I'm turning into someone else.

They say my mother must have been prophetic in my naming. She has the habit of naming things for people in her favorite stories. My eldest sister is a water nymph. My youngest brother is an elven king. She named me for that myth about the Queen of the Night. She didn't mean it, and I don't know whether things would still be the way they are if she hadn't named me this, or if maybe it would have been different. Maybe it was fated that she'd name me this because it was fated that this was going to happen to me. Maybe they're right, maybe effect does sometimes precede cause. I don't know.

Maybe it's not even really happening. Maybe it is just my imagination, like some of my friends try to tell me. But I know, no matter how pretty they all say I am, with black hair and pale skin and eyes of jet and slender build, that that isn't why I can't walk down any street, empty or crowded, without notice. There is always someone, and most commonly several someones, looking at me. Squinting, trying to place where it is they've seen me.

One young man half-joked to me, once, that I was the girl of his dreams, and I punched him and screamed that that wasn't funny. He never understood why this upset me so. I never tried to tell him that it wasn't my fault, that I can't help it. I walk the dreams of others; I'm slowly losing Isera and gaining the Queen of the Night.

Odd things happen in their dreams, and they dream corporately. I am loved and loathed, worshipped and persecuted, welcomed and driven away.

It wasn't always like this. I used to dream of normal things, like a normal girl. I didn't look so much like her, once. I didn't find myself thinking the thoughts of a myth, a woman who is only a story. I was smiled upon by adults, not looked upon with fear and dread. I played with the other children, once; I had as many friends and playmates as any other. Now I am alone; I am an object of awe and fright; I am the Night-Queen born again, in appearance and in deed; I force my people to do my bidding in the night, in their sleep; I rule them.

Things are real there, but not like here. They are more real yet less real. I can do things there I never dreamed of before; things that may delight others, but which scare me beyond any other fear.

And slowly, ever so painfully, draggingly slowly, I am becoming her. My mother laughs at me, and pats me, when I cry to her in the evening, before it is time for bed, but her laughter and the comfort does not reach her eyes. In them, I see fear. She is no different from any of the others, at night, in her dreams, and it is then that I become her fully, that I am the harsh mistress, unforgiving, unrelenting. I can hear her weeping, as I drift off to the dreamland, and I cannot rise and comfort her. As I fall asleep, she who I am going to be, she who I am, but she who never was, takes hold of me. She is perhaps more cruel with me than with them; they can escape, at times. Every night I know that there is no escape, until the daylight.

The daylight is becoming less and less of a way out of this madness. More and more look upon me with that mixture of fear and dread and loathing, more and more see me as her than as the child of a poor woman. More and more, some look at me with that love of a devoted pet, and some with the hatred of the slave. I stopped one of them in the street, once, telling them that it wasn't my fault, that I was sorry, that I would try to be kinder the next time, and they looked at me with disdain and disbelief. How could I know that I resemble so closely the woman in their dreams? Add a few years to my face and body, and I am she. They think that I am just a crazy woman, as they see my mother, at times, that there must be something that one of the lords could do. But there is nothing, as I have heard it whispered. The lords fear me and welcome me the same as the beggar on the street.

And tonight, as I stretched out upon my bed and gathered all my courage to close my eyes, and as I drifted to sleep and heard my mother weep, and as the dreams, my dreams, their dreams, the dreams of all, came, and as I felt more fully to be the Night-Queen than ever before, more so than the change of every night, I awakened. This has never happened before, never. I hear them still sleeping, the slow, even breathing of the peaceful slumber that holds not dreams of me. And I fear what I half-know, and I half-desire to return to the restless sleep that has become normalcy. But she has all but taken me over, and I rise, and I reach the lamps and light one, and I gaze into the looking-glass to see what I will see, and I stifle the scream that fights for freedom from my throat. The time has come and the transformation is complete, and as the last vestiges of myself die, they whisper their last words, and her first:

"I am she; I am the Night-Queen."




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