Biography 2

“Revolution.”

"Stop this! Please, I beg of you! Let me go!"

The voice echoed, shrill and cracking through the pitch-black like glass against obsidian. There was no answer—just the steady rhythm of boots on stone, three pairs: two measured, one wild with panic.

Xandera remained silent in her cell, back straight, eyes open in the void. She did not move—she merely listened, as she always did. She had learned that in the dark, there was nothing but sound and memory. And memory, like rot, bloomed where the light refused to reach.

The door of the next cell opened with a mechanical hiss and a rusted groan. The voice—young, shrill, frayed—continued to plead. A boy. Perhaps nineteen. Hope still clung to his syllables like meat to bone.

The clank of the lock, the rattle of chains, and then the boy was thrown into the darkness beside her.

"Let me out!" he screamed again, his voice now laced with something more primal. Terror. The void had teeth, and he could feel them.

Xandera could almost picture him. Youthful, defiant, but already cracking. So many had been thrown into this abyss. So few understood what it meant until they felt time slip between their fingers like dust. The dark wasn’t merely an absence of light—it was an engine of decay, eroding the mind grain by grain.

“Quiet down in there!” came the rasp of an older prisoner, a voice rough with stone-dust and old blood. The revolutionary—his tone familiar to her by now. He had made it his duty to calm the fresh meat.

“It won’t help,” he continued, not unkindly. “Screaming. Begging. This place has no ears and no gods.” A dry chuckle followed. “Close your eyes and suck on your memories like candy. It’s the only sweetness left.”

Xandera did not laugh. She rarely did.

The boy did not listen. He pounded against the iron, screamed until the pain took his voice, until the rhythm of his sobs grew wet and ragged. The walls swallowed his panic whole. Xandera knew the pattern. Hope came in loud, but it died quietly.

“This place—” the revolutionary muttered, “—it breaks you before your body ever stops. That’s the genius of it.”

He spoke often, this old man—between silences that stretched like centuries. He told stories of a world once full of purpose. He was a man who once rallied armies, lit flames in hearts too long cold. He had tried to tear down the system. Now, the system had entombed him.

But still, he spoke of revolution like a prayer, like a rusted hymn.

“They’re out there,” he would say. “My people. They’re organizing. One day, they’ll come for us. They’ll break the locks. They’ll burn it all down.”

Xandera said little.

She had known cells before. Prisons more cruel than stone. And some that looked like palaces. She had walked the length of time, seen empires mistake corpses for currency and name that horror "civilization." Darkness had been her cradle and her lover both. But this place—it felt personal.

She couldn’t remember when they had taken her.

Or why.

Only the stillness.

Only the rot.

Then—one day, the silence ruptured.

Gunfire. Shouts. Screams of authority undone.

The cell doors were torn open. Freedom came, loud and hot and sudden. Armed youths in ragged banners pulled the prisoners from their tombs. The revolution had arrived.

But the light—the cursed, blinding light—was too much.

The old revolutionary staggered forward, one arm across his eyes, the other reaching for something that was no longer there. When his knees gave way, Xandera caught him.

He gasped, eyes weeping tears that were neither joy nor relief. “Val—no… Xandera, tell me… what does it look like? The world. The outside. Are they… happy? Are they smiling?”

She turned her gaze outward.

The battlefield lay in ruin.

Bodies strewn across blood-soaked ground. Children torn apart by stray shells. Civilians gunned down beside soldiers. The flag of revolution soaked in viscera.

Freedom had come. But it had not brought peace.

She closed her eyes for a moment, drawing a breath she did not need. Then, in a voice so gentle it barely rippled the air:

“You must work to build a peaceful society now.”

He nodded. Blind. Believing. The lie was kinder than the truth.

As the medics lifted him away, still mumbling his dream, Xandera stood in the gore-slick light, her form untouched by time or shrapnel.

She walked. Slowly. Deliberately.

She passed the boy—the one who had begged to be freed—now motionless, crumpled, eyes glassy beneath the setting sun. A bullet had found him before the doors could open.

Xandera knelt beside his body

.

She closed his eyes with her fingers—cool, ceremonial, unflinching—and pressed her forehead lightly to his.

"You are free now," she whispered.

Then she rose. The wind blew through her veil, carrying ash and the faint scent of wildflowers long burned away.

The revolution had come. But revolutions, Xandera knew, were not ends. They were thresholds. One cage opens. Another waits.

She walked into the sunset, a queen without a throne, a corpse that had chosen to remember. And behind her, the battlefield lay quiet. Only the wind remained.

The darkness would return. It always did.

But Xandera would remember. And she would walk still.

“The Wayward Son”

She stood alone upon the moss-slick pier, a monolith draped in violet and void. Her silhouette, tall and statuesque, seemed less a woman than a funerary effigy carved by time itself. The wind danced through the obsidian silk of her robes, and her pale, flawless hands rested gently upon the pommel of a ceremonial blade she did not need. Xandera, Lich Queen of Kilk-Mire, Sovereign of Silence and Warden of the Forgotten, waited.

Beside her stood Saran, a woman aged not just by years but by longing. Her hands trembled around a soft, yellowed handkerchief, embroidered with clumsy childhood stitching. A relic, she claimed, of the boy she had not seen in nearly thirty years.

“He’s coming,” Saran had whispered the day before, her voice feathered with joy and trembling with disbelief. “He wrote me. My son is coming… at last. He says he’s bringing his children to meet me. I’ve sold everything. I want to leave this island. There’s nothing here now. Nothing but the ghosts of waiting.”

Xandera had not spoken then. She rarely did. The dead taught her long ago that silence was often kinder than hope. Yet she remained by the woman’s side, as she had for nights uncounted, not as a queen nor reaper, but as a quiet companion to sorrow.

The boat approached now—its mast a shadow against the dying light. The sea, still and glassy, whispered secrets she’d heard a thousand times.

Saran leaned forward, eyes wide with hope. Her hand clutched Xandera’s sleeve. “Do you see him?”

Xandera did not answer. Her golden eyes, rimmed in kohl and grief, narrowed. She too was waiting for a man. A name inked in blood on parchment—a contract of vengeance long ago signed. She had been hired to end him. A bounty was promised for his death.

And yet…

The ferry docked. One by one, its passengers disembarked—merchants with dull eyes, children who clung to strangers’ hands, wanderers wrapped in cloaks of fatigue. But the face Saran longed for did not emerge.

The light in her eyes faltered, but her lips curled upward. “Tomorrow,” she said, almost convincingly. “Tomorrow, he will come.”

Xandera turned to her, voice low and smooth as embalmer’s oil. “He will come. If not today, then tomorrow.”

But tomorrow came and went. So did the days after. Each evening they stood together, watching the horizon, watching the ferry arrive. Each time, Saran’s posture stooped a little more. Her coin purse lightened. Her smile thinned into a mask.

From the finest inn she moved to a weathered room on the edge of the village. Her dresses wore the salt of sea breeze and tears. And still she came, clutching that small handkerchief like a prayer made cloth.

“I’ve been foolish,” she whispered one evening beside the ruins of Xandera’s temporary sanctuary. “He has a life. He’s busy. Who has time for a mother whose hands are too frail to hold his children?”

Xandera knelt. Slowly. Deliberately. The bones of her armor clinked like wind chimes in mourning.

“Do not mistake absence for abandonment,” she said. “Even when the flesh forgets, blood remembers.”

Saran gave a weak smile. “You’re kind to say that… But a mother knows when she’s been left behind.”

That night, the fire burned low. Saran’s stories came softer—memories of a mischievous child with clever fingers and a defiant smile. “He was always running. Always chasing something. The last time I saw him, he never turned around. He just… vanished.”

Xandera listened. She did not blink. She did not breathe. But inside, something hollow ached.

The next dawn brought a storm—and fever.

Saran's frail frame, burdened by damp nights and brittle years, could no longer bear the weight of waiting. Her breath grew shallow, her fingers cold.

Xandera stayed with her, wrapping the old woman’s body in warm linens and whispered magic, gentle as moonlight through ruins. She recited no prayers, only memory.

And then, the ferry returned.

This time, a man disembarked—tall, gaunt, weathered. His eyes darted across the shore like a child searching for something lost. A long scar stretched across his cheek. He carried nothing but a satchel and a terrible weight in his gait.

Xandera stepped into his path.

Their eyes met.

He knew.

The bounty. The reckoning. He had heard of the Lich Queen in the southern reaches. He recognized her as death incarnate.

But she did not raise her hand.

“She is waiting,” she said instead, voice cool as rain on ash. “Not far. But not for long.”

The man opened his mouth—regret swelling like tide—but she lifted a hand.

“Go. Go now. Hold her, if you dare still call her Mother.”

He ran.

Not from fear, but from time. From the years he had stolen. The silence he had sewn. He ran toward the forest, toward the flickering candle of a soul that had waited decades to be seen.

Xandera turned from the dock. She did not wait for thanks. She did not wait for payment.

The wind howled. The ferry’s horn blared.

As she walked, a stillness settled behind her.

A moment passed.

Then—a cry. Not of grief. But of reunion. Fragile. Late. But not broken.

She did not turn back.

Instead, she whispered to the tide:

“Let this bond hold, if only for a breath.”

And as the sun set—its light painting the water in hues of fire and rose—Xandera disappeared into the woods, her veil fluttering behind her like a banner of mourning in retreat.

Some bonds, she knew, outlived even time. But waiting—waiting was the cruelest necromancy of all.

 Dunes of Time 

The dunes of the world’s last empire unfurled before Xandera like the pages of a forgotten gospel—one written in ash, silence, and wind. The White Sand Empire, once a colossus of marble citadels and sun-temples, was now a whisper adrift in the scalding breath of the desert. Each swell of ivory sand caught the light like polished bone, each valley a hollow ribcage where the heart of civilization had long since stopped beating.

Xandera walked with the poise of the eternal—not like a woman, but like a verdict. Her black silks dragged across the sand like funeral banners, and the desert, in awe, did not dare cling to her hem. Her every step undid the footsteps behind her, time erasing time, the sand swallowing her passage as it had swallowed empires.

Beside her, Devante walked with the slow grace of one who had learned patience from the stars. His fox ears flicked at the rustling wind, and the many tails at his back flowed like starlight being poured into the earth. Though centuries lay behind him like cloaks discarded on the floor of time, he bore the same curious warmth he always had—a quiet ember that glowed without flame.

“I still feel it,” Devante said, his voice low, melodic—like poetry exhaled. “The pulse of the empire. But it’s slower now. Like a dying breath held too long.”

Xandera did not answer at once. Her eyes—twin mausoleums lit with soulfire—swept the horizon. “Everything fades,” she murmured at last, “except the dead. And those who walk among them.”

They came upon a hollow—shaded by dune and time—where a small village slumbered in ruin. It had no name now. Its stones were cracked, its doors long since unhinged. But at its center stood a well, untouched by the ruin around it. A mouth to the underworld, silent and waiting.

Devante approached the well and peered into its depths. The water still shimmered, dark and unbroken, like memory sealed beneath obsidian. His reflection danced there, older than his face suggested. “Obsidian Canyon lies beyond the next ridge,” he said. “The place where I was born, though I wonder if it remembers me.”

Xandera moved to him, her silhouette casting a halo of dusk across the stone. She reached out and laced her fingers through his. Her touch was cold, yet it did not repel—it reassured. Death had touched her, but love had not withered.

“The world forgets,” she said, voice like velvet soaked in iron. “But we remember. That is our burden, and our gift.”

The village whispered around them—an echo of laughter long extinct, the ghost of markets, of morning songs. It had once been full of breath, of birth, of petty quarrels and sacred unions. Now, it was nothing but bones beneath sand, just as every city would be, given time. And yet the well remained, faithful and unyielding.

Devante’s ears twitched. “Do you ever think we’ve stayed too long? That while the world is reborn, we’ve become... ghosts wearing crowns?”

Xandera was silent. The desert wind moved across her cheek like a lover’s final breath. She did not blink.

“Perhaps,” she said at last. “But even ghosts have songs. And some songs deserve to be remembered.”

She gestured to the dunes, rising and falling like the breathing of an ancient beast beneath the earth. “Empires crumble. Bloodlines rot. Even gods perish. But we—you and I—we are what remains. And that makes us more than survivors. We are witnesses. We are what history dreams about when it dares to mourn itself.”

Devante smiled softly. His tails swept the sand behind them in quiet arcs. “Then we’ll write this world a lullaby it won’t forget.”

They turned from the well. The canyon—black, jagged, and crowned in silence—loomed on the horizon, its shadow a relic of the past rising into the sun. Obsidian Canyon: once Devante’s cradle, now perhaps his shrine.

But they did not quicken their pace. Time did not hound them. They moved with the slow certainty of the undying, two relics wrapped in memory and myth.

Behind them, the wind swirled through the village ruins, lifting sand like incense, weaving it through broken beams and collapsed roofs. For a moment, the air seemed to remember music. The scent of dates. The voice of a girl calling her mother home.

Then it was gone.

And the desert was quiet again.

As they walked hand in hand across the dunes, the sun dipped low, gilding them in gold and shadow. And though they left no footprint that would endure the wind, the bond between them burned like a brand in the firmament.

They were not merely remnants.

They were the keepers of a dead world’s last heartbeat.

And they walked forward—not to restore the past, but to outlive it, together.

“The Chorus”

The jungle shimmered under the heavy breath of dusk, its canopy gilded in amber light and mist. Beneath the trees, where roots clutched the bones of the earth and the air pulsed with the breath of ancient things, a chorus began—a symphony not of man, but of memory.

The cicadas had awakened.

Their song fell in waves, not chaotic, but measured—like the inhale and exhale of something far older than civilization. To the villagers, it was sacred. A lullaby sung once every seventy-five years by creatures who slept their entire lives beneath the soil, only to sing once before dying.

Xandera, wreathed in shadow and violet silk, stood near the elder’s hearth. Her presence darkened the firelight, but not the spirit of the people. They did not fear her. They revered her, as one might revere a relic exhumed from sacred ground. Her pale hands cradled a ceramic cup of fermented berry liquor, but she did not drink.

The elder—his back bent like a prayer forgotten by time—watched her with clouded yet reverent eyes.

“Tell me, Xandera,” he rasped, his voice sticky with age and sugarwine, “Do you know the true worth of what we protect here?”

Xandera inclined her head. Slowly. Silently. Her voice came like dusk itself. “The cicadas.”

The elder smiled—a tired, triumphant smile, as if relieved that someone else still remembered the rhythm of what mattered.

Around them, mercenaries—hired steel, dusted with arrogance and greed—lounged with flasks and scowls. Their expressions twisted at the mention of insects.

“Cicadas?” one scoffed, slurring through liquor and disdain. “You’ve paid us to die for bugs? This is madness.”

Laughter followed, brittle and hollow, as if they had already chosen what they would not understand.

Xandera did not answer them. Her gaze remained fixed on the canopy above, where the chorus swelled like the ocean’s heartbeat—not shrill, but full. Triumphant. Fragile. She heard it not as sound, but as memory incarnate. A hymn to patience. A dirge for time. A victory cry that would not be heard again for generations.

The elder set down his cup, his hands trembling. “Seventy-five years,” he said. “Buried.

Forgotten. And yet they rise. Not for themselves. But for the promise made by those who came before.”

One of the mercenaries snorted. “And now you want us to die for some dirt-dwelling bugs so your grandkids can hear this racket someday?”

The elder’s eyes sharpened, like stone blades unsheathed.

“No,” he growled. “You are asked to fight for a future that will not remember your name—and that is the truest test of devotion.”

The mercenaries fell quiet, their pride pricked but not pierced. One by one, they gathered their weapons and slunk into the forest’s edge, muttering curses and shallow oaths. By moonrise, they were gone.

All but one.

Xandera remained.

She did not need coin. She did not need honor. She had no children to inherit the world, and no homeland to mourn her if she fell. But she understood. The jungle, the cicadas, the slow, sacred turning of time—they were a covenant, not just with the living, but with the dead, and those yet unborn.

The elder turned to her, his voice low.

“Why do you remain, my queen of bones and silence?”

She turned her eyes toward the rising dust on the horizon, the harbinger of an invading force. “Because I remember,” she said. “And I am the grave that sings back.”

She stepped forward, her gown whispering like funeral cloth, her pale skin gleaming under the canopy’s shifting light. Her blade, etched with prayers in a forgotten tongue, shimmered like moonlight over still water. The cicadas screamed around her, but to her, it was no scream.

It was invocation.

A young scout beside her, barely old enough to wield a spear, asked quietly, “Why do you fight, Lady Xandera? You could leave. You could survive. You have before.”

Her eyes did not move from the growing dark on the horizon. “Because someone must fight for what they will never hear,” she said. “So that others may one day forget why they are safe.”

The elder, still seated beside the hearth, lifted his final cup to the sky as thunder rolled—not from storm, but from war. The cicadas sang louder, defiant, eternal.

And Xandera walked toward the edge of the jungle, toward blood and fire, carrying death not as a weapon, but as a vow.

The chorus did not pause. Even as arrows flew and swords clashed, even as blood fed the roots and screams stained the canopy, the cicadas sang on—oblivious, immortal in their own way.

And long after the battle, when the silence returned…

…they would sing again. In seventy-five years.

And someone’s child, someone’s grandchild, would hear them—never knowing the name of the woman who died for that song to rise.

But Xandera did not fight for names.

She fought for the chorus. And the memory it guarded.

“The Wall Crumbled, But Not All Chains Were Stone” 

"The wall divides no longer," they proclaimed.

But Xandera stood at the edge of its ruin, motionless as a gravestone beneath the sun. Her towering figure cloaked in a living veil of ink-black silk that stirred not with the wind, but with the breath of the dead—a goddess of decay witnessing the end of division. All around her, the once-impervious barrier now lay in pieces, its bones splintered by hammers, its voice silenced by jubilant cries echoing across the lands it had once severed.

And beside her, brooding in his stillness like an unshed wound, stood Yulgan, a former border sentinel raised upon tales of blood and mistrust.

“Look at them,” he spat, his voice bitter as rust on a forgotten blade. “Dancing on gravel. Laughing like their hands were never stained. Do they truly forget so easily?”

Xandera did not answer at once. Her gaze was fixed forward, cast across the celebration with eyes older than memory—eyes that had wept kingdoms and watched empires rot into peace. When she spoke, her voice unfurled not with haste, but with the gravity of ancient scripture carved into bone.

“They do not forget. They choose to remember differently.”

Yulgan’s lip curled, his youthful face contorted by the weight of dissonance. “But I was raised in vigilance,” he said. “Taught to ready my blade, to see those beyond the wall as monsters. And now a handshake, a feast, and the world is made whole?”

The Lich Queen turned then, and her presence fell upon him like a cathedral’s shadow at dusk. Her smile was not soft, but solemn—knowing, patient, and terrible in its depth.

“Hatred is a clever architect,” she murmured. “It builds walls not only of stone, but of memory. It teaches you to fear the silhouette and call it substance. But tell me, child—does the shadow bleed when struck?”

Yulgan faltered. His fingers curled unconsciously, as though they still gripped a spear long since cast aside.

“It can’t be that easy,” he muttered, gazing down at the shattered remnants of the wall beneath his boots. “I’ve spent my life hating. It filled me. It gave me purpose.”

Xandera stepped forward, her hand—cold, but alive with purpose—settling on his shoulder. A Queen’s touch, but also a mortician’s.

“Then let it die,” she said. “Let it rot. Not all deaths are loss. Some are necessary compost for better things.”

The crowd ahead had swelled like a tide of flowers breaching through concrete. Laughter, tears, and offerings passed between those who were once enemies. Amidst it all, Yulgan stood as if the last ghost of the war, adrift in a peace he could not yet taste.

He whispered, “What am I, if not what they made me? What do I become, now?”

Xandera’s eyes softened, yet remained sharp as ossified truth.

“You become you, for the first time. No longer the son of dogma, but a man unshackled. Transformation is painful—but so is resurrection.”

Yulgan looked up, confusion still stitched into his brow. “But I believed. I believed everything they said. Was I a fool?”

The Lich Queen’s smile returned, small and full of sorrow. “No,” she said. “You were pure. But purity is not the same as clarity. And belief—like the flesh—must sometimes be buried to be reborn.”

Just then, a girl from the opposite side of the wall approached—young, delicate, but unafraid. She carried a tray of heart-shaped sweets, each glazed with a shimmering syrup and dusted with powdered petals.

Her voice was soft as dusk. “Would you like one?” she asked, offering them forward. “I made them this morning.”

Yulgan hesitated.

Xandera gave him no command—only a look. A permission forged not in command, but in the quiet grandeur of a Queen who ruled not with compulsion, but with patience.

With trembling fingers, he took a cookie. Bit into it.

Silence.

Then, a blush. “It’s... sweet,” he muttered. “Really sweet.”

The girl beamed. “Then have another,” she said. “Peace tastes better when shared.”

Xandera lifted her gaze skyward as she always did when something worthy occurred. Above them, a flock of bone-white birds took flight—creatures sacred to the swamp, symbols of both memory and change—cutting across the sky where the wall had once reached to blot the sun.

Her voice, when it came, was not for Yulgan alone, but for the living, the dead, and all who straddled that veil:

“In the beginning, there were no walls. Only rivers, only sky. It was man who drew lines and called them law. But the bones beneath do not know these borders. And neither shall the children above.”

Yulgan turned to her again, his voice quieter now.

“Do you think I can change?”

Xandera smiled—not kindly, but beautifully, like the last blossom on a battlefield.

“You already have. The dead do not ask for permission to return. And neither must the living to begin again.”

And in that moment, with his second cookie in hand and the taste of peace upon his tongue, Yulgan took his first step forward—not away from the past, but through it, like one walking through mist toward the rising sun.

Nuptials of the Undying 

Xandera stood before the mirror—not as a bride, not even as a woman, but as an epoch clothed in ivory. The wedding gown, stitched from ancient silks steeped in pallor and penitence, draped her towering frame like a winding shroud. It clung not by needle nor thread, but by fear itself, as though the fabric feared to slip lest it draw her ire. The lace at her throat whispered of long-dead things—love songs rotted into hymns, kisses fermented into curses.

Clusters of bone-white roses, dry and brittle as preserved sin, crowned her bodice and hips. Each petal a brittle vow. Each thorn, a history. They had once symbolized purity, she supposed. Now they were the ghosts of that lie, pinned to a body that had never been made for softness.

And beneath it all—beneath the veil, beneath the silk—stood the truth of her. Unyielding. Unweeping. Undone by nothing.

The veil was a fragile lattice of translucent mourning, pinned lightly over her cascade of molten copper hair. With each breath she took—if breath it could be called—it stirred like a spirit barely tethered to her will. It was a thing for mortals to wear. A gesture. A play. And Xandera, divine in her blasphemy, knew the theatre of mortals better than they did themselves.

The mirror gave back her reflection in silence. It had no words for her, only awe—as if even its silver backing could feel the weight of her stare, the drag of the centuries caught in the hollows beneath her eyes. Those eyes: two ancient suns swallowed by shadow. Not warm. Not cruel. Merely infinite. They held the stillness of a tomb sealed in worship, the kind of gaze one might find etched into an ossuary or carved across a saint's coffin lid.

Her fingers, clad in long black gloves, adjusted the roses at her waist. Her touch was elegant, deliberate—as if she were arranging bones for burial, not flowers for love. She marveled briefly at the softness of the fabric. It reminded her of skin—of the way it stretched, the way it failed, the way it grew cold.

She had not been innocent in many, many lifetimes. The ritual of this gown, this veil, this day—it was all pageantry. Not for her, but for them. The living. The frightened. The temporal. They needed the white. They needed the vows. They needed to pretend that love was eternal because they were not.

Xandera had buried more husbands than most dynasties had ever crowned. Each union began with wine and poetry, and ended with her standing alone beneath the stars, the crown heavier, the silence deeper. She remembered them all—not with longing, but with the detachment of a curator dusting off old scrolls. Some had loved her. Some had feared her. None had endured.

They always withered before her. Time claimed them. And she remained—unwilted, unconquered, unloving.

Love was a hunger she had outlived. And yet, here she was again, cloaked in it like ceremonial ash, preparing for another binding, another politicized entanglement dressed as devotion.

This marriage, like the rest, would be a ledger’s line. A treaty. An exchange. She would gain territory, secure power, project softness. But she knew the truth:

There is no altar that does not become a grave.

She exhaled softly—a breath that had outlived its necessity, more ritual than need—and slipped a hand beneath the lace of her sleeve, adjusting the tightness at her wrist. The movement was almost girlish. Almost. Her hand bore runes—inked into the skin, etched into the bone beneath. Marks of her dominion. Of who she truly was beneath the veil.

She thought, briefly, of the man she was to wed. A duke, a warlord, perhaps a scholar. She couldn’t recall which, nor did it matter. What mattered was his lineage, his land, his allegiance. He would kiss her hand. Perhaps even her lips. And in a decade—or three—he would wither. And she would walk again in white, a vision of undiminished majesty while the world rotted beneath her.

This was not love. This was monarchy. This was eternity. This was war disguised as lace.

Time did not pass for Xandera. It pooled around her, gathering at her feet like fog in a crypt. And as she turned from the mirror, the veil trailing like a sigh from the afterlife, her steps carried her not toward the altar—but through it, beyond it, already disillusioned.

She did not believe in forever.

She was forever.

Let the bells toll. Let the guests rise. Let them throw petals at her feet like offerings. They would speak of beauty. Of vows. Of futures bright with hope.

But in her heart, deep in the marrow of her immortal bones, Xandera knew the truth.

This, too, would pass. This, too, would fall. She would endure.

She always did.

“The Stars”

The jungle wrapped itself in velvet darkness, its breath thick with petrichor and secrets. Bioluminescent fungi etched faint patterns into the gnarled roots beneath her bare feet. Leaves whispered in the hush of the night, rustling in rhythms known only to time and trees. The living things of the forest slumbered or stirred, but Xandera did not sleep.

She never did.

There, upon a moss-veined rise above a sleeping bog, the Lich Queen of Kilk-Mire stood, shrouded in robes stitched from shadows and silk, her bone-crafted adornments faintly aglow with magic too old for language. Her golden eyes, laced in kohl and exhaustion, turned heavenward.

Above her, the stars bled quietly through the leaves—not twinkling, not shimmering, but watching. Distant. Unchanged. Or so it seemed.

And yet she knew the truth.

They vanished. One by one.

She had watched them.

Whole constellations erased by time, as if the heavens themselves had begun to forget their own stories. What were once maps to the divine were now broken glyphs of memory—half-syllables scattered across a midnight page.

She inhaled, deeply. The air was wet, sweet, rotted. It smelled like life becoming death. And death, reshaping itself into life again.

But above?

Only indifference.

“Why not me?” Xandera whispered aloud, her voice soft and sonorous, steeped in ritual. It was not the plea of one who wished to die, but the bewilderment of something left behind.

She had outlived empires. Outlasted the gods who once cursed her. She had walked through plagues and cataclysms, seen oceans boil, skies crack, and lovers reduced to names etched on withering bones. And still she stood.

Not living.

Not dying.

Just... enduring.

“If even the stars may perish,” she murmured, “then why am I still here?”

The jungle stirred no answer. The stars blinked silently—burning, collapsing, indifferent.

Somewhere in her marrow—where magic and memory coiled like serpents in a tomb—she felt the ache of something she could not name. Not pain. Not grief. Something quieter. The echo of purpose long since passed.

She sat then, with the same grace she had used to kneel before altars and executions, her body folded like scripture against the trunk of an ancient tree. Roots wrapped around her legs like old friends. The earth did not recoil from her cold presence—it accepted her, as it always had.

From the folds of her robes, she withdrew an instrument—a harp wrought from femurs and web, its strings spun of moonlit spider silk. Its song had been played in the courts of necromancer-kings, beside funeral pyres and cradle beds alike.

She plucked a note.

It lingered in the air like a perfume of memory—haunting, golden, heavy with time. Another note. Then another. A slow melody unfurled, curling upward toward the stars like incense from a reliquary.

It was not a song of sorrow. She had exhausted those long ago.

It was a hymn of remembrance—of things that had died but mattered anyway. Of children whose names had faded but whose laughter still echoed in stone. Of old gods turned to myths, and mortals who once dared to dream across centuries.

And it was, perhaps, a song for another like her—somewhere beyond the stars, another eternal soul wrapped in solitude, gazing into the same indigo void.

“Are you there?” she whispered between chords. “Do you endure too?”

The music answered in place of words. Every note carried a name, a prayer, a fragment of some long-ago dusk where she was not alone. Her fingers moved like they were tracing the scars of history itself—across time, across loss, across the cosmos.

The jungle held its breath.

Even the insects went silent.

The stars did not shine brighter, nor did they fall. But in their cold, unwavering gaze, she found companionship. Not comfort. Not hope. But acknowledgment.

And that was enough.

Her lips curled faintly. A smile, worn and small, like a candle flickering within a crypt.

“We are all flickers,” she said softly, “drifting between silences.”

And yet she played on.

Because even flickers burn.

Even liches remember.

And even if the heavens forgot her name, the jungle would remember the sound of her song.

When the final note faded—when the last vibration stilled against her fingers—Xandera leaned back, head resting against the bark of the tree.

Her golden eyes closed.

But the stars kept vigil.

Above her, light would die.

And below her, she would remain—not in defiance, but in devotion.

A sentinel beneath the sky's forgetting. A song lingering in the bones of the world. The last echo of what once was, and what dares to be again.

“That Darn Brat”

Everyone in the market square despised the girl.

She was no older than ten, yet she wore the weight of suspicion like armor—threadbare, clumsy, but familiar. She had long since become a nuisance to the townsfolk: the “orphaned liar,” the “darn brat,” whose tales spread like rot through their routines.

“Hey mister, a burglar just ran into your house!”

“Ma’am! I saw someone knock over all your shelves!”

“Everyone, listen—the traveler said bandits are coming tonight! We have to hide!”

Each story more outlandish than the last. Each lie another crack in the town’s thinning patience.

And now, Xandera had arrived.

She stood at a quiet produce stall—an unmoving monument in layered robes of dusk and bone-threaded trim. Her presence felt colder than the frost-kissed barrels of apples beside her. The greengrocer, a heavyset woman with hands like worn bread loaves, leaned closer and whispered through stiff lips, “Watch out for her. That little thing lies worse than a grave-robber’s alibi.”

Xandera did not look up. Her pale fingers continued sorting a crate of root vegetables, each movement slow and deliberate.

“What about her parents?” she asked without turning.

A sigh dragged from the woman’s chest like old wind through a ruined chapel. “Dead and gone, I suppose. Her mother dropped without warning, healthy as a mare. The father left for the city a year ago. Said he’d send coin and letters.” Her voice dipped into bitterness. “We got a few. Then nothing.”

“She sleeps in the storage house now. We tried… truly, we did. Everyone offered a hand. But she began lying. Constantly. Not just mischief—deep things, dark stories. Some folks say she’s cursed. Others say she’s just hungry for attention.” The greengrocer shook her head. “It’s like something left her when her mother died… and what remained’s just clawing to be seen.”

Xandera knew the type.

Loneliness did that.

She, too, had been abandoned once—by death itself.

As the woman retreated into her shop, the sound of soft footsteps behind Xandera announced the child’s approach before a single word was spoken.

“Hi, miss! You’re new here, right?”

Xandera turned her head slowly. Her golden eyes, rimmed in soot-like cosmetics, met the girl’s with cool precision. The child flinched—only slightly—but recovered.

“You’re not from this town, huh?” the girl said, hugging herself.

“No,” Xandera answered flatly, returning her attention to the crates.

“Are you living upstairs? You work here now?” The questions spilled from her like riverwater—unfiltered, restless.

“For now,” Xandera replied.

The girl leaned in, voice lowering to a conspiratorial whisper. “Wanna know a secret?”

Xandera, already expecting it, nodded once.

“There’s a ghost here,” the girl said. “Everyone’s too scared to talk about it ‘cause it’s bad for business, but I’ve seen her. Loads of times.”

Xandera listened without blinking.

“She’s a mother,” the girl continued. “Her daughter died in the sickness years ago, and she was so sad, she took her own life. But now, she can’t find her daughter—not even in the other world. So she wanders every night, whispering, ‘Where are you? Come to Mommy.’ Isn’t that… so sad?”

It was said with theatrical sadness, but there was something raw beneath it—like meat exposed beneath scraped skin.

Xandera’s voice came softly, but with the weight of centuries behind it. “Why do you think she cannot find her daughter?”

The girl blinked. Confused. Vulnerable. “I… I don’t know,” she murmured. “No one’s ever asked that before.”

“You’re different,” she said, her voice lighting like embers catching on dry leaves. “I think we could be friends.”

Xandera did not smile. But she did not turn away, either.

The girl came back daily. Whispered fables. Brought rumors and invented conspiracies. She spun tales of being kidnapped as a baby, of baking ghost-cookies with her mother’s spirit, of taming wolves in the forest. Each lie was a thread, spun from grief and hunger for connection.

Xandera listened. She always listened.

She saw the girl not as a pest, but a creature craving narrative—weaving lies as survival, because the truth was too barren to shelter her.

But the stories began to change.

“You could rob the tailor,” the girl said one evening, crouched beneath Xandera’s stall. “He keeps his money in a clay pot. He deserves it. He stole from my daddy. He took the letters… and the money.”

The lie was intricate. Righteous. Dangerous.

Xandera said nothing.

That night, the market exploded with uproar. The tailor’s shop had been ransacked.

The girl ran through the streets, shouting, “Burglars! I told you! Someone robbed the tailor!”

The townsfolk rolled their eyes. Some turned away. One man threw a stone.

And then the tailor emerged—ashen-faced. “My money’s gone,” he croaked.

The crowd turned. Their eyes found the girl. Of course. It was her.

They advanced like wolves. With curses. With hands clenched.

But Xandera stepped forward.

“I took the money,” she said.

The words fell like iron on snow.

She threw a leather pouch at their feet.

Silence reigned.

The greengrocer stared at her. “Why would you—?”

“Do as you will,” Xandera replied, voice cold, eternal. “I will not resist.”

But before judgment could fall, the truth surfaced.

Letters. Dozens of them. Hidden beneath the tailor’s floorboards. All from the girl’s father. Unopened. Stolen. Forgotten.

The tailor stammered, but it was too late.

The town fell silent. The girl was gone.

A letter arrived days later.

Clumsily written. Spilled ink. Words that trembled.

“Thank you. I know you knew I was lying… but you still listened. That made it real enough to survive. I’m going to find my dad now. I think I’m strong enough. Because someone like you believed in ghosts and stories. Even if just for a little while. I’ll stop lying when I’m ready. But I think I’ll always remember you. Thank you, ghost-lady.”

Xandera folded the letter.

She burned it in her palm.

But she remembered every word.

Because lies were not just weapons or distractions.

Sometimes they were anchors—for children who would otherwise be pulled under.

She watched the smoke drift upward, curling toward the ceiling like a lost mother’s whisper.

“Come home,” she murmured.

Then she turned back to the stall. The girl was gone. But the silence she left behind was no longer hollow.

And Xandera remained—as she always did—keeper of sorrows, listener of fables, the silent godmother of liars who only wished to be heard.

“An Isolated Town”

The mountain-ringed village lay cradled beneath a thick quilt of snow, its rooftops bowing under the weight of winter’s silence. The wind, cold and constant, carried with it the faint perfume of woodsmoke, blood, and memory—the latter so heavy that it clung to every breath. Here, in a place untouched by time but marked by death, Xandera walked.

She did not wear a cloak. Her presence itself seemed to rebuke the chill—a silhouette of midnight wrapped in silks woven of shadow and bone, untouched by frost, untouched by age. The snow refused to land on her. The cold respected her.

Beside her strode a young man, barely into manhood, his breath visible as puffs of fleeting warmth in the glacial air. His cheeks were red, his voice light, but behind his words lay a truth too heavy for his youth.

“Why so many children?” he asked, not unkindly, but with that quiet melancholy reserved for those who have learned to hope in the face of inevitable sorrow. “Because most don’t make it past six. Disease. Fevers. Accidents. We don’t know why. The gods must call them home early.”

Xandera said nothing. But her golden eyes turned toward the rooftops of the village, where no elders walked. No wrinkles. No stooped backs. No wise eyes behind the hearth. Only youth—and then absence.

The boy smiled despite himself. “Even the village headman’s lost seven of his ten. But he keeps smiling. We all do. We have to.”

They reached the mountain path that curled upward like a serpent made of ice. The trail led to the sacred lake—a mirror of silver, sealed in cold, where the villagers came to harvest what they called the “Spring of Life.”

“The ice never melts,” he said reverently, retrieving a small, glassy shard and offering it to her. “It’s a gift from the gods. Keeps us strong.”

Xandera did not take it to her lips. She didn’t need to. The truth hissed against her senses like a whisper from a corpse’s mouth. She could feel it—the trace poison in the ice, faint but persistent, a legacy left by a forgotten mining site buried deep in the mountains long before the village had ever been born.

She closed her fingers around the shard, gentle but firm. It gleamed in her palm like a cruel jewel.

The boy—his name was Harel, though it would soon be forgotten—began to speak of his wife, heavily pregnant, and the child she would soon bear. “Maybe this one will live longer than six winters. Maybe she’ll grow old enough to carve her own name into the family shrine.”

Xandera did not offer false hope. Her tongue had buried too many names.

She watched him as he carved blocks of the sacred ice with practiced hands, his blade moving with the rhythm of someone who had never known anything else. His breath clouded, rising and vanishing, just as he would.

Then came the sound—the toll of the village bell.

A single, solemn note that pierced the forest stillness. He dropped his tools. His face lit up.

“She’s here! My daughter! The gods have blessed us—blessed her!”

But as he turned to run down the slope, he staggered.

And then he fell.

His heart stopped before it could feel his daughter’s first cry.

Xandera stood motionless, her hands still holding the ice that had killed him. Her gaze did not waver as the last of his warmth bled into the snow, staining it a fragile pink.

She lifted his body with reverent grace, laying it across the sled they had brought. She had carried bodies before. Kings, tyrants, lovers, monsters. He was none of these. Just a man who dared to hope in a place where death had always been more certain than dawn.

When she returned to the village, the people gathered—not with screams, not with grief—but with smiles. They welcomed death the same as birth. There were no tears. Only acceptance, as if fate had long ago declared this was the way of things.

His wife, pale but radiant with new motherhood, stepped forward, cradling her newborn. She did not weep. She placed a small shard of the sacred ice into the baby’s mouth.

“Grow strong,” she whispered, her lullaby soft as snowfall. “But take your time, little one. No need to rush to Heaven.”

Xandera wanted to scream. But she had long since buried the impulse.

She remained silent. To speak the truth would be to crush this village’s most fragile beauty: their belief in grace. In divine design. In the comfort that what stole their children was not cruelty, but calling.

The bell rang again.

And Xandera turned away, her veil fluttering behind her like smoke from a sacred pyre.

The wind howled between the mountains, but she walked on, each footfall deliberate, echoing like the heartbeat of a mausoleum. She did not look back.

But she remembered.

She remembered the poison beneath their miracles.

The cradle that doubled as a coffin.

The mother’s whispered blessing, oblivious and sincere.

She carried it with her—like she carried every death, every deception preserved in silence. She was the archive of forgotten tragedies. The undertaker of faith.

And though the snow would eventually erase her footprints, the memory of the man named Harel—the one who dared to smile, the one who never got to hold his child—remained etched into her being like scripture burned into bone.

As the village disappeared behind the rise, the Lich Queen whispered a prayer not to the gods, but to the stars that watched without blinking.

“Let her live. Let one of them live.”

And the wind carried her voice, not upward—but downward, into the earth. Where bones listened. Where memories rooted deep. Where death remembered what the living forgot.

And Xandera walked on—a silent shadow against the white, alone but never unburdened.