Once I was She Who Sings the Ocean to Prosperity, but now? I am the Endless Wail. [ How to answer it for someone that does not understand the implicit nature of what she is, and that she is a what, now, not a woman.

Her hand withdraws, cupping against his jaw as she tilted him to look at her eyes, churning and dark in the fire light. Let him look, look, look and she wonders, if she shall be all he fears, once she tells him. Shall he strike her down like the nobles he spoke of?

She can only hope so. ]

My enemies caused me to go to war. But I am Daughter-Sea, Second-Child, to the Sea-Father himself. My voice is pure, even when their assassins mistakenly took it from me. I am a malformed, little creature, but the love I gave was given to my Holy Father pure and my voice true to Him in worship, and He has always returned it fully.

So when my pain was great, my fear greater, He answered the way He knows how. I went to battle in the throws of it all, I screamed and screamed and screamed, and laid waste to them all so utterly in that moment I ended their petty war with themselves for good. I sank a hundred ships. I drowned a thousand men and women. In a moment, I littered the water with so many corpses, they wash up still upon the shore.

When the waves crashed to shore? I had destroyed my own city, too. Dozens of my own people, innocent to it all, left dead under the rubble.

Including one of my own children.

[ She bares her crimes patiently, one by one. Step by step. ]

I know why to this fallen place I have come. If all was right, I should be nothing but bones scraping the sea floor.