i feel divinity in my bones like aching; like fire
Spring is still a foal when Antiope sets forth for the mountains. Still new and wondering, still walking along on wobbly legs, being coaxed across the nation with wide and bright eyes. She pauses, for a moment, where the path cuts up into the trees and away into Arma. She pauses, for a moment, beneath the shadow of scaffolding and half formed plans. It is too early in the day for the builders.
She has not slept, as she pushes forward in the washed out grey morning light, on toward the pass. There is nothing to mark her leaving but the sound of her hooves scraping against stone. There is nothing to accompany but the shine of her axe and the echo of her own thoughts against the high ridges and deep ravines.
It is late afternoon by the time Antiope pushes through the gate of the Solterra proper, sand clinging to her skin, gold fading from her eyes like the ichor is draining from her bloodstream. The Denocte Sovereign stops, for only a moment, to take in the golden city and its sand covered streets.
It is like nothing she has ever seen before.
Everything is bright and burning in the sun and the tigress is a slash of shadows and marble on its walls, a spray of blood on its floors. Her sapphire eyes are sharp, sharp, sharp, as she pushes deeper into the crowd. She can’t tell if this place makes her feel more like a serpent or if it’s just the way some of the citizens are looking at her.
When she rises up the steps of the citadel, some stop and stare. Some whisper, and wonder.
The guards stop her at the top. “I am Queen Antiope of Denocte,” she says, but it feels wrong coming from her lips. She still remembers the day she had stood at the entrance to that pass in Denocte and thought that one day she would cross it—one day, she would see the rest of Novus—but then she hadn’t expected that moment to be as Sovereign.
“I sent a raven ahead of my visit, I should be expected,” but here, in the Sun City, Antiope can almost forget the eyes of Caligo watching her from on high every night. Here, in a warrior’s court, she can almost forget what it is like to not know whether or not you can trust yourself.
FIRE-LIT, HALF SILHOUETTE AND HALF MYTH, THE WOLF CIRCLES MY PAST, TREADING THE LEAVES INTO A BED TILL HE SLEEPS, BLACK SNOUT ON EXTENDED PAWS. BLACK SNOUT ON SULPHUR BODY, HE NUDGED HIS WAY INTO MY CONSCIOUSNESS. THERE IS NOTHING THAT WON'T BE LIT UP IN THE DARK TORCH OF HIS EYES.
There is something changing in him. There is no one in Novus who knows him well enough (well, perhaps one person, but that in and of itself is a different story, one he has yet to understand, a girl named Boudika in Caligo’s Court who sings to the sea and dances dressed in ribbons). Anyways, it is not the same as the unknowing faces of his court, the tense hospitalities, the draining kindness that even now causes his heart to throb in his chest.
They do not know. They could not possibly know that at night he lay awake with a great roiling inside him, the roiling of monsters and fading memories, of a half-lived life. He is forgetting. If he had not been forgetting all along, then he certainly is now, and the black spaces of his memory are large and complete. It must be the vacuum of Novus’s magic at work; the way the Solar Deities strip from the inhabitants everything they’ve ever held before and now, yes now, they strip from Orestes’s his memories too. It had been happening all along; like a sleight of hand, he would discover a name opportunistically absent from his thoughts, or that the details of his imprisonment had become faded and inconsistent.
Now, however, the contrast is startling and obscure. He knew he had come from another land; but now Orestes revists his journals to recount the tales; the difference being is that was all they had become. Tales. They read like another man’s fables, disconnected, impersonal.
Orestes found himself more sullen than usual, more withdrawn. He busied himself with the activities of the Court and always, always presenting himself as he had been: charismatic, genuine, warm. Yet beneath this lurked a man with bloodshot eyes, who could not sleep for fear of forgetting more of the things that made him himself—
Whatever thoughts he would have had were interrupted by his telepathic bond with Ariel. She is here, your majesty.
Orestes had nearly forgotten Denocte’s Sovereign had sent a raven. This was uncharacteristic of him, and for a moment he was forced to steel himself. He clears his throat and rises from his study; it does not take him long to descend the slender staircase into the hall below, and walk to meet Ariel in the throne room. Sovereign and Sun Lion walk side-by-side as Orestes approaches the front; the guards have already let her in, and one stands nearby, weary and watchful as she admires the long hallway that marks the entrance of Solterra’s citadel. Orestes had commissioned a local artist to recreate the rich tapestries that lined the hallway, but the works were incomplete, and thus far only Solis’s creation decorated the walls.
““My apologies, Queen Antiope. I would have liked to meet you myself, but you know—" and Orestes cuts off with a supple, leonine shrug of his shoulders. She could end the sentence anyway she liked, but the meaning was implicit: there are always things to be done. ““To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit? I recognise Solterra is a difficult place to visit, and I thank you for the journey. Would you prefer to stay in the citadel, or have me guide you through the city itself?” Orestes nearly apologises; he is not tense, per se, but the light does not radiate from him as it usually does. There is something harder in his expression, something imperceptibly tighter. He is tired.
Ariel stretches languidly at Orestes’s side, yawning to expose the large incisors of a predator. The Sun Lion appraises Antiope with eyes the colour of burning gold but does not yet express an opinion one way or the other. Orestes, even after months of being bonded to the lion, finds the gesture unnerving. In a moment of uncharacteristic snappishness he says, “And please, m'lady, excuse the overgrown cat. We have yet to teach him manners." Ariel chuffs disapprovingly.
There is a moment during the interaction when Orestes wonders, briefly, what has become of Denocte's other Queen. The woman he had met in the maze, looking for a monster to fight, for something of flesh to sink her teeth into. A woman nearly god. Orestes almost asks, but decides against it. What is one more lost soul in a lifetime of hundreds of them?
i feel divinity in my bones like aching; like fire
The guards finally allow her passage, though they linger as if she might be dangerous. It reminds Antiope of the way the other passengers on the ship had looked at her when she first arrived in Novus, on the shores of Denocte. She wonders if it’s the axe hung behind her shoulder or the red like blood about her neck and in her hair.
Perhaps it is her eyes—too sharp like sapphires, too much like a storm at sea.
When Orestes and a great lion come down the hall toward her, Antiope knows without truly knowing that this is a king and his bonded. Like knowing that the one place in Novus she will always connect with the most is that damned magic-filled island, even though she can’t figure out why. Like knowing Caligo has not yet struck her from the earth for the things she has done but not trusting why.
“Solterra is not so difficult a place to visit,” she says, with a rolling shoulder, a step closer. Not for me, she suggests, in all the ways she doesn’t say it. Not with her magic. There is little she cannot do, least of all cross an expansive desert with sweat barely darkening her back. The tigress looks at the marks upon his face; are they tattoos, like the red stains beneath her eyes and scattered across her skin and on her hooves, or some kind of marking?
They glow, faintly, like a dying ember. His shoulders are rigid, his eyes dark like hers but not for the same reason. Antiope knows weariness, she has spent months on battlefields curing her soldiers of it so that they could fight another day. She too, knows restlessness herself.
And so, she wonders…
The Denoctian sovereign feels the lioness in her bones yawn awake, lazily striding through her as she draws up some of her energy, picking it like a flower from a field. Her eyes begin to fill with gold, begin to glow, as she attempts to pass the energy to Orestes as if a gift. But her magic is fickle, and uneager to relinquish her energy to someone else.
Antiope can feel his energy, wan as it is, and attempts to thread her own with it. Mere seconds, perhaps, of struggle, before the lioness of her magic cuts short the thread between them. The ichor drains from her eyes. She doesn’t know if it has made a difference at all with him, but she does now know that her magic is still not up to the tasks that it once had been. She tamps down the frustration like it is a small flame, errant from its fire.
“If you wish to show me your city, I would be happy to see it,” Antiope replies, as if she has barely missed a moment in their conversation. She has stepped closer to him now, close enough that the uncertain guard is now very alert. Perhaps it was her display of magic that has him so on edge. She smiles, a curling, otherworldly smile. “If you are feeling up to it?”
FIRE-LIT, HALF SILHOUETTE AND HALF MYTH, THE WOLF CIRCLES MY PAST, TREADING THE LEAVES INTO A BED TILL HE SLEEPS, BLACK SNOUT ON EXTENDED PAWS. BLACK SNOUT ON SULPHUR BODY, HE NUDGED HIS WAY INTO MY CONSCIOUSNESS. THERE IS NOTHING THAT WON'T BE LIT UP IN THE DARK TORCH OF HIS EYES.
Solterra is not so difficult a place to visit. It is her comment, her tiger-like expression, that makes Orestes believes the rumours about her, that she is only a step from godhood. He smiles a small knowing sort of smile; a smile pinched and interested, gone within a hairsbreadth of existing. Her eyes trace his tattoos, the ones on his face, and he cannot help but say:
“They’re magical scars.” It is the first time he has made the confession aloud to a resident of Novus; and it comes with a sort of self-deprecation, lighthearted and yet utterly abysmal. He cannot help but think they do not look so different, she and he. If she is a tigress with red tattoos than he is a lion across from her—he prepares to say more, but her eyes begin to fill with a gold as bright as Ariel’s.
Orestes stares curiously; there is a tug within him, strange but not unalike the powerful connection he shares with the midday sun, a type of threading, a type of strengthening. He closes his eyes in a bizarre display of trust and drinks the energy she shares; then his eyes open and he smiles, a genuine smile.
Ariel snorts, a catlike display of derision. Yet the lion cannot help but be impressed.
“I must say, Lady Antiope, I am feeling much better since your arrival. I would be more than willing to show you my Court.” Orestes gives a charming, roguish smile and steps passed the weary guard, nearly into the other Sovereign. But the gesture is unthreatening; if anything, it is the opposite. He opens his side and gestures with his chin toward the corridor that stretches away from the entrance of the citadel. It is a short walk to a much smaller door, although still ornate; Orestes opens it with a flourish and gestures Antiope through, before following her into the daylight outside.
They have exited the citadel not through the main entrance, but a smaller side-door that leads through a small garden. The sandstone wall beside it is too high to see over and, from the outside, looks like the rest of the citadel. They pass a fountain that chimes with a noise brighter than laughter; and then past desert foliage Orestes unlocks a cast-iron gate and suddenly, abruptly, they enter the sandstone city.
Beneath Solis, Solterra is always lit like bullion bricks. Orestes glances sidelong. “Honestly, the garden is one of the better aspects of the city. We have been making repairs since Raum and have seen a significant amount of progress.” The streets are active with a foray of life; children and shop-owners; merchants from abroad and other Courts; and of course the soldiers, standing watch at their numerous posts, walking along the battlements above. Orestes takes no particular direction; instead he appears almost aimless, pointing out statues, buildings, or objects of note as they go.
At last, however, Orestes begins to delve into more substantial conversations. “And if I may be so bold Lady Antiope, to what do I owe the pleasure of your visit? If it is for pleasure’s sake, consider me appreciative. But we Sovereigns rarely have time for pleasure.” He smiles again; perhaps it is foolish of him, but Orestes finds he enjoys her company. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact she offered him energy; perhaps because she reminds him of magic that, with his fading memories, seems difficult to believe in.
the ending won't be forgotten
it's written in the stars and the hieroglyphs
When he tells her what the shapes and markings and designs upon his skin are: magical scars, Antiope gets the urge to reach out and touch them. An urge that she has no choice but to ignore, to push aside and down. But it makes her wonder, not for the first time, what other equines think when they look at her.
A warrior with no scars.
Oh, she has many, but they are not the kind you can see with your eyes or feel with your touch. Even the place over her ribcage where the spear had entered and pierced her lung, that place that should have killed her and didn’t, there is no scar. When she had woken it had been like she was born anew.
The gods had made her many things, any hard to catch had certainly been one of them. So, when she passes equines on the street and they look at her axe and the stains of her tattoos and the red at her throat, do they see someone who is more powerful than she looks, someone to be feared?
The Denoctian sovereign does not reach out to touch his scars, no matter how she might want to. And even then, she is giving him her energy—or trying to—and then he is smiling at her with brighter eyes and now he is glowing, she notices, and the moment is past.
“I am glad to hear it,” she responds with bright, bright eyes, as Antiope turns into his side and steps through the opened door and into the sunlight. She basks in the heat and the light like a wildcat, and realizes how refreshed it makes her feel without need of her magic for herself. Her eyes take in the sight of the high sandstone walls and the exotic plants. The fountain rings in her ears long after they have passed it.
He glances at her as they step into the streets and she is taken again by the sight of it. “Perhaps you are not looking in the right places for the beauty,” the queen says, because all she sees is burning, burning, burning. Brightly, like the sun. Blazing like a flame. Perhaps it is her magic, but she can feel the energy everywhere.
It is alive.
“What you are doing for them, after everything they have been through,” Antiope stops, and looks at Orestes. Again she is struck by the lines etched upon the curves of his skin, somehow more prominent it seems out in the sun, “Thank you.”
She does not tell him that Raum did not deserve to walk this earth, but there is knowing in her eyes, dark and rumbling like thunder. It was she, after all, who had told Isra that sometimes things just need to die.
But he is giving them something that they have not had in a long time. She wonders if he is struggling to see it, but Antiope knows well a land ravaged by war and loss and someone who thought that they stood higher and taller than all else. Perhaps she can feel it because it is the thing she came to Novus so desperately searching for: peace of mind. If these people know anything, they know Orestes will not harm them. Not like they have been harmed before.
She has to smile at his words, because he is right. She appreciates his forwardness. “You might be surprised how much more time I have for pleasure this time around,” Antiope quips, surprising herself but realizing how true it is. When she had been leading the kingdom in her old world, war had occupied all of her time. War, and planning for war, and never anything else.
“I came because our previous queen, Isra, has gone to sea, to a land far beyond it,” she thinks of that night by the sea, when Isra had boarded that ship with the others and went, smaller and smaller to the horizon until they had disappeared. “If I am to be queen, I want to know Novus. I want to know Solterra, and Delumine and Terrastella as much as I know Denocte.”
She lays her eyes upon him. “I want to know your people, like my people,” how else, Antiope wonders, can she be expected to understand and trust them? How else can she expect them to understand and to trust her in return? “I want to know you, if you would like to know me.”
FIRE-LIT, HALF SILHOUETTE AND HALF MYTH, THE WOLF CIRCLES MY PAST, TREADING THE LEAVES INTO A BED TILL HE SLEEPS, BLACK SNOUT ON EXTENDED PAWS. BLACK SNOUT ON SULPHUR BODY, HE NUDGED HIS WAY INTO MY CONSCIOUSNESS. THERE IS NOTHING THAT WON'T BE LIT UP IN THE DARK TORCH OF HIS EYES.
Orestes watches her admire Solterra The only word that comes to mind when he sees the mare hit by sunlight, standing in a garden bubbling with sound and life, is vivacious. Antiope possesses a vitality he would find strange, if not accustomed to magic and immortality.
Perhaps you are not looking in the right places for beauty, she says. Orestes cannot help but smile; her words remind him of the greater truth of himself, the optimism that he had once held to his heart so inherently. A love of beauty. A love of brightness. He says nothing but his smile says what his words don’t: you’re right.
What you are doing for them, after everything they’ve been through. The queen has thoroughly surprised him. Orestes holds her gaze, but briefly. “It’s what I was born for.” He says it without arrogance; it is a quiet, contemplative belief, one spoken like a prayer. And what he means is, it’s my penance. There is no other reason he would have been able to walk through Solis's flames, if not with the proclamation of, let me burn.
But with comment, it is not difficult for Orestes to realise he has grown to love Solterra fiercely. He has grown to love it with pride. In so many ways it is opposite of his life before, and that is the precise reason he can hold it in his heart. They move on, further into the city.
“This time?” Orestes questions. He arches his brow, catching the comment. He has heard rumours of Denocte’s new queen being immortal, being a goddess of sorts. But he does his best not to trust such rumours and, anyway, he recognises the sentiment. This time.
He realises he has not been living this last chance with as much attention as he should be.
Orestes stores that thought away for later, however. “I see.” Orestes remembers Isra. He remembers feeling her anger in the air like so many hornets buzzing, buzzing, buzzing. He remembers seeing her in a moon-soaked night transforming a maze into all sort of terrible magics. Orestes remembers telling her, Perhaps, if the mood takes you, you can even transform me into a monster to defeat, to fight, to gnash your teeth at. I do not want to be a monster, but that is what I will be if that is what you need. In saying he, he remembers thinking, she belongs to the sea. Orestes is glad to hear it has welcomed her, and more glad still to think she may have found another monster to fight after all. Almost as an afterthought Orestes adds, “I hope she makes peace.” With herself. In the land she chooses to inhabit.
Orestes pauses for the next aspect of their conversation. He turns to hold Antiope’s eyes again. In the sun, his skin radiates light; it is easy to mistake it for a reflection, but it is not, it pours from him as if radiating from a fire, from a subtle star.
“I would like that very much, Queen of Denocte.” He laughs, soft. Charmingly. “Although I must admit, my people are hard to get to know. I am still doing it myself.” He respects her for her boldness, for her initiative, for opening Denocte’s borders. “I will be a little easier to know, I think.”
The entire time Orestes has been leading them toward the centre of the court; a fountain bubbles there, too, and in the light children play a game of chase around it. Vendors are open, and selling wares. Some stop and whisper, or gesture a greeting toward the Sovereign and his guest; many recognise Antiope, with her distinctive red markings and stripes.
“I am a foreigner. The rumours tell me you are, as well? Where do you come from?” Orestes has always believed to know someone, you must first understand where they have come from, what circumstance has built them.
the ending won't be forgotten
it's written in the stars and the hieroglyphs
Antiope cannot help but watch this man closely, cannot help but admire him and look on with equal parts wonder and familiarity. What is it about him that makes him feel so well-known to her? And then she thinks she spots it, when he says, “It’s what I was born for.” As though it is the only explanation necessary for the wonderful things he has done.
“I was born for something, too,” she says, voice lowering as if they stand about a campfire in the night for telling tales and not among the streets of a bustling city. “But being born for something does not give you the passion for it. Being born for something does not mean you actually do it, or do it well.” Perhaps her experience is not the same as his, but she knows them.
Oh, she was born to kill and not to save, god knows. And she had been very good at what she was born to do, made to do. But she had turned away from it, the same as he could have. He didn’t have to help Solterra, that was a choice. One he does not give himself enough credit for.
There is a long pause after Orestes poses his question of what Antiope means by this time. She lifts her face to the sun and her eyes to the clear blue sky, contemplative. “That is a very long story, for another day perhaps.” The corner of her lips curls up as the light glints off her eyes like sapphires.
This time, this chance, this day. This life she has given to herself.
Antiope has taken many things over the years. Lives, mostly, on the battlefield. The Denoctian sovereign can never bring them back, but she can try to give back now. Try to live and do better. To protect the ones she cares about.
She thinks of all the lives Isra put her in charge of when she went away. So, too, the striped woman thinks of all the lives Isra has put herself in charge of, wherever she has gone. Will they both succeed in their tasks? To free and to defend? “I do too,” Antiope responds softly, but she cannot help but think, to fear, that the Isra that returns to them one day will be one she won’t recognize any longer. And then, for perhaps the first time, she thinks of her sisters. Would they recognize her, if they saw her now? Would she still be their sister, after what she has done?
The sovereign buries those thoughts, buries them deeply. Surely they will surface one day after she has gone without sleep for many nights as she often does. But here is not the place for them.
When Antiope’s eyes meet Orestes’ again, blue like stones and blue like seas, she recognizes the divine light pouring from his marks. Again she is struck by familiarity, for it is as much the light of gods as the color of her eyes when she uses her magic, or the color of her axe when it becomes hot enough to burn, burn, burn.
“I might have more in common with them than you think, Sir,” the Queen responds with knowing, with a quirk of her lips. “But knowing you will be enough to satiate me, for now.” Her eyes land upon the fountain and the ring of children’s laughter brings a sharp pang, one she has felt too many times before. It takes care not to let the expression on her face fall away too shortly, though her glance lingers on the sight of the joyful foals a beat too long.
After a moment she turns away, glancing at the faces of the equines who pause to greet their King. She offers them a smile, as she thinks how best to answer Orestes’ question. “Aetherian, a place besieged by a half-century long war,” and when she laughs, it is not happy, or sad, it just is.
“I know something about inheriting fights that are not my own.” And fighting in them, too, and finding peace, and love. And then finding anger, and learning how to wield it better than any weapon, and alongside a weapon. Antiope knows about having to rebuild your life after tragedy. “And you?”
FIRE-LIT, HALF SILHOUETTE AND HALF MYTH, THE WOLF CIRCLES MY PAST, TREADING THE LEAVES INTO A BED TILL HE SLEEPS, BLACK SNOUT ON EXTENDED PAWS. BLACK SNOUT ON SULPHUR BODY, HE NUDGED HIS WAY INTO MY CONSCIOUSNESS. THERE IS NOTHING THAT WON'T BE LIT UP IN THE DARK TORCH OF HIS EYES.
I was born for something, too. But being born for something does not give you the passion for it. Being born for something does not mean you actually do it, or do it well. Antiope’s words warm him in a way that, in Novus, he is unfamiliar with. They hold understanding and, perhaps, even a little acceptance. As a foreigner who became Sovereign, he has grown more than accustomed to being unaccepted and challenged at every turn. This is as if she knows, however.
Orestes’s smile is a little sad when he answers. “You are very wise, Antiope.” He does not elaborate further; Orestes does not feel as if he needs to. What she says is true, but for him it has always been a duty. He had been raised by it; moulded by it. His duty formed him more fully than any parental figure or real person and he will serve it until it’s finished, until he’s dead.
Keeper of Souls.
That is a very long story, for another day perhaps. Orestes feels as if he will hear that story, another day. He is surprised to discover their eyes are not so different. Orestes does not often feel the need to confess things, but something about the nature of their conversation and their leisurely stroll through his beloved city—well, it makes Orestes want to say more. The urge to confess—and what he is confessing, he does not yet know—nearly overwhelms him. I might have more in common with them than you think, Sir. Orestes laughs. “That may very well be. Perhaps we ended up Sovereigns for the wrong Courts, if that is the case.” Orestes says it lightly enough the joke is clearly marked.
It hits him solidly, and strangely:
He would not trade Solterra for anything.
Even if it meant undoing the past he cannot remember, Orestes no longer thinks he would change anything. His presence here might be his penance; but it is also his new calling. It is only because he is watching her so closely—from the corner of his eyes—as he thinks that he notices her expression linger on the children by the fountain. Before he can help himself he asks, “And do you have children, Antiope?”
Aetherian. The name is as foreign as Oresziah. As Khashran.
And you?
He voices his thoughts; “Oresziah, a place besieged by a century long racial war.” Orestes also says it pragmatically; as a hard fact, neither good nor bad. He is smiling in the next breadth however, walking further into the courtyard; there is a vendor he knows. “I would be a poor host if I don’t treat you to a Solterran novelty. Would you care for prickly pear lemonade?” The heat of the day is just truly beginning to set in; it wafts off the sandstone pathways and into the air, a contrast between the bright sky. “I think we have quite a bit in common, Antiope.”
Orestes approaches the vendor, a dark bay stallion named Elijah. They engaged briefly in conversation, and Orestes walks away holding two glasses in his telekinesis.
the ending won't be forgotten
it's written in the stars and the hieroglyphs
Antiope smiles when he speaks of them being destined to lead the wrong courts. Although she can hear the jest in his voice, the Denoctian Sovereign feels it in her heart (and, looking in Orestes’ eyes, thinks he feels the same) that the only place for her is right where she is at. There is much still left to be done for her people, to bring them out of the shadows, to guide them into a greater future. She wants to be there for all of it.
His question is unexpected and hits her quick and clean, like a spear to the ribs. An old, familiar feeling. “I had a daughter,” the familiar taste of bitterness coats Antiope’s tongue as she says it, the familiar taste of loss. She pushes them down, down, down. The sun is strong and bright on her back and there are new futures awaiting her out here.
She follows him just a beat behind as he moves toward a vendor. The heat does not bother her, though it is drier than she is used to. A welcome change, to be truthful. When Orestes returns, Antiope gracefully sips from the second glass, eyes sparkling over the edge of it. “I agree, Orestes,” she responds, as the pair continue to share in companionship and drink, deep into the day, with the sun shining down upon them.
"Speaking."
I just want to get a closed thread out of this don't mind me
![[Image: 13716916_Rc8f5hGvZkB3cYP.png]](https://file.toyhou.se/images/13716916_Rc8f5hGvZkB3cYP.png)
