Editing Sigil:Kursa (section)

== The Queen of Bats and Bone-Mother ==

The title '''Queen of Bats''' survives most strongly in folk religion and rural storytelling, where Kursa is depicted beneath ruined towers or under moonless skies while clouds of bats wheel above her. Later artists made the image increasingly theatrical, but older stories emphasize the creatures' ability to move confidently through darkness. This has led some later devotees to reinterpret the bat in a way the harshest Kursan traditions probably never intended: darkness does not prevent movement merely because ordinary sight has failed.

'''Bone-Mother''' is older and stranger. The title is often interpreted as referring to what remains after the identities through which people understood themselves have been stripped away. A king loses his throne, a warrior can no longer fight, a parent loses a child, a craftsman loses the use of a hand, or beauty disappears through illness or age. Kursa asks what remains when the thing someone believed themselves to be is gone.

The old stories do not always answer triumphantly. Sometimes the answer takes years. Sometimes another identity grows around the wound. Sometimes nothing replaces what was lost, and a person simply learns to live differently. Kursa's significance lies partly in refusing the comforting fiction that every loss can be neatly repaired.