okay now that I've slept and delt with my headache, for completely benign reasons I'm thinking about Emhira, and how she compares to the raven-haired mage Patia knew over two centuries before.
The Raven Queen that ascended was an arcane master and follower of her predecessor, implied to live in Avalir. We don't have a confirmed class for the Matron's og self, but given she taught Patia I'd bet Wizard... which is a very different way of accessing power than a Warlock. And if she was trusted to teach the Por'co grandchild, presumably this woman was highly regarded indeed.
As much as Emhira is coming to Downfall with a unique perspective among the gods (as touched on in Cooldown, being a mortal who usurped a god AND death / fate being her domains), her perspective as a mortal was an outlier among mortals even before she ascended. Not just that she was the only one to pull off this ritual successfully, but in being in the upper class of a mageocracy in one of the most powerful flying cities to exist.
And now she has been living on the ground, under the supervision of her Champion, for decades. Her Champion who stepped onto Avalir with muddy boots and ranger leathers.
Is Emhira a likeness to the Matron's first body? Was she born to be herself again, only to be molded by cataclysm and suffering into a far more ragged, worn woman than she was before? Hell; was that mage in Avalir all that familiar with death at all, with magic always so close at hand? How has it been to see death and death and death around her, out of her control?
How does it feel, to have a name again for the first time in two hundred years? To not be a porcelain mask but a person?
Given this war between gods is an extinction level event (the ash covering the sun reminds me of thd K-PG extinction event, and also how are y'all growing apples??), I wonder if Emhira is just as changed as Asha is. Life is choked and slaughtered and dying, they are both sides to that coin. How frayed are the strands of fate?
Is Emhira more like the Matron, or more like the woman who came before them both? Or is she a third, more mortal thing?
