The Slumbering Queen's "gift"

The Slumbering Queen, speaking through Gwenivere Velmont’s sleeping body with the guard at the door standing asleep on his feet, told Mikhail she had left him a present. Her home was under siege, she said, she was too far removed to send it any aid, it was all taking too long, and he should come and speak with her again once he had found the thing and enjoyed it. Someone was manipulated into procuring it; who, she did not say, and nobody has since put a name to it.

He searched his own belongings that evening and found nothing. Nobody else has found it either, and the second meeting she asked for has not happened. The party could not settle whether she was desperate, the ooze her power fed on being close to destruction, or playing a longer game to seed a thought in him and see what it provoked.

Asked about it afterwards, Baku said the gifts of the Chantry are rarely objects, more often a nudge toward a person or a choice, arriving the way a dream does. The Queen, by her account, knows people’s minds and where they want to go, and can weave one road to run alongside another; she has met more than a few who seemed to have been touched by her that way.

The ooze was destroyed in the end, burned apart at sunrise in the keep beneath Haudh-Gwenn, with Gwenivere away at the Crack and no hand in it. What the Queen is has since been said outright by Nancáro: she is Gwenivere’s own dreams, manifested in her by the ancient thing the Mól imprisoned beneath the city, which is why the two of them can never be awake in the same hour. That thing feeds on dreams, it had been feeding on the ooze, and the Queen’s own work was part of what held it down.