[AW] the world is ugly

[Antiope]

tagged
@Morrighan

credit
1 / 2

antiope

/

in me forever the charge of Other,
the blood of my unconscious,
the dark song in me from elsewhere—

Antiope looks at Morrighan and feels an unsettling mixture of emotions that have her stomach churning. Anger, disappointment, empathy. It’s clear the woman is a mess, and how exactly things got to this point the Denoctian sovereign is not entirely sure, but they’re beyond that point now.

Now, they are at the point where she is letting it affect her work and her life. That is worse than any punishment Antiope could possibly give her, except perhaps to remove her from her position. At the moment, that won’t be happening.

“I’ve got a hard truth for you, Morrighan,” Antiope says, releasing the words with a breath. Her voice is not as hard as it had been earlier, but it’s clear that she doesn’t intend to be soft and gentle and coddle the woman. “There is no place for you to decide you just don’t want to think, anymore,” when the Regent sinks to the ground of the quiet alleyway, Antiope remains standing, “You have a job to do. You’ve made a promise to me, and to these citizens.”

Her eyes are still seas at storm, still dark waves crashing over themselves, swallowing themselves whole. “And beyond that you have a daughter that needs you. You don’t get to decide to not think when she’s relying on you.” Though her tone is sharper, there is genuine concern in her voice.

Then, Antiope relents and sinks to the narrow street across from the other woman. “When I told you that I had lost someone I loved, and the child that we’d had together, what I didn’t tell you was that it was the gods who had killed them.” The sovereign looks up at the thin strip of sky visible between the looming rooftops.

“They made me, the gods, and when I stopped doing what they wanted—when I fell in love and saw there was more to the world than death—they took the only ones in the world that I had. The ones that they associated with my treachery.” Although Antiope doesn’t know how much of this story Morrighan will actually remember, she feels it’s important to tell it. Maybe she will understand.

“After I found out what they had done, I went to their temple,” she doesn’t think she will ever forget that day. The sky, deep and red. Her burning, burning, burning. “I killed them. I killed them because I was so angry, because I thought that it would help, somehow.” She, god-killer, once-mother, once-lover.

She, made for death, for war. “It didn’t make the pain go away, what I did. It didn’t make me forget.” Antiope had left, after that. She had traveled, and she had ended up here on Denocte’s shores. Perhaps the place in the world where she needed to be most.

They had all paid the price for their actions in the end; but as much as she felt that the gods being gone meant they could no longer hurt anyone else the way they had hurt her, killing them had fixed nothing inside her. Being here, opening up to others? That is. Slowly, perhaps, but everyday she feels less like a monster made for murder.

“I don’t want you to be sorry, Morrighan,” Antiope says at last, “I want you to get up and do the right thing by your daughter, by your people, and by yourself.”