[P] that long blue body of light

[Antiope]

the Steel in our Hearts will be Monuments /
today, they'll Hear the Violence

↠ ♕ ↞

The island has claimed Antiope, in the way it has always claimed her. Wild and strange, mysterious and otherworldly. Something other than what it is supposed to be. Something else. The man who had, once, not been a kelpie but now is, has gone. Antiope has spent minutes, or perhaps hours, or perhaps days, wandering the halls of this castle. She has explored every dead end of the maze surrounding it. She has looked at every item in every keeperless shop.

Or perhaps she hasn’t, and only everything feels so familiar that she thinks that she has.

Maybe it has only been minutes, and the island has been fooling her all along into believing she knows it better than she does.

As Antiope turns a corner and finds a room missing that had been there once before, she does not think so. She thinks, rather, that it might be changing. That, like how a body sheds its hairs and cells every day, this inside-out iteration of the island might shed parts of itself as new ones settle into place.

What does not change is the throne, or the moon-eye hovering over the city.

She still has not found a monster.

She still thinks that all along the monster has been her.

Antiope has always been restless, has always lived off the energy of the world around her keeping her awake, and alive. She is not just restless now. There is unrest inside of her. There are waves inside of her, thunder and lightning, and seas at storm. There is a great gaping, like the way the island’s abdomen has been carved out and exposed, she is also empty.

What the striped woman does know is the path to the throne room, the same way that she knows every back alley and hidden shortcut in the court that is no longer her own. Antiope has not gone inside the room since that first day when she came, dragging her axe across the long spine bridge. She stands there, with her axe at her shoulder and her eyes like storms.

Until there are steps behind her. Until there is life behind her. Her magic can feel it, aches to consume it. Antiope turns, and something in her sharpens, bites at the air. There is a fair haired girl with familiar blue eyes and a golden strand about her neck. But Antiope is not the same that she was the last they met. She is hungrier, more turbulent. Darkened.

"Speaking."

∞ | @Bexley