[P] the edge of paradoxes

[Antiope]

”Is there something behind it?”

Antiope grasps the handle of her axe a little harder, turning eyes as blue as the churning sea toward the girl who has come up behind her. There are no monsters swarming beneath the surface of her gaze, but it looks like there could be, looks like perhaps the lioness in her bones isn’t so far under her skin as she seems.

“No,” she replies, turning toward where her axe had struck the vines. Her blade, gifted by gods with a heat so bright and burning it could cut through most things, had made not a single mark on the wall of ivy. “My weapon has never failed me before. Whatever this is, it is magic—a strange, powerful magic.”

In a moment the glowing of her axe’s double-headed blades has dimmed down to nothing, making it appear once again as just a normal labrys, before she places it back in the sling about her chest and sides. She turns fully toward the other equine, and her eyes are like a wave as they rise up and over her newfound companion, scouring her form. She sported a pearlescent horn and golden spikes in her mane, as sharp as any weapon. As sharp as any tongue, too, Antiope thought.

“I don’t believe there is a way through, unless you have got any ideas,” Antiope takes a step away from the wall, putting less distance between her and this stranger, and she thinks that there are so many reasons she wants to go beyond the ivy. As many reasons, she assumes, as it has for keeping her out. But she’s not sure her reasons are strong enough to keep her standing here. To see if it eventually reveals its secrets.

There is something else about her, though, as she stands there backed by the bridge and the water and the sky. Something wild and untamed and otherworldly. Perhaps it is the depth of her eyes or the shadows of her stripes, or the blood red she wears so casually splashed across her throat, in her hair, around her eyes. “You’re the first I’ve seen since coming out here.” Where were the rest?

credits | @Aghavni

[Random Events]

A Random Event Has Occurred!

It begins with a low tone, a droning that could almost be music. As soon as Antiope’s ax falls into the wall of ivy the sound is there, a hum like a mountain might make, or like all the bees in the world together as one.

Beetles begin to crawl out of the ivy from the place the ax struck. Their shells glisten, hard, gleaming like stones - because they are stones, they are agate and amber, beryl and garnet and topaz. The beetles are eating the leaves, though the sound of their eating - a terrible sound! - is more like click of machines than insects.

They eat and they eat until there is a hole opened up in the wall about the size of a fist, or of a heart. And then the hundreds of beetles all take flight at once, bursting out like bats between the two horses. Very quickly they are only a black cloud against the blue sky (like a cloud of ash). Very quickly the awful sound of them has died away and there is only that hum, that ringing, that endless tone like the singing of a planet or a moon. It grows fainter and fainter and then it dies away altogether, and there is only a small hole in the ivy, a round little window into another world.



 

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@Antiope might realize that the sound she's hearing is something more than the sea and the echo of the beating ivy. She might also realize that while it's a slow reaction that her axe hasn't failed her, although perhaps the magic of the ivy has made the workings of it wrong. In the place where she struck stone beetles starts to pour out. They are almost as lovely as they are horrible. But it's what they leave behind that really matters.

Antiope will be awarded +100 signos for encountering a Random Event! How you reply is up to you; feel free to NPC the beetles or anything else.

Enjoy!