[AW] the light that remains

[Antiope]

Antiope
the voice begins to call you while you hunger
a taste of destiny you're searching for

When she turns, there is a familiar face standing there before her, among the emptiness that once held a gate so grand and burdensome. Antiope dips her head in kind to the painted woman, “Hello, Warden,” she says, lifting her head even as the other woman’s eyes take in the rubble around them.

She looks to the sky, which gazes down upon them brightly from between the mountains and the trees above. Blue eyes reflecting back an ever lighter and more endless blue abyss. What had happened here? Although the regent knows the tales, she wishes that she could speak more to this place’s history.

Antiope has heard of the magic that lets you look into the past of objects, and the thought always makes her wonder what items such as this would say. “There once stood an imposing and monumental gate here,” she says, finally dropping sapphire eyes back to blue and gold. “In Denocte’s history, we were an isolationist kingdom.”

It doesn’t occur to the tigress how easily she says we, how easily this place has become her own in such a short span of time. Scarcely just under a year, and already she has a place, a purpose, a meaning. It is more than she ever could have hoped for, first arriving upon Novus’ shores as something else and other.

“The gate was open, for a time however, until the Regime before Isra became Queen decided to close it,” she tries again to imagine the gate how it once stood, looming so tall over her that it would have been nearly impossible to escape its shadow. With soldiers keeping guard atop its high walls. “I don’t know their motivations, but they had cut the Court off from the rest of the world, not allowing any to leave nor to enter.”

Difficult as it is to imagine how the equines must have felt who had been locked inside, Antiope can understand to some degree the isolation. Even in her discussions, its hard to exactly understand how they felt; she has never been the most empathetic of equines. She was not made for such things, hard as she might try.

“I have heard that after the Regime disappeared and Isra ascended to the throne, a stallion and his beast rode to the gate and destroyed it,” the Regent glances at the moss covered stone and rotted wood again, the remains that speak volumes more to her than words ever could. To see it like this, it is a strange, eerie feeling. “They were freed, and now slowly the mountains and the forest have been claiming back the pieces of what once separated it.”

"Speaking."

∞ | @Morrighan