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[P] sculptures of open-armed sadness [winter] - Printable Version

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sculptures of open-armed sadness [winter] - Isra - 05-03-2019

Isra who yearns for a window

“Shall we mourn here deedless forever a shadow-folk mist-haunting dropping vain tears in the thankless sea” 



At first Isra came to the lake only to lay beneath the willow tree, bury herself in snow, and listen to the glass leaves sing a sad song against each other. She wanted to dream of Eik who tucked clovers and sweet grass between her lips. Any dream full of rolling meadows instead of fire or waving flowers in the wind instead of waving swords in the sand. Isra is desperate for anything that feels like love instead of hate, peace instead of war. 

Sometimes she feels like she's dying in her own skin. 

The distant sea is still calling her home in that place between the dream and the real. Each day it's leaking out a little more.

So she came to bury herself in winter instead of fury. But instead she found a castle by the lake, shining with more colors than she could ever name. It looks like something too wonderful to touch (she thinks she breaks everything lovely she ever touches). Isra almost trembles when she gets closer, and when that old artist looks at her she feel like a lie of a queen. She's about to turn away. But--

She spots the widow on which a mare and a stallion lay tangled beneath a shroud of stars. Air catches in her lungs and her heart quivers like an arrow in her chest. She feels hollow and wanting, and, and, and...

And she feels like she wants to learn how to bury herself in whatever ice that window is cut from. Isra wants more than anything to lay her cheek against that plane of winter and scream Eik in her head until he can hear nothing in the world but her calling him home. She wants every mind in the world to echo with the sound of her sorrow, until he has no choice but to listen. It terrifies her to think that she wants justice with the seem fervor as she wants Eik.

A mare crosses before her, and Isra cannot help but look at all the elegant curl of her neck and think, this is how I should learn to move, always. She calls out and it's soft like the lowing of a swan at the crescent moon. “Are you going in?” Her hooves whisper through the snow and leave small moons full of rubies in each place she steps. The stones glitter like blood, like she's bleeding out a hundred small pieces of something hard and sharp.

“If you are, would you mind if I walked with you?” Because she's so very terrified of what she might do if she makes it alone to that window singing to her of winter, and Eik, Eik, Eik.

@Antiope


Art



RE: sculptures of open-armed sadness [winter] - Antiope - 05-10-2019

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."
credits


@Isra


RE: sculptures of open-armed sadness [winter] - Isra - 05-13-2019

Isra the ship in the sand

“And white winter, on its knees, observes everything with reverent attention.” ”



Isra is learning how to read that flicker of something greater crawling across a map of bones and skin. There are messages in the fire of all of them, bits of fury and hate, that refuse to be drained dry like a spring pond in summer. It's in her too, that eddy of heat swirling and caught in the corner of her heart. She knows it'll never go away, not when her body remembers feel of teeth at her throat, or the way her magic feels like a whip of salvation when it flays pieces of her off.

So perhaps they walk through the arching doorways not like two mares, but like summer chained.

The rubies follow her, blooming across the ice and snow like not-flowers. They bloom glorious and strange, a little like the ice rising around them in a place where flowers have died to give it life. Isra wonders if she's the winter or the summer; she wonders which parts of her are life and which only death.

And when that window etched with love and constellations stretches alongside them, she does not look. Instead she looks only at the mare and smiles even when she wants to scream, and cry, and turn the temple into wood. Wood can smolder, it can burn just like she's burning with need to turn towards that window.

“I'm Isra.” Her name sounds a like hollow, cracked bell-chime. She's a steeple with no foundation, an altar with no religion, a ship trapped in a sand dune. She is a hundred different things that do not make sense anymore, nothing does. Even her name seems strange on her own tongue when she wants to ask the mare who she is, why her eyes look not like eyes but like an ocean. She wants to fill the silence around them with enough words to drown her need to turn the winter to burning wood.

She doesn't let her step falter when they walk by that window calling to her heart. But the rubies are still blooming at her feet in small reminders that even her magic still doesn't feel like her. So she says, to break the sound of ice turning to bloody stone, “What would you have carved on a window?” Because she knows what her heart and her awful magic would have demanded she carve.


@Antiope


Art



RE: sculptures of open-armed sadness [winter] - Antiope - 05-15-2019

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."
credits


@Isra


RE: sculptures of open-armed sadness [winter] - Isra - 05-22-2019

Isra who forges a blade

“Not so sad and tender, like I’ve always been, they say, so I changed. ”



Isra knows that she should look inward, towards the beast in her belly that's rattling like chain around her leg. There's ice all around her, but there is only winter in her chest where wonder should be. All her blood feels like festering wine, too sweet and ruined to do her any good now.

And maybe, she's feeling like the sea is crashing against the shoreline of her bones. Maybe she wants to drown so that she won't look at the window and her city shining with light and fire. Because each time she looks all Isra can think of is all the ways she's still going to bleed, and bleed, and bleed for all of them.

So instead she looks at Antiope and tries to forget the sea, and the windows, and the way her blood hurts each time her heart beats. Isra tries to smile when the rubies stop blooming strangely at her feet. She tries to look like anything but a unicorn with teeth-mark scars across her neck instead of pearls. It's a queen she's trying to seem like when Antiope says, death.

Then--

She smiles. It doesn't look as forced as her queenly walk and her blood starts to run smoother, like steel through skin. Isra feels easy in her own skin. She feels like the sea feels against the horizon (easy and endless). “Necessary.” She repeats and it doesn't sound like the question it should be; it sounds like a prayer to a god she's just learning about. “I never thought about death like that before.” She doesn't say that it helps or that she understands it's as necessary as a leech is to a riverbed. But she wonders if her eyes, that are shining too brightly against ice and rainbow walls, give away all the words she's not saying.

“I will carve it with you.” Not would, tonight the word would is as dead as her innocence. Tonight there is only doing, only death.

Isra lays her cheek against the ice. She sighs for the coolness of it against heat of that fire smoldering in her bones. The ice turns to cedar-wood. It's red, red, red against all the white and clear ice around it. She turns a lantern hanging near them into a blade with an ivory hilt. It glimmers wicked and sharp in the dancing, colored light around them.

And when she uses her telekinesis to hand it to Antiope, her smile fades into something as deep as a pledge. Above that her eyes are whispering I understand and we are death. Another lantern turns to a blade but this one has below it a hilt of ore, pitted and black.


@Antiope


Art



RE: sculptures of open-armed sadness [winter] - Antiope - 06-23-2019

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."
credits


@Isra


RE: sculptures of open-armed sadness [winter] - Isra - 07-06-2019

Isra running to carve the world

“and if by life or death I can save you, I will.”



Each carving slice Antiope makes in the wood opens up another cut inside of her. The rings wrap themselves around her heart in bands of steels that are getting tighter, and tighter. It hurts. But when the stones are being carved Isra counts them one by one, just as she counts the sharp facets of each carving. She presses her eyes closed against the ache, against the sharp stab of a cold tear leaking through.

There is a memory of counting banging like a hammer behind her eyes. Now she counts the beats of her heart and waits, tight and barely held together, to feel the drop, drop, drop of blood against her wet cheek. It feels like she's waiting for snow, for flakes each more impossibly cold and intricate than the last.

When Isra gets to the last stone and she hears the sigh of a axe cleaving the wood she opens her eyes. The bright glare burns and something in her chest, some fury sea of magic, starts to rise, and burn and shine in answer to that glowing weapon. There is a star in her core, a furious comet streaking violently though the cosmos towards some nameless, foretold death.

Death, she thinks, there is that word again. And the pitted knife blade still feels like a brier against the fragile grip of her magic. Isra holds it tighter and welcomes the sting.

She looks away from the burning wood and her smile feels like a mouthful of shark teeth when she steps back from the smoke and cinder. All the cuts left in her are bleeding, and bleeding, and bleeding until there is nothing more inside the once slave than a ocean of salted-down blood. Isra is choking on it, and she's almost surprised that the ice at her hooves isn't turning crimson as she starts to drown.

“Thank you.” Her eyes say the rest, for walking with me, for cutting free all this death inside of me. They are blue gemstones, hard and faceted in her head (and they are two instead of four). She's still holding that blade like a candle. It catches like firelight in the glow of the lanterns, and she does not need to wonder what darkness she might chase back with it.

This time when Isra blinks her tears are turning to sharp diamond drops thudding against the floor. Still she's counting, each word, each cut, each ring around her heart. “It's not wood that I must carve.” One. Two. Three. She's still backing away and when she gets to four she turns and starts to run. Fable roars in the distance, urging her to hurry.

It's not wood she has to carve.

It's a king.

It's the world.



@Antiope


Art



RE: sculptures of open-armed sadness [winter] - Antiope - 07-31-2019

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."
credits


@Isra just my close <3