The bone of contention was, to put it simply, complicated.
Her brother expected her to fold her newly established empire and place them on her living ship as he led them to an unknown destination.
She defiantly refused that proposition, which her brother had made with the support of her best friend who was now turned his fiancée.
When her brother tried to force her hand with the agreement she made in exchange for his help, she reminded him that the only clause of their contract stated that he would offer his help to her, which, in exchange, would saddle her with the obligation of offering her Living ship for and escorting him on, his mission to another continent, one in which her best friend would tag along.
Defeated, her brother and her friend who was becoming more of a stranger to her by the day, all gave her resigned looks as though...she was walking into a trap which existed on her path of which they could not directly tell her about.
Thus, when the D-day came, having been given a quest to spread the reaches of her Empire to the new lands she was going to explore, she took three camps worth of the most loyal of her people alongside her brother and his fiancée with her on her living ship and sailed off to the unknown where her brother would guide them to.
The journey was peaceful at first. They did not experience even the slightest weather disturbance even after many weeks into the sea. And with the special nature of her Comfort Living Ship, the journey was like a picnic on the seas, with none of them suffering from sea sickness at all, instead waking up feeling more reinvigorated to enjoy another day.
That was until her brother decided to switch away from the planned path suddenly that everything turned from best….
….to worst.
Ship tilting storms that threw some crew members off board, poor visibility, attacks from eldritch oceanic life-forms and even the ships failing ability to keep sea sickness away were the least of their worries.
The most worrisome thing then was that her brother who had led them down this path did not know where they were headed.
They circled around the same places many times, experienced eldritch oceanic horror which they had killed before again and again and even met crew members who had slipped off board, but this time as haunted creatures of the sea who lent a hand in the combined effort of the oceans to sink her living ship.
Those were her people once.
Fear had been palpable aboard her ship, and the fear had been slowly morphing to desperation.
When everyone was close to their breaking point, they found land and desperately rushed to it.
As though to mock their desperation, the land seemed to be just at the horizon no matter how much they rowed in its direction.
Despite the apparently expanded space, they made land fall. Her ship was badly damaged in the process though.
Her misfortunes were just beginning.
When her brother who had gone to look for a safe place for them to camp took too long to return, she went in search of him with her erstwhile best friend who insisted on coming along.
She found her brother watching a high stakes battle from a cliff with a detached expression inching step by step towards the end of the cliff. He would not die from the fall but if he joined the battle below, his survival, despite his overwhelming power, his chances of survival would not be certain.
She shouted his name and tried to rush forward to stop him. Her effort though, was all in vain.
Just as she tried to, her friend did something that made her to resent her for a long time; she held her back by grappling her and pinning her to the ground. Her confusion and the betrayal she felt at being held back by the very person she had called her friend made her not to react in time.
"We are at a balance, a crossroad of fate; one decision shall be the catalyst that tilts the balance" her friend had said then.
By the time she regained enough presence of self to channel the power made available to her by her position as the Empress of the Tyros Empire and push her best friend off her body, it was already too late.
Her brother had jumped off the cliff.
The battle was extremely brief. Apparently, it had been locked in a stalemate that her brother has broken by involving himself in it. From her vantage point, she saw how her brother was surrounded by dead bodies and was dying himself. When she jumped down to his level, she had a new found appreciation for how close to the grave he was; there was a gaping hole right where his heart should have been.
He would, as she knew, that he would not make it.
She watched in stunned silence with tears running down her eyes as her brother went about absorbing the fragments from the bodies of his dead opponents when he got close enough to get the disembodied voice prompt.
When he was done, he turned to both of them and sighed making them promise to remain at each other's side forever even if both of them would not understand the full extent of what he had done. After that, he made her promise to protect her people to her last breath. Then he gave a verbal statement of how they should share his fragments when he died amidst hitched, breaths before breathing his last.
At his death, his two fragments revealed themselves, she took the one called the Piece of the Elemental One and her brother's fiancée took the one that had to do with something esoteric.
Ironically though, she had to dig her brother's grave and bury him all alone after the fragment her friend Evelyn had absorbed from her brother made her blind.
Her emotions died that day, and she began to treat everything with cold logic in regards to her operations and socialization with people, going alone in everything concerning her and in all her decisions.
From then on, she also avoided Evelyn who had been her former best friend like a deadly plague, treating every one as formally as possible and keeping everyone at the horizon's distance socially.
She had not understood what her brother had done until today.
From the angle of logic, if he had explained his plans to her, she would have laughed him off as being delusional or would have even thought his mental health had probably been impacted by the years of being cast alone as a failure and ultimately the sudden inter- reality transference they had experienced. She would have even gone as far as to threaten him with her life if he showed any strange behavioral signs given her personality.
And then what she now know he did would have remained undone.
She, despite her reservations, decided to wait to cross-reference her observations with Evelyn before drawing any conclusions.
What she clearly understand though, is that, her none of them had a full understanding of what her brother had done yet, even if Evelyn was sure to understand more of his plans initially than she did But first, she had to put the lessons she had learnt to work.