She walks with the confident, at-ease trudge of a soldier on patrol. She’s working tonight, as the rest of the court is carousing (some with joy, some with sorrow, most with a mix of the two) and blissfully trying to shed the worries and concerns of their daily lives. Money is flowing in the marketplace, all manner of goods and services being bought and sold. Magic flows too. He feels the familiar spark-crackle-buzz of it in his knees, in his chest, in his blood.
She knows he’s following her.
He senses it in the subtle tension that flares in her movement. She almost seems happy. Excited. A cat, living among mice, finally given an excuse to flex its claws. Or maybe he’s reading too much into the spring in her step and the arch in her neck. He doesn’t use his magic, not yet. He might not use it at all tonight. Ever since the kidnapping, these large gatherings make him nervous.
She doesn’t look back, but she stops to investigate a merchant selling flowers. She’s waiting for him. Or, she has a sudden interest in purchasing flowers.
Eik approaches casually and looks at the flowers with interest. “One of those, please. Just a single one.” It’s a white lilly– he doesn’t know the name of it. He floats a coin to the merchant and gently ties the flower to his mane. For Isra, later.
And then he turns to Antiope, who stands there with the dangerous poise of a lion. “Hello, Regent. May I walk with you?”
and you keep telling yourself
there is no smell of war in me
but why else would this feel like madness
hold your breath, close your eyes, turn your ear to the sky
She knows who he is, of course. Has seen him on Isra’s elbow many a time in the court. She has seen him stand in stark contrast to the queen’s dark hair and earthen skin; the moon and stars to her shadows and night. But, what Antiope wants to know is why he is following her.
Down every crowded street, past every merchant stand, he is there just behind her. Even when she can’t see him she can almost feel him. It’s an ability that never leaves you, like an extra sense, from years on the battlefield. He passes over the adumbral streets like a ghost.
Why?
She pauses at the flowers, finally, sapphire blue eyes sharp and bright and clear as they look over the variety of blooms. One in particular does catch her eye, a deep and vibrant flower whose colors shift from indigo to violet. The man at the stall tells her it is a Gladiolus. The color reminds her of a goddess who had given her magic, and her spine stiffens a little at the thought of gods and god-things, even if she is one too.
“Hello, Regent. May I walk with you?”
Antiope lifts her sea blue eyes, darker in the night, and the firelight all about them gleams off the sharpened edges of her axe. “I assume you mean at my side?” she responds, watching him with the lily in his mane and his eyes as deep and dark as her stripes. “Please, join me.”
The tigress turns away from the stand, away from the flowers that remind her of all of the things that she is trying not to be and all of the things that she would like to be instead. The altars are beyond them, where the crowd thins and grows more silent than seems natural, and somewhere she can hear the sound of children laughing, probably playing the games that have been set up. Her heart, she finds, is both happy and sad. “What can I do for you?”
“I assume you mean at my side?” Cool and composed, he would not have expected anything else of the Regent. Cool and composed, every time he saw her, verging on what one might call stony except for a sharp look in the eyes which suggested in the course of a split second she could transform into something very wild and, with no uncertainty, beyond the control of any man.
Naturally Eik was not afraid of such wildness. If anything he was drawn to it, same as he was drawn to the endless miles of dusty plains and the cloudless nights by the sea, for he was wild too. Time had worn him down, smoothed and sanded his edges like sea glass, but it had not broken him. Not yet.
The grey does not smile, but pleased amusement crinkles at the edge of his dark eyes. “Yes. Thank you.” Eik feels tension in his shoulders as they turn and walk further into the market, and he is not sure if it is because of the conflict he senses in her mind, or the sudden realization he had not prepared anything to say to her.
“I just wanted to learn more about my regime.” He speaks plainly and formally, soldier to regent. "Who are you, Antiope?" Still plain spoken, still formal, even though the question was surely not a conventional one. He glances at her from time to time, but mostly keeps his attention on the They walk slow and certain into the night, no rush at all to delve into the mysteries of the market.
“Also I…” He trails off as the market suddenly thickens around them. A troupe of dancers is moving through, brandished with colored veils and silks and flowers. “I need to know that Isra is safe with you.” He speaks to her directly with his mind, where he doesn’t have to raise his voice over the crowd.
hold your breath, close your eyes, turn your ear to the sky
His question catches her off guard, for its forwardness and searching. It’s not a question any have asked of her yet, and for a moment she isn’t really sure how to answer it. She could tell him all the things she is: a killer of gods, a mother who has lost, an ex-warrior who wants to put the battlefield to rest. But is that what he wants to hear?
They walk in silence while she thinks, her sapphire eyes farther away than they were a moment ago, her steps less sharper. Someone’s shoulder in the crowd bumps up against her and she lifts her head, turning her attention back to the man at her side. “I was made from magic, carved from marble,” Antiope says.
She still remembers what it was like to breathe her first breath, to open her eyes to the world. Her birth was not so different from most others, but hers starts with nothing, not even a womb. “I am someone with regrets, and pain, and anger,” and a lot of it, enough to engulf an entire world. Enough to carry her through the hardest battle of her life. “But I also am someone who loves, and hopes.”
Who cares, miraculously, despite the things she has lost, and who continues to search for a place that she fits and a role that suits her that is different than anything she has ever done before. Antiope doesn’t know if those things answer his question, but she has a feeling he could figure out a lot more if he needed to.
When the crowd thickens to spectate the dancers with their finery and beauty, Antiope is stopped in her tracks. There are many things she can expect, many things her warrior life has taught her to be aware of. But it seems that Eik is one of the more unexpected things she has ever come across, and when his voice fills her mind her gaze lands sharply upon his face, turning away from the display before them. Magic, and Antiope is finding that this world is full of it.
“The first time I met Isra, I showed her the darker parts of me,” the Regent says, lifting her eyes momentarily to the sky. It was almost a year ago now, that night in the ice castle when they both had been burning for different reasons and making death a necessity. “And she still offered me this position, trusted me with something greater, something good,” Antiope breathes out, lowers her head.
“I can never truly repay her for that, but I can spend every day trying.” And then the woman smiles, something a little less serious, a little bit more wild, a little bit other. She shrugs the shoulder that bears her axe, and breathing in the energy of the world around them, pulls a little out of the breeze that flits across her back.
Her eyes begin to glow like ichor, just for a moment. Just blink and you’ll miss it, before Antiope releases the energy and they return to sharp sapphires; but her eyes never leave Eik. “Besides, I was made to be the perfect, indomitable warrior—if her safety from others is what you’re worried about.”
“I was made from magic, carved from marble.” He can hear the truth in her voice, the impossible truth, and although he raises a brow in skepticism, it is more out of habit than anything else. Of course he believes her. He remembers first coming to Novus, wide-eyed and full of disbelief. He remembers how his definition of impossible had been challenged, time and time again, hammered thin.
“I am someone with regrets, and pain, and anger,” Is it just his imagination, or does she linger on the word anger? He thinks of Isra, and the smoke that billows behind her sky-blue eyes. Was the anger carved in to Antiope, lodged with intention in the crook of her hips or the curve of her belly? Was the rage planted in Isra, a seed buried in her drowning lungs?
Eik’s own anger was slow and steady but never quite certain where to direct itself; were the gods to blame for shaping women into weapons, or was it nature?
“But I also am someone who loves, and hopes.” He smiles sadly at the word hope; his great enemy. How much pain could have been avoided if he could have simply smothered the damned stubborn hope that burgeoned in his chest, relentlessly. But without hope Eik would not be Eik, and Antiope would not be Antiope, and the whole world would stumble to a halt because what’s the point of doing anything at all, without something to hope for?
Just as well as Eik knows hope, he knows honor. As Antiope continues to speak, he bobs his head in shared understanding of what it means to owe someone who sees clearly through all your monstrous depths and embraces you anyway-- who maybe even treasures you all the more for the length of your shadows. Honor was a fine code to live by, and better still to die by.
But when her eyes glow for a fraction of a moment, like a spark jumping from a bonfire, he wonders if she’s had to do terrible things, for honor, or love, or hope. And he wonders if they weigh on her, like his past weighs on him, or if the gods carved her so that the guilt and the shame would slide right off.
“Oh, I never doubted your prowess,” he almost laughs at the thought. Antiope would be terrifying to face in a fight, even for someone as careless with their life as Eik. “Just your intent.” His words still carry a Solterran lilt to them, and buried beneath that the faint color of a faraway land. (dusty grey earth, the darker-than-black depth of charcoal, crystalline blue-- the sky seemed so much farther away, there)
The spark in her eye is gone now, but it doesn’t matter. He knows it’s in her, waiting for the opportunity to show itself. Maybe even pacing back and forth, restless like a caged lion, eager for a fight. “And what is it you hope for?” He wonders aloud. It was the question that was circling his mind discontentedly, lately; what next?
hold your breath, close your eyes, turn your ear to the sky
He raises a brow at her admission—a fact of her life which she has until this moment not told anyone else—but he does not verbally question it. Whether Eik believes her or not is not the important thing; her birth is really of little consequence. What matters is what came after, or before. It is her creation, her life. Not how she took her first breath.
It is a strange thing, to stand next to the man who has the heart of Isra and know so little about him; but at the same time, to see the understanding in his eyes. That looked of shared knowing. Antiope sees, perhaps fractionally, what Isra sees. And knows, perhaps more than any, what lengths there are to go to for such love.
“I was made with one intent,” she says, gaze a little distant as she looks at Eik. As if he is not Eik but perhaps someone else, far from here. There were hundreds of horses just like Eik, faces in a crowd, only the crowd was a battlefield. And all of them were dead. “I thought, it was just how I was meant to be,” there are green eyes, then, and skin like a desert marred with shadows, “I have been fighting against that intent for some time now.”
Antiope is back in the markets, but she turns her head away from the silver man at her side. There is a tightening in her chest, alongside that ever-burning flame. The gods had not given her anger when they made her, but when she had discovered the anger it had consumed her.
She wonders, if their intent had always been to do whatever was necessary to keep her on her path. She wonders what had gone wrong, that she had turned against them instead.
So, too, Antiope wonders what her hope is made from, when Eik asks. Why is it that she continues to hope, despite the truth of what she is and where she has come from? But the Regent knows, sure as she knows that she left her home behind because it was no longer home: there has to be more out there, somewhere. “My hope is for change, for purpose, serenity.”
Finally, she turns back to Eik, eyes still sapphire sharp and bright. “What is that you hope for, Eik?” Her hopes have been built since she took that first step nearly a year ago off a ship docked on Denocte’s shore, and only growing. What of his?
The hardest things are like that; too deep and raw and slippery to simply lay out on the table. Something like that, it's easier to speak around it, outlining, defining with negative space. The burden of interpretation rested on the listener to translate; they could understand, or they couldn’t.
Eik understands, but he doesn’t.
See, he was made with the opposite of intent. Chaos, violence, wanderlust. He was a weak seed, in a field of thorns, and he grew to be unexpected and mediocre in every sense of the word. (Look close, the story is etched in skin. The best fighters did not wear as many scars as him; the worst did not survive.) But he knew what it was like to struggle against your purpose, to live and breathe at the heart of war’s storm. So he nods curtly; a gesture so slight it could almost be mistaken for an accidental twitch, or the shooing of a fly. But she would know it was neither of these things.
Talk rolls on as around them the marketplace ebbs and flows like a river. The scent of baked apples fills the air just as the regent says she hopes for change, purpose, serenity. This he understands, and he smiles sadly.
But what did he hope for?
... Something simple, surely. A landscape entirely silent except for the wind’s song trickling through it. A place for his bones to rest undisturbed, to sink quietly back into the earth. And something not so simple. The world-- for his children. The world without fear or hate or the god’s intent. His hopes soar higher than he dares confess. They sit there unspoken in the wooden rafters of the godless church he built. Breathe in deep; salt in the air, sawdust on the hands. Warm sunlight filters peacefully through the rainbow-colored glass--
Dreamers will dream.
He smiles, thinking of all the seeds the old oak plants after the fire. Death and deathlessness. He humbles himself, reigns in his dreams (or else just hides them, plants them deep). “I hope to meet my grandchildren someday, and to watch them grow up in a kinder world than I did.” A simple hope, and not so different at all from change, purpose, serenity.
He feels a certain sort of comfort settle between them. An understanding that relaxes him, just a little. “On that note, I should probably find my daughters. Good night, Antiope. And--” As he steps away he catches her gaze and holds it. “Thank you.” And then he is gone. An unremarkable man, easily lost sight of in the reckless, swirling crowd.
E I K "A thousand dreams within me softly burn. From time to time
my heart is like some oak whose blood runs golden where a branch is torn."
hold your breath, close your eyes, turn your ear to the sky
The world grandchildren is like someone has taken her axe and embedded it deep into her heart. It is a legacy, but one that she might never leave behind. A part of her story which will never be written. The way that Eik speaks about his children can do nothing for Antiope but open up this gaping hole inside her which echoes a name, over and over again.
He cannot possibly know what is missing, but every part of her feels it deeply and unendingly.
The Regent doesn’t know how to tell him that the world is incapable of such amounts of kindness. Her years have given her nothing but war, and that is why she wishes for peace, because if she had peace her wish would be for something else. Perhaps that is the ache inside her, the longing, the lioness who haunts her bones, that says there will never be change, or serenity. Perhaps finding it can be a purpose.
“Farewell, Eik,” she remarks, as the dark-eyed man begins to dissolve into the crowd. She does not speak again—merely nods her head and blinks, slowly, like a cat sharing its understanding. All she had given him was the truth. It is nothing remarkable, honesty, but what equines owe to each other and to themselves. He is gone, by the time she turns away, burning and aching and aching.
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