i searched the world to find you

The island.

It is Antiope’s siren song, her kryptonite.

It comes and she cannot help but go to it, again, and again, and again.

When it had dropped into the sea she had thought she was done with the island and all of its otherworldly magic that felt like an affinity to her, that felt like it had reached inside her and made a world out of all the strangeness in her veins.

The island is here, and Antiope can hear the whispers of it. They have passed her on the street every day, filled with awe and disbelief and uncertainty. So she crosses the bridge, and every step brings her closer to something that feels like knowing, or understanding. If she can only know the island and all the ways it is extraordinary and beautiful, maybe she can know the magic inside her and why it is wild and so unlike how it should be. Maybe she can control it better.

When she takes the first step onto the island, it is like stepping into another world. The Denoctian Regent tells herself there is no way this is the same island that had once stood in this place. Nothing is familiar, and her heart is beating wildly like a bird attempting to escape from a cage. It is all pristine and white and sparkling in the light, the only disturbance to the snow are the sharp shadows and shapes of trees bearing the weight of snow upon their limbs.

It is like her, like the sharp contrast of all her marble white splashed against her earth striped skin. Her sapphire eyes are the winter sea, lazily embracing the shore. Why is she here? This place is inside her, in her bones, and she cannot get rid of it. So she presses forward, and all the red on her is like blood on the snow, marrying this wonderland with visions of battlefields and death.

The trees envelop her like a gentle caress the further into the island she goes, low branches brushing their fingers across her back. The snow is cold but she is burning, burning, yearning. And then, from out of the trees dashes a light. It goes weaving through bushes and branches faster than almost her eyes can track it. She nearly loses it in the glare of the sun off the sparkling white blanket covering everything.

Then, there is another, and another. They float past her as if on a wind that she cannot feel, deeper into the forest. If the island is her siren call, then surely these are the sirens, but Antiope follows them regardless, that trio of little dancing lights, wherever they may lead her.

"Speaking."

i searched the world to find you

Antiope is scarcely expecting the strange lights to lead her to another equine, but they do. On this island, that is not like home but like a vision of all the Other things that make the Regent who she is, she manages to be led to company. Perhaps it is trying to tell her something about being alone, even though everything she has come to know about this island is strange magic and wicked isolation.

As she steps into the clearing, Antiope is greeted by the lights, which glide over to her, dance through the air, and, does she hear them laughing? The other woman walks over, colored like midnight with a moon resting between her antlers, and introduces herself. She speaks of the lights as if they are some sort of creature, but they are nothing like any creature Antiope has seen before.

“Excuse me, did you say ‘they?’” she asks, but something about the way the mare closes the distance between them makes her gaze sharper, keener. She turns her eyes away from the lights, whatever they may be, to the woman who calls herself Vaeri.

Surprisingly, this Vaeri reminds her of the equines from the jungle that she once called home.

Though her coloring certainly would have made her a target among the trees, she seems like someone comfortable among the shadows. Someone comfortable going unseen and unheard. The equines in the jungle had been wonderfully talented at camouflaging themselves—at becoming the proverbial fly on the wall.

“You can call me Antiope,” she responds, after a moment considering. There are many kinds of curiosity out there. Some, she thinks, are liable to get you into more trouble than others. And she can’t help but wonder what sort of curiosity is this woman’s specialty.

"Speaking."

i searched the world to find you

Vaeri tests the Regent’s name aloud, as if tasting it for its authenticity. There is a smile upon her face, as though she approves of her name. Antiope isn’t sure what to make of it; she knows it denotes her as queenly, as a queen of warriors nonetheless. The gods certainly knew what they were doing when they named her.

“The same Antiope that is Denocte’s Regent?” the other woman asks, eyes gleaming. Antiope rolls her shoulder, brushing the words aside. They land roughly in the snow between them. It seems she is quite popular these days—everyone knows her name, even if they do not know her. It has been a long time since it has been like that. “Yes, the very same,” she responds.

But they don’t linger long on the subject of her position, as the focus moves to the shimmering, dancing, floating balls of light. Antiope listens as Vaeri explains what they are, and Antiope is intrigued. She has read and heard of fae, but has never come into contact with one before. She has to wonder, though, how they came to be on an island that has just risen from the sea. The Regent can’t remember them having been on it before.

Vaeri plays with the creatures as if they are kin, like foals on the streets of the court would play. How strange, she thinks. But, then again, she feels a strange affinity to the island as if it is alive itself. She can fault no one else for being familiar with tiny beings of light.

“Fickle, too, it seems,” Antiope comments idly as the things disappear among the trees, though just a moment ago they had been seemingly comfortable among the equines. But they are not why she is here. The striped woman has begun to wonder if no matter how often she returns to the island it will never give her the answers she seeks.

Still, it calls to her and still, she comes back to it again and again.

Hoping, one day, perhaps it will reveal its secrets to her.

Antiope watches as Vaeri conjures a small ball of light, though it doesn’t last for long, dissipating to nothing more but air in mere moments. She would almost argue that she is not only a creature of light, despite the obvious magic and the small glowing moon illusion she carries between her antlers.

Even Antiope, whose eyes glow golden when she uses her magic, and whose axe glows so bright it is nearly blinding, is more than merely a creature of light. She is chaos.

“So, you have heard of me. What do you do in the Court?” the Regent asks, sapphire eyes still focused on the other woman. There are no obvious scars, and the sense that Antiope gets from her does not speak soldier. She wonders what rank this blue hued mare carries, what it is that she does as a calling.

"Speaking."

i searched the world to find you

Vaeri states her role among the court, though the way she says it makes it sound more like a passion or a hobby rather than something that she does for a living. She says, “I’m a dancer,” not that she dances, or that she is an entertainer. It makes Antiope wonder if there is something else that she does, to earn or keep a living.

The girl sways back and forth, stepping back a short distance to twirl among the snow. Antiope isn’t sure what she’s hoping will happen, but the Regent does not join her. She is not here to dance and cavort like a spring babe. The striped woman is here for answers to questions she refused to ask aloud. It is like the island can see inside her, and she wants to know why.

When Vaeri begins to speak of the shed-stars Antiope glances at her with sharp blue eyes. A shed-star who no longer lives with her people? That is quite unusual, and rather curious. The shed-stars don’t often come down from the mountain, though they have often visited during Denocte’s many festivals to give readings to visiting equines. Antiope can’t say that she has ever knowingly spoken to one before. Even a distanced one.

“A boat did,” she responds, rather wryly, knowing that is not exactly what the other woman had been asking. Vaeri is swaying again, and even for someone as restless as Antiope she cannot see how someone can possibly never stop moving like that. “It dropped me off at the docks, and here I was.”

She still remembers that day, there had been a festival then too. It had been the lanterns that had guided her to the city, like embers floating through the sky. So many things are different now, and yet some have stayed the same. And the longer Antiope stands here, the more she thinks she the island is truly not what it seems to be.

"Speaking."

i searched the world to find you

“Somewhere else,” Antiope says and although she is too far into the island to hear the ocean crashing against its shores, she can almost imagine it. She can almost imagine the first time she heard the sea, standing, alive, in the middle of Corellon. “But it had the sea. I was born next to the sea,” high upon a cliff, within a marble temple surrounded by gods, “I lived somewhere far from it, however.”

In a jungle, with a canopy dense and green and a people fierce and bold.

The Regent can’t say which place shaped her more, which is more of her. She is both places. Both the sea, and the marble—the jungle and the shadows. Perhaps that is why the island calls to her so, speaks so strongly to her soul, because it is not just one thing but many. It is changing, and shifting, and strange and magical.

Antiope looks at Vaeri as she wonders about the world beyond Novus’ borders. She has never been a drifter but the wanderlust is easily seen in this girl’s blue eyes. The tigress wonders how long the court can possibly contain her; how long it can possibly keep her interest. It seems there is so much more else in the world she would rather see than what is offered to her here.

Perhaps that is why she left the mountains, when her family is there, her history, her home. If everything Antiope knew was still back in that world, alive and well, she never would have left it. But she can’t fault a young girl her own type of restlessness.

“The world is full of different lands,” the Regent says, blue eyes turning on the island surrounding them, “Those of us not from Novus had to have come from somewhere.” She thinks of the festival that had been held this past season in Denocte, and how one of the altars had been for a golden skinned woman with amethyst eyes.

Distinctly, she remembers an inscription saying something that the woman had crossed into another time, another realm. Some of the patrons who had stopped to look had whispered of her ability to cut through time and space with a dagger she had worn around her neck, though the inscription mostly likely had a double meaning for both her ability and her passing. It is a fascinating, curious thing, regardless.

Antiope thinks of all the times she has been to this island and cannot help but wonder how many more times she will return to it in the future. “I have been to the island a few times, before,” Will it change again, or will it stay the same? How can she possibly know? That alone is like a dare, as though the island is asking her, “how can you possibly stay away?”

"Speaking."