[P] [FALL] Man of oil

[Antiope]

hold your breath, close your eyes, turn your ear to the sky

He raises a brow at her admission—a fact of her life which she has until this moment not told anyone else—but he does not verbally question it. Whether Eik believes her or not is not the important thing; her birth is really of little consequence. What matters is what came after, or before. It is her creation, her life. Not how she took her first breath.

It is a strange thing, to stand next to the man who has the heart of Isra and know so little about him; but at the same time, to see the understanding in his eyes. That looked of shared knowing. Antiope sees, perhaps fractionally, what Isra sees. And knows, perhaps more than any, what lengths there are to go to for such love.

“I was made with one intent,” she says, gaze a little distant as she looks at Eik. As if he is not Eik but perhaps someone else, far from here. There were hundreds of horses just like Eik, faces in a crowd, only the crowd was a battlefield. And all of them were dead. “I thought, it was just how I was meant to be,” there are green eyes, then, and skin like a desert marred with shadows, “I have been fighting against that intent for some time now.”

Antiope is back in the markets, but she turns her head away from the silver man at her side. There is a tightening in her chest, alongside that ever-burning flame. The gods had not given her anger when they made her, but when she had discovered the anger it had consumed her.

She wonders, if their intent had always been to do whatever was necessary to keep her on her path. She wonders what had gone wrong, that she had turned against them instead.

So, too, Antiope wonders what her hope is made from, when Eik asks. Why is it that she continues to hope, despite the truth of what she is and where she has come from? But the Regent knows, sure as she knows that she left her home behind because it was no longer home: there has to be more out there, somewhere. “My hope is for change, for purpose, serenity.”

Finally, she turns back to Eik, eyes still sapphire sharp and bright. “What is that you hope for, Eik?” Her hopes have been built since she took that first step nearly a year ago off a ship docked on Denocte’s shore, and only growing. What of his?

"Speaking."

@Eik <3

∞