[Quest] come out of this dull world

[Antiope]

I swear on Heaven and Hell this is my revenge

Antiope does not often sleep. She does not sleep because of the magic thrumming in her veins and the lioness hunting in her bones. When she sleeps, her sleep is as empty as the marble she had been carved from, once upon a time. It is empty because for so long none had taught her how to dream.

Once they had, her dreams had been taken away from her.

She sleeps now because of the fires, because she has not come to this world for war but war has seemingly come for this world on its own. Antiope sleeps because her magic in this world is not what it used to be and she had used too much of it to save the food that would get these equines of this world through the winter.

She sleeps, because her magic is hungry and starving and had taken everything out of her that she'd had to give. She sleeps through the days of heat, through the coming of the darkened clouds that fill the sky and leave no blue, no night, no stars to see.

And she dreams.

If you can call them dreams.

Antiope sleeps and she sees—there is darkness, everywhere, all consuming. And inside the darkness there are snippets of memories, drawn from her thoughts but they are wrong, wrong, wrong. In each of them something lurks, something strange but familiar.

Something dead, like all the dead things she has ever made. And there is a calling. It calls and it calls her until she is awake, suddenly, like a death. It calls her until she is standing in the night with the clouds above her and silence around her with nothing but the beast in her bones and the axe made of god light. It is quiet, but somehow the air is restless.

She follows the calling, though the lioness inside her sniffs warily at the strangeness of the stillness of the world. Antiope moves north and her steps do no falter, her courage does not waver, and the calling does not stop, even when she reaches the mountains. Even as she begins to climb.

Even when the sky cracks open and begins to scream its fury down upon her, smothering her. Engulfing her like the darkness had in the dreams. It is relentless; but so is Antiope, the girl made from marble, the girl who killed the gods. But something was not right, even in the storm, even in the darkness. Her axe feels like a strange, foreign weight against her side, though she has carried it since her creation.

It is heavy, and heavier, and she wonders if it is the thing doing the calling.

She wonders why she is here, climbing this mountain, standing on this flattened peak, until it appears. The bear is huge, and dark and its anger fills the air more than even the storm’s, and its eyes are like gems in the night. Its anger is familiar, its anger is inside her and around her. Its anger is her, and so are its jewelled eyes.

Antiope draws the axe from behind her shoulder and holds it by the twisted handle and her blue eyes flash in the night as she speaks, “Theófos.”

God Light.

And the axe begins to glow, and glow, and glow. So hot that the snow and ice melts before it touches the blades, so bright that the ocean of her eyes turn to the sun in its light. Antiope smiles, not like a girl but like a weapon, and everything that happens after is lost to the wind, and the storm, and the darkness. And the light of gods.

"Speaking"

credits

@Random Events <3