Moonspear take charge of your life

Lyra’s remark is spiteful, and so Andraste is quiet — only when the queen’s humor elicits the wisp of a smile at her shorn lips does the stricken eventually relieve the serpent of her fathomless eyes.  

“Your trust has not been misplaced,”  words limned with a sigh of practiced peace; promise.  “I intend to depart within ze end of this week ... but it is not my intent to leave you unreplenished, regardless if I chose to stay on.”  Then the mountain’s matriarch speaks of a pack and a dove; and with a slow sense of vague recognition does the Marked know that of which Hydra alludes.

She waits for the lull that comes with forgetfulness to crest; waits for a mother’s fright to flutter in her breast; waits for the misery and the melancholy;
but all that remains in the hushed whispers of her deadened mem’ry is the murmur of a babe, or two, some delphic-sweet nothings. Listens to all with a significantly muted ear;
and speaks the words of slumber:  “Avinimnë lanye.”

A ponderous lull. Then:  “No — ze heavens have spoken. To return to all that I once had and could not come to be would have myself struck down once more. To remain on ze Moonspire would only further tempt another undoing. I am Andraste. I will no longer be without such thought.”  With a furrowing of her shorn brow, words which she’s only whispered in the waters to her golem now returned:  “I must away. I must away, and I must bring to fruition a fortress that is mine. One of theory and of tutelage, sages, students.”

Lightning or no, it has not occurred to her how her initial departure must have seemed to a son and daughter who had lived so long with early smatterings of such. Never had she foreseen her asking after alliance to become one of abdication. She would never forgive herself; has come to expect a queen-dam’s disdain as she had when Mahler had first sighted her;
the last fragment of Aurëwen, therein as a quiver of moon jaw, a salted gleam of the silver eyes, and—
mother nevermore, undeserving of such a mantle, even in blood and bone.

Much too fey was she still; yet the figments of which she’s brought again before Hydra have drawn her soul back into the her own vessel, grounded; tethered now in the fashion she’s meant to be; for even though the earth shivers beneath them, it will not impede her.  “I shall not return to ze riverlands.”  Finally Andraste looks into the piercing eyes with a delphic glint. Drageda, Diaspora; Kaistleoki, Moonspear;
there was now no horde that could claim her as theirs but her own. ... There hadn’t ever been. 

It was essential.