Faerie Queen

It's borrowed time at best, anyone with sense can see that, but happiness, even if momentary is invaluable. The more Haven grew, the surer it was that the eye of the Great Old Ones would fall upon it. Her sons were all held captive, her people, the faimen she'd failed once before, and this realm she had poured her heart into terraforming all hung in the balance. On a balcony that overlooked the ocean, Titania stood there as she looked out at the churning tides. The salt in the air reminded her of that day with Mars, when she had told him what it was she'd done to their son, and the betrayal that had caused the rift between them.

In the great distance, a city of Elysian gold floated above the water, miles and miles away, but the lack of haze made it impossible to determine just how far it was. Somewhere within faimen were being forced to use their powers constantly as the empire of the Great Old Ones only continued to grow, beneath was garden of blood, silver forests where roots were fed by the bodies of her sons and her people.

"Will you ever forgive me?" Titania asked, she did not have to look to know that he approached. Would anyone? The golden prosthetic curled gilded digits over the corner of the railing, she had tried for so long. Thousands of years of effort, thousands of years of mistakes, nothing she did now would wipe the slate clean; Titania was a shell that was filled with nothing but virulent purpose.

Too late. Titania was always too late. Too late to save her warder, too late to shield her son, too late to love her second born, and now too late to save the youngest. Nalwyn. Aegnor. Farenduil. Meryasek. To so many Titania had always been more Goddess than Queen, not a person but a fixture, people forget that she was still a child when she took the throne. Only a few centuries and still so naive: she'd taken every one of her mother's lessons in stride, grew up learning the ways and the machinations of the ancient elves, only to watch them inevitably fall. Still, when Titania had sewn the seeds of humanity into the garden of Eden, she'd had so much hope. Hope that this dark power she wielded within her breast would serve the greater good, hope that the power she bestowed upon Eve would be the sort of gift that she needed to subvert the same fate as Lilith.

Little by little, time and truth eroded everything that she'd hoped for. Little by little she lost people and homes, creatures that she loved and family that she adored. Titania planted a tree over her mother's grave, then she planted another over Nalwyn's, and then a third over Aegnor's. Once Titania had come to walk through a garden of corpses and gravestones and said no more, I can't take it anymore. For all that she was and all that she had tried to accomplish, at every turn her resolve weakened.

In the end, Titania had found her power too late, even with Mars at her back the two had failed to make it in time to save their son. Her people were all in the dirt, and the realm that was meant to be her mother's great legacy was taken once more.

High above in the sky above them, a great city and industry of Elysian Gold held so many halfbloodeds, her grandson among them. "Rainer. Don't." Titania said as she stepped from the alley, their presence shielded by her magic as the flayed and the autonomous machinations of eldritch technology patrolled the skies and newly-gilded streets. "Don't throw your life away."

He opens his mouth to speak only to close it and every deity knew he’s done a lot of that lately. But there is no reason to hesitate to speak, not anymore. Not when he is looking at the woman whom he has been so harsh with in his own head for so long. “I became you, I think.” And no matter how much turmoil befell him, he’d never really gotten to just outright cry before and doing so makes him think of Micah. Of the day he had held his son as he’d cried outside the cabin and explained what had happened to his sister. But he does there before his mother, tears trailing down his cheeks as he speaks because she has to know. “So strangled by grief and expectations that I forgot who I was.” Or perhaps had never really found out. “I have been trying to fill roles for people for so long, I don’t quite know who Farenduil is, anymore.” The Prince, the brother, the de-escalator, the levelheaded one, the father, the only shoe that ever seemed to fit was failure. “And by trying to find out, I think I just failed you. And everyone else. I thought I was running away, but maybe I could still run towards something.” He brings up a hand to wrap over hers and he squeezes it gently as his voice shakes. “I love you. And Mery, and Aegnor, more than anything. I don’t think I was ever meant for this.” 

-

A selfish hope had still burned within her that Farenduil would refuse, that her heir would not want to give up the power that Titania down to him. An unbroken line of royal blood flowed through his veins, history so old and rich that there were those within this world that would do anything to have what he’d been born into. Farenduil was right though, this life that she’d all but chosen for him was not one that he was born for. She saw the heads of blonde twins that had been denied him, infants with eyes that mirrored his own that he never got to see mature. They were adults now, but he could still be a father, he could still someday be a grandfather, and he could still be all the things that Titania had failed to be. This was the end of their road, but if she stood still then someday her son could look back and see how far he’d come. 

Among the Seldarine this magic would be called blasphemy, this power that Titania had over her people had never once been used in this way. The Queen could had never wanted to take from even the worst of criminals the divinity that was their birthright, but this was Farenduil’s choice, and ultimately it would save what remained of his life. She would never see her son again, and by the time she learned how his story ended he would likely be long gone. 

Light bloomed around them as the trees of Arvandor grew silent, the godling children that peered at them from their hidden places looked on in wonder as Titania sang a new song for her middleborn son. 

“Close your eyes,” Titania whispered, “and breathe.” 

“I suppose growing up is realizing that those that are supposed to guide us are lost themselves.” He says it without much thought, as if his filter is just gone now. It’s something he’s spent a lot of time thinking about, parenting, guidance. Farenduil looks to this woman that he wants so badly to hate and there are so many people like that now. People he wishes he could just dismiss and leave behind or that they’d write him off instead, thinks maybe he’d be better for it. Instead he sits in some kind of limbo, being of no use to them and still trying to do….He doesn’t know what he’s been tryign to do. Be a better father, a better friend, and he thinks he has failed at both of those things, that he just consistently fails and fails and yet here he is. Pausing in his steps, he stands just a bit straighter and he looks to the woman who gave him life and takes in what she’s saying and he knows. He knows that something has taken root, that there is indeed something around the center of him and strangling him every day since Dirthara came back to them. And he thought maybe that was what his use would be, to let it strangle him. It makes sense, what she is proposing, it is something he has thought of time and time again, Fen’harel changing had planted a seed in his head that he couldn’t ever quite shake. Ideally, what she is proposing is the life he has wanted, she has that right. But it is not so simple, it is something else to unravel. Because he remembers dancing with Emma at that wedding before her death, he remembers Micah’s ire at Mercuralia and it is centuries ago and yet it still hurts. He loves them, he loves them so much that he spends time thinking they hate him, that he is perpetuating the cycle of being a parent that is just not enough. 

“I once told Yavie that something was too complicated and he told me that it wasn’t.” Aurora, they’d spoke of her and just thinking about her hurts, too. His ever faithful warder is a concern too, the man he knows will truly live forever, he’s written plenty of letters in bottles telling him so. Yavie would forgive him, his children on the other hand he had no idea how they would feel. “You would do that?” It feels like a stupid question, but a necessary one. 

-

If only someone had told her own mother that, long ago. It made her smile as she conjured Yidhra into her memory. She’d felt the young warder’s life fade, felt his small existence blink away and counted that as another loss for her son. The friend that she’d appointed to protect him long ago, Titania had been good friends with Amille, they’d argued when the noble fall eladrin had remained in the mortal realm but ultimately she’d respected her choice. “He sounds like his mother, Amille.” Titania remembered a time when the noble would do somersaults in their Eden as a means of entertaining her, that had all been very, very long ago though. “You’re my son, I should have made you the most important thing in the world to me, and instead I treated you like an afterthought.” She folded his hand between hers and held it close, well aware that if he chose mortality that this would be the last time the two of them ever spoke. So many years Titania had carved herself into only one shape, but if there was a way to give him what he wanted: a chance at the sort of life he always desired, then she wouldn’t hesitate. “I love you, and there is nothing in this world that I would not do for you.”

He doesn’t want to talk to her but he doesn’t quite want to talk to anyone. But there’s some kind of sick solace in that he doesn’t have to hold back anything with her anymore. He thinks he has been broken down to the smallest he can be. When he actually manages to sleep, he pictures himself a tree that someone keeps hacking branches off of with a sword forged of iron. How many limbs can they all truly lose before something happens to the trunk? It’s not how they work, trees, you can cut all their branches off and they’ll still remain at least a trunk. He doesn’t see it that way in his head anymore, every branch, every person lost puts some kind of venom in him, kills something maybe and he’s waiting to just start withering away.  “I used to think you were the most important person in the world.” Farenduil says, voice hardly above a whisper where he looks up at her from the path as they walk. He doesn’t think they are here together as mother and son, queen and prince, but perhaps as two tortured souls that just don’t know when to give up. “I’d sit there and I’d watch you on that throne and I watched everyone look at you with this kind of reverence, because I think they all thought it, too.” Maybe her people thought she would save them but at the end of the day, power and title aside, she was just one woman. 

-

“I never asked for that, from any of them.” Even the traitors who conspired against her, Aurora and Fen’Harel who’d seen her dragged from her throne in chains. Titania understood why they despised her, age and power inevitably drew hateful enemies. “Yourself included.” Titania said sympathetically, “I pinned every hope I ever had on you, every dream that I’d once given Aegnor, all my failures, and everything I wasn’t strong enough to do myself.” It was no wonder that this was what her heir had ultimately become, removed from the throne, from court politics entirely. Why he’d even chosen to come here was beyond her, another time she might have hoped that Farenduil would have wanted to try for their people but Titania wouldn’t bother entertaining it. “I asked too much of you, and I broke you, I see that now. The instrument you channelled to resurrect Dirthara infected you and will kill you.” Titania reiterated, “If I take your magic from you, you’ll be mortal, but you’ll get to live a mortal life alongside your children, like you wanted. Like I denied you for so long.”

“I was a terrible mother,” Titania whispered, “I put everything I was into being Queen of a people that came to hate me. I wanted to be a mother, and I failed. I wanted to be Queen, and I failed at that too.” The archfey wasn’t the type to purposefully invoke sympathy or to petty self-pity, but the long years tethered to so many of her people had addled her mind alongside the spellplague. While the pharmakis had restored her and the Gods of Elysia had healed her, Titania wasn’t the woman who’d left the mortal realm behind. She’d promised so much to Zahrya, to Meryasek, but even in her resurgence she’d vowed vengeance and made them pledge the same. Everywhere she looked there was fault etched in the lines of all that she had written, Farenduil had not held back, she knew that he despised her: and he’d been right to. Titania despised her too. 

“I thought for so long that it was within my power to control everything, that if I just held on tight enough then we wouldn’t have to lose anymore than we already have.” Titania turned towards her son, worried hands wrung in front of her, “You and your friends came here seeking aid but you won’t find any: Corellon turned his back on the mortal realm long ago.” Farenduil, the son with whom Titania had expected the world and Meryasek, the son with whom Titania had never expected anything. How they’d both surprised her, and how she’d ruined them both. She could feel the pain of his broken soul as his magic ran keenly through her, the death of a warder was an insufferable loss. All because they had hoped to find aid in a hostile realm. Boons, perhaps, but nothing more: these elves sought worship, as all Gods did, nothing more. “As have I.” It was time for the eladrins to come home so they might at last be restored.

“Wrong answer, Titania.” Hyperborea would be conquered, one way or another. He needed no army. The drow queen would fall first, he’d send her head to Titania in a box, hang it on her palace wall for Venus to see. But as the high elf kept speaking, anger bubbled within his chest. It was for her his heart held any love; it was for her that he continued to breathe the same air as these pathetic mortals she surrounded herself with. “I would make you a queen!” He shouted now, uncaring about who saw them. There would be whispers, perhaps, but this ground was for them, and them alone. Ares had done everything for Titania; even waited for her to decide that she wanted him. 

“I would restore that which you cry for. All that was taken from you. And you would call me death for it – but death I am, ma vhenan.” The word was said with little care, but it held a deep enough meeting, when he’d tried to do as she wanted. When he’d bent to her will, to give her a son, to give her and him a life that they deserved. “I did it your way, once. And look at where it got me? Years of silence. A dead child. Nothing but chaos – and that’s what you’ve given me.”

-

The guard would be here soon, Ares made too much noise to secure any privacy even as they stood over their son’s grave. Titania had cowered in fear at the thought that her infidelity might come to light, and because of that fear she had lost her son. Ares had a right to his wrath, to his vengeance, but her duty was not to him, it was not to her heart or to her children. It was to the realm. To the people that had put their lives, their hopes, and their futures in her hands so that she might lead them into a brighter future. Ares did not know what that burden was, he knew conquest and he knew battle, but he was not a king, he would never be. 

“I was a Queen long before you met me, and I will remain a Queen long after you are gone.” Titania whispered, she did not falter under the weight of Ares’ wrath, his anger was a storm, a war of its own but no matter how the wind howled the mountain would never bow. “You came to me once, desperate for a place to call home. Leave this realm, conquer where you may, but I will never allow you to return.” Titania sheathed her blade, she would not use it, not on him, perhaps never again unless she was bid no other choice but to do so. “I choose not the path of fear, but of faith: someday our son will return to me, in this life, or in eternity that comes after.” Her hand touched his cheek as she spoke, brushed the place that her heart had once whispered was home. “Ma vhenan,” she breathed, “you are broken.” A heart broken by her own hand. “Hate me if you must, it is what I am owed. I will not stand in your way, but bneither can I stand by your side so long as you choose the darkness.” 

Another blade was pulled from nowhere, and while he knew she could press, end his life, the entirety of the Mars line – she wouldn’t. Too many vampires were alive, too much would fall apart – a kingdom of ash was a kingdom of nothing. “Titania,” he crooned, trying not to smile as he leaned into the press of the blade. “Both,” he grinned finally, all blood and war reflected in his eyes. She was close, still close enough to touch, and while she did not pull away from his touch, he knew how to make her come to him. She would, in her own time, and Ares wouldn’t have it any other way. They would stand, side by side, equals among lessers – and now, he could see the hesitation. 

“When they are free, they will be indebted. As all are, when lifted from oppression.” A ruler, their son could do it – that’s what he was made for, until he’d fallen into Ayi’ig’s clutches. “We need no one but ourselves – and someone to bring them forth. Yet all you have are whelps that live and do as they please; what a shame.” Golden Aegnor, who grew lazy on earthy desires; idealistic Farenduil, who had half mortal children – she knew it to be true. “What say you, love?”

-

Though the queen never waivered, in this instance Titania’s hand nearly trembled. There was no breath that fell from the original’s lips, but she could feel the life that emanated off of him just the same. The heart that did not beat lived instead within her own chest, it hammered even now as she thought to Venus who attended to the guests below. There was few that Titania wished for, more than anything to once again hold Meryasek in her arms, to undo the mistake she had made, but also to return home to the realm that had been taken from her. The fields of Hyperborea where giants roamed and the light of the elves sang symphonies that echoed for millennia, overlaying melodies that interlaced one upon the other in a beautiful harmony. It was her burden to be the last of her kind to remember this, but when she was a little girl it was the only song she knew. Ares had promised to return this to her before, but nothing was ever truly evil in the beginning. 

 “You would make me a conqueror, no better than my sister. You see no difference between the two.” Titania whispered, “That is why I will never stand at your side.” She would carry the burden of Meryasek’s memory with her dying breath, the child that never was would be an agony that would never cease to haunt her. A wound that hallowed out her breast, made worse that it was her own blade that had carved it out. But it was for Merysaek and for his memory that Titania would not darken her heart to either Ares’ ambitions, or her own. “My children are free. Free to live as they desire, free from war, free from violence and bloodshed. There’s no place for the them in the future you conspire towards. I see you, Ares, for all your devotion your heart is blacker than the void.”