[SWP] ACT VI: if you can dream

[Antiope]

Antiope

I can be your heavenly or I can be your hell

More equines come for the relic. They gather, jostle, to get closer, but still nobody makes for the chalice just waiting there in the center of the clearing. So easy, and yet, isn’t that the point? It looks easy, but nothing is ever as it seems. If it was as simple as walking up to the relic and taking it, the first equine here would have done so and been gone with it.

So what, Antiope wonders, is this island waiting for?

She knows what it is. Magic. Strange, wild magic. And it will no doubt put up a fight before it allows any of them to leave with the relic in hand. This island has done nothing the easy way, has been nothing expected. Why should this hunt be any less?

So when the world begins to tremble and shift and move, when trees begin to shed their bark and bushes their leaves, the striped woman doesn’t know what to expect but she knows its not the snake that forms, otherworldly and yet entirely of this world.

Antiope looks into her eyes that are not eyes as equines all around her jump into action and, for a heart-stopping second, she aches. It’s a floodwater cry, filling her, as she swims in those swirling ocean pools.

Of a mother: who has loved, and lost and been unable to protect. She feels in her her heart and her soul, like a burning flame, like a rushing lava flow.

For a moment, Antiope does nothing.

For a moment, she considers turning away. Leaving.

But this island, this snake, is a keeper not a mother. It called them here to challenge them, to test them, and she will not be frightened away. She pulls Theofos from behind her shoulder and speaks softly the axe’s name, and as it begins to blaze she raises it to swing down upon the head of the snake. Its hide of leaves and wood, she hopes, will burn.

"Speaking."

Antiope chooses option 1, surprisingly (to me at least lol)

credits