This first gift is a story in flame who will not try to kill her. Not many of those types of fire people, as far as I know.

Simple gratitude: thank you, death mage, for sparking a kind of hope in me months ago. Thank you, death mage, for quelling the palace fighting and fleeing with me. Thank you, death mage, for giving my birds freedom and my closest friend a resting place.

Yet I know, simple gratitude does not suffice. Thank yous don't mean the same amount to every people--Uyagaq recently told me a friend told them that, years ago. After that, the death mage never struck me as a person filled up by thank yous.

I know the death mage could kill the Jani empress. Flick of her wrist, or something, I am not an expert on death mage magic.

But the piece of death mage magic I do understand has something to do with seeing things in fire that the rest of us don't see--people, specifically. Dead people. Usually, dead people the death mage has killed. These ones take up the most space, cry for attention the loudest.

Which sent the question rattling around my head, how much space does a dead Empress take up? How much space does she demand, vengeful, conquering, stated to hate anything magic-tainted?

This gift is a story someone never has to live. My gift is a story I can tell myself, to myself, branded into my body instead of another's.

As queen, I have learned a lot about delegation. Sure, I could've done it all myself if I had time. Time to learn the skills of many languages, time to study maps of the whole world, time to set the whole palace city in order. But I didn't. Hence the more capable servants, the king, Aqtilik, my father.

This is one thing I will not delegate.

Never let the bird do a queen's job, that will only look like an unlikely accident.

Never let the next ruler do this queen's job, that will only look like a succession war.

This is intentional. Purposeful. I am the queen, this is my land; leave, or I will rid this place of you myself.

Yet, maybe I do mean to be a martyr. Maybe all this is so I no longer have to wonder why I was the one to live, not Aqtilik. Why did Panuk have to die too? What purpose is there in all this death, for me to live on in a queendom I lost myself? What power does an avalanche of rage contain if it only collapses down mountains inside you, disappears in a flood of exhaustion?

My carefully placed snowflakes toppled, and ashes became of them.

Maybe I do mean to be a martyr. Maybe I am blinded by a Jani empress deserving death at my hand. In my plans, the death-blow hand is always mine. No death mage to be haunted, no jet bird, this blow is mine. I cannot surrender that knife to another's hand more capable.

Look at me, chasing my thoughts in circles. Telling myself my own death will sate the Empress' people need for revenge, and in those ashes, my people can have peace.

Or perhaps I just want to prove that I am capable. This queendom was not luck, a decade of peace was not luck, the fact we lost it merely evidence of our luck running out. I am a better queen than that, aren't I?

Look at me, chasing my thoughts in circles.

Uyagaq, you can rip out these paragraphs too.

Death mage, my second gift is a fragment of a home. Perhaps grander than what the first gift is physically worth, when I am gone and the consequences are paid by you and Uyagaq.

My second gift is a fragment of a home. If my words were still decrees (which they aren't), I would grant you safety in every town of the Nunait. If my words were still decrees, which they aren't, and I could verbally grant you safety in every town of the Nunait, I still know people bend the laws to suit themselves. And the threat of the law is little water to douse a fire of fear, for I know how death mages are feared.

Which is why the gift I seek to give you, a home, is not something I can truly give.

I know something of the years you spent alone, however few details I have heard. The most alone I ever felt was in the days after my father's death. As if the whole world were descending to weigh down only my shoulders. And I had a whole palace then, other people who knew my father and mourned with me. So I do not know what years spent alone aches like.

But I do know about love. Like a wild bloom capable of cutting through our masks, worn to protect ourselves from burrs and thorns; a wild blossom capable of cutting through skin, smiles, straight down to the bone. Love is double-sided like that, soft petals, cutting to the thickest hearts.

I am learning about forgiveness; a madman suffocated my palace from me but in my heart I find no vial of poison with his name on it.

I know about the love that wrenches like a ruined blanket when your father's closest advisor dies, two years after your father. I know about the love for a mother you never met but would have raised you. I know about love for a place, a blossom so enamored with the carvings and the stone that uprooting it leaves your planet yawning and un-whole. I have a field of blossoms for all the people of the Nunait, I have never met most of them and I probably couldn't stand some of them but they are my people. I am their queen. What sort of judge would I be if I did not love my people simply for being mine?

As if I own them.

I know about the love that sucks up all our life, from the leaves and roots, into opening a flower. I know about what happens when those petals die, all forsaken. I know about losing children before they were truly mine.

I know about the love that lets them go, the please don't leave me, please still need me, but if you go I will send your sails off with my steadiest storms.

I speak of love as a flower. A wind. A possession. Touch me, hold me, take me, show me. As if love were anything less than the entirety of our beings.

Death mage, here is my fragment: somebody loves you, even if I do not truly know you.

I think I now know one thing--where the avalanche goes. My fury, a cold and jagged thing at a king, I parceled out atop a stone heart, neat and tidy. If Aqtilik taught me how selfless love is, she also taught me that hearts are only a part of an ecosystem. Laid to rest, Aqtilik is an interconnected self more than her bones.

I know where the avalanche goes: it erupts from my heart and takes over my ribs, overwhelms my throat and balloons in my abdomen. Sets my veins vibrating with motion. My mind sharpens as a cutting ice knife, my senses lightning, reaching out for my family, Uyagaq, my people. I thunder with the force of us, rising and roaring, united, taking the heights of mountains with us.

In my racing heart, there is always room for wilder avalanches. Softer snow. Storming flurries of dancing mountainsides.

You--bloom with us. Join us in our avalanche.