The queen keeps ravens because ravens keep her secrets with a trueheartedness that cannot be matched by any man, by any girl, by any beast that has never craved the melting sweetness of dead flesh in its mouth. Their black and shining wings rise around her like a shield against decay, their landing comes soft as nightfall when her dreams are bright, too bright to bear. Their hunger, swift, consumes the path she has walked down from the distant hills, far from this clashing, crashing sea. Attended by ravens, the queen does not fear her past or her future. They tore the one to pieces long ago, they hold the other at bay.
How beautiful and kind they have been, she reflects, their cruel silhouettes bent over tattered banners and bloody horses on the battlefield where a wounded king took the last step toward his downfall.
But Ravenna has eaten her fill of kings and their graceless battles. Such things have never soothed her hungers. Perched in a castle overlooking the frothing sea, she steals away to her towers and heights thinking of a time when flesh and love made her heart light. The simple contentments of youth. A time she never knew. A thing she was denied. Before, when great weakness still overwhelmed her, she would look to Finn in the hope that he might tell her otherwise, that he would say she ran and skipped in the sunlight like any child; but there was such fear and sadness in his eyes when he beheld her even then that she can hardly stand the thought of him, she screams and rages to know that he would pity her. Pity her! Pity the ageless, bloodless beginning and end. Pity his dauntless sister, the deathless queen.
His sorrow was ugly and misguided. Ravenna is certain that she has known true love. She may not worship at its altar but her heart knows the proper gestures of devotion. She has loved, she has done that, and not merely opened herself to a man's desires or coveted the arch of another girl's back. Each of the women she has consumed, they who sustain her; every one is beloved. And Finn who honoured and affronted her with his dumb adoration; beloved. And the people in the streets who hate her with all their souls; beloved. And the birds in the tower and the birds in the sky and all the birds who have winged her away from powerlessness and anguish; best beloved.
Only — this is not love in the way of the flesh and the heart at once. She must admit it. Even ageless, she is human and she thirsts for the press of humanity against her, inside her, to lie immortal beside some ephemeral beauty. And so, she thinks often of Snow White.
What value is she, the princess-no-more of a country and castle wholly conquered? Unlike the ravens, she keeps nothing for being kept; but still it pained Ravenna to have her slip the collar of her captivity, not least of all with that precious young heart clutched tight between her ribs. Snow White is a rare bird, a memory gone past and a shadow on glass, the ghost of a girl lost long ago. Not of herself, no, Ravenna crows; for that girl is not lost. She simply never was.
No. Snow White is a beauty composed of many unlike parts. She is the subtle raven with the songbird's sweet voice, her eagle-brave heart is nestled deep in owlish wisdom. And most precious of all, she has the human gaze that Ravenna thinks she must crave, the eyes that could look upon her and the hands that could touch her face. Gentle and proud is Snow White, stung by the hollow places left in her by loss. These are places Ravenna could fill: place of the mother, place of the friend, place of the woman who has also suffered, who knows how it feels to lie awake, alone. Or, lastly and at last, that place of deepest longing, sated only by the lover's caress. And such a caress she could be made to endure, more ecstasy than a proper princess was ever taught to expect: a queen's regal tongue on her breast, a queen's elegant fingers easing between her legs, slick and sweet, the one silver talon arching over her clitoris, the clawtip circling down and down.
As kings on the battlefield fall, so too may a queen find herself brought low by her passions. Her instincts warn her not to personify prey. Kill the girl. Claim her heart. It gleams in the mirror, all the ways she might do it. Quick and slow, bloody and clean. But Ravenna's designs here have been crafted with an eye for a wider purpose. She will rule forever, she will lay men down as carrion for her ravens, and ravens will fill her skies as she looks on, triumphant. Not alone; no. All those years, all the world. She could not bear it. Even with Finn at her hand she would not have been able to bear it; he who loved her too much and she of a beauty so great that mountains would bow to her, so pure that it would demand adulation from one more worthy. And so she indulges her fantasies. For the dread queen, a dread consort; beautiful, sweet-lipped, courageous, wise.
A bright dream. Too, too bright in dark times. Towers of ravens shriek and whirl, hungry for the sweet, bleeding future they have been promised. And Snow White is gone. Snow White is far away, obscured by the veils of many deaths, by water and forest and fire and ice. She sleeps, her dreams as delicate as glass. Do not shatter, Ravenna prays, thinking of mirrors. Even as her magic wanes, she troubles herself to look inside the girl and flinches away from the fierce joy she takes in what she sees. Shards bury deep in her heart and eyes. Tiny reflections of a thousand possible futures, drawing blood drop by drop. The tower shakes with the currents of a storm stirred by a million struggling wings and Ravenna smiles though it hooks deep creases into the corners of her mouth. She smiles.
The ravens cry because Snow White's lips are red as blood that cannot be kissed away. She tastes it when she wakes. It melts down her throat and her black hair shifts like wings hunched against the cold winds, a streaming banner over kind hearts hardened with the hunger for war.
Written for apricity in Yuletide 2012.