'So why not carve you to be the god of war?'
I wish I could take her words: I have had my retribution. If I could I would swallow them down like stones to whittle down the sharpness of my teeth. I wish, oh I wish, my lips (my throat, my lungs, my ragged roaring heart) would learn how to form the shape of them like one of my daughters' bedtime stories. But all I can do is smile and try to make it look less like a violent slash of teeth on my face, like I'm so happy she's not full of all the sharp glass bits that I am.
Like I'm grateful that there is this world full of stars, and hope, and love, that some of us can still see.
But I can't see it in moments longer than a blink of my eyes, or a stutter of my lungs. I can't see the stars without seeing them dripping blood, or the moon not haloed with the echo of a terrible sun. I cannot see a world without horror.
All I can see how, when I close my eyes to dream, or wonder, or catch my breath, is the way this universe is dying beneath the heel of evil hearts. All I can see is Eik's halberd glinting in the sun like a comet as he twirls it around, and around, and around like a planet orbiting the star of him. All I can see are my daughters looking at the scar across my hip and asking why?.
And all I can feel is the sea calling me home, and the holiness in by quartz blood, and the magic snarling in my veins like a trapped and rabid thing. My rage is not a quiet thing, it's not tamed, and oh, oh, oh--
“I'll do what I can do fireproof it.” This magic, this creation, is as easy as breathing. I hardly feel a feather in my chest when it races out of me to make every building in the harbor granite, and gemstone, and precious metal. It all glimmers in the corner of my eyes and dances in the moonlight like the entirety of the heavens have settled down upon my once-court. And maybe it's like the heavens came home, when I look at Antiope and say, “the rest will be up to you.”
Her skin is warm under my touch as I draw an answering circle upon her shoulder. “And you to your moon.” I can feel the words spreading out form my lips like roots growing across her skin, or maybe it's more like chains. Either way I can feel the way the horses behind us are all looking at their Regent, their new Queen, and wondering if she'll be the one to stay where I could not.
Like Caligo I cannot.
I brush my nose against her ear, even though I can hardly hear anything but the roaring sea in my own now. “Do not make my mistakes.” And I have made many. I had mercy when I should have destroyed. I had hate when I should have had peace. I have made so many mistakes in this land. But it was never my land, not really, not forever. It is hers.
The crowd seems to be like more stones, other bits of earth I wonder if I can change, or shape, or turn eternal. It seems like a shore so very far away even as my shadow stretches moon-silver across it for the last time as its Queen. The last time for me--
But the first for “Queen Antiope”, whose name rings like another bell in my voice when I say it to the crowd like a forgotten hallelujah. The crowd cheers, and if there is a sorrowfulness to it, a good-bye, I cannot hear it beyond the bellow of my dragon and the lulling song of the sea. My blood is pulling me into the tide, my magic echoing back another tune that sounds not like a warning, but like a hello between monsters with the same bone caught between their snarls.
So it's to the sea, and the ship I go, a god caught in a net of her own making.
And it is net. Oh! it's a net and noose--
Until.
@Antiope
