Blackfeather Woods What do you talk for? You'll never make us stop

For @Faustus!

From the desert she fled into vast open plains speckled with woodlands and waterways, fleeing the fate she had chosen for herself. The journey was a shedding of sorts; all that had made her, she left behind in the sands, dropping somewhere along the way the titles she'd clutched so closely to her chest. Princess; demigod; Greek; she was all of these things but none of them, not any longer.

Here, she was nothing. She stepped under the cover of dark woods and felt free for the first time that she could remember. The fever still burned in her, eyes reddened, lips and gums pale, and Andromache knew in some instinctive way that she would die if she did not stop to rest and care for herself for a time.

She settled in a bed of ferns and watched the nightcloaked birds in silence, contemplating her life and what it would mean to preserve it.