She had thought long on the nature of power of what it meant, what wielding it was for.
She knew now that she had the core of it right in the beginning.
Power was change. Power was resisting change. All boiled down to that. Power was the exertion of your will upon the world, of making your beliefs reality, of making them matter.
The wisest philosopher's wisdom was nothing if it did not reach ears that could take up their cause. The most diligent ruler's reforms were nothing without the power to enforce them.
…That was what she had done. What her songs did. She sang, and sometimes, the world listened. Small as she was meager as her personal power was…
She had wrought this, without her, a titan, a Sovereign, would not be screaming.
Power did not have to come from within. Winter was not one voice, one single thing, but the movements of countless forces in unison wrought by the turning of the world, set in motion by voices long, long gone.
How many of those voices had been forgotten, mighty or not?
Ling Qi rose from the boiling muck like a flickering star as the firmament exploded under her feet, a thousand thousand roots and filaments of power reaching to strangle her, touching her, leaving welts and tears upon her skin before they burned to ash and seared her too in doing.
