“I was made from magic, carved from marble.” He can hear the truth in her voice, the impossible truth, and although he raises a brow in skepticism, it is more out of habit than anything else. Of course he believes her. He remembers first coming to Novus, wide-eyed and full of disbelief. He remembers how his definition of impossible had been challenged, time and time again, hammered thin.
“I am someone with regrets, and pain, and anger,” Is it just his imagination, or does she linger on the word anger? He thinks of Isra, and the smoke that billows behind her sky-blue eyes. Was the anger carved in to Antiope, lodged with intention in the crook of her hips or the curve of her belly? Was the rage planted in Isra, a seed buried in her drowning lungs?
Eik’s own anger was slow and steady but never quite certain where to direct itself; were the gods to blame for shaping women into weapons, or was it nature?
“But I also am someone who loves, and hopes.” He smiles sadly at the word hope; his great enemy. How much pain could have been avoided if he could have simply smothered the damned stubborn hope that burgeoned in his chest, relentlessly. But without hope Eik would not be Eik, and Antiope would not be Antiope, and the whole world would stumble to a halt because what’s the point of doing anything at all, without something to hope for?
Just as well as Eik knows hope, he knows honor. As Antiope continues to speak, he bobs his head in shared understanding of what it means to owe someone who sees clearly through all your monstrous depths and embraces you anyway-- who maybe even treasures you all the more for the length of your shadows. Honor was a fine code to live by, and better still to die by.
But when her eyes glow for a fraction of a moment, like a spark jumping from a bonfire, he wonders if she’s had to do terrible things, for honor, or love, or hope. And he wonders if they weigh on her, like his past weighs on him, or if the gods carved her so that the guilt and the shame would slide right off.
“Oh, I never doubted your prowess,” he almost laughs at the thought. Antiope would be terrifying to face in a fight, even for someone as careless with their life as Eik. “Just your intent.” His words still carry a Solterran lilt to them, and buried beneath that the faint color of a faraway land. (dusty grey earth, the darker-than-black depth of charcoal, crystalline blue-- the sky seemed so much farther away, there)
The spark in her eye is gone now, but it doesn’t matter. He knows it’s in her, waiting for the opportunity to show itself. Maybe even pacing back and forth, restless like a caged lion, eager for a fight. “And what is it you hope for?” He wonders aloud. It was the question that was circling his mind discontentedly, lately; what next?
@Antiope
Time makes fools of us all
