Biography 4

“Winners and Losers”

The regime was a monument to cruelty—its architecture carved in concrete and certainty, its philosophy divided the world with ruthless clarity: there were winners, and there were losers. The latter were discarded like rotted fruit, locked away in cold, iron tombs and forgotten, their futures erased before they’d even begun.

Xandera did not come to this city-state as a liberator. She came as an instrument—a sovereign specter garbed in veils of authority, summoned to oversee order during the foreseen collapse. Where others saw rebellion as chaos, the regime saw it as inevitability. And when a system prepares for its own immolation, it hires not protectors, but executioners.

“You’ll keep them in line,” the commissioner told her, his voice lined with the weariness of bureaucratic hatred. “The children. The losers. If they riot, you break them.”

His words carried no venom, only hollow certainty. The commissioner was a man who had long since emptied his soul to fit inside his uniform. “Life’s a lottery,” he added, “and some tickets are just blank.”

Xandera said nothing.

She merely accepted the writ of lethal authority—a license to extinguish—and tucked it into her robe like a funeral prayer. Her silence was not compliance, but observation. For Xandera, death was no stranger. She had walked with kings and slaves alike as they crossed into her domain. She had buried empires beneath obsidian crypts and resurrected hope from bone and memory. But here... here, in this prison of children, she saw something different.

She saw the undead before they had died.

The prison was a mausoleum masquerading as a correctional facility. Cold, unlit corridors swallowed sound. Iron bars wept rust. Thin-boned boys and hollow-eyed girls lay listless in their cells, too young to understand the weight of their sentence, too old to pretend it would be undone. Labeled early. Discarded swiftly. “Losers.”

“They’re not even human anymore,” a guard scoffed, his words sharp with contempt. “Just meat with problems. The system tagged ’em. All we do is process ‘em.”

In the punishment wing, Xandera felt it—a different pulse. Not hope. Something older. Defiance.

She stopped at the final cell. Inside was a boy. Frail, pale, his breath shallow from starvation—but his eyes burned. Burned with that sacred and dangerous fire—the refusal to die on his knees.

“Diran,” the guard said with a sneer, sloshing a bucket of freezing water into the cell. “Refuses to break. But he will.”

Xandera’s eyes never left the boy’s. She saw not weakness, but will. Not defiance, but truth—that flicker of undeclared divinity in those whom the world cast out.

That night, the city roared. The coup began, as prophesied. Fires bloomed across districts. Sirens died mid-howl. And the prison was left to burn, abandoned like an unwanted relic.

The guards fled.

But Xandera remained.

Amid smoke and rising flame, she moved through the collapsing halls like a spirit untouched by heat or fear. She reached Diran’s cell and shattered its lock with a single gesture. The boy blinked up at her, disbelieving.

“Why?” he asked, voice raw from silence.

Her answer was calm, eternal.

“Because I do not believe in winners or losers. Only in those who are given the chance to rise.”

She handed him the ring of keys. “Free them.”

He hesitated—but something in her presence forbade disobedience. As if she were not offering salvation, but commanding resurrection. Diran ran. Locks clicked open. Shackles hit stone. Children emerged, not like prisoners, but like the waking dead—startled, slow, and then wild with the scent of air and sky.

Before they could flee, Xandera raised a single hand.

“Return at dawn,” she said. Her voice was the sound of judgment, the weight of tombs and testaments. “Return, and defy the world. Prove them wrong—not with rage, but with presence. With life.”

Diran stared at her, lips trembling—but he nodded. He understood.

The prison burned.

But when the sun rose over the scorched city, every child returned.

They stood before the gates—barefoot, soot-streaked, eyes wide open. They came not to beg, not to scream, but simply to exist in defiance of the world that called them less.

It was enough.

The system crumbled, torn apart not by fire, but by the quiet horror of its failure. Its labels lost meaning. Its walls were ash. From its ruin rose a new voice. Diran, once branded irredeemable, became the mouthpiece of a generation—the flamebearer of a movement that rejected division in favor of dignity.

And Xandera?

She was gone.

Like a whisper down a crypt. Like a goddess who never asked for thanks.

But across the world, where children once feared the label of “loser,” they spoke of her in hushed awe. The Bone Queen. The Flame in the Ash. The Warden Who Freed the Forgotten.

And deep in the Ossuary Codex, etched in blood and bone, is a passage:

“From rot may rise the righteous. From the discarded, the divine. There is no such thing as a loser—only the unawakened dead.”

“Killing Monsters”

The desert burned like a wound beneath the setting sun, each dune aglow in gold and arterial crimson. Amid the silence, Xandera emerged—no longer the monarch of courts and catacombs, but something far older. She did not walk; she arrived, her silhouette etched in dusk and dominion. Draped in the woven shadows of bone spiders and crimson sashes that danced like bloodied tongues, she stood at the threshold of a noble’s tent, dragging behind her the colossal severed head of a serpent.

Its lifeless eyes reflected her eternal calm. Its fangs, longer than scimitars, dripped the last venom of its agony onto the alabaster sand. The beast had died beautifully—like all things do under her hand.

Inside the tent, decadence reigned. Pillows like sacrificial altars, gold-threaded canopy silk, and lanterns that glowed with the illusion of warmth. There sat the noble—gorged on luxury, perfumed with conquest. His robes were emerald, his rings obsidian and diamond, and his smile glistened with the false humility of the well-fed.

He rose like a performer before his final act, arms extended as if to embrace the inevitable praise.

“Xandera,” he purred, the syllables dripping with practiced awe. “You’ve done a magnificent deed. The serpent is no more. A threat vanquished. A service to the people, truly.”

She said nothing.

The serpent’s head landed at his feet with a deafening thud, spraying sand and bone fragments across the polished rugs beneath him. The noble flinched, only for a moment—then corrected his composure like a child caught trembling.

“And now, your reward,” he began, voice oily with entitlement, reaching toward a ceremonial chest.

But Xandera raised her voice—not loudly, yet it halted time.

“Why did the beast strike only one family?”

The noble blinked, caught mid-performance. “Beasts are... erratic,” he said. “Their rage is... untamed. Who can truly understand—”

“No,” Xandera interrupted, stepping forward. The light dimmed behind her, as if the very sun bowed from her approach. “I traced its path. A perfect arc. It did not strike at random. It knew where to go. Something... drove it.”

Her voice was calm—too calm. Like winter air before the avalanche.

The noble paled, laughter drying in his throat. “Their lands... their stubbornness... I offered gold. They refused. That land—fertile, untapped, blessed by underground rivers. They stood in the way of prosperity. Of order. Of me.”

He stepped back. “I did what rulers must. I had no choice.”

“Choice,” Xandera whispered, tasting the word like ash. “You chose to unchain a creature of nature’s wrath and aimed it at your enemies. You murdered innocence by proxy. And you used me as your executioner.”

“You were paid to kill a beast!” he snarled, anger masking fear. “You serve death!”

Xandera’s lips parted into a smile—not cruel, but ceremonial. “I do not serve death. I am its steward. And death, unlike men, keeps its contracts clean.”

She drew her sword, a blade forged from consecrated bone and tempered in lichfire. Its edge shimmered not with steel, but memory—the memory of every neck it had severed in sacred judgment.

“You hired me to kill a monster,” she said, stepping through the incense-clouded tent. “And now, I have found one.”

He turned to flee—but the silk walls of his opulence could not shelter him. Her blade danced through the air once, twice—the first cut for truth, the second for silence.

His body fell like a curtain. Head severed clean, crown and arrogance removed in a single breath.

Xandera stood above the corpse, her blade dripping not with gore, but vindication. She gazed into the encroaching desert where nightfall stitched the horizon with silver thread. The winds stirred, lifting her veil like the wings of a spirit poised for flight. Her footfalls left no trace—the sand, like memory, accepted only what it could endure.

Behind her, the noble’s palace of deceit began to crumble—not with fire or siege, but with abandonment. Servants fled. Histories rewrote themselves. The monster was gone.

But not forgotten.

Xandera walked on.

Not as a savior. Not as a killer. But as a judgment etched into time.

The world would call her many things—goddess, reaper, queen, curse. But she needed no titles. Only purpose.

And as long as monsters wore crowns, she would be there when they fell.

"The Chains Beneath the Sand"

The white sands of the Aetherion Basin stretched into infinity, a cemetery of glass and memory. Above, the twin suns roared like wrathful gods, and beneath them, Xandera—once queen of obsidian sanctuaries and storm-sung rituals—was made to kneel. Her skin, once anointed in myrrh and moonmilk, blistered beneath the sky's holy cruelty. Her hair, a cascade of molten orange, clung in salt-drenched coils to her shoulders. Gone were her robes of dominion. She wore only sweat, dust, and shackles.

She worked.

Not as queen or priestess or philosopher. But as beast. Her long-nailed hands sank into the gummy mire beside the river’s vein, shaping crude bricks from the blood of the earth. Around her, hundreds toiled. Bodies broke. Spirits unraveled. She said nothing, for there was nothing left to say that the sun had not already screamed.

Her spider-like limbs—once grand and terrible, revered in jungle temples where devotees fed her whispers and incense—hung limp behind her, shackled like forgotten relics of a ruined goddess.

She remembered trees. Their psalms. The rustle of sacred canopy. The soft, damp hush of life. But here, there was only sand. And the stench of men.

She labored beneath the eye of the taskmasters—bare-chested patriarchs of empire, draped in belts of bone and cords of cruelty. They circled the slaves like vultures who had never known death’s final feast, their whips singing songs that only the punished could hear. Xandera was struck often. Her back bore the proof. But no sound escaped her lips.

The others whispered of her in fear—the giantess, the witch, the cursed bride of some jungle god—but none dared say it aloud. Not even the taskmasters. They feared her eyes—eyes that had seen nations fall and rise again on skeletal knees.

And among those eyes, there was one—Ravin—a noble cloaked in priesthood, raised on purity and riddled with rot. His faith was armor too thin for what Xandera made him feel.

He watched her from afar first. A glimmer of gold on a woman built like defiance. Her silhouette at dusk was not a prisoner’s—it was a monument. He prayed. Fasted. Flagellated. And still he dreamt of her—of the sweat pooling between her breasts, of the way her hips defied doctrine, of how her gaze did not flinch when he barked orders.

She had bewitched him, he thought. He cursed her. Then desired her. Then hated her for making him desire.

She was Eve, Lilith, Jezebel. He was righteous.

Until the river. Until sunset. Until the last splinter of his virtue broke.

Ravin came to her with a dagger in hand and the desert in his mouth. He called her filth. He called her whore. He called her the reason for his fall from godhood.

“You’ve polluted me,” he spat, trembling. “You... your obscene form, your foreign curse... You are why I sin.”

Xandera did not tremble. She rose, slow and terrible, like a monolith being unearthed. Her chains clattered like omen bells. “I am not your demon,” she said, her voice a prayer wrapped in steel. “I am your reflection. All your sins made flesh. Blame me if you must—but know you birthed me in your hunger.”

He struck her. She bled.

And then, as if summoned by justice itself, the taskmaster came.

Not Ravin. Not the priest. But a younger man. Quiet. Kind-eyed. One who had once sat beside her and said nothing—but everything. His whip cracked once. Ravin’s blade flew from his hand.

Another motion. Another breath. A dagger buried itself in the zealot’s heart.

Ravin fell like a temple shattered by truth. The sands drank his blood in silence.

The taskmaster freed her. Not with fanfare, but with calm, practiced hands. She stood, bare and blistered, but unbound.

"You've saved me," she whispered.

He did not answer at first. Then: “Sometimes, salvation is shared work. Sometimes... it's parting ways.”

She offered him sanctuary. He declined. She warned him of the empire’s wrath. He only nodded. “We all pay,” he said. “One way or another.”

Then he was gone.

And Xandera walked.

North, toward the green cathedral of her people. Her chains were broken, but her vow was forged in iron.

She would not forget.

Not the sweat. Not the brick. Not the sun’s holy war. Not Ravin’s blade. Not the kindness of a man who wore no crown.

When she returned to power, she did not burn the empire in fire.

She raised it again in bone.

She made justice eternal, her throne forged from the bricks of that riverbed. And in the darkest chambers of her palace, she kept two relics—not gold, not swords, but memory:

• A broken length of chain

• And a bloodstained whip

So that even as Queen of Death, she would never forget what it cost to survive the living.

“The Thistle Path”

Anri's breath rattled like dry parchment, brittle and uneven. She swallowed the last of the Thistle beads, those violet-gray pearls that shimmered faintly with necrotic dust. Her fingers trembled as the final one slid down her throat, a whisper of a promise: numbness, maybe sleep. Maybe more.

The once-spry girl now looked woven from shadow and gauze, her body so light it barely creased the mattress beneath her. Each breath she took was a betrayal of how little remained of her. And beside her, silent as an unmarked grave, stood Xandera—the Lich Queen, draped in a tattered gown of dusk-red organza and moth-lace, her presence far too divine for a house this small, this mortal, this forgotten.

“Why don’t you take one too?” Anri managed, her voice like frost on glass, and held out a lone remaining Thistle bead in her shaking palm. Her lips curled into a smirk, twisted by both mockery and longing.

Xandera said nothing. Her golden eyes, ageless and solemn, flicked down to the bead but made no move. Her fingers—long, bone-ringed, lacquered in ash—remained clasped over the back of the girl’s chair.

“Coward,” Anri whispered, the word a feathered stab. She coughed, and blood stained the edge of her smile like jam on porcelain.

The room was dim. No candles burned. They would not waste wax on someone halfway to the other side.

“How many?” Xandera asked, finally, her voice a balm laced with frost, reverent but never soft.

“I stopped counting after the third satchel,” Anri replied, tracing the leather pouch at her side like a child might a talisman. “They said one a day. Then I started taking two. Then three.”

Xandera nodded once, as if the answer had been expected. Thistle was never meant for such doses. It was a soul-map, not a balm. Crafted by tomb-binders and seers in the lower dominions, it was meant to guide the dying through death’s spiral without fear. But when taken too often, it became something else: a slow invitation to dissolve.

“Do you think I’ll go peacefully?” Anri’s voice trembled. “Or will it be like the others… like the visions?”

Xandera said nothing for a long moment. Then, almost absentmindedly, she reached into the folds of her cloak and withdrew a vial sealed with obsidian wax—a true end. Quick. Merciful.

Anri eyed it with a hunger that frightened even herself.

“You’d give it to me?” she asked, voice tight.

“No,” Xandera replied. “But I would use it... if the moment came.”

There was a silence then. Not the silence of awkwardness, but the holy hush of a mausoleum before dawn.

“I don’t want to suffer anymore,” Anri said, her eyes glossing as another tremor stole through her. “I don’t want to remember. My mother’s voice. My brother’s laugh. The smell of smoke when the town burned. All of it… it clings. It’s in my skin.”

She began to seize—small at first, then violently. Her thin limbs contorted, her body arching with pain no potion could dull. Her mouth foamed with whispers.

“Mama… where’s Mama? Don’t go—don’t leave me, please—don’t go don’t go don’tgo—”

Xandera moved with deliberate, inhuman grace. She knelt beside the bed, her many silken limbs fanning outward like the petals of a mourning orchid. She did not open the vial. Instead, she reached out, cool fingertips brushing Anri’s brow, and whispered a litany older than any prayer spoken by mortal tongues.

“Not all roots rot,” she intoned. “Not all who descend are lost. The thistle grows not to wound—but to remember.”

Anri’s eyes fluttered open.

They were clear.

For the first time in days, she saw. Not visions, not phantoms, but Xandera. Not as Death, but as something older and kinder. Something that had walked through too many endings to fear this one.

“Are you... my mother?” Anri breathed.

Xandera did not lie. But she did not correct her. “I am what you need me to be,” she said.

Anri’s hand reached out. Xandera took it. The girl’s frail fingers clutched with a strength that surprised them both.

And then, the tremors ceased.

Anri did not die in terror. She did not scream, nor beg, nor see the hallucinatory river of fire the overdosed often spoke of. She simply exhaled, long and low, and did not inhale again.

The stillness that followed was not cold.

It was kind.

From the corner, the village doctor—wide-eyed and wordless—watched the impossible unfold. “I thought… I thought she’d choke on her tongue. Die thrashing. That’s how it always goes.”

Xandera stood. “She did not need fire. Only someone who did not fear her ending.”

“She… she looked happy,” he muttered.

“No,” Xandera corrected, as she moved to the door, her hair flowing like a funeral veil of sunlit moss. “She looked seen.”

As dawn approached, Xandera stepped outside, the Thistle vial still sealed, tucked away into the folds of her robes. She would not use it—not yet. Her path stretched long and aimless, winding through warfields, nurseries, hospitals, and graves.

But for one night, she had not reaped. She had cradled.

And in that act, she remembered what it meant to be feared not for the end she represented, but for the grace she offered.

The Thistle Path remained behind her. But the memory of a girl who smiled in death, who asked if love had hands— That she carried forward.

“The Eternal Queen”

Xandera stood upon the obsidian balcony of her necropalatial spire, her gaze stretching far across the Dominion she had shaped by decree, by blood, and by bone. The lands below bore the mosaic of centuries: blackened volcanoes now cooled and hollowed into sanctuaries; once-barren riverbeds now reanimated with purpose through enchanted irrigation canals; grave-gardens where flowering bones bloomed beneath harvest moons.

Empires had risen beside hers, only to be unseamed by time.

Her own realm, however, stood unmoved—not because it defied time, but because it embraced it. The necrotic breath of change whispered through every tomb, every tower, every tree still fed by ancient sacrifices. And Xandera, the Lich Queen, had not changed. Not since the day she severed her mortal ties and crowned herself sovereign over death.

To rule forever is not to cling to power.

It is to endure its cost.

Nekhar entered her sanctum, draped in embroidered crimson and silver, his voice smooth as dust stirred beneath coffin lids. “My Queen,” he said with a bow so rehearsed it no longer contained reverence. “The preparations for tonight’s Rite of Binding proceed. I shall accompany you this time, if it pleases Your Majesty.”

She regarded him with a look as ancient as regret.

Nekhar thought himself clever. He had bartered secrets in the dark, seduced generals with whispered promises, threaded rebellion into the very seams of courtly protocol. His ambition was not unique—only his ignorance. He did not understand that nothing within these walls decays unnoticed.

Let him think himself a spider.

He was only ever prey, wriggling in a web spun before his grandfather's birth.

She offered him a nod. “As you wish.”

After he departed, Xandera summoned General Khashan—her bladehand of four decades, a relic of flesh still worthy of trust. Weathered, iron-eyed, and tethered to honor, Khashan bowed without words. She spoke first.

“It is time.”

He stroked his graying beard. “You’ve seen their fangs grow fat.”

“They mistake my silence for blindness,” she replied, voice soft as soil upon a coffin. “But I am not of their world. My patience is measured in epochs. They come with knives dulled by haste.”

They set the plan in motion.

She had allowed the rot to grow. She had watched Nekhar spin his rebellion like a weaver of curses. And now, at the precise hour carved into her long-forgotten grimoires, she would excise it with surgical ruin.

When the coup came, it arrived like a fever—hot, frantic, clumsy. And like all sickness, it could be purged.

Within the hour, Khashan’s soldiers had circled the city’s infected organs. The young protégé, Rashan, whom she had watched from afar like a mother watching a fire learn to burn, led her inner guard through the palace halls. With precision taught by bone and blood, they unmade the traitors.

In the throne chamber, beneath vaulted ceilings etched with the names of every soul who had ever knelt before her, Nekhar was thrown to her feet.

He begged. They all did, in the end.

“I was faithful,” he wept. “You changed. I only wanted to restore what was lost!”

Xandera looked down at him—not with rage, but with divine exhaustion.

“You will die with the dignity you denied yourself. Go by your own hand. That is the only mercy you will find.”

He was given a blade.

He used it.

Later, beneath the silence of bone chimes swaying in the midnight wind, Xandera stood once more upon her balcony. The land below glowed with the dull bioluminescence of funeral crops and spirit-fed groves. All was as it should be.

Khashan’s protégé approached, bearing a report. He knelt, precise and disciplined, eyes steady. But Xandera did not hear his words—she heard only the echo behind them.

The same ambition. The same flicker of pride. The same hunger that rots men long before death.

And so the cycle spiraled again.

Another hopeful tyrant in the making. Another betrayal she had already foreseen. Another face she would one day forget as she walked alone through the tombs of memory.

But Xandera did not weep.

She did not rage.

She simply returned to her vigil.

For she is not a queen of fleeting crowns. She is the ruler of inevitability. She is the silence after the last scream. She is time made fleshless.

And she waits—always—because the living are forgetful, and the dead are not.

The Gospel of Bone: Xandera’s Creed of Rule and Ruin

Many a star-blind fool extols the so-called blessing of immortality, envisioning it as an endless banquet of wonder and splendor. But those with eyes unmarred by the naivety of fleeting life know better. I, Xandera of Hextor, do not dream—I remember. And remembrance, my dear pilgrim, is the cruelest necromantic rite.

An eternal voyage is not a boon but a binding. Beneath its silk veneer lies a sepulchral malediction—a sarcophagus of solitude, regret, and knowing. I have wandered the rot-choked swamps of Hextor longer than the graves remember names. I have seen the tides of sin surge across kingdoms, borne on the selfishness of a single generation, whose gluttony devoured every grain from the storehouse and salted the earth to spite those unborn.

This tale never changes, only the costuming does. New banners wave, new oaths are sworn, yet the same tragedies unfold as if stitched to fate’s unbreakable thread. Power-crazed monarchs soil the soil with their folly, and the innocent are cast like bones across the gameboard of empires. I have witnessed it all—from gilded cathedrals erected in the name of false gods to pyres lit not for warmth, but for war.

Yet life is an exquisite pollinator. It exchanges not just bread and blood, but the intangible: ideology, resolve, fear, and faith. I have discommoded empires, toppled dogmas, and whispered into the minds of tyrants, not for pleasure, but purpose. For to leave desire unexamined is to invite ruination.

You wish to understand power? Then unlearn what you think you know. Power is not fire hurled or armies amassed. It is not the cracking of bones beneath boot or the thunderous roar of siege beasts. Power is a word whispered with just the right tone to crumble a will. It is the soft weaving of truth and terror so fine, the fly steps willingly into the web and thanks the spider for the privilege of dying.

Some call that manipulation. I call it salvation.

Tell me—what is more divine? To carve down your foe until their heart ceases to beat, or to so alter their soul that they weep for joy as they die for you? To conquer the flesh is a brutish feat. To convert the soul? That is godhood.

Thus, it is no mistake that my taint took the form of a spider. I am no mere monster—I am providence adorned in chitin and bone. I weave my dominion not from laws or swords but from threads spun of necessity, of insight, of inevitable truth.

In the halls of Hextor, I wear my crown not as ornament, but as oath. I rule not for pride, not for thirst, but because none else dare bear this burden. Mortals are fleeting, and their hearts err easily. But I? I have seen what happens when the wrong hand seizes the throne. The rot spreads. The people starve. The cycle turns red once more.

So I lead. I govern. I endure. Because I must.

Do not mistake my words for boasts—they are laments etched in ossuary stone. Hextor, my swamp-wreathed sanctuary, is a dream dredged from the abyss and bound in necrotic silk. It is civilization clawed from mire and miasma. It was forged through attrition, ambition, and ash. The sacrifices cannot be tallied. But those bound by my web enjoy more than mere survival—they know purpose, safety, unity.

Gone are the petty jungle feuds, the fractured tongues, the clans clawing at each other's throats. In Hextor, a thousand dead gods are buried—but in their grave soil, I have planted something greater. Culture. Sovereignty. Identity.

And yet, I have not forgotten fear. I do not scorn it—I honor it. It is the flame by which we test steel. But fear left unchallenged rots the mind, and courage without counsel is suicide. Thus, I surround myself not with flatterers but adversaries who dare strike my ideas when they limp.

Beware the kiss of enemies. It is the slap of a friend that preserves.

As for treachery—mark this well: if your comrade sups with your enemy, let your tongue never again grace their name.

To win without war—this is wisdom. A thousand battles matter not if you have already won the soul. When you are weakest, let the world believe you are strongest. And when you stand at your zenith, drape yourself in shadows. Your plans must seem erratic not because of your genius, but because your enemies mistake their own dullness for your madness.

The foolish architect builds a fortress for the siege of one enemy. I build for ten thousand.

Power, true power, is not seen. It is felt. Like the stillness before a plague. Like the hush in the swamp before something stirs beneath the water.

And so I say to you—be like the bog. Unshaped. Ever-changing. Impossible to grasp. Govern by example, and let your people love you while your enemies fear you. That is the bone-throne's mandate. Anything less is betrayal.

And if fate demands your demise? Greet it not with dread, but with dignity. For the grave is not the end—it is merely the place where the rot begins to bloom anew.

This is my scripture. Etch it into the marrow. Let it echo across the crypt-choked courts of Hextor. Let it outlive even me.

I am Xandera. I have broken the wheel. And I shall remake it from bone.

“The Last Light in the Mire”

There are no lullabies for liches, save those sung by the dead.

The chamber was quiet.

Not with peace, but with the heavy silence of remembrance—a stillness so absolute it suffocated time. The flickering green glow of ghost-flames danced upon bone walls, casting long shadows like skeletal fingers reaching for a touch they would never feel again. Each wall was carved with glyphs in the old tongue, etched by hands that had long since withered, hands she had known. Loved. Buried.

In the center of the chamber, atop a wide altar-like bed of pale velvet, Xandera lay reclined, wrapped not in her usual layers of regalia or ceremonial silk, but in black necrosilk lingerie—a sheer, delicate thing that shimmered like dusk against her cool, corpse-pale skin. Her body was sculpted with the grace of someone carved from centuries, not born. Her curves were neither soft nor cruel—they were immortal, untouched by the sag of age or the cruelty of time, perfect in their unaging ache.

But tonight, there were no admirers. No acolytes. No generals or priestesses to fall to their knees.

Tonight, she was alone.

Alone with the book she had clung to for longer than kingdoms remembered their founders.

Her fingers, long and adorned with rings of phalangeal bone and dried rose stems, curled protectively around the leatherbound tome resting against the swell of her bosom. She held it as a mother might hold a sleeping child. Or a widow might clutch a pillow that once bore a lover's scent. It was not just parchment and pigment—it was everywhere she had ever been, everyone she had ever failed to save, every ghost too precious to abandon.

And tonight, she read them again.

Her glowing golden eyes shimmered as they scanned the pages in the dim flickerlight. Her lips moved without sound, her breath slow and steady, as if each sentence were a prayer offered not to a god—but to the memory of meaning.

She closed her eyes.

The voices of the dead stirred around her—not wailing or screaming, but humming, like a lullaby whispered in a forgotten language. The room darkened as if the shadows leaned in to listen. Some of the voices were warm. Others accusing. Some cried for justice. Some merely wanted to be heard.

But none were angry with her.

Because she remembered them.

She turned to the last written page. Her hand hovered, quill ready, but she paused.

Not out of hesitation. But because this was the final dream she would record tonight, and something in her—the last shred of her that was not queen, not necromancer, not deity—wanted to feel human again.

Her body relaxed, sinking into the plushness of the bed like something long burdened finally surrendering to rest. Her head tilted back against a pillow embroidered with bone-flower patterns. Her lips parted slightly—not to speak, but to feel.

The book remained nestled against her chest, rising and falling with her breath like a lover who would never leave. Her legs curled slightly inward, one arm draped across her waist as though warding off the chill of eternity.

The voices continued their whispering. The soft murmur of names.

Thessa the Firemaid. Old Ichol of the Barren Choir. Prince Khashec who sang to his mother’s bones. Children who bled starlight. Lovers who died in each other’s arms during the Plague of Blue Moths.

Xandera knew each one. Not in passing, not in summary—but intimately, as though each soul had written itself into the marrow of her ribs.

She did not cry. She could not. But something in her ached in place of tears.

And then, with her arm curled tighter around the book, she whispered, not to the room, but to the weight in her arms:

“You’re all still here. I remember you. And that is enough. For now.”

The green flames dimmed to a low glow, barely more than breath.

And in the darkness, wrapped in black lace and memory, Xandera the Undying did not sleep—she rested, in the only way someone like her could:

Not beside a lover. Not in the arms of victory. But nestled against a thousand silent names—

Each one a story. Each one a scar. Each one carried.

And in the center of it all, her book still open against her chest, beneath the words etched in her own ancient hand:

“Never forget.”