Disclaimer: Tin Man does not belong to me.
She does not know how best to calculate her age – and not from a lack of pondering the possibilities either (spending mental energy on that theoretical question is often much safer than following the trails of any of the other thoughts that force themselves to the forefront when she is left too much to her own devices).
Generally, she gives the standard answer as derived from the annual of her birth. It is, after all, what would typically be considered the correct answer (never mind how the number of annuals that her body has drawn breath seems so out of sync with the goings on inside of her head).
In many ways, she – Azkadellia of the House of Gale – simply stopped on the day that she followed DG into that cave. She never stopped being that terrified adolescent who was locked in place desperate for someone to come and put a stop to what was happening. She is not sure it is possible to grow in maturity under the circumstances that she experienced. What she knows of growing into adulthood and about being an adult came to her from observed rather than lived channels. But even though that is the easiest way for her to say what she is attempting to express, she knows that it is not quite the full or the completely right explanation either.
She still lived the time in between. She still experienced those moments. They are in her head – welded in place. Any scream or pleading voice can come back to her at any time – do come back to her when she dares to close her eyes in the night. Every act of violence ordered in her voice and every act of violence carried out at her hand are all there waiting to be drawn out for her perusal (torture – same thing really). She was not not there when they occurred.
Thus, she has that maturity at her disposal as well as the maturity of the hundreds of years of waiting that entity known as the witch had to offer from the wells of hatred and rage she had cultivated during her imprisonment. The witch had pillaged her mind at will – calling to hand whatever information she had believed was necessary at first to avoid suspicion that anything was amiss and later to keep for her advantage any and all knowledge of the royal family and the OZ that she believed would further her ends. Such a connection cannot operate on a one way path – magic much like physics has foundational rules to how it operates.
This leaves her in this in between space. Part of her is still the Az that was. She is still fourteen annuals and trapped in the memory of being crushed all over again every day that no member of her family had come for her – not her admired, leader of their people mother, not her affectionate, always seemed to understand her better father, and not the beloved little sister who had stubbornly insisted on the path that had led them to this. Part of her is as aged as the crone. She is daily crushed under the weight of the evil she spent fifteen annuals suffering as it tethered itself ever more deeply into her soul. Since she can see the two of them so distinctly as separate yet entwined entities, she supposes that she must be some sort of anchor point between the two. That part frightens her the most.
She is not sorry that she took her sister's hand that day as the eclipse culminated in the sky above them because that is what stopped the vengeful crone's final bid for power. Whatever else she is, Azkadellia was still raised to believe her duty was first to the residents of the OZ. It was put into her head from the time that she was a very little girl that her life would always center around serving the people of the Outer Zone. She, truly, has no memory of a time before that lesson had been drilled into her head so thoroughly that she never even questioned why it had been pressed upon her. She was and is the eldest daughter of the House of Gale and, thus, the inhabitants of the realm were and are her responsibility (all of her lessons centered on that fact in one manner or another). She believes that makes it not so very strange that she finds herself contemplating how much better off the majority of the residents of the OZ would be if she had come to her end in that final confrontation. She is, in fact, often quite sorry that the force of magic that completed the separation did not simply end them both at the same time. It would, she believes, have been a far simpler solution.
It could not have been before the witch met her demise, of course, because allowing her little sister to face that monstrosity alone is not something she can even fathom (not to mention she is more than reasonably certain that the actual purging required the two of them united in purpose to accomplish – why else would the ancients have locked the witch away rather then ended her). That unfolding of events in the immediate aftermath, however, might have made things better. If she could have quietly faded away in those moments with only Deeg there to hold her hand with maybe just enough time to tell her sister that she was proud of her, she would, she thinks, have been quite happy with that.
Their realm would have forgiven her much as a martyr. They would have spun a folk song or two about her final act in aiding her sister in clearing the threat and darkness from their home. It would have been far easier for them to choose to believe the truth of the tale without her presence there to continually remind them of their resentments.
Their parents would have had an easier time of it – burying her and moving on rather than the daily tip toeing around all of the things that they are terrified to say to each other. The never ending political intrigues that had come flying back almost sooner than the Court could be reassembled would certainly be far easier without her continual upheaval of their various plans and preferences by her mere existence.
In short, the only person who would truly miss her more than they regretted her was her little sister. It was not so much that she actually needed her as it was that she preferred Az's way of steering her through the practices and pitfalls of a homeland that she had spent the majority of her life away from than other people's methods of choice. DG would have been just fine without her, but she would have suffered more difficulties until she learned enough and been sadder until time went by enough that she accepted that none of the things that had happened had been her doing.
She chooses not to regret her path, then, for DG's sake – and also for Wyatt Cain's. He, by her methods of reckoning, is the only person in all of the OZ that she knows is better off for the fact that she continues to draw breath. The poor man having been fool enough (or fond enough or some equally mixed combination of both) to accept the "honor" of an appointment to head of her sister's security as a reward for his assistance to the royal house is run ragged enough as it is let alone what it would be like if she was not around to curb some of her sister's most likely to lead to disaster impulses.
She does what she can to ease the way for each of them while doing her level best to never repeat the utter devastation that was the first and only time that she and her mother had been left alone together. Not repeating that event prevents her father from feeling put upon to choose sides. It is the best she has to offer for the people that once made up a family.
If she manages to slip away some nights and visit places that need just a tiny smidgen of help to aid the rebuilding and healing that her land and people are going through, well, that is her business and hers alone. She never does anything large or too impressive – nothing that will make it necessary for people to ask questions about what has happened. This is her life now. It will be all she has until is isn't any more, and she does not stop to think about the fact that there are at least two very different things that that sentence could imply.