[P] only a star, only the sea

[Antiope]

Antiope.

Antiope doesn’t know why Isra is laughing when she emerges from the water, but her words almost make the striped woman herself laugh. If only Isra truly knew her. Antiope, who has killed gods, claimed by the sea. That would be laughable indeed, a truly pathetic end to the life she has lead. Or perhaps a poetic one.

A girl, who killed something that should have been immortal, killed by something as endless and deep and wild as the ocean. Killed by the thing that is the color of her eyes.

“I am not so easy to claim, Isra. Don’t worry, you are not rid of me yet,” she says, taking a few steps closer to the queen. Her now-blue eyes follow the path laid clear by the unicorn down the cliff and across the beach. “Do you always leave rubies wherever you go?” It is the second time, she’s noticed. Rubies, like drops of blood, like fields of poppies, spread out behind her.

But in a moment, there is more than just a path of rubies. Soon the whole beach is rubies and gold and white. For a moment, Antiope feels like she’s looking at some abstract representation of herself. She exhales, a little short, a little tight, and turns back toward Isra and the sea, where Fable rides out in the waves with his fish. It makes her glad that she managed to get free herself.

The redness is still spreading over the water, she cannot help but see it. Like blood, like the burning of a sunset And something inside the woman still feels trapped out there, tumbling and rolling beneath the waves. She pulls her hair strand by strand away from where it clings to her body, wrings the seawater from it and twists it high up into a bun on her neck.

“I miss them,” Antiope says, and her lungs are tight with the admission. But she has to learn to say it. She has to learn to let them live in her heart, instead of trying to forget that they existed because it hurts to remember them. The striped woman thinks back to that first day that Isra and she had met. She thinks that, of all the rings she had drawn broken that perhaps hers should have been it.

"Speaking."

credits

@Isra <3