Work Text:
This is your hive’s ancestral hall. Unlike most trolls heiresses are not given the small luxury of building their hives from scratch, rather all heiresses are indentured in the ROYAL HIVEPALACE built by some ancient fuschia. Each heiress usually adds on or changes something about it, including yourself. You could never go without your cuttlefish sanctuary. this place though? It is one of the oldest places in the hive, this hallway? It terrifies you. Not for what it is, but what it represents. In actual contents it is sparse, other then the paintings on the walls, one for every heiress that has walked these halls in the past, Mariah Okanus, Pontaa Inomea, Trizza Teyths, with each step you are brought another 9 sweeps into the past. There is a bit of humor to it, since in your wigglerhood you might have….painted on them with a bunch of silly colours. In spite of that though underneath you still see it, the same horns, the same finned auricular sponge clots, the same look, that maybe just maybe, this time they’ll win. And then you notice the plague underneath, identical for almost all of them. Impri Olania [KILLED BY THE EMPRESS]. Maowei Seanya [KILLED BY THE EMPRESS] Izbeth Regall [KILLED BY THE EMPRESS]. It scared you, you know that they were like you, full of hope and wishing that things would be better for them and theirs. After an uncomfortably long time you get towhere you wanted to, a name that throughout the short almost 6 sweeps of your life you’ve had memorized in your thinkpan. Meenah Peixes [ASCENDED TO TITLE OF EMPRESS] your ancestor, the empress, from looking at this you know she was once like you, and you use that knowledge to assure yourself that like her you too may become empress, your castename,Peixes hasn’t been seen since her time. Whether that’s a sign of your destiny, or a cruel joke by fate, is something you don’t know yet. This hall may fill you with fear when you walk down it’s smooth metallic tiling, but it also gives you something else, determination. Seeing your predecessors, seeing those who may have called you their descendants instead of her, it fills you with a will that this time you will succeed, you will defeat your ancestor and you will make alternia a better place. Not only for yourself and yoru survival, but for your friends, those who would be crushed by the empire, and those who wouldnt make it more than a couple days past their ascension. As well as them, these endless halls of hopes, and dreams, crushed by a monster who wouldnt even give them a chance. And you use their will, you use their resolve, to help push you from one day to the next. They may not all have been as selfless as you, some probably were just as bad as your ancestor or even wrose! But even still they are your ancestors, their lives changed you in the same way your life will change those hwo will come, hopefully you’ll teach them to have a little more mercy. And as you reach the last of the photos, and exit the hall you look back one more time. You look each of your ancestors in the eye, one, by one, and thank them. because seeing them, and hearing of what they’ve done has given you something you need more than ever, perspective, you hope though that unlike them you will be remembered by more than just a single painting.