LYSSARA
Her name was Mira.
She told me this after everything else, after the founding era architecture and the household's function and the four generations of watching from a distance that most people would have called impossible. She told me her name last, the way people told you the things that were most theirs when they had spent a long time being defined by their function rather than by themselves, and wanted to establish the function's legitimacy before they offered the personal detail.
I received it as the gift it was. The last Alpha Queen had known she was dying. Not immediately, she had months, enough time to make deliberate decisions rather than emergency ones, enough time to understand that the specific thing she was most afraid of was not her own death but the specific vacuu
