Dicentra, Dicentra, what else will the fools have to do?

She had been no older than eight when she realized the actual place of beasts in this world. As that changes, even to her benefit, the less she trusts her right to it.

It’s the last time she can remember there being a real enemy amongst the magelands, when the kinder lines amongst them in their prejudice could hold a candle to the Beastlands. It was the last time when the world were enough a stage that her kin needed pay tribute to the notion of external diplomacy.

Since that time it's been what was inside that counted. And she feels that this too is tainted.

By lineage she could be dubbed Lammuform or Sphinxform, lion shaped, kind faced and fearsome, though she unlike many of her recent ancestors was noticeably upright. Kinder forms were once preferred, and whether it be the magic of this world, or the nature of their bodies it was possible to interbreed, and as this for a time was preferred, they did so.

Like many of a beastial type, she was born with a tail. Like fewer of that type, hers has a spur.

Bore by both her parents, it was the inheritance of a Manticore, of common lineage, and once before the rise of the Shepherd, a true royal line. Venom draws from a gland within that spur, reactive by design with the nervous system of most animals on this planet. It is the reason, some suppose that our forms until so recent a generation could vary so much with little issue.

It is considered the finest feature of her kind.

Upon her back, and much of her outer skin there are bones, small and noticeable, and sturdy. A feature bore in common with much of the population. It makes the beasts who possess it good deep swimmers. Her hair and face are white, unlike the reddish tones the rest of her body prefers. Piebald they call it.

A feature she shares with the shepherd. Along with height, some finer points of figure, and blood.

It’s common enough knowledge that the shepherd was found first in Badiya, sandy and harsh, and that he, like many a strange beast, was brought before the King there. It's less common to acknowledge that like the manicores of old, or the magish war brides of centuries ago, he found his use first as a lover.

That was after great triumph of course, he was not ever an easy being to overtake. But it was then, and maybe more a secret than ever now, that he’d taken pleasure in their poison. The venom, that in all other known creatures was a death sentence, left the shepherd pleased.

And in that pleasure he caused atrocities. A bloody swath through and through, and all to her family’s use. The strange creature Mosis Opensky, chimeric and striking in all manners, with the funding first of her family made short work of their enemies, subsuming them into a whole.

And that whole soon became his.

Inch by inch, mile by mile, his ideals, enforced by the nature of a seemingly unending life have made the beastlands as a whole relentless and stable. And yet she wants it to burn.

That was unfair, she wanted a united beastland, but the bar of common knowledge was in her opinion too high, and the result was a populous too certain of their unique ability to decide their fate only for themselves.

She is thirteen when she decides the world has gone mad. Years before she’d lost her parents to their nation's final victory over the Muhtab, killing their monarchs and absorbing their populace. Years before she’d really thought at all, the shepherd chose to adopt an unaffiliated foundling as his own.

She liked Alilaih well enough, cryptic anatomy or not, but having no bloodline to speak of? And she of all children chosen so charitably? It was not disturbing to her back then, but it would be in time.

For that year when she was thirteen, a Feliform girl no older than six decided to grow up way too fast. And Alilaih at ten would support it, which at the time was a joke.

Five years later, that girl would through perseverance she found disturbing, become a legal adult. And at eleven a girl she’d known in diapers had become so over informed that laws she’d been raised under would dignify her with adulthood.

She was not an ignorant woman, but even being so close to them socially she found the whole thing disturbing. At nineteen she’d passed her season not three years before, but the choice of them both to forgo those last years of youth and test out of childhood seemed premature.

More disturbingly, they did so together, binding themselves in a Maylok.

A marriage of types, enmeshed into law by the sublimation of Tarbiya and So-neith populations. The Caden-Parsimony, meant to enshrine civilian adulthood with the manners and skills attributed to adequate self-determination. And somehow these children passed. It was a travesty.

A wicked consequence of wicked laws.

And the Dicentra. The Dicentra would change it.

Not for them, certainly not for them. There is no need in a better world for already ruined children. But a better world was possible without too-young adults.

Trapped in the darkness with the monster from which she partially descends, she is certain of her desires. Most beasts by the age of sixteen pass into adulthood, informed and ready to live, a disbelief in self-determination does not change this. It is easy to pass a test when you know the answers they want. But you don’t have to believe them, trust or accept them.

You say what they want and you’re in the clear.

You state the rhetoric they’d prefer and you take what you want anyway.

Mosis looked upon her with pride, but he looked upon everyone this way. Loved them all as creatures in common, one cell in the whole of a body he adored. In the common manner he saw all she could only imagine weakness, even as she knew to slip and try his might would kill her.

For she loved him like all the beasts did love him. He was the shepherd, who led them from feebleness and imagines them good. He was the damnable abyss tamed by righteous King, fiery, just, perfect and cruel upon all that opposed him.

Yet the man she’d known was sick, a lover of lovers, his own kin and strangers alike, impetuous and meandering in equal measure. Drunk and feeble on the venom of her kind, and yet so certain they should not bear the right of choice in the damnation of their enemies.

Merciful rarely, and only in death, for he saved lives even amongst the conquered and made them not subject but civilian. And this too, youth as she was, raised finely in this world, found suspect.

And yet she speaks nothing of this to him.

For it is nothing to lie for one season, when one has seen fit to lie her entire life.