[P] it starts with a spark

[Antiope]

antiope

forever may you reign
forever may you reign

A

ntiope chooses not to counter Morrighan’s words. She doesn’t know enough of Raum or the situation in Solterra to say different, even if she feels differently from her own personal experience. She can say without a doubt that no matter how prepared a kingdom may feel, no matter how strong their leader, how loyal and ready to defend, it all depends on the opposition. Antiope and her sisters were examples of that. They had been made to break barriers and kill, without struggle.

Perhaps that is who Raum had been to Solterra’s queen. Who is she to say? But the people are still suffering, needlessly, when they have done nothing to warrant it themselves. If Antiope has learned anything from her life, from those gods who had forsaken her, from the ones she had fought alongside and the ones she had loved, it is that a good leader must be both soft and strong. They just have to choose the right moments in which to be one or the other.

For a moment the fire stays smaller between them. Antiope can still feel its energy filling her. She feels more awake, alert. Her legs beg her to run, her muscles beg her to kick. But she stays there, by the flames, with Morrighan, and ignores the call of the energy. She didn’t take much, and it would slowly drain itself away. It is a strange feeling, to take the energy and hold it in. She has never taken energy and not immediately used it, and it is a restless feeling even she is not used to, for as restless a creature as she is.

“My magic was given to me as the means to an end,” Antiope says at the other woman’s comment, “But fire is very important. It is powerful, destructive yes, but it can save lives. It can light up the darkness.” It is an admirable magic to have, certainly, and one that Antiope’s magic would very much enjoy to have close. Fire is such a great source of energy, indeed, and as the fire grows larger and Morrighan’s eyes gleam, she cannot help but think that the mare has caught on very quickly to this.

Antiope looks into Morrighan’s eyes for a long moment, sapphire blue into earth and sky. The firelight dances across their bodies, throwing long shadows across the space around them. When her gaze shifts to the fire once more, whose flames lick at the sky as hungrily as the lioness in her bones does, something in Antiope feels not right. In truth, it is not what she can do when she gets a lot of energy that is truly dangerous, but what happens when she takes too much.

It is one thing to kill a tree for the bountiful energy inside it.

It is another to drain the life from an equine on the battlefield who is attempting to kill you or your sister. To watch the light slowly dim in their eyes until it is fully extinguished. Until they are limp in your grasp.

She is not dangerous. It is her magic that is the dangerous thing, as lustful as it is. Once, she would have happily drained this fire and showed off her abilities, but now? Antiope wants something more, something else. “Unless you want to have a competition, my magic boosts my strength, stamina and speed.” It was meant to make her unstoppable in war, and now she feels it serves little purpose at all except in the few cases she has used it to try and aid others.

“But, I would understand if you weren't up to it,” she says, and if there is a smirk on her lips, well, it might not just be the shadows and a trick of the light. Maybe for now she could just enjoy having it.

@Morrighan "speaks"

rallidae | rhiaan