If she did not know any better, Antiope might think she were standing in a different world, poised in the middle of the study as though she had stepped out of some portal. As though she had just awoken from a statue-like slumber. The vaulted ceiling is a map of the night skies, blues and golds depicting stars and constellations and planets. The wall of wrought iron framed windows looks out over a garden and courtyard, letting in the late afternoon light.
Antiope feels out of place in this room—shoulders uncertainty like the axe she bears at all times. Like the red ribbon in her hair, like a stain of blood.
Isra is gone, her ship has long since passed the horizon line. The striped woman had seen to her people… Her people. They have been her people for many months, but they are hers in a different way now. It feels like a different way, now. She is more than just a guardian, more than just a protector. She must also be their foundation and their shelter in the hard times, their light in the darkness.
Antiope’s sapphire sharp eyes slip over the lines of asterism on the ceiling and she cannot help but wonder if she will be good enough this time around. A lamp shaped like the moon hangs in the corner of the room, not lit, but still the Sovereign can do nothing but imagine it the watching eye of Caligo.
What does the demi-goddess think of her? That question she had asked herself out in the courts on that moonstone carving lingers in her heart.
How can she trust the gods?
There comes a rasping at the door, before it is pushed open and a familiar, dark-skinned face appears through the opening. “M’lady, the Delumine Sovereign has arrived,” the steward says simply, voice low like a distant rumbling thunder. “Thank you, Sullivan. Please, show him in.” Antiope breathes, and turns away from the everlasting night sky above to greet her visitor.
I hope you are blessed with a heart like a wildflower.
He stares at the painting while he waits. An off-black canvas stretches along one wall, with the drapes set just so that depending on which corner he sets his eyes to it appears almost red, or blue, or green, or a mix of colors he isn’t sure he wants to see. It’s easier, sometimes, to imagine the sky as something great and empty instead, something so deep it consumes every color that lives here on the earth.
Maybe the artist had seen something different in the night sky, something to make her paint it with the colors he didn’t see.
Strewn across the canvas are ten thousand stars, painted so meticulously it seems, when he first sees them, as if he were looking through a window to another world. Each one, he knows, had been painted painstakingly by hand, one miniature white dot at a time, until an entire universe of far-away lights filled the black background. In them he thinks he can see the constellations, as if the artist had been careful to transcribe the cosmos exactly as she saw them.
He remembers seeing this painting in another room once; a room that had been shuttered, so that only the small, faint lanterns had illuminated the faces of each art piece. To better draw the eye, Reichenbach had told him, his voice still husky and warm, as if he were speaking directly from the shadowy recesses of Ipomoea’s memory. Do you see how the center is painted lighter, where the bulk of the stars lie?
It was harder to see it here, with the light throwing so much into contrast. And yet it was easier, too, to see a thousand other small details now, details that had formerly been hidden in the shadows. It seems to Ipomoea that he is looking upon an entirely different painting, similar and yet not the same as the one he had seen in that darkened room so many years ago. In a way, he finds it fitting; a new painting for a new Denocte.
”My lord? The queen will see you now.”
The steward’s voice interrupts his thoughts, and it is with some reluctance that he pulls his eyes away from the artwork. With a nod of his head, he follows the man as he leads him down the hallway. Pausing before the door, he steels himself silently before pushing his way through.
“Sovereign Antiope,” he says smoothly, listening to the doors thud closed behind him. “Thank you for seeing me. I’m sure you have many things demanding your attention today.”
Above them the night sky sparkles, brighter and more lively than the painting that had decorated the hallway. Ipomoea glances briefly up at it, as if to acknowledge Caligo’s presence, before he offers a warm smile back to the queen. ”Congratulations, on your ascension.”
He watches her now, standing directly beneath a midnight-sky even while sunlight pours in through the windows. He can't help but compare her to Isra, and even to Reichenbach, and to all the other kings and queens of Novus. His eyes linger over the ribbon tied to her hair, a flash of red that is bright against the rich colors of her coat and mane. Red. It suits her better than the forest; red like the distant star that lingered low over the horizon each morning in Delumine.
He hoped, silently, fervently, that it was a good sign.
She watches with keen eyes as Ipomoea enters the room, eyes bright and rosy, skin mahogany and white—not unlike her own—and small pairs of pristine white wings at his fetlocks. Sullivan closes the doors behind him with a resounding thud, and it suddenly makes her wonder if his voice has always matched the solemn sound of heavy wooden doors closing.
“There is always time for making new friends,” Antiope says, watching as the Deluminian King glances toward the star-adorned ceiling, “I hope.” They watch each other, like there is so much emptiness between them, so much space to fill, so much unknown. She wonders what is behind his eyes, is it how she imagines Caligo’s? Judging, wondering, waiting.
She must get out of this office, very soon. The stars are whispering to her, the planets scalding her skin with their stares. “Please, come join me. Would you like something to drink?” Antiope motions toward a low table lined with deep velvet navy pillows, sewn with thread that looks like pure gold.
Upon the table rests a cast iron tea set, the kettle embossed with a large raven flying through a cloud-filled sky. The moon, full and round, sits opposite the side of the raven. The entire set is glazed with an aubergine color. “I am certain Isra appreciated you being here to see her off,” Antiope tells him, recalling him stepping up to speak to her before slipping away into the crowd.
The tigress looks out the arching windows with the warm light rays slanting in through them.
The ocean is out there somewhere. Isra is out there, somewhere, on that sea. “She was so convinced that the court would be better off without her,” when she turns back to Ipomoea, she smiles, “I think, in the end, it was hard for her to see how much she would be missed.” If there is any uncertainty in her eyes, it is hidden by the shadows falling over her face.
I hope you are blessed with a heart like a wildflower.
Ipomoea can no longer count all the times he’s stood in this hall, staring up at the bewitched ceiling. It feels as if he’s always been here, one way or another; as if there were a part of him that had always been looking up at the stars, through an enchanted mirror or otherwise.
The thought brushes across his mind then, as a wave of sea air drifts in through a window, if she knows how many times he’s been here, how the Night Court had always been a home to him - had she seen him in the market, when the fires had ravaged it? Waiting on the shores, when the sea had created an island? Had she been here for the thunderbirds, when he had stolen away again to make sure their court was not aflame like his forests had been?
This room had always made him wonder at all the questions he was too afraid to ask; he supposed the stars and magic had a way of bringing out the dreamer in him. And from the way Antiope looked at him, with her eyes full of wondering and waiting, he thinks it may have the same effect on her.
"I would love one," he admits, and follows her to the small table. He sinks down into the pillows across from her, thankful for the informality, thankful for the warmth of the steam rising from the kettle.
The distance between them feels greater than it had between he and Isra, during their first meeting; her words still echo in his head, the memory of her standing upon the steps to the castle with the smell of the sea clinging to her like a veil. Isra on the beach telling him to be brave, Isra by the lake teaching him how to shoot a bow, Isra in the desert with her gemstones - clever boy, she had called him once, as they talked about her city. Antiope’s city, now.
“Reichenbach once called Denocte the Court of Dreams and Dreamers.” His voice sounds impossibly quiet, as if the words were drowning in the galaxies above them. He has heard the words spoken time and time again - less so after Isra came from the sea to lead her people, and yet, the less Denocte’s people had said it aloud, the more true it had seemed to become. In the same way, the small part of dreamer still in him came alive each time he crossed the border.
He looks down at the amber color of the tea, watching it bead against the sides of the cup as he swirls it. For a moment Ipomoea thinks he can see shadows hiding in the current of it, and he wonders what a palmreader might tell him it meant. He smiled to himself, a small, wistful thing that is soon fading. “I suppose she was off to see her dreams through.”
His eyes meet her’s from across the table, and he offers the new queen a smile.
“Isra trusts you,” he says simply, taking the first sip of the tea. It warms him from the moment it settles into his stomach, feeling like moonfire spreading across his skin. “She wouldn’t have left, I think, if she didn’t believe her people would be held safe for her. And so I’m glad Denocte has you to lead them.”
It had felt almost like a betrayal, when he had first Isra standing in the place of Reichenbach.
But as he looks at the new queen's piercing blue eyes, and sees something almost like a god staring back at him - it feels only like a new star being named, a new constellation being formed from the story of the night's champion. It feels only right.
Antiope joins the Delumine sovereign amongst the pillows surrounding the table and fills two cups, already with tea bags resting in the bottom, with simmering water. She realizes, as she looks over the table and the steam, that she scarcely knows this man. She realizes how scarcely she knows any of Novus other than her own little corner of it.
Perhaps that is her own fault, for having never ventured beyond their borders before she got swept up into a war that was not hers (that thankfully did not come to pass) and a queen who felt like kinship and a land that felt like coming home.
She could have gone, at any time, and she should have gone. Even as Regent, even before. Now she is Queen and she is a stranger and a mystery to all these courts that she should have relationships with. Antiope can only hope it is not too late. “Isra only ever had hopes and possibilities in her heart for Denocte.”
The sovereign thinks of the day she had been made Regent, and so many other days. Isra, turning the court to fantasy with a simple brush of her magic. Isra, beseeching her people to build Denocte into everything it could be. “I never want us to stop reaching for the stars,” she says, blue eyes affixed on the man across from her.
It’s difficult to say whether the things Isra has gone off to fight are because of her dreams or her nightmares. She was sharper, before she left, blacker, like the god-forged blade of Antiope’s axe. Isra was going with vengeance in her. Can vengeance be born of dreams?
He is not the first to say such a thing to her, and Antiope is keenly reminded of her conversation with Morrighan when they had still been Regent and Warden. In the markets, on that moonstone carving. Again, she finds herself wishing for Isra’s eyes to see with. Or even Caligo’s, perhaps, to ease the burning feel upon her back.
“I can only hope that once we are more familiar with each other that you will still feel that way,” she responds, almost idly, almost without thought, “Though I have no intention of misplacing the trust she has in me.” The tea is fragrant, when she lifts her cup to take a sip of it. The smell lingers, even after it’s been placed upon the table again.
The pair are limned in warm light from the windows, watching each other with eyes that are sapphire and eyes that are rose. There is a galaxy above them, to reach toward, as Antiope finally says, “Will you tell me something about yourself, or about Delumine?” She hopes there will be plenty of time, plenty of chances, for them to talk politics at another time.
I hope you are blessed with a heart like a wildflower.
He listens to her, quietly, thoughtfully, stirring his tea and watching a falling star arc through the enchanted sky above them. It blazes white-hot and bright, brighter than the other stars that watch on in glittering silence. He wonders briefly if the other stars are silenced by awe, or judgement; but he knows without asking that it doesn’t matter. A shooting star plummets only for its only glory, its own joy, its own sense of adventure. In a sky full of stars that all looked the same, only a few dared to be different.
Isra had been like that - and still was - a shooting star, a thing for dozens of others to cast their hopes and their wishes upon.
“Then you must show them every day that the stars are still worth reaching for,” he tells Antiope, and this time the smile he offers her is not so shy. Ipomoea knows what it feels like to take the place of another sovereign, to rule in their absence; he does not know Antiope, but he has seen her from afar, seen her in the streets filled with smoke and starlight, seen her raising her axe like a promise when Raum threatened to tear the city down. He knows she is not a child of summer, but one who has seen winters and darkness and chosen again and again to push through until the morning.
He supposes she was made for Denocte as much as Isra was; and he hopes he is right.
“What would you like to know?” he asks her, setting his own tea aside. He can see the steam still rising from their cups, twin ribbons curling through the air to find each other. "They may call Delumine the Court of Scholars, but history is not all we record. The libraries are as filled with fiction as they are archives, and wonderful artifacts that others have forgotten the use of. A hundred stories of how the world came to be, and how an orphan boy from another court came to rule."
What he wants to say, but does not, is sometimes, I love your Court more than my own. And it scares me.
Instead he only swallows thickly, and smiles at her when he lifts his cup again.
“But if I had to choose a favorite, it would be their study of the different plants. The gardeners say they hope to grow every plant in the world there someday, and I hope that they achieve that goal."
@Antiope
ahh i am sorry this took so long “speech”
He asks her what she would like to know and Antiope thinks, everything even though she doesn’t say it. Perhaps it is in her eyes—in their keenness, in the glint of their sapphire facets. Instead, the Denoctian sovereign lets him talk. Lets him tell her about his version of Delumine, not the version that she has learned from the rest of the world.
As Ipomoea speaks she thinks of a library stretching toward the sky, with shelves packed full with volumes thick and thin. Some covers are worn, others the binding taught and new. Books in every color, every size. She likes to imagine that she could learn so many things in a library like that. “What about other worlds?” Antiope asks, wondering if they keep knowledge of places that are not Novus.
What she wants to know is if they have a story of a woman carved from stone who was raised for war. A woman who turned against her creators, killing them out of anger, before running away to a new land.
She doesn’t tell him that, however. Antiope is still learning how to let that part of her out, and struggling to. Not here, not with Caligo’s eye bearing down upon her back.
“That is an incredible hope. I would like to see their collection someday,” the woman says, glancing down at the swirling steam, rising from her cup in the barest of wisps. “I love that Denocte is a gathering place for all kinds of equines, from all corners of the world,” her voice is softer, and low. “I know that I can walk down the market streets and not recognize half the faces on any given day, as new merchants file in from the port.”
Antiope thinks of all the exotic wares, all the far-away spices and regalia that come through the streets. “We are always changing, but we are always still Denocte.” When she finally looks up, there is maybe something darkening her eyes, something sad, but her smile is sincere and honest.
I hope you are blessed with a heart like a wildflower.
Ah, he knows that look in her eyes.
The look of a starving woman, of wanderlust taking root in her skin; the look that says tell me everything because it is through the telling of a story that the dreamers in them come alive. He wonders then if she was like Isra — a storyteller, a dreamer, woman who made her dreams and her stories into reality. He wonders what she dreams about at night, and if she only dreams to keep alive the legacy that Isra carved into the moonstone streets of the city.
Or does Antiope dream for something more? For Denocte, for Novus, for herself?
Ipomoea dreams for more.
“I have always loved that about your court.”
The admission slips past his lips before he can stop it — but once it is free, he realizes it would have done no good to hold it back. He smiles at her then, a slow, almost-shy thing that shines like stars in his eyes when he sets the teacup down. “I came here for the first time as a boy, with the traveling merchants — and I fell in love with it. With the people, and the sea, and the way no one here was afraid to dream, not at all like the way the people of Solterra were afraid dreams would bring hope, and hope would bring them heartbreak. There is a part of me still who wishes I had stayed here.” There was a part of him that was full of a thousand what if’s, a part who forgot he was supposed to be a king of wildflower-meadows and centuries-old books instead of smoke and spices and stardust every time he crossed through the mountains.
Sometimes when he lies awake at night in Delumine, alone save for his wandering thoughts, he feels that unease in his heart that whispers to him this is not really your home — and he thinks of all the half-homes he’s had, all the places he might have called home had things been different. On those nights he can’t help himself from wondering if his magic might have been the kind to turn water into wine had he stayed here, if he would have been able to transform the ground under his feet instead of bidding flowers to grow through the rocky earth.
But Ipomoea had been made for poppyseed and paper-birch bark, and forests so deep he could run for days and never reach the end of them. A part of his heart would always stay here, in the city of dreams and dreamers — it was the place he kept coming back to, time and time again, to remind himself there were stars still worth reaching for. It is why he looks upon Antiope and lets himself smile, lets himself hope that she will be the leader her people can learn to be brave and fearless dreamers with.
He is silent for a moment, watching her from across the table. The water in his tea is beginning to cool now, when he lifts it to his lips and drains the cup.
“I hope you will come see Delumine one day, Antiope.” Each word sounds like a wish upon shooting stars. “I hope you will get to know us, that we can get to know each other; I believe my court could learn a lot from your’s,” he says with a smile. I will always love Denocte, he does not say, but it is there in his eyes when he stands and faces the door, shining like the hope he found all those years ago.
If only Ipomoea could know that Antiope does not dream. It is true that she rarely sleeps, relying on her magic to carry her across days and weeks without so much as an occasional rest. But even when she does sleep, she does not dream.
To her, the word dream means something else. Something you do in the day, when you’re standing on the steps looking down over your court and imagining all of the places that you could take them. To her, the word dream does not mean something you do in sleep, when your body is vulnerable and your mind under a spell of dormancy.
Who is to say why. Perhaps because she was not born but made; maybe the gods did not give her the right pieces to dream. Perhaps it is because she came into the world an adult, and not a child. She never had a chance to experience the wonders of an imagination, as she was thrust immediately into a world of war. Who is to say.
She can’t say she recognizes the look of wanting, of feeling like he is not in the right place, but she understands how he fell in love with this city. The sovereign had, as well, even without trying to. “Denocte is always open to you, Ipomoea. I hope that even with Isra gone you will feel welcome here.”
As he finishes his tea, she has this sudden and overwhelming feeling that their time together is coming to an end. It upsets her, for some reason she cannot identify. Perhaps it is that she feels some sort of unnamed kinship with this man. Perhaps it is that looking upon him fills her with hope of what Denocte can become.
Antiope stands, “I would like that,” her voice is quietly honest, her eyes less like storms at sea and more like gleaming sapphires. She would like to go to Delumine, and get to know Ipomoea and his people, “I would like our courts to learn from each other.” A smile curls up the corners of her lips, hopeful and genuine.
“If you’re not in a rush, there is a small bakery in the markets I would love to take you to,” She moves toward the door, pulling open the heavy dark wood. It swings slowly, and a rush of air blows over her as it rushes in from the hall. “What do you say?” The Denoctian sovereign glances over her shoulder, almost as a dare, and then steps through the door and out of the room. Out of the past, and into the future.
I hope you are blessed with a heart like a wildflower.
She beats him to the door, and Ipomoea realizes when he looks at her eyes that he is all too willing to follow her through her city. And he realizes he wants to know what kind of queen she is, because he hopes she is the kind who will walk beside her people and smile at them the way she is smiling, now, as she makes him promises and pleasantries.
He thinks it lucky then, that all of Denocte’s leaders have always inspired him so. He knows the people in the court of dreams and dreamers need people like Vale, and Reichenbach, and Isra, and he hopes Antiope, too, to show them how to be the stars lighting up the darkness.
"How am I to say no," he tells her, and is surprised by his own honesty. And still he follows her out past the heavy doors, and into the fresh air blowing in down the hallway.
He does not tell her that he already knows every bakery in the city (he has visited them all in turn, in the years he lived here.)
But as he follows after her with a heart that is remembering how to beat again, the look in his eyes is hoping for her to show him something new.
If she did not know any better, Antiope might think she were standing in a different world, poised in the middle of the study as though she had stepped out of some portal. As though she had just awoken from a statue-like slumber. The vaulted ceiling is a map of the night skies, blues and golds depicting stars and constellations and planets. The wall of wrought iron framed windows looks out over a garden and courtyard, letting in the late afternoon light.![[Image: 13716916_Rc8f5hGvZkB3cYP.png]](https://file.toyhou.se/images/13716916_Rc8f5hGvZkB3cYP.png)
