but the night was dark / and love was a burning fence around my house.
Bexley looks down at herself in the mirror-clean surface of the glass streets.
From under her feet, her reflection stares back. Her golden face is clean; the scar that runs through her white blaze is thin and pale, almost invisible from a certain angle; her eyes are blue as moonstones, but clouded by a lack of focus, shifting from side to side so rapidly she has ceased to notice it happening. The thin gold chain around her neck is tight and ice-cold. Where the light glints off it, it turns pure white, and as Bexley raises her head she sees in the reflection that her throat has briefly become a high-beam.
Everything here is so bright, so intense. There isn’t a place to look that doesn’t dazzle. The streets are metallic, or mirrored, or iridescent; in some places it somehow manages to be all those things, while in other places it’s sectioned like a patchwork quilt. Gemstones are buried in the sidewalk: rubies, sapphires, topaz. And trees in this city are not trees at all but strange sculptures, made of iron and glass. The buildings that rise up on either side are long, narrow things that spear into the sky—taller even than Veneror, their spires swathed in clouds that float through the pale blue sky.
There isn’t a place to look that doesn’t dazzle. But it all dazzles so brightly that Bexley thinks there must be something very, very wrong with this place.
There are no birds here, no squirrels or mice either. And no plants—just metal shaved into the shape of bushes, flowers made of paper-thin gems. There is no noise, either: nothing but the sound of her own breath whooshing in and out, the roar of blood in her ears as her pulse rises.
As far as she knows, Bexley is the only living thing in the city. It could be a blessing or a curse.
Finally, she tears her ghost-blue eyes from the glass streets, up toward the city that rises around her like a welt. There is a storm brewing overhead: faint gray like the wing of a wedding dove. A cloud of white hair floats open behind her, coasting in the soundless breeze that emanates from the castle at the middle of the road-spiral.
And Bexley starts to walk toward the sovereign, who she’s heard might be a monster.
the Steel in our Hearts will be Monuments / today, they'll Hear the Violence
↠ ♕ ↞
The island has claimed Antiope, in the way it has always claimed her. Wild and strange, mysterious and otherworldly. Something other than what it is supposed to be. Something else. The man who had, once, not been a kelpie but now is, has gone. Antiope has spent minutes, or perhaps hours, or perhaps days, wandering the halls of this castle. She has explored every dead end of the maze surrounding it. She has looked at every item in every keeperless shop.
Or perhaps she hasn’t, and only everything feels so familiar that she thinks that she has.
Maybe it has only been minutes, and the island has been fooling her all along into believing she knows it better than she does.
As Antiope turns a corner and finds a room missing that had been there once before, she does not think so. She thinks, rather, that it might be changing. That, like how a body sheds its hairs and cells every day, this inside-out iteration of the island might shed parts of itself as new ones settle into place.
What does not change is the throne, or the moon-eye hovering over the city.
She still has not found a monster.
She still thinks that all along the monster has been her.
Antiope has always been restless, has always lived off the energy of the world around her keeping her awake, and alive. She is not just restless now. There is unrest inside of her. There are waves inside of her, thunder and lightning, and seas at storm. There is a great gaping, like the way the island’s abdomen has been carved out and exposed, she is also empty.
What the striped woman does know is the path to the throne room, the same way that she knows every back alley and hidden shortcut in the court that is no longer her own. Antiope has not gone inside the room since that first day when she came, dragging her axe across the long spine bridge. She stands there, with her axe at her shoulder and her eyes like storms.
Until there are steps behind her. Until there is life behind her. Her magic can feel it, aches to consume it. Antiope turns, and something in her sharpens, bites at the air. There is a fair haired girl with familiar blue eyes and a golden strand about her neck. But Antiope is not the same that she was the last they met. She is hungrier, more turbulent. Darkened.
but the night was dark / and love was a burning fence around my house.
Before Bexley sees the stranger straight-on, she sees them in pieces.
Caught in the silver of the mirrored walls, she sees a white-stockinged leg slip by in a quick gait. Halfway to the ceiling, she sees a thin red ribbon turning over itself in the wind. There, a glimpse of tiger stripes in black and brown—an eye cast in bright blue—a sinewy shoulder rolling in and out of vision.
She watches from the corner of her eye as all these glimpses come and go, and lets them fade from view without resistance. If there is one thing Bexley was born knowing—
Pretty girls aren’t meant to chase.
Instead, she slips like water through the narrow silver chasms of the city. Mirrors crowd her overhead; with her gaze turned up toward the ceiling, Bexley sees the bright gold question of her body wind through empty rooms, stores with broken windows, churches with statues whose heads have been torn off. Birds without wings sit inside the doorways. There are skeletons here, too; but they are configured in manners that defy all laws of the natural world, and some of them look to be made out of diamonds. In a few places, she finds jewels so fine it hurts not to take them, but at certain angles the dark energy that sticks to them is visible, even palpable. Looking at them, Bexley’s heart thrills with cold fear.
Everything here is so odd. The silence, the stillness, makes Bexley’s very bones feel cold. It’s like a curtain has been drawn over what should be a bright and violent world. It muffles life’s music and the sun’s golden light; it bleaches everything of its proper color.
Except the stranger. Who, when she rounds the corner, turns out not to be a stranger at all.
Solterra’s golden girl is cracked into the past like a whip, torn through time to that night, years ago, when she had found the not-goddess in Denocte’s street and seen her reflection like an oil painting in the silver puddles on the street. Then, the sky had been a dark blue like velvet; Bexley had felt the cold snap of the wind up against her chest, but it was nothing next to the warmth that flooded through her from the heart out. Today it is nearly the same. She looks up from the mirrors at her feet, and Antiope is standing there, her head turned, at the end of the hall.
Bexley bites her lip, not quite hard enough to taste blood; the watery blue of her eyes turns to the color of the sea, wine-dark.
“You asked me,” she says calmly, “about my desires. Long ago.”
![[Image: 13716916_Rc8f5hGvZkB3cYP.png]](https://file.toyhou.se/images/13716916_Rc8f5hGvZkB3cYP.png)
