Lion Head Mesa she cries 'cause she's nothing like you, is she like you?

thread song

down the mountain. sloping into a darkness that felt like choking tendrils. she walked not as a soldier or a prince, but as a rogue. damned and dreary. to know that this was it, the end of a road she had walked since birth. it could be the end of her own road, she thought. was the thought comforting? if her eyes closed as her father's shall, she'd never be burdened by these things again.

perhaps a coward at her core — or maybe just a girl. a girl not even a year into life, prepared to commit patricide to ascend a throne for...her people. the priest, the jodai, the sisters and brothers to be left in a mad pharaoh's wake. who would stay still when the world was turned upside down by her own hands?

she had wept at the creek for some long time before the final stretch of home. somebody would surely spot her return, she knew it. let them. let them whisper down halls until it reached the fever peak of her own father. pharaoh. ill, mad man.

was he still her father? was he still the man who had doted upon a lotus become lioness? she had lost that man somewhere in the ice carved canyon of her heart.

sentimentalities must be set aside. she came with a scentless bundle to the dark room of @Senmut, not a sound to be given less she stir any other priests present. perhaps he did not sleep. perhaps he had felt the grief in her heart and soul all the way down the mountainside. perhaps he felt the tired burn of lapis upon him now and knew that they could wait no longer.