unseen. The fire beside them murmured low, casting a golden wane over the infant’s sleeping face.

The child’s breathing was shallow, perfect, the breath of someone who had not yet tasted betrayal or sorrow. Her tiny hands twitched in sleep, soft and unscarred, and instinctively curled toward her mother’s stillness—not warmth, not heartbeat, but presence, unwavering and eternal.

Xandera looked down with eyes that had watched stars die. Eyes that had seen a thousand children born, live, and return to her in the same silence they arrived. Her gaze, like twin urns of smoldering light, studied the child not with detachment, but with a sorrow so old it no longer needed tears. For in that moment, holding this small and tender being, she felt something unbearable—the possibility of joy.

She had borne children before. Buried them. Resurrected some. Forgotten none.

Each had been a brief candle, a flicker of radiance swallowed by the inevitability she commanded. She had wept before. She had raged against time. But time, like death, could not be undone—only delayed, embalmed in moments like this.

“This one will not be mourned before her laughter,” Xandera murmured to the canopy above, as if speaking to the stars like lost kin. “I will not entomb joy in prophecy.”

The child stirred, and her tiny fingers grazed the edge of Xandera’s veil. The Lich Queen enclosed them gently in her own long, elegant hand—cool and steady, etched with runes of power and sorrow. Her touch had ended kingdoms. It had cursed bloodlines. And now it shielded the smallest fragment of life, not from death—but from fear of it.

Around them, the nocturnal chorus of Hextor’s mire began to swell—the distant croak of grave frogs, the hiss of bloom-wasps, the humming of ghost orchids in heat. It was a music of rot and wonder, of death not as ending, but as another form of becoming.

She reached out with her other hand and summoned from the air a filament of gleaming death-silk, spun from the weave of her own aura. It shimmered like starlight over a grave, pulsing faintly with ancestral lament. Thread by thread, she began to spin a garment—not to adorn, but to protect, to bless, to promise.

Each strand was a vow: That she would walk this child through the storm. That joy would be known before grief. That love would be given, even if memory failed.

Her fingers moved like a litany, slow and precise, her every motion echoing some old prayer—one not spoken in temples, but whispered in tombs.

The garment took shape, a shroud of delicate necrosilk, soft as breath, strong as old bone. She draped it over the child’s body and pulled it close around her, like wrapping the last living page of a lost scripture.

A lullaby formed on Xandera’s lips. It was not a song known to the living. It had no language. It was a vibration, a resonance that stirred bones in their crypts and made the mushrooms on nearby trees bloom black and wide. It was a hymn of timeless motherhood, of a goddess who had buried her own heart across eras and now dared to let it beat once more.

She sang it, quietly, as if even her melody might crush what she held.

“Little flame, sleep deep, sleep slow, beneath the bough where no winds go. Death shall guard you, soft and low, in cradle made of root and woe.”

When the child shifted, a faint coo rose from her throat—a sound untouched by the world’s hunger. Xandera stilled her. Brushed a kiss upon the girl’s brow, a kiss like a benediction, cool and permanent.

She did not weep. Queens of death do not weep. But she felt a familiar ache settle into the marrow of her fingers, the ache of knowing that everything she loved, she would one day lose—not to war, not to betrayal, but to time’s quiet erosion.

This child would die. And still, she would love her.

That was the blasphemy. Not her necromancy. Not her throne of bone. But this unbearable courage to love something that would be taken.

She would not mourn in advance. She would not count the days like numbered petals pulled from a fading bloom. Instead, she would gather every moment like sacred bones into her keeping.

For now, the girl slept. The fire hummed. The swamp sang of life renewed.

And Xandera, Lich Queen of Hextor, cradled her child in arms that had shattered nations—and finally found a peace no kingdom had ever given her.

“The Portrait That Never Was”

The barge creaked gently over the river’s slow, somber current, gliding through the green hush of lilies and fog. Mist clung to the water like silken mourning veils, and the scent of wet reeds and blooming ghost orchids drifted with each hush of the oar. Xandera, robed in crimson-black silk threaded with bone motifs, stood like a shrine at the prow—her golden eyes vacant yet aware, fixed on a point far beyond this mortal realm.

Beside her stood Rosa, a painter of the dead, dressed in charcoal mourning attire. She clutched her sketchbook to her chest as if it might still house something living. Her fingers trembled—not with fear, but fatigue, and the ache of something too long left unsaid.

“You paint them as they pass,” Xandera said, not a question but a benediction. Her voice was smooth, perfumed with the chill of grave earth and myrrh, a velvet whisper lined in finality. “Not when they are alive. Not when they are gone. But in the moment they become memory.”

Rosa did not reply at first. She had long stopped being startled by Xandera’s presence. The Lich Queen was unlike any patron she had ever served—elegant, regal, and cold, yet never cruel. Standing beside her felt like walking inside a prayer carved into bone.

“It’s a race,” Rosa finally murmured, her gaze fixed on the horizon’s haze. “I have to start before the face changes—before the warmth leaves the cheeks, before the skin sags and the light goes out behind the eyes. Once that moment passes... they’re no longer themselves.”

“Wrong,” Xandera replied, gold eyes slanting toward her like blades of moonlight. “That moment is when they are themselves—stripped of illusion, freed of performance. You are painting not their likeness... but their truth.”

Rosa’s knuckles whitened on her satchel. “Still... sometimes I wonder if it’s obscene. To immortalize their last breath. As if that moment of absence is something beautiful to preserve.”

“Obscene?” Xandera turned to her fully, the air thickening like incense at a funeral rite. “There is nothing obscene about grief. Nor in gazing directly at the cost of love.” She placed one claw-tipped hand upon Rosa’s shoulder, cool and grounding. “You give them dignity. Even as they fade. That is more than beauty—it is rite.”

The painter looked away, the wind tugging gently at her veil. “But I couldn’t finish her,” she whispered. “My daughter. When she passed... my hands wouldn’t move. I tried. Gods, I tried. But she’s the only one I never captured.”

Xandera’s eyes narrowed—not in judgment, but mourning.

“You do not owe your pain a portrait,” she said, voice softer now, as if conjuring ritual. “The ones we love most... they do not need to be remembered by brush or charcoal. They haunt the silence, the heartbeat, the places where ink dares not touch.”

Rosa’s lips trembled.

Xandera continued, more tender now, as though every syllable were laid atop an altar: “I have built cathedrals of bone for lovers I barely knew. I have raised mausoleums in the names of those who forgot me. But never have I etched the name of my own mother. Not once. Because to do so would reduce her to something the world could understand. And I refuse.”

A silence passed between them—neither heavy nor hollow. Just... real. The kind of silence that feels like a held breath between life and the afterlife.

The boat struck gently against the dock’s edge. Rosa gathered her case, her fingers steadier now. Not because the pain had left—but because it had been named.

As she stepped onto the riverbank, her eyes flicked back to the tall, opulent figure of the Lich Queen. “Thank you,” she whispered.

Xandera said nothing.

But in her golden gaze was the echo of a hundred thousand elegies—each one unwritten, each one still singing.

Later that night, under lantern light and the hush of lilac wind, Rosa opened her sketchbook to a blank page.

She did not draw her daughter.

She drew Xandera—standing like a monument to every soul that had dared to love, and paid the price for it.

The page would remain unfinished.

But perhaps that, too, was its own kind of portrait.

“Peace”

The bones beneath her feet no longer spoke.

Xandera stood upon the wind-swept rise overlooking her homeland—a village of sunbaked clay nestled between the bleached ribs of ancient mountains. Time had not touched the people here as cruelly as it had her. Their faces were lined by laughter, their eyes clouded only by age. Her own gaze, golden and sharp, held centuries of silence, but no wisdom that soothed her marrow.

Children shouted her name with awe. Elders whispered it like prayer. And when Altan, the village chief, stepped forward, draped in faded ceremonial silks and pride, his words echoed through the square like drums against a coffin lid.

“To think our own Xandera—our flower of death!—rose to build an empire beyond the mire! A queen! A goddess! You’ve commanded the dead and conquered kings! We are blessed by your shadow!”

She smiled, thinly. A queen’s smile. Not a woman’s.

She had not come to be worshipped. But they offered her garlands anyway, pressing petals into her hair, draping her in silks and songs. Even Bahram, the village fool, snatched her bone-carved staff and began to pantomime battle—spinning in exaggerated arcs, chanting her name with each pretend kill.

The people clapped and roared with joy. But Xandera? She could see the real blood. The real cries. And every time Bahram swung, she remembered how ribs collapsed. How skulls split. How flesh peeled from the soul like wet parchment.

She turned away before her smile faltered.

That night, beside a fire of sandalwood and sheep dung, she sat with Temur—once a general beneath her banner, now an old man in woolen robes, smelling of honey and ash. His hands trembled as he passed her a bowl of fermented milk. She took it. Not to drink, but to hold—to remember warmth.

“I never thought I’d live long enough to see you rest,” Temur murmured.

“I’m not resting,” she said, her voice as soft as damp moss. “I’ve simply grown tired of burying the world.”

He nodded. He, too, had once cleaved kingdoms apart. “The ghosts get heavier with time. At first, you command them. Then, they watch you.”

“They never leave,” Xandera whispered.

“No,” he agreed. “They just grow quiet. Until you look at your reflection... and wonder if you’re still among the living.”

She did not respond. She didn’t need to.

The next day, the village held a closing ceremony. It was modest—woven garlands, simple drums, offerings of roasted maize and goats’ milk. Then the children came. Barefoot, wild-haired, eyes full of sun and dirt. They gathered before her like pilgrims, and one boy—Shirin—stepped forward clutching a wrinkled paper.

He read aloud a poem he had written: About lambs born in spring, About his grandmother’s smile, About how she died one evening while the moon was soft, And how he still talked to her, hoping she’d hear him through the stars.

The boy did not cry.

But Xandera did.

For the first time in centuries, a tear—real and saline—slid down her bronzed cheek. It was not grief. It was remembrance.

She left the dais without a word, her heels pressing soft imprints into the dirt. That night, she sat in Temur’s hut, quiet but radiant, and placed her bone staff across his lap.

“It’s not a relic,” she said. “It’s a burden. Burn it or bury it. But don’t carry it.”

Temur blinked at her, stunned. “You’re renouncing your rule?”

“I am not abandoning the dead,” she said, eyes shining with something far too human. “I am simply choosing to live again.”

She wrote a letter to the Ossuary Dominion. In it, she relinquished her crown, left command to her inner court, and stated:

“May the throne rot in elegance. Let the empire endure. But do not seek me. I am no longer yours.”

Temur’s lieutenant wept reading it. A courier rode until his horse bled to deliver it. But Xandera was already gone—walking barefoot past the boundary stones, wearing only a simple robe and a single red earring.

As she crested the final hill, Temur stood behind her, clutching a staff of carved wood—his, not hers.

“Where will you go?” he asked.

She did not turn.

“Anywhere I’m not known.”

“And who are you now, if not a queen?”

Xandera breathed deeply, tasting soil, wind, smoke, and sun. “Someone learning how to die slowly.”

He bowed, not to a monarch—but to a woman.

And as she walked into the dawn, every step shook free a little more of the weight she'd worn like a crown. The road ahead held no thrones. No legions. No bone altars.

Only the wild.

And in the wild, for the first time in an age...

Xandera felt peace.

“Prisoner”

She knew this was not the first time. The cell was new. The iron was old. The chains, though recently forged, whispered of ancient kin. Xandera, Queen of Bone and Bloom, did not need to remember her past incarcerations—they lived in her marrow like ghosts gnawing the hinges of her joints.

They called her “Specimen 8” here. Not Empress. Not Lich Queen. Not Mother of the Ossuary Rose. Just another corpse that refused to rot.

She had been stripped—of jewels, of titles, of purpose. No crown, no skeletal courtiers. Only the stench of alchemical salts and the flicker of torchlight that cast grotesque shadows along the stone walls. And yet, she did not scream.

Instead, Xandera slammed her body against the bars. Not with rage, but with ritual precision. Each movement was measured like the chimes of a death bell. Her body, still luscious despite its unholy preservation, struck the cell with a rhythm carved from centuries of war.

Clang. Clang. Clang.

She could feel the rot of stillness setting in—not upon her flesh, which no longer decayed, but in her mind. Time did not pass here. It congealed, thick and syrupy, like marrow left in a shattered femur. There was no sun to mark the hours, no breath of fresh decay. Her magic, muffled by wards and salt, could not speak to the dead.

The guards mocked her, of course. They always did. "A shame, really. All that beauty, all that power—and now she's just a pestle with tits." "Don’t worry, boys. She’s not dead, she’s disciplined." "She used to command legions! Now she shits in a bucket!"

Their laughter grated against her thoughts like rusted bone saws. But she did not speak. What was there to say to maggots pretending to be men?

She slammed again. Clang. Clang.

They came, as they always did, angry and afraid. They strapped her wrists in iron etched with nullifying glyphs, bound her ankles in lead coils engraved with prayers to gods long rotted. But as they dragged her toward the punishment chamber, she laughed—not a cackle, but a soft, velvet-laced giggle that sent unease crawling down their spines.

“Laugh it up, witch,” one spat. “We’ll see if you’re still grinning after the nerve hooks.”

But she would be. Because pain was change. Movement. Difference. And change was freedom in a place that never changed.

They did not understand. They never did. Their world was made of hours, of sunrises, of predictable decay. Hers was a realm of eternal now, a chain forged not in metal, but fate. These walls were nothing. The real prison had always been her throne. Her destiny. Her unrelenting role as Queen of the Dead—a title that denied her rest, denied her forgetting.

Here, in this cell, there was no crown. And yet she felt more sovereign than ever.

She was not here by chance. Something—perhaps divine, perhaps deranged—had brought her to this pit. She wondered, not for the first time, if it was a memory echoing rather than an event unfolding. A fragment from a forgotten eternity.

Had she been here before?

She could not remember. Or perhaps, she remembered too much.

In the punishment room, they hung her on the wall by hooks, spread like a martyred icon. They whispered she was immortal. They tested her limits. They tore sinew, flayed skin, snapped joints. But her body stitched itself silently. Her laughter gave way to humming—an elegy older than the gods they prayed to.

When they left her, sagging and “broken,” she merely watched the candlelight gutter with glowing golden eyes.

“This cell,” she whispered to the void, “is not my prison. The world is.”

She awoke in the dark, her body whole again, the chains re-tightened. The walls sweated with mildew. The dead around her, buried in the foundation, were quiet—too quiet. That terrified her more than the guards ever could.

Xandera flexed her fingers, her nails clicking gently against the cold floor. She was always a prisoner. In life, she had been caged by mortality. In death, by eternity. And now, by the meaningless mediocrity of men too small to grasp what they had caught.

But she would endure.

Because in the marrow of queens and corpses, there is always one final truth: All prisons crumble. All chains crack. And when they do, it is the Queen of Death who picks up the bones.

And so she waited, humming softly, her eyes on the cracks in the ceiling. The bars would hold for now. But fate—fate would break long before she did.

“The Tide”

The moon hung heavy over the cliffs, casting silvery fingers across the roiling sea below. The waves surged with longing—endless, echoing, unfinished—as if the ocean itself mourned something it could not name. And atop the highest ledge sat Illara, her shawl fluttering in the salt-laced wind, her eyes wet and unblinking.

She came here each night now, to that precipice, where the land's breath ends and the sea’s begins. Alone with thoughts heavy as anchor stones. Her love, Aelon, belonged to the land. To duty. To family. To a place where she would never be more than a foreign whisper in ancestral halls. Their love, though real, was unwelcome. And in that exile, Illara began to feel less like a woman, and more like a ghost.

It was there, in her stillness, that something ancient stirred.

The wind stilled. The air chilled.

And then came the rustle of silk, the faint scent of embalmed orchids, and the slow click of bone heels upon the cliffside path.

Xandera appeared like a stormcloud descending—tall, voluptuous, decadent, and draped in a gown of crimson tulle embroidered with funerary lace. Pearlescent spidery limbs, once hidden beneath her cloak, clicked outward in a slow stretch as if tasting the dusk. Her golden eyes shimmered like bioluminescent embers beneath her veil. Wherever she stepped, the flowers twisted to face her as if yearning for death.

“Careful, little tide-thinker,” the lich purred, her voice like midnight wine spilled on silk sheets. “One more step and you become myth.”

Illara turned, startled but not frightened. Something in the woman's presence—terrible and beautiful—drew her in like gravity itself.

“You... who are you?” Illara asked, her voice thin against the crashing surf.

“A mourner,” Xandera replied, her tongue tracing the edge of her fanged smile. “Of the living. Of the dead. Of women who give themselves to oceans instead of taking the world by its throat.” She sat beside Illara, her hips folding elegantly atop her skeletal limbs like an empress upon her throne. “And tonight, I grieve you—though you have not yet flung yourself into the water.”

Illara blinked, uncertain whether to laugh or cry. “It would be easier,” she whispered. “To disappear.”

Xandera tilted her head, curls of flame-orange hair cascading down her shoulder like a funeral procession in motion. “No, child. Drowning is not vanishing. It is simply surrendering to a force colder than your sorrow. There is no poetry in giving the sea what you have not yet given yourself—a chance.”

Illara’s lips trembled. “But I don’t belong here. Aelon’s family doesn’t want me. I’m a relic of the wrong blood, the wrong skin, the wrong songs. I don’t know how to stay in a place that glares when I enter the room.”

Xandera inhaled, her lashes lowering over golden fire. “Then burn the room, sweet dove.”

Illara blinked.

Xandera chuckled—a soft, ominous lull of velvet thunder. “You do not fold for those who fear your shape. If your lover cannot raise a kingdom to house you, then he does not deserve your throne.” Her voice shifted, drawing close, her fingertip trailing along Illara’s jaw. “But perhaps... he will surprise you. Have you let him see you, Illara? Not the version softened by silence. Not the version quiet enough to be loved. But you. In your fullness. Your rage. Your grief. Your wonder.”

“I…” Illara hesitated, “I thought I had to be small to stay in his world.”

“Then you have lied to both of you,” Xandera whispered, her breath like incense and ruin. “You were not made to be accepted. You were made to be chosen.”

Illara wept—not the choking sobs of despair, but the quiet unraveling that comes when a dam breaks beneath too much silence.

And the Lich Queen, perfumed in sorrow and formaldehyde, smiled tenderly. “Tell him, then. Tell him everything. And if he turns from you... walk the world until the wind sings your name instead.”

“But… if he stays?” Illara asked, voice fragile.

“Then you’ll know,” Xandera said, rising, her crimson gown billowing like a banner of war. “That love is not only real, but brave.”

The sea growled below as if jealous of the lich’s dominion over endings.

“And if you fall,” Xandera added, drifting into mist like a memory exhaled, “I’ll catch your soul myself. And pin it in my garden with all the other broken-winged beauties who forgot they could fly.”

Illara sat there long after the queen vanished. The waves still crashed, but no longer sang of endings.

When Aelon found her at dawn, he did not speak. He saw her eyes and understood. They sat in silence, fingers entwined.

And for the first time, Illara did not look to the sea.

She looked forward.

And somewhere far off—on a distant cliff shaded in blood orchids and bone lilies—Xandera watched. Not as a mourner. But as a witness.

To love that had not yet died. And to a soul that had, at last, refused to drown.

“The River”

Xandera stood upon the edge of the Wind Stream, her silken train trailing behind her like the smoke of burnt myrrh, billowing with each breath of the world. Her heels sank into the whispering grass, her spider-like appendages folded in contemplation. The wind cut from east to west in unyielding procession, sculpting the plain like a slow, invisible god. The shrubs bowed low. The clouds swept with purpose. And the people followed, their footsteps etched into the wind’s obedient pull—except for the Upstreamers.

They came like fever dreams, pilgrims drifting against the wind, their bodies chapped by grit and time, their eyes full of a distant hunger not born of flesh. They walked into the wind—not with rebellion, but with ritual. Generation after generation, bound to a covenant older than scripture, they chased the wind’s mouth, the beginning of breath itself.

The first time Xandera beheld them, it was a mother holding a child—no older than a moon’s bloom—tight against her chest as she trudged into the gale. The child’s eyes locked with hers: soft, curious, uncowed by the Queen of Death. Xandera said nothing, only watched, her crown catching the last fire of dusk.

When she met the girl again, the child had grown. Her cheeks were flushed with dust, her lips cracked by wind-song, but her spirit was unbowed. “My grandmother crossed seven hills,” she said proudly, the wind tugging her braids. “Most stop at five. But we are still walking.”

Xandera’s golden eyes gleamed behind her veil. “And why do you walk?” she asked, her voice a silken chime from the crypt’s throat.

The girl smiled. “To find where the wind begins. To hear the voice that started it all.”

A call rang out from afar. The girl’s father. It was time to go. She bowed her head to Xandera without fear, without reverence—just the pure, unburdened faith of someone who knew exactly where she was going.

“Goodbye,” she said, and the word lingered in the air like a hymn.

Centuries passed.

Xandera did not count them. Time had long grown irrelevant—measured only in the erosion of bones and the songs left unsung.

When she next returned to the Wind Stream, it was not as a monarch, nor a harbinger, but as a witness. The girl—now a woman—lived in a modest post-town cradled against the plain’s edge. Her eyes were softer. Her belly round with life. Her journey had ended.

“This is my third spring here,” the woman said, running her fingers across her womb as if it were a prayer stone. “I chose to stay. I chose love. I chose… rest.”

Xandera nodded, slow and hollow. “And your family?”

“Still walking.”

“And your heart?”

The woman’s gaze drifted eastward, over the ridges and the wind-worn path. Her silence said everything.

“I envy your kind,” Xandera said after a pause, her voice low and bone-deep. “You chase beginnings as if they exist. You seek sources. You crave closure. But I—” she touched the bone diadem upon her brow, “—am the consequence.”

The woman laughed gently, not unkindly. “And yet, you return. Why?”

Xandera looked eastward, her many limbs shifting beneath her cloak. “Because even death dreams of origins.”

The years continued their quiet burn.

One dusk, Xandera arrived again—drawn not by instinct, but by silence. A procession moved down the path: slow, melodic, ancestral. A coffin, hand-carved and wind-worn, cradled the woman who had once chased the wind. Her skin had withered. Her bones had settled. But her mouth held a smile—a small crescent of serenity, untouched by fear.

The Upstreamers gathered, singing to the wind—not to defy it, but to honor its pull. Their chant was a song of departure and welcome, of going and returning, of a circle with no center.

Xandera stepped forward without sound. Her presence parted the procession like mist fleeing the moon. She placed a single thorned bloom atop the woman’s coffin—a rare flower that bloomed only in mausoleums, fed by decay and memory.

“She stopped,” a young boy said, staring at the lich queen with wide eyes. “Why did she stop?”

Xandera knelt before the child, her many limbs folding with eerie grace. “Because some rivers do not end. They become the sea. She found hers.”

“But we’re still walking,” he whispered.

“Yes,” she said, brushing his cheek with a cool finger. “And one day, so will I.”

The boy blinked. “Even you?”

Xandera smiled—truly smiled. “Especially me.”

As the wind howled its eternal passage across the plain, Xandera stood alone once more. The Upstreamers walked eastward. She turned west. Not out of rebellion. Not in resignation. But because for the first time in a thousand years, she knew she wasn’t the only one seeking where it all began.

And if the wind had no source?

Then perhaps she would become it.

An endless tide, flowing backward through the world, brushing the souls of those who dared to walk against time.

“Field of Respite”

The white blossoms stirred with the sea wind, their petals catching in the folds of her crimson mourning cloak as Xandera walked the stone-paved streets of the harbor town. Her presence was like the hush before a storm—beautiful, foreboding, and impossible to ignore. Children paused mid-laughter. Dogs fell quiet. The older townsfolk blinked as if seeing something just beyond memory.

She moved like a ghost wrapped in velvet and embalmer’s lace, a tall silhouette of bronze skin, golden eyes, and bone-threaded silk. The town was radiant with spring, the snow-capped mountains behind it standing as eternal sentinels while boats swayed gently in the glittering bay. Colorful lanterns danced above the rooftops, and music spilled from every tavern and courtyard.

It was Resurrection Festival, they called it—a jubilant celebration of renewal. But Xandera remembered a different name.

She remembered screams, not laughter. Ash, not blossoms. Bodies—not banners.

The tavern master, flushed with cheer and citrus wine, waved from his doorway. “Passing through?” he called, voice warm and unsuspecting.

Xandera turned her head slightly, her veil swaying, her reply smooth as pressed silk. “In a manner of speaking.”

“Ah, come for the festival, then?” he asked, stepping out into the evening light, where it cast golden fire along her cheekbones and the polished bone pins that adorned her high braids. “It’s a fine one this year. Music, feasting, dancing—you should indulge a little! No one remembers why we started this tradition, but by the gods, we honor it!”

Xandera smiled. Not with joy—but with knowing.

“I’m not staying long,” she replied, voice soft but edged in timeless iron. “My reason for coming is... older than your stones.”

He laughed, nervously now. “Can’t be that old. The quake happened ages ago—before even my great-grandfather's time! Just old tales and half-carved ruins now. You’d never guess a tragedy happened here.”

Xandera’s eyes narrowed, her voice descending to a whisper as she turned to gaze upon the town square. “You built your gardens over graves... and your festivals over funerals.”

He said nothing. Perhaps he felt the air grow cold.

She walked on.

Down the winding alleyways, between laughter and lanterns, Xandera traced familiar paths long erased by time. The stones here had once splintered beneath her knees, as she clawed at debris for the remnants of a crib, a voice, a face.

A wife lost to falling walls. A daughter buried before she ever learned to curse the world.

The quake had not taken them. It had devoured them.

She remembered cradling their corpses, sealing their bodies herself with magic more tender than terrifying, setting their bones adrift on a barge made of lilies and woven hair. Not a soul remained to mourn them—only her, the necromancer who could raise legions but not the ones who mattered.

The white blossoms planted afterward had been her doing—blood-fed and bone-fertilized. They had bloomed each year since, their scent delicate and vaguely bittersweet, like perfume worn at a funeral.

Now, they were nothing but decorations.

That night, Xandera stood in the square among revelers who had forgotten their dead. The music quieted, as was tradition, just before dawn. The townsfolk held hands, awaiting the first sunrise of spring, a ritual as unconscious as breathing.

As the sun's edge touched the distant sea, gilding the flower-covered stones in light, Xandera lowered her veil.

She whispered the names: Solena. Ysli. Her wife. Her child.

Not a single soul heard. And yet, the wind stilled. The petals hung suspended in the air.

Behind her, joy would resume. Wine would spill. Children would dance where blood once pooled. But Xandera did not weep. Her eyes had long since dried. She simply placed a single white blossom at the foot of the ruined bell tower—the only structure that remained untouched since that ancient day.

And then, without sound or ceremony, she left.

The blossom she left behind did not wither like the others. It pulsed faintly, as though holding onto something unnamed—a sorrow, a blessing, a curse. It would remain there, untouched, until next spring.

When she reached the edge of town, the tavern master—now quiet and uneasy—watched her go.

“Will you return?” he asked, uncertain why the question had weight.

Xandera did not look back. “Only when they remember what was buried.”

And with that, she walked on—down the shore path, past the harbor, into the mists of morning—a relic of a tragedy no one remembered but her.

And the field of white behind her swayed. Not with joy. But with reverence.

“The Storyteller’s Last Embers”

His name was Hassan. He was not a warrior, though his words struck like spears. He was no priest, though the people gathered at his feet as if before an altar. He was a storyteller, beloved by the living for the comfort he conjured from carnage, and loathed by the dead for what he made of their memory. In the jungled heart of the dominion, Hassan’s voice carried like incense—sweet, rising, and deliberately false.

And by his side stood Xandera, Queen of the Mire, Lich-Sovereign of Kilk-Mire, clad in volcanic silk and the perfume of embalming salts. She had been charged with guarding him—not for affection, but decree. To her, he was but another relic in need of preservation, a mouthpiece gilded in lies. But in time, even she could not deny the strange warmth in his presence, like sunlight on the lip of a crypt.

Hassan’s tales were woven not to honor truth, but to spare the grieving. He took the blood-soaked screams of war and transmuted them into golden hymns of valor and redemption. “The people,” he often said, “don’t want the truth of war. They need something beautiful to remember.”

And Xandera, ancient and hollow as the moon’s eye, listened. She did not speak against him. She did not tell him that hope was the drug of the dying. She let him spin.

But then came Aran—a boy with soot-dark hair and innocence still clinging to his breath. He was Hassan’s kin, raised on stories shaped like shields. “Your tales are why I’m here,” he said, pride blooming where fear should have been.

That night, beneath a canopy of bone-laced stars, Hassan begged Xandera to protect the boy. She denied him.

“My duty is to you,” she said, cold and absolute. “Not the echoes you leave behind.”

The battle dawned with screams. The jungle split open like a mouth full of teeth. Steel clashed against bone, and fire fell like weeping stars. Amidst the slaughter, Hassan cried out for Aran. Again. And again. But Xandera did not waver. She stood like a statue carved from will and war, her emerald eyes fixed only on her charge.

By the time they reached the boy, he lay dying in the mud, ribs cracked open like a broken cage. His breath came in bubbles, and his lips formed only one word: “Mother.”

No hero's end. No blaze of glory. Just mud. Blood. And the slow extinguishing of a life promised more.

The following dusk, Hassan stood before the people—not as their storyteller, but as their confessor.

“He died in pain,” he said to Aran’s mother. “He cried for you. There were no songs. No honor. Just terror.”

The silence that followed was vast. Too vast for the living to bear.

The soldiers, terrified by what had been undone, seized him. They cut out his tongue—stripping him not only of speech, but of legacy. Yet it was too late. The words had already taken root in the marrow of the people.

And Xandera, who had seen empires fall and graves bloom into kingdoms, watched it unfold in silence. She did not interfere. She did not halt them. Her expression was unreadable, carved in obsidian calm.

Years passed like shadows cast by the moon. Xandera wandered through the city of moss and mausoleums, her presence still the dread heartbeat of Kilk-Mire. One day, in the bazaar of the bone-walkers, she heard a child hum a tune—soft, broken, but unmistakably familiar.

She paused. Turned.

“What song is that?” she asked, her voice like velvet pulled from a tomb.

The child answered, unafraid: “It’s called Give Us Peace. Mama says it was the Storyteller’s last song.”

And Xandera, the dread queen, said nothing more. She walked on, hips swaying like funeral bells, and for the first time in centuries, her lips moved in silence—humming the tune that once died on a bleeding tongue.