When you come undone, I'll carry your chains

So you can feel freedom and a little less pain

She was the wolf that prowled in snowy fields of plush white, her howls reaching across eons, her breath staining the air with a ghostly plume that lingered for centuries. She was the wolf that carried the burden of every defeat and triumph, every broken bone and mended body, the failures of a past that haunted and taunted and drowned out the soft whispers of the victories.

She was the white wolf, the winter wolf, and she was back.

The ex-Wolf Queen had returned to Novus, to Terrastella.

Her Court of Winter had fallen. It laid behind her in a heap that could not be repaired, could not be even considered anything that it once was. There had been war--how there was always war--and that time she could not stop it. That time--her second visit and what she had intended to be her final one but in a different way since she first sought out the sister continent of Novus--that time she was powerless to stop the destruction from reaching their door. Her brother, righteous and valiant in his own way as the true heir Heimsterra called for, could also do nothing but watch in horror as all he had built those past years settled into simple rubble. How easily everything had crumbled without a second's thought, as if the foundation itself had given up the fight before it ever really even began. It was a home to those who sought solace from the endless-blizzards, a refuge for any who wandered through, a birthplace for her. And then it was all gone.

She had been left without a place to be once again. Her last few moments in Novus were spent with Vespera, the painted star-girl down on her knees as she shed a tear for all she couldn't become; cold, cold was the alter on which she begged for some sort of sign of what she was supposed to do, begged for a forgiveness she didn't deserve for letting down an entire kingdom she had tried to carry on unfit shoulders. Her crown tarnished, her name stripped of all honor, she was left with nothing and no direction to go. Though she had been chided (like a child's whims of grasping at false promises) for losing her hope in the process of the natural order of their world, the ethereal Goddess of Dusk gave her a pledge of a brighter future as she brought life to fruition below her hooves.

In the end, the woman of cream hues and spilled blues would slink back to her den in Veteris, and there would be more life brought to her in ways she couldn't imagine.

And so with the demise of the forever-winter court, she sulked back with tail tucked between legs into the territory of the Dusk Court, alone. The stone tower was as it had always been, but the path to reach it had been more treacherous than she recalled. But she had been gone so long, and oh the events she had missed out on. Her once-lover and first child both sought solace elsewhere and the others under the guidance of Glacia had either stayed with what little remained of their kingdom or also found themselves out seeking alternative options. But she, the one who put so much of herself into a place she wasn't part of, went back to where the true test first began.

Fitting for the name the land held, her star-speckled body appeared at the steps of the dusk tower under a falling sun. The sky was painted in streaks of pink and purples, loud lines of sunlight cutting through the otherwise otherworldly colors. Teal eyes that once held the life of an entire population in their depths were then just shallow pools, and they looked up, up to the window of a room that should have belonged to their current Sovereign. The one who she last saw as just a child. "I am here for the Queen," she called out with a heavy voice laden thick with her viking accent, the sound resonating emptily like a bell rung through the expanse of an endless field. Her cape hung limply over a body that seemed smaller than it ever had before.

Meek was the Winter Wolf. Powerless was Rannveig.

When you come undone, I'll carry your chains

So you can feel freedom and a little less pain

For all that she would learn in their time together, her and the current sovereign, there under the waning sun as the moon was already high on the rise, she would have almost wished she'd never went back.

But, really, what other choice would she have had?

Her path there to the foot of the tower, the one she once knew so well and occupied as its head, was ingrained so deeply in her memory that she could have gotten there blindfolded despite the slight terrain change along the way. The atmosphere itself, however, was bleak; few wandered the grounds, and hardly a face passed her during her trek across the outlying territories. She hunched from the weight of her failures, and they drooped with her, but she didn't know why. Perhaps more had changed than she thought while she was away, at least the past year slipping by without much hesitation or second's remorse. She didn't know what else she would have expected to happen, maybe for things to flourish where she had only withered them?

As she stood defeated, her coat was limp and she nearly trembled from guilt. It was sure to eat her alive there on the spot, in front of... no one since the court was empty. But the lack of others only made her feel worse, not better, and so when she called for Florentine she was at least pleased one face poked out to receive her message. It flitted away as quickly as it appeared, gone into the gaping halls of the castle. She felt like a stranger, like she didn't belong there, the empty husk all that remained of a once-Queen who seemed destined to piece their court back together so long ago... and then was part of the reason it fell apart. Maybe she had no hand in what happened, but in the end she would always blame herself.

Footfalls pulled her head up to the open doorway of the tower, hooves striking against stone in a strict staccato that wrapped around the protective barrier of her heart. She expected the small, winged girl she left the crown to, the brightly painted golden child who found a spot inside of Rann that she could not shake her out of. She expected the flood of emotions to roll in like a tidal wave and flood her with things she couldn't contain. She did not expect Asterion.

He went to her as she stood with soft shock blossoming in her chest, equal in height, in stature, in the sense of failure they carried with them. The touch against her skin sent a small shiver down her spine, though he wouldn't have been able to see it; she hadn't been in contact with anyone for months, and he wasn't known well enough by her for it to be comforting. He bowed his head, and before she could speak to tell him no, to tell him to not do that, to tell him anything, his voice broke through their void and her thoughts began to race. Florentine was no longer Queen; she could have proposed to herself that that would have been plausible, but it never crossed her mind before then. For some reason she had only believe Flora would be sitting on the throne, and so the news rattled her. It might have been visible in her eyes.

"Asterion..." His name came easily--she never forgot a face--and she stared into the spaces his stars occupied in his skin. "Where is she?" At first it started broken, his name cracking around her words, then it grew with vigor and her question almost seemed like a demand to be answered. But she was still somewhere, far from where they were, as though her mind and body were two different entities in that moment. Was the small flower girl she once knew hurt? Why would she pass the crown to another? Had she left?

She came back to them then, the murkiness in her eyes snapping back into focus. She glanced around, at the quiet, at the slightly rugged look the Dusk Court had developed since she left. "What happened here?" It was thin again, her voice, accent barely lilting while she appeared defeated by a monster neither could see. A pause, and then, "And I am Rannveig no longer. I do not deserve such title. I am Silanos, name given to a girl with nothing."

The name given to a girl who would amount to nothing.