She was soft, once. A little naive, and kind. Her name was Anahita. She never wanted the throne, nor the killing it would inevitably demand. She plotted with one of her mother's guards — a man who loved her — and tried to escape. He wept as he betrayed her, forced by the rules of the Succession Game to return her to the Citadel. She did not hold it against him. She could not. He reminded her, even then, of something she wasn't yet ready to name.
She killed her first sister in self-defense. The second to avenge her twin. The third had been her mentor, and that death was the one that cost her most — she passed the test by drinking the last of her own tears. The rest she dispatched with a poisoned dinner and trembling hands and eyes that had already gone somewhere else. She has never forgiven herself. She has never forgotten the girl she was before. But she never speaks of it.
One sister she has kept alive in secret: the youngest, who was only a baby when the Game was played. She lives now as a peasant in the middle rings of Gamora, happier than her only surviving sister could ever hope to be. She remembers almost nothing of where she came from — only an unexplained longing for the spires of the Citadel, which she cannot account for and does not try to.
Among the Spire Elves of Gamora, succession to the throne is not inherited — it is contested. The daughters of the reigning Queen are set against one another in a ritual elimination known simply as the Game, which ends when one remains. The rules are enforced not by law but by the Hive's will, and breaking them is not possible in any direction that leads to survival.
Anahita survived hers. That is the whole of what she will say about it, if asked — which she is not. The Game is not discussed in the Citadel. It is not commemorated. It is simply the price of the throne, paid once, and then buried in the particular silence that comes after you have done something that cannot be undone.
What makes her unusual is not that she survived. Queens always survive. What makes her unusual is that she carries it — all of it, every face — and has never found a way to set it down.
Her marriage to the King is purely political. Everyone knows this. It is the Emperor she lost her wings to — and the details of that coupling are hotly and wildly theorized throughout Gamora's social strata, but what is clear to anyone paying attention is that she loved him. As much as something like her could love something like him. Anyone could see it. Anyone but herself. Queen Anahita will always wonder whether he was a part of the Game to her, or something else entirely. He always reminded her of that guard.
She has mourned the Emperor's death for centuries. Her spirit knows no other path than the ruins of his palace, and she still dream-walks there — whispering prayers of healing to his shuddering, malformed shape of a body. She knows she cannot save him. The cataclysm did not only destroy an empire. It unmade the possibility of everything she might have been with him. The sky is so black over what used to be Candorman's Hold, and she and her Emperor will never look at the same moon again.
Anahita dream-walks. It is not a skill she sought or cultivated; it appears to be a function of grief and proximity — her spirit and the Emperor's have been entangled long enough that the path between them wears itself into her sleeping mind without her permission. She returns to the ruins of Candorman's Hold in her dreams as reliably as the tide, and finds him there in whatever broken form the cataclysm has left him.
These visits are not recoveries. They are vigils. She speaks to him. She does not know how much reaches him through the wreckage of what he has become. But she goes, because not going is unthinkable, and because the alternative is simply the dark.
Communication between them in waking life is possible but fraught. The Fraternity of the Bellicose Dawn maintains careful surveillance over any contact, and magical wards constrain the Emperor's reach. What passes between them is filtered, monitored, and incomplete — nothing like what dream-walking offers, and nothing like what they once had.
Anahita is aware of the Order of the Scarf and Sword's rise and of what the Fraternity of the Bellicose Dawn is doing with it. She knows they exploit the Emperor's image — mythologizing it, using it to sanctify their authority, weaving Malrik into a story that serves them and not him. She finds it repugnant. She also finds herself unable to stop it without risking exposure: of her own power, of the true state of the Emperor, of the narrow and precarious equilibrium she has maintained by appearing to acquiesce.
Her involvement with the Order is not endorsement. It is constraint — maneuvering within the narrow corridors the Fraternity allows her, restraining where she can, observing where she cannot, waiting for a moment that has not yet come. Her grief for Malrik and her horror at the Order's methods have compounded the isolation that has always shadowed her reign. She is the Queen of the safest city on God's Nest. She has never felt less safe in her life.
Anahita's resentment toward her husband deepened when she learned — or at least came to strongly suspect — that expeditions had been dispatched to the Scar to retrieve Ki-Oth following a vision. No effort had been made to retrieve Malrik, who remained alive and suffering in the very same place. She confronted the King. Their argument was volcanic.
Her grief and fury clashed against his sense of duty and the impossible weight of prophecy, and neither of them came away satisfied. She understood, on some level, why he had acted as he did. That understanding did nothing to soften the cruelty of his choice, or the silence where a different choice might have been.
She has not raised it again. She keeps a great deal beneath the surface, these days. It is a skill she learned young, and she has had centuries to perfect it.