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Private  - in one corner lies strong desire

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Played by Offline Kat [PM] Posts: 146 — Threads: 25
Signos: 77
Vagabond Battlemage
Female [She/Her/Hers]  |  Immortal [Year 498 Spring]  |  15.2 hh  |  Hth: 28 — Atk: 32 — Exp: 53  |    Active Magic: Energy Transference  |    Bonded: Fylax (Gryphon)
#1

Antiope
acting on your best behavior
turn your back on Mother Nature

She stands out from the crowd because she walks like she is otherworldly. She walks like her skin is trying too hard to contain the lioness in her bones, like everything inside her is rising and rising and rising like some tidal wave, threatening to consume.

She stands out from the crowd because of the blood red strung across her throat and the ocean blue of her eyes and the heavy, double heads axe strapped just behind her shoulder. She looks like a warrior wearing a goddess' skin, or maybe just a goddess of war. And, the gods perhaps had made her beautiful to hide the killer beneath, knowing the most beautiful things are the most deceiving.

Can they see it, the equines passing her by on the streets? The thing inside her that hungers and screams and yearns for blood. Antiope doesn't know how to make it be quiet, for it has always been a part of her. A part of her that until recently, had been satiated. A part that, until recently, she had put aside in favor of something better. But the gods had taken that from her, too, and she had taken everything from them.

Antiope is a powder keg, she is a starving beast, she is just waiting for something to set all the things inside her ablaze. Waiting to catch the scent of blood in the air so that she can follow it down, down, down to the darkest parts of the world. She doesn't know how to be like these equines who look at her unsurely as she stands in the square and passes the mouths of alleyways.

She doesn't know how to be tamed, how to stand and breath and just be. She has only ever known violence and death, has only ever known the things that the gods made her to be. And when she thought she had finally found something else, it had not been meant for her. Would she ever be meant for this life?

Antiope, who does not sleep because she is too restless. Who does not fight despite the singing in her veins, who does not stand and breathe and be. Antiope, who is too much and too big for this skin and this world, stops in middle of the markets and wonders what it would be like to unleash the lioness inside her onto these equines, like she so willingly would have—once.

"Speaking."
credits


@Septimus




[Image: 13716916_Rc8f5hGvZkB3cYP.png]
a war is calling
the tides are turned








Played by Offline Jeanne [PM] Posts: 79 — Threads: 19
Signos: 440
Inactive Character
#2

WE WERE HUNGRY BEFORE WE WERE BORN--


If you wander enough worlds, you learn to recognize a predator, no matter what sort of skin it wears.

In this case – from where he stands leaned against the wall of one of the shops in the market, watching the crowd with hooded eyes –, the predator is her. It is late at night, and the markets are alive with a throng of bodies, with dance and song and drunken laughter; the citizens of the darkling nation seem to be fond of revelry, even in the prelude to disaster. He is old enough (and, in spite of his youthful features, Septimus is very old) to recognize the tension that lines these star-spangled, incense-thick streets, the bright stroke of fear behind the glass-drunk eyes of the passerby. The ash-smoke and flame of volcanoes. The heavy brew of war like a growl of thunder on the edge of the horizon. He wonders if Denocte is always like this, so full of smile and song, or if it is only that desperate need to deny, deny, deny.

But. That is irrelevant.

What is relevant is the woman who stands in the center of the market square and watches the passerby. What is relevant is the neat curve of her neck, the dark tiger-stripes that interrupt the white of her coat, which is likely stark under the light of the sun, rather than the moon. What is relevant is that slip of violent red that curls like a noose around her throat, as though it has just been slit; what is relevant is her collar of teeth. And maybe those wild, burning blue eyes, visible even from some distance for the way that they catch in the gleam of wrought-iron lanterns. She is not drunk. She is not reveling. In fact, she seems deadly serious.

(And nothing, he thinks, that wears a necklace of teeth is a thing of peace.)

But Septimus has teeth of his own, jaws made to snap and tear – he does not stand apart from the crowd, but, in spite of his rather imposing stature, with great antlers and wings, moves within it. What lies beneath his skin is a thousand years (or two, or three; he loses track) of shape-shifting, of movement between spaces. He is never in one place for long, and he is certainly never one thing. He brushes shoulders with passerby, and they do not know that he is a witch-blooded thing who’s seen more centuries than he can count, and he does not know what they are either. One thing he does know: the woman who is wearing a collar like spilt blood is restless. He is restless, too, discontent among these walls, among these pretty, glittering things. Maybe that is what leads him to her, to part the crowd like a serpent slips through the grass and draw close to her side, close and close until he is sure that she can hear her over the overwhelming sound of the marketplace.

A low, easy smile rests across his dark lips, pulled just high enough to reveal the sharp curves of his canines. “Are you hunting something, Miss Tiger?” He inquires, with a curious arch of his brow, leaf-bright green eyes heavy with some indiscernible meaning.

He doesn’t sleep well within these walls, either.




@Antiope || <3

"Speech!" 





@









AND RARELY, IF THE WOOD ACCEPTS THE BLADE WITHOUT CONDITIONS
the two pieces keep their balance in spite of the blow


please tag Septimus! contact is encouraged, short of violence






Played by Offline Kat [PM] Posts: 146 — Threads: 25
Signos: 77
Vagabond Battlemage
Female [She/Her/Hers]  |  Immortal [Year 498 Spring]  |  15.2 hh  |  Hth: 28 — Atk: 32 — Exp: 53  |    Active Magic: Energy Transference  |    Bonded: Fylax (Gryphon)
#3

Antiope
acting on your best behavior
turn your back on Mother Nature

For a moment Antiope considers what these equines would make of her if she pulled her axe from its place just behind her shoulder and set it ablaze. She wonders what they would think if she suddenly started to draw upon the hungry magic in her veins that would make her stronger, faster, that would make her eyes glow.

What would they call her?

God? Devil? Perhaps they might think her a prophet or saint. A savior. But Antiope is none of these things, even if at times she has felt like all of them. After her creation, worshipped by the people, on the battlefield. In her non-death. When she killed her creators.

And when the boy of earth and leaves sidles up to her, her sea blue eyes turn toward him and she realizes something. She had seen him, standing there, leaning up against the market stall, but had looked past him. She would not look past him again, Antiope thinks, as he speaks and the points of his sharp teeth catch in the light.

"I am hunting for an old friend," she says but she doesn't elaborate on what friend. She thinks of certainty and assuredness, of satiation and reprieve. Of rest. What Antiope does not think about is Rezar, nor her daughter, for they were much more than friends and now they are only memories.

The markets are too loud and buzzing and buzzing and the lioness in her bones is rearing her head with eagle-sharp eyes, and everything inside Antiope is too big for this place. It pushes against her skin and presses against her ribs and she wonders if the antlered man at her side can sense it, if he can see it.

Why should she deny the hunting, if it is so obvious. Why should she deny the predator living in her skin. "And you? Is there something you wish to see hunted?" Her eyes glimmer in the firelight and her skin, it glows and glows under the dancing of the flames. Is it obvious then, too, that something other is inside of her?

"Speaking."
credits


@Septimus <3




[Image: 13716916_Rc8f5hGvZkB3cYP.png]
a war is calling
the tides are turned








Played by Offline Jeanne [PM] Posts: 79 — Threads: 19
Signos: 440
Inactive Character
#4

UNCOVER OUR HEADS & REVEAL OUR SOULS--



She looks at him, and her eyes are like the ocean – they are so blue. Septimus thinks that he could drown in eyes like hers, dense and dark with a meaning that he can’t quite discern. There are storms, there, and flashes of lightning, and he wonders for a moment what kind of a woman houses a storm inside of her skin, and what put it there in the first place. “I am hunting for an old friend,” she says, and her tone suggests that he shouldn’t bother to push her on the subject, strange as her answer seems; there is something to the way that she stands in the crowd, a lone bastion against the passerby, that makes him think that she is a solitary creature, untethered to any sort of companion.

Perhaps, he thinks, that is only because she hasn’t found that friend of hers yet.

In any case, she is out-of-place. He feels like she shouldn’t be here, among these crowded, incense-filled city streets; he imagines her like a tiger, deep in the jungle, low to the mossy ground. “And you? Is there something you wish to see hunted?” The question surprises him, but not so much as the way her eyes – distinctly predatory, and nearly humming with anticipation – gleam in the firelight, as though they are burning.

“I don’t know,” he admits. “There’s something I’m searching for, but I’m not sure that I can hunt for it.” He pauses for a moment, as though he is considering whether or not to tell her the truth, and sighs. “When I fell into this land – by accident – I lost…a bit of my soul. My magic, if you will. I’m not sure how to get it back.” That is true, but it is only a part of The Truth, which is that Septimus is looking for something far greater in scope than his magic. He is searching for a reason to stop wandering, a place that won’t carve him into two; simply put, he is searching for a home, even though he already has one. But the forest only houses his fae-blood, his wildling half, and there are tender, mortal parts for him that long for somewhere to rest, as mortal things, he’s noted, are want to do.

He tilts his head at her, then, dark wisps of mane falling into his eyes. “But I suppose that lays the groundwork for an extensive hunt – I’ve heard there are plenty of strange, magical beasts and eldritch locations in this land to search, and-“ his lips curl in the barest hint of suspicion, and, when he speaks the next word, there is more than a hint of disbelief in his tone, “-physical gods.”




@Antiope || <3

"Speech!" 





@









AND RARELY, IF THE WOOD ACCEPTS THE BLADE WITHOUT CONDITIONS
the two pieces keep their balance in spite of the blow


please tag Septimus! contact is encouraged, short of violence






Played by Offline Kat [PM] Posts: 146 — Threads: 25
Signos: 77
Vagabond Battlemage
Female [She/Her/Hers]  |  Immortal [Year 498 Spring]  |  15.2 hh  |  Hth: 28 — Atk: 32 — Exp: 53  |    Active Magic: Energy Transference  |    Bonded: Fylax (Gryphon)
#5

Antiope
acting on your best behavior
turn your back on Mother Nature

If only she could see inside his mind, to read his thoughts, she might find irony in the way he places her and the stripes sewn upon her skin in the forest, stalking the jungle shadows like a predator. She might find it funny, how accurate his assumptions are. Or, how accurate they once had been. It’s not hard for Antiope to remember that distant jungle kingdom that had once been her home, whose warriors she had wielded and controlled as she wields and controls her axe.

Whose people had worshipped her like a goddess, had been awed by all of the things that the gods had given her, had made her.

His eyes remind her of that jungle, vibrant and verdant and, perhaps, more keen than given credit for.

“I did not stumble into this world by accident but it seems it is hungrier even than a starving lioness,” Antiope says, though she does not say that the starving lioness is her. “It did not take my magic, but weakened it,” and she can still feel the way it doesn’t yield easily to her whims, the way it once had. It is temperamental and young, it fights against her and seems to mock her when it does not do as she wants of it.

A hunt is just what the lioness in her bones is calling for, aching for. Even just the word makes her stir, makes her focus sharpen. Hunt, seek, destroy. It is what she is made for, after all. Antiope had been made to save a world only by wreaking havoc on its people and its lands. Oh, the gods could have fooled themselves into believing their intentions were good, but had any good come of it but more death and more destruction?

And when he says it, this verdant-eyed-boy, when he says “physical gods” Antiope wants to laugh the same as the hackles of her lioness rise and adrenaline rushes through her like a low growl. The storm in her skin swirls, and she can feel a wave of red-hot pouring into each of her cells. “Pray that I never find them,” is all that she says, because she does not trust herself to contain the mantra of hate, hate, hate that lives inside her.

“I’ve yet to see evidence of magical things and places,” she says instead, after a too-long-moment, and the sea of her gaze rises up over the crowd and swallows each equine as she searches. Not to say that she has not seen magic, for she recalls the girl named Isra who made rubies appear in the snow and turned lanterns to knives.

And Antiope—walking, living, breathing evidence of a world’s magic and a world’s gods—would be foolish to write off such existences. Oh, perhaps she has not seen this world’s gods or lands pouring over themselves with magic, but she knows they must exist. She would be even more foolish to believe such things would not continue to follow her, to haunt her, long after she has hoped to put them behind her. She thinks there is not a place in this world or the next or any other that would calm the hunter calling her ribs residence.

"Speaking."
credits


@Septimus <3




[Image: 13716916_Rc8f5hGvZkB3cYP.png]
a war is calling
the tides are turned








Played by Offline Jeanne [PM] Posts: 79 — Threads: 19
Signos: 440
Inactive Character
#6

OUR TEMPLE, YOUR TOMB--



A starving lioness.

“I did not stumble into this world,” she tells him, “but it seems it is hungrier even than a starving lioness. It did not take my magic, but weakened it.” He tilts his head, something ticking behind his eyes – as though he has encountered a problem, and now he must see it solved.

He does not linger long over her words, but he thinks that this world is less of a starving lioness than the woman in front of him, though he does not know what she is hungry for – wild-eyed and with a presence that eclipsed the crowded marketplace around them. When she is here, he can almost forget that the crowd, hurrying about their business, exists, like she is the only other thing in the world; a vacuous, gaping space that swallows up the world around it.

“A strange consequence,” Septimus remarks, raising his brows at the tiger-woman. “What manner of magic do you have?” It is not simply his curiosity at the situation that prompts him to ask – he is witch-blooded, with wildly divergent magic that comes primarily from ritual, but he has always been fascinated by those with more inherent abilities, beautiful and rampant in their singularity. He wonders what magic would suit this woman, with her tiger-striped skin and eyes that are a storm at sea, with her necklace of teeth. Something destructive, he thinks, something violent - he cannot see her with a magic that makes flowers grow or stitches closed wounds.

His comments hit a nerve.

Unintentionally, of course – but he sees her darken, sees the lightning flare above the waves that are her eyes. Her voice is a growl. “Pray that I never find them,” she says, and he believes her, though these gods are not his to pray to.

“They are no gods of mine,” he says, that half-feral smirk, like a wolf’s, curling across his lips. He wonders: is she implying that she would kill them? Septimus is not sure that he would mind to see her try. The idea of a mortal – though, the more he looks at her, the less sure he is that she is a mere mortal; she feels too much like the half of him that is not, relentless and feral, the half of him that would hunt through the dark, tangling woods by moonlight, for want of blood in his teeth - clashing with something divine is exciting.

But there is more than the desire of a man for a beast beyond his skill in her voice. There is genuine resent - and he wonders what the divine have done to her.

She is quiet, for a moment. He does not dare to break the silence, though it hangs between them awkwardly, even uncomfortably. Then : “I’ve yet to see evidence of magical things and places.” Her gaze turns from him, towards the crowd – and she scans each face, as though she is still searching for that old friend.

He wonders if they are as strange and wild as she.

“I’ve heard nothing more than rumors, myself,” Septimus admits, “but I find that most rumors hold a hint of truth…I’d like to search for those places, if they might help me find what I’m looking for.”

(There is a part of him that wonders if this tiger-woman would hunt with him – perhaps they could find what they were looking for in this strange land together. But he dares not ask. Not yet.)

“But I haven’t introduced myself, have I-?” He chides himself inwardly. How rude, even to a tigress, to say so much without offering his name. “My name is Septimus. And you? Unless you’d prefer I call you Miss Tiger, that is.” The smile that pricks at the corners of his lips is genuine, and somewhat tame – he swallows the wolf, with his smirking and his sharp teeth, in favor of common courtesy.




@Antiope || <3

"Speech!" 





@









AND RARELY, IF THE WOOD ACCEPTS THE BLADE WITHOUT CONDITIONS
the two pieces keep their balance in spite of the blow


please tag Septimus! contact is encouraged, short of violence






Played by Offline Kat [PM] Posts: 146 — Threads: 25
Signos: 77
Vagabond Battlemage
Female [She/Her/Hers]  |  Immortal [Year 498 Spring]  |  15.2 hh  |  Hth: 28 — Atk: 32 — Exp: 53  |    Active Magic: Energy Transference  |    Bonded: Fylax (Gryphon)
#7

Antiope
acting on your best behavior
turn your back on Mother Nature

When he poses the question, the moment it is off his lips, Antiope takes pause. Her sapphire eyes look into his verdant green ones and she wonders if it’s a good idea to tell a complete stranger what her magic is. He seems quite curious, and she can’t be sure why without asking herself. Her magic had been born inside her from her creation. It has always been there, from the moment she breathed her first breath out of that marble statue she had once been.

She wonders what it must be like to not always have magic, and to one day come upon it. She’s heard of such happenings. Even as weak as her magic is now, Antiope cannot imagine being without the lioness in her bones. It is as much a part of her as the blood in her veins. “Transference,” the striped woman says at last. It is enough. She doesn’t know him, and she’s not quite sure that she trusts him enough to tell him everything that her magic is.

“What was the magic that you lost?” it is only fair, she thinks, that now she asks him the same question. Although if he chooses to disclose as little as she then Antiope would understand. It is easier at least to talk about something like personal magic. Something she knows and is familiar with. Something which is here and now, and does not make her think of times she does not want to think about.

His smirk is something of a salve to her anger, but moreso are his words. Not his gods, and neither are they hers. Which means the pair do not need to speak of them at all, and that suits her just fine. Truthfully, this is the first anyone has mentioned them and she hopes it will be the last. If she never hears gods spoken of again it will be too soon, and Antiope is all too happy when the conversation moves on once more to the magical.

It seems her strange companion has quite the interest in things regarding magic. Whether it is magic itself or places which might be magical in nature. Perhaps he hopes that in finding a place with magic filling it, he might somehow get his magic back? “Yes, it would be unwise to assume a place ripe with magic in its citizens does not have magic somewhere in its world.”

And if that is how it works, then perhaps it too would make her magic stronger. Somehow, however, that doesn’t quite make sense to her, even if the lioness in her bones perks up at the thought of being more powerful. It almost purrs at the thought, stretching languidly throughout her veins. Ah, how much her magic could do without the binds that now hold it.

“Please do not,” Antiope responds, blue eyes sharp and bright with the look of a smirk that doesn’t quite pull at her lips, “my name is Antiope.” And although she has just met him, Antiope finds that the pleasant, cordial smile on his face looks out of place. She prefers the wolfish, sly look, she thinks, because it very much suits her first impressions of him.

"Speaking."
credits


@Septimus <3




[Image: 13716916_Rc8f5hGvZkB3cYP.png]
a war is calling
the tides are turned








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