[ She takes it, just as slowly as she gave it the first time. Not skilled enough to begin with to let only one image fill her mind - rather, there is the full weight of concerns. Of being here, of being separated from her duty to her people - that these aren't her people. This isn't her rebellion, these aren't her subjects. The connection to Elena that isn't just irritation or some petty hatred. It is a violation so consuming, she might just destroy herself.
The longing, and the wanting, of something so far gone from her, she doesn't think she even knows what she wants anymore. All of herself, laid out, sparking, darting, twisting around itself like flames around a dry log that is her. Her - not Lakshmi, nor Queen - but Jhansi ki Rani and the embers of everything else that came before that lay below it. A mind older, older than her youthful face masks her as. ]
Alright -
[ And slowly, she takes the strongest thing she ever knew. The walls of Jhansi - high, strong, powerful, where she walks in her dreams so often. They rise up and up and up. Impenetrable stone walls that from which she looks down from, the figure of Shiva, that as she recounts the names she once used to calm her mind, she wraps those walls like his many arms, and as powerful as the trident he holds - The universal destroyer, He whole holds the bow, the arrow, the skull, the lightning bolt, the battle-axe, the sword and the trident; he who is beginning, middle and end. Unfolds and unfolds to be great and tall and worn through against all these wars and yet withstood them all. Here, come, she wants it to say, lay siege. I have withstood them before. ]
no subject
The longing, and the wanting, of something so far gone from her, she doesn't think she even knows what she wants anymore. All of herself, laid out, sparking, darting, twisting around itself like flames around a dry log that is her. Her - not Lakshmi, nor Queen - but Jhansi ki Rani and the embers of everything else that came before that lay below it. A mind older, older than her youthful face masks her as. ]
Alright -
[ And slowly, she takes the strongest thing she ever knew. The walls of Jhansi - high, strong, powerful, where she walks in her dreams so often. They rise up and up and up. Impenetrable stone walls that from which she looks down from, the figure of Shiva, that as she recounts the names she once used to calm her mind, she wraps those walls like his many arms, and as powerful as the trident he holds - The universal destroyer, He whole holds the bow, the arrow, the skull, the lightning bolt, the battle-axe, the sword and the trident; he who is beginning, middle and end. Unfolds and unfolds to be great and tall and worn through against all these wars and yet withstood them all. Here, come, she wants it to say, lay siege. I have withstood them before. ]