splickedylit:

You know what keeps occurring to me though. If the Condesce was alive SO FREAKING LONG, which is looks like she probably has–like, SO long. Way too long–then like what if her species has evolved without her? What if the young would-be empresses come to fight her for the throne, expecting somebody like them, like the adults they’ve met who laughed when they demanded respect? And the empress comes out of the dark with a face like an ancient animal and a mouth that goes too wide and too full of teeth and pitch-black keratin plates so thick clothes are a formality. Just black chitin and then these great, vivid slashes along her sides where her gills are, and gold everywhere, she can just carve lines in her plates and fill them in with gold. And her teeth are too long and so is her tongue with its gold studs, and her eyes are from an age when there weren’t seadweller hives in the oceans of Alternia. Just darkness all the way down to the Emissary who raised her. They’ve evolved so tame down on the homeworld, cute little silver-skinned minnows. Tame hair that straggles out down their soft, bare necks, tame claws that are barely claws, tame little delicate horns that would crack the minute they slammed together to fight head to head like she used to when she took the throne. Tame bodies that aren’t made to dive onto all fours and long-lashed eyes that barely see, let alone in the abyssal dark. They’ve gotten smaller and smaller–faster because of it, with hands made to do the work she sets them too, but not fast enough, and so small and so, so weak. She could gut them with one thumbnail, and her reach is so much longer than they ever trained for and sometimes it’s nice to indulge in animal instincts (hers are so much closer to the surface than theirs) so she reaches out and she does. At least they developed glitter and big plastic sunglasses. Not a total waste.

Okay but, no.

Because remember, she too is a paradox clone, made of the same genetic stuff as modern trolls, even if she far, far predated them.

So imagine it the other way. She’s an upstart, small and slight at the age she took the throne (compared even to them now, knowing as we do that highblood males outnumber females and look how they bulk up, nevermind that many of them are ancient in their own right). Imagine the small, scruffy heiress, who is at her core still a thief, who uses speed where no one could hope to prevail with strength.

And imagine what that does to the species, after. The empress is the pinnacle of desirability, the sexiest troll in the universe, and so it’s traits like hers that are selected for as centuries turn to millennia, as sexual selection becomes the driving force of troll evolution.

Imagine the other ancestors, each trolls like her in their modern beauty - and we know at least some of them contributed their genes to the slurry, each one a gentle further push towards the ideal of the empress.

Imagine modern trolls, now hardly different at all from her, providing a perfect environment - because one such beauty in a century is notable, two perhaps not beyond expectation, but twelve? One of every caste, within a single sweep?

There’s no way they would have gone unnoticed, unless the species had already evolved to disguise them, under an empress who made soft and slight and speedy the new dangerous, the new sexy, and eventually, the new norm.