It looks nothing like the temple on the cliff that the gods who created her sat within. The temple that they had looked down from on to their world of mortals, judging, interfering. Taking. It is not open to the sun and the wind and the sky, not made of huge pillars and marble as white as the canvas parts of her skin. It is not bathed in blood and burning, burning, burning.

But still the strange keep made of ice reminds her of it, somehow. With its shining, gleaming exterior and it's high high walls that grasp for the heavens above—(when gods die where do they go? Are they there, in the sky, planning their own revenge from a world away?)—it looks like a temple. Antiope hates it, it makes all of the burning, fiery, righteous anger inside her steam and boil and threaten to rupture from her skin.

The lioness that lives in Antiope's bones stirs and she can feel the rumbling of her growl crawling across her skin. It is a warning and a message. And the god-slayer, once-lover-once-mother, she intends to heed it. There is nothing in those shining ice walls and glittering colored windows for her. Nothing but reminders and so much hate. Hate and anger and an ocean of leaving behind.

She is walking not toward the castle but away from it when the voice calls out to her. Antiope stops and her jewel blue eyes (ocean blue, sky blue, there is a world of blues in her eyes that they had drawn from) settle on the other woman. The rubies in the snow, glittering and red, are as like blood as the red splashed across Antiope's throat and streaks through her hair. 'Are you going in?'

No.

'If you are…'

The lioness inside her huffs its disappointment, its disapproval. Antiope glances back at the towers of ice and she doesn't know how her hate, how her anger, will like it. The heat of everything inside her might bring it all to the ground. She brings everything to the ground, eventually. She has killed everything she's touched. Will she kill this too? "Yes," Antiope says, biting her tongue, roiling, screaming.

"You can come," and she's changing course, angling back toward the castle that is a temple that is bathed in blood and the remains of everything some gods had once held dear. In the blood of who she had once held dear. She moves toward it like a predator and like a goddess and, over all, like something so unearthly that it is strange and beautiful all at once. Antiope takes the first step through its arching entrance and even as the chill rushes over her skin, she burns and burns.

"Speaking."

Antiope can sense the fissures in the woman at her side, in the way her voice sounds like the wind passing through a cracked window. She can sense them as though she can see them, but Antiope was never made for repairing, only destroying. So, she doesn’t know how to fix them, to seal them off, to stop whatever it is that’s leaking out of this woman Isra. She can barely stop the things inside of her from emerging, like the lioness that calls the cage of her body home, who is bloodthirsty and indulgent.

She sees the window of lovers and stars and it should remind her of Rezar. It should remind her of the thing that she had, but all it reminds her of is the thing that she lost. She looks at the window and hates the soft, sweet couple she sees because she hates the memory of the lover and the child that she lost.

Not lost, they had been stolen from her. Ripped from the world and her grasp and her heart.

“I am Antiope,” she responds in kind. They called me Antiope, she thinks, and she thinks that they did not think very hard when they gave her a name that would put her against them. Gods, who can see so much, know so many things, make and give and take, but how stupid they are to overlook such simple things. She may have been their downfall, but only because they had been their own first. There is nothing in her blood that feels regret, nothing in her bones that sings of remorse.

When Isra asks her what she would carve into a window Antiope can see it, like she can see inside herself, like she can see the stars in the sky even as they fade away against the morning sun. She sees a temple on fire, with blood like lava rushing through its doors, and all the anger in the world knocking down each pillar and bringing the whole thing to the ground. She sees statues, crumbled and bodies crumbled and so much fury spiderwebbing across it. Antiope says none of these things, however, only, “Death.”

And her eyes are an ocean but her heart is a blaze, all-consuming. “Because it is all-around and inescapable and sometimes,” she pauses, eyes dancing across the rubies glittering in the snow and to the eyes of the woman Isra at her side whose cracks can only be filled with one thing: the thing that she too is filled with, “necessary.” And she wonders, and wonders. She doesn’t know this unicorn, and Antiope has not come to this world for war (she does not want to fight, for what is there to fight for now) but,

“Would you carve it with me?”

"Speaking."

Antiope is no artist, she cannot put pen or paint to paper or canvas and create something beautiful and awe-inspiring from it. She was made to create only death, and thus death is all that she knows. And, perhaps it is the essence inside her made of blood-red (or maybe the one made of death’s black cloak) that makes her think even in death there can be found beauty.

Surely, in death, there can be found reprieve.

She takes the blade with the ivory hilt handed to her, and wonders for a moment at its magical change of being. Once, it had provided warmth and light and guidance, and now? Now, it provides defense and calls for blood and satiation. The blue of her eyes seems darker without the firelight, seems more like the deep unforgiving sea.

Antiope is no artist, but when she puts the tip of that dagger to the wood she almost believes that she could be. What she carves is no masterpiece, but it is clear in her eyes that each symbol means more than words alone can express. Near the bottom of the wood she carves one ring, standing alone against the emptiness of the world around it.

When her eyes flash like lightning in the gloom, she begins to carve a second ring, wrapped around the first, but it is incomplete, broken, hanging haphazardly off the first. And all she can hear is the buzzing in the back of her mind that whispers, Rezar over and over and over again. And the fire burning hatred inside her bubbles a little closer to the surface as she scrapes into the wood a smaller circle, intertwined with the first two, but this one is also incomplete.

She bites down on the name that wants to free itself from inside her but she cannot. Antiope does not allow this, this one thing, to escape. She presses it back and down, down, down, until the blade clasped in her fist is carving new shapes, high above the first set. Gems, four of them. One surrounded by fire, another by leaves, another by smoke and the last by ink. They form a short line across the wood, and their carvings are made deep in the truths behind them, deep and jagged and wicked.

Then, the blade falls from Antiope’s grasp as she takes something else up into arms. She swings her axe high above her head and she asks it to swing true and to swing righteously and it begins to glow and glow and glow, brighter and brighter until it is almost blinding. And it falls, slicing through the air like it is flesh, until one blade on the double-headed weapon is buried among the wood, burning through those gemstone carvings.

When Antiope pulls the axe free, no longer blazing with heat or light, she says nothing. She merely looks away from the smoldering, blackened wound, and toward her new companion. Antiope looks at Isra and at the dagger with the obsidian hilt that she holds and the lioness in her roars. The question is in her eyes, that she does not have to ask, what will you protect? what will you take to do it?

"Speaking."

Antiope looks at Isra and feels like she recognizes what she sees. There is something familiar, something distant and wan and not exactly the same. But it is close enough that the smile the unicorn wears of a hunter, of a predator, does not frighten her in the least. She thinks that if this unicorn to weaves magic like it is breathing is capable of anything near enough to what Antiope has done, then she will take down worlds for what she loves.

She will tear down kingdoms and galaxies and evils.

Antiope hopes that she gets to see it.

And when Isra says it, says Thank you, Antiope is still burning and the lioness in her is impatient and restless and unsatisfied. She isn’t sure how to answer, and so she doesn’t. She merely dips her head and closes her too-blue eyes for a moment long enough to listen to the sound of gemstones falling to the snow. Isra is backing away but Antiope does not open her eyes again until the unicorn is gone, and the words are drifting away in the air like petals on a breeze.

The lioness inside her understands, Antiope understands. It is not wood she had carved, either. It is never wood that must be carved. For a moment, the girl with shadows and snow on her skin follows the prints Isra had left in the snow, out of the castle that is still standing despite her burning, and into the open. For a moment, she considers continuing to follow them. To follow Isra to the thing she must carve, and to deliver upon it the justice Antiope knows is deserved.

But she thinks, perhaps, there are some things which must be carved alone, as she had done to those gods and their once-powerful existence. So she turns away instead.

"Speaking."