It takes Micaiah a long time to become herself, and it's a self that only half-belongs to her, like the moon and her light, half what she made it and half what people imagine; the person remembered in history books won't have her selfishness, and depending on the author or the time or the politics at play, she'll be a coward or a hero, a monster or a victim, an idealist or a ruthless pragmatist, a conwoman or a prophet, but no matter the quill she won't be remembered as that loner who lived on the roads, only trying to survive, and whom the wings of war might not have touched at all if not for the way it misplaced her only human attachment, that boy who in time would become her consort.

History remembers the deaths she caused and the lives she saved, the war she won and the peace that turned into poison, the war she almost lost and the peace she tended to until the country calls it "a silver time", silver thought more precious than gold, her strangest legacy - it remembers her a fortune-teller, a resistance leader, a figurehead, a general, and the Silver Queen of Daein.

It doesn't remember the girl who chose to care, after decades of numb survival; it doesn't remember that the woman leading Daein to the dawn had stepped out of ashes of her own - but does it truly matter: history remembers the dawn.