[P] half-gods

[Antiope]

i feel divinity in my bones like aching; like fire

The guards finally allow her passage, though they linger as if she might be dangerous. It reminds Antiope of the way the other passengers on the ship had looked at her when she first arrived in Novus, on the shores of Denocte. She wonders if it’s the axe hung behind her shoulder or the red like blood about her neck and in her hair.

Perhaps it is her eyes—too sharp like sapphires, too much like a storm at sea.

When Orestes and a great lion come down the hall toward her, Antiope knows without truly knowing that this is a king and his bonded. Like knowing that the one place in Novus she will always connect with the most is that damned magic-filled island, even though she can’t figure out why. Like knowing Caligo has not yet struck her from the earth for the things she has done but not trusting why.

“Solterra is not so difficult a place to visit,” she says, with a rolling shoulder, a step closer. Not for me, she suggests, in all the ways she doesn’t say it. Not with her magic. There is little she cannot do, least of all cross an expansive desert with sweat barely darkening her back. The tigress looks at the marks upon his face; are they tattoos, like the red stains beneath her eyes and scattered across her skin and on her hooves, or some kind of marking?

They glow, faintly, like a dying ember. His shoulders are rigid, his eyes dark like hers but not for the same reason. Antiope knows weariness, she has spent months on battlefields curing her soldiers of it so that they could fight another day. She too, knows restlessness herself.

And so, she wonders…

The Denoctian sovereign feels the lioness in her bones yawn awake, lazily striding through her as she draws up some of her energy, picking it like a flower from a field. Her eyes begin to fill with gold, begin to glow, as she attempts to pass the energy to Orestes as if a gift. But her magic is fickle, and uneager to relinquish her energy to someone else.

Antiope can feel his energy, wan as it is, and attempts to thread her own with it. Mere seconds, perhaps, of struggle, before the lioness of her magic cuts short the thread between them. The ichor drains from her eyes. She doesn’t know if it has made a difference at all with him, but she does now know that her magic is still not up to the tasks that it once had been. She tamps down the frustration like it is a small flame, errant from its fire.

“If you wish to show me your city, I would be happy to see it,” Antiope replies, as if she has barely missed a moment in their conversation. She has stepped closer to him now, close enough that the uncertain guard is now very alert. Perhaps it was her display of magic that has him so on edge. She smiles, a curling, otherworldly smile. “If you are feeling up to it?”

"Speaking."

∞
@Orestes