[P] god is she

[Antiope]

You can't Hide from Who You Are, the Light peels back the Dark

I leave the island behind, with all its bones and teeth and deadly things. I leave the island behind, with its spiralling city and breathing walls and empty shops. My skin is painted with blood, which is dried to deep, deep red. I feel like a feral thing, I feel like a thing from my past come back to life.

I do not go to anywhere familiar. I walk, and I walk, and I walk. I follow the sea and listen to her sing and feel her kiss my feet, until the ground rises up and away from the ocean. Until the wind whistles in my ears and the seagulls cries become nothing more than a distant keening over the water. I can hear the waves crashing against the base of the cliffs. The air here is damp with ocean spray.

At once I am both one with the wild world around me, and nothing at all. I am a forge from which weapons are molded, a reserve from which energy is drunk. I am the doorway to greatness, and death. The grass under my hooves lives because I let it. The seagulls sing because I let them. I could just as easily make the seagulls sing louder.

I am the perfect weapon that my gods designed me to be. I am the perfect partner in war, the worst enemy.

The sea calls for me. The waves crash like a war drum. I do not stop until I am standing atop the tallest cliff, with the wind pulling on my hair like a petulant lover, like an impatient child. The ribbons in my hair flutter like banners of blood, the teeth about my neck bounce off each other and make an almost jubilant tinkling sound.

For too long I have forgotten my stripes—like a tiger’s. I am meant to be a predator. I was never meant for walls lit by magical flames and moons that judge every step I make. I was not meant for the humanity I found in Rezar. Perhaps that is why they had taken it from me.

“Speaking.”

∞ | @Elena oop trying first for her

[Elena]

elena

I've hidden memories in boxes inside my head before. Sometimes it's the only way to deal with things.

“Lilli, I found a way, a way to bring them back. It’s ancient magic, but it will work.” She had said those words so long ago, before turning around to leave Beqanna, knowing she would never come back because she met a shadow on her way out and the way it stuck to her, against her skin told her if she returned he would kill her.

She didn't want to die.

And she left, to find magic that didn't work, that took pieces from her that she didn't want taken.

Some how, all of it, all of this, it lead her to Novus and to such a different life than the Champion has ever imagined her life becoming. It has hurt her and brought her so much joy. She holds her bruised heart in that soft mouth of hers.

Elena paces this empty oceanside with the intense focus of a fox trying to catch a grasshopper. The crash of the waves is familiar now, but she swears she can hear different pitches in each of the waves as it lands against the shore. Music, melody, tempo. It was singing a song to her. (‘As it does to all women.’ She can hear the deep voice of Torix.) Her ears pin backwards at the sound of him, it is not in hatred, but because he says these big, true, wild things, and she finds herself wanting to claw at him, open his chest wide and force him to take it all back.

He once asked her, what the most monstrous thing she ever did was. Her answer has changed, and if he asked again, it would not be the same as what she said before.

And suddenly the beach is not so empty anymore. It is no longer hers, but theirs. Elena watches the painted woman with glacial blue eyes, though they harbor no only the warmth of summer skies as a rush of gratitude for this stranger exhales through her. She did not realize how much she did not want to be alone until presented with the opportunity for someone else to be with her. Her steps are steady, open, as she approaches. She does not attempt to conceal herself, but makes her presence all too known. ‘Don’t go,’ she wants to say before she has a chance to even think it, but Elena bites her lip against. She says instead: “I don’t know if you are seeking company, but I would love some.”

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[Antiope]

You can't Hide from Who You Are, the Light peels back the Dark

I am drinking hungrily of the air and the sea spray and the gull song like a starved thing. I am caging my magic because it is feral, and wanting, and all-consuming. It paces through my bones, that lioness, and she cries, and yowls, and screams.

And I wonder, what if I let her free?

All the empty, sharp things inside of me are biting at the air when I see the woman in the distance turn and acknowledge me. All the dark, yawning places inside of me are aching to be filled when she begins to move toward me.

For a second there is a void of wind around me. My hair stops dancing, my ribbons stop waving. For a second, my eyes are gold instead of blue. Then the woman’s words drift to me on the salt-stained wind. I think: I will devour every good thing about you. I think: I will not leave you the way that I found you, but worse. More broken.

I think: perhaps that is what I was always meant to do.

I hope there is still some part that is better than that. I do not go, even though I should. I stay, and my eyes are blue (if not sharp, if not tossing seas). The wind is in my hair and the teeth at my neck. “I do not think I am the sort of company that you seek,” I say. But I stay, because I am still stuck between fighting what I was or what I have become.

“Speaking.”

∞ | @Elena

[Elena]

elena

I've hidden memories in boxes inside my head before. Sometimes it's the only way to deal with things.

There was a Great War before she was born, before Lilli was born, before even Valerio, Aletta, Elena’s own parents. It was a tale that has been told countless times in different forms, one of good and evil.  In this one, the great stallion, Elena’s great-great-grandfather. fought to protect his home against the  the wicked ringleader of the dark beings. Blood poured down into the valley as ivory and obsidian clashed against one another. In the end, and here is where the fairytale differs, in the end, no one won, it was a draw, a standoff. Life sacrificed on both sides, innocent blood spilled. “What do you think is the purpose of this story?” Alvaro asked the two fillies when they had been spending the afternoon with him, before his patrol duty. Lilli, the child she was, had a ready made answer dashed in perfection. Elena, for her part, stared at him with such a fiery resolved, her blood boiling beneath young golden skin. “Why fight even? What is the purpose? No land is worth the blood of innocents, the blood of family.” And she had scoffed, gone to the waterfall, listened until the thundering of the falls sounded like water again and not the drums of war.

There is that lovely dancer’s stride in which she moves and when the sun hits her just right, Elena looks like fire in this light. Elena likes the sound of moving water, crashing and flowing. Maybe she was always destined to fall in love with the dance of water. Her parents, after all, fell in love in the sandy shores of the sea. She was born near it, not an ocean, but a thundering waterfall. She grew next to a river, ran beside it. And then she found that even the shimmering surface of a glistening lake can be deafening. Water and its cascading, it’s crashing, it has been her entire life. So she finds solace in the sea, and in new faces.

There is a hunger inside her, like there are so many others. Elena can feel it, and she should know by now that hungry things will devour whatever light she offers them. They take, take, take, and Elena cannot help but keep giving.

Energy. She reads from the woman. Moving energy. She heard of the woman with this power, built of two colors, with ribbons in her hair. “Forgive me, but— are you Antiope?” Elena asks her, peering up from long, dark lashes, the blue of her eyes striking brighter, like lighting over water. “I had always hoped I would meet you.”

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