Antiope remembers the sea. Not that the sea is easy to forget here, it is everywhere, but she remembers the sea of her home. She remembers it being the first sound she heard when she woke from the statue. The temple of the gods who had made her, it stands on a cliff overlooking the sea. The sun rises right into the columns, bathing the entire structure in golden light during the early mornings.
She hadn’t known the sea for long, because once she and her sisters had been crafted, the gods had sent them away. Perhaps one or two of them had been stationed in a place close to the sea, but Antiope had been sent to the jungle, where she became the warrior tigress.
The last she had seen the sea of her home, it had been awash in red. A sunset so deep it had obscured the entire world.
Antiope wades out into the tepid waters, which eat hungrily at the lengths of her mahogany and ivory hair, dragging them beneath the surface and then releasing them to allow them to drift and float upon the surface. She has never swam in the ocean before, and she can feel the current pushing and pulling against her body as she goes, further and further. The sand and stone is strange beneath her hooves, not quite solid.
Behind her the court is a shadow, a sentry, watching and standing guard over the woman who dares to go swimming in the sea when the sky is barely light enough to chase away the stars. But Antiope has never been a good sleeper, especially now, and she wanders too much and rests too little.
So she presses further into the water, until her hooves can no longer touch the floor of the ocean and she must kick her legs to keep going. Until only her shoulders are cutting through the dark mass of the waves and everything below is hidden.
When the wave comes, it is like the maw of a massive beast—opening wide, wide, wide—and it swallows her entirely, dragging her down beneath the water. For a wild moment Antiope tumbles, and rolls, and forgets which way is up and which way is down, and her hair is wrapped around every part of her. And then her lungs are begging for air, for breath. For a second… for a terrible, horrible second, she wonders if she almost-dies again if Rezario will be there when she wakes up.
Like last time.
But then the lioness in her bones is comes awake and Antiope gets a burst of strength enough to untangle herself and push up until she breaks free of the water. Her eyes are still glowing, fiercely bright and golden, when her hooves touch the shore again.
Antiope is dripping saltwater from everywhere but even from her eyes, because as angry as she has been at everything, she has never properly mourned him. Either of them. And she looks back over her shoulder at the ocean, and all she can see is it red, red, red.
She doesn’t notice the other equine standing there at first, doesn’t think about her long strands of hair pasted against the curves of her body or the fading of her strange magic-eyes to jewel blue. “Isra,” Antiope says, and it is something of a broken hello.
Isra and the golden shoreline
" for wild wolfish women with sharp teeth and sea in their hair "
From the cliff, with the wind whipping against her shoulders, Isra had watched Antiope come to the sea. Even when the other mare took to the tide she stayed on the cliff with the starlight cool upon her back.
Fable is flying lazy circles over her head between the thick early morning clouds. There are dewdrops forming on his wings that fall like promises on her spine we he flies low enough to whip a whistle of air through her horn. It is going to rain today. He says and Isra only looks out to the horizon with the dark pooling clouds. She shivers.
It always feel like it's going to rain. Even when she dreams it's rain and running, rain and running.
The roar of the waves brings her back to the earth and she looks away from her dragon to watch Antiope swim deeper and deeper into the black sea. From her vantage point she can see the waves far from shore gathering, and gathering, and gathering with the horizon storm. Isra is already running down the cliff when the wave crashes over Antiope.
Fable. She bellows down their link but the dragon is already diving into the ocean, nothing knows how the riptides go better than him. It's in his blood-- the pull of salt, and brine, and sand. Rocks are dashing themselves against her hooves only to become rubies and seeds rolling wildly down to the shore in the wake of her. She does not stop (running or turning the world into something else) until Antiope rises from the sea.
The first things Isra notices are her eyes, golden like ichor and god-blood. She steps closer and her own hoof prints leave puddle of golden where the sand has been pressed down beneath her weight. It's the anger though flashing through all that gold, that makes something in Isra perk up and howl. And later she won't know what it is that made her laugh to hear it in her blood and see it in Antiope's eyes. Later she might call it madness, the way she starts to laugh like a wild thing with the sea roaring out a denial behind them.
But for now she is laughing (and it leaves a taste like viciousness on her lips, like freedom, like alive, alive alive). “I thought the sea might have claimed you.” Laughter is still leaking through her words-- laughter and something deeper, darker, blacker. Fable peaks his head up through cresting wave and there is a fish hanging from between his teeth. The sight of it makes the blackness a little more like moon-black dappled silver.
She steps closer and the whole shore ripples and sheds it's skin of sand. With no more than an inhale it's rubies, and bone-white coral, and golden ore stretching out around them. It all seems like brightness to chase away the coming sun. And maybe it's a little like Isra is telling the sun to turn away because the night needs not the warmth of it.
Antiope doesn’t know why Isra is laughing when she emerges from the water, but her words almost make the striped woman herself laugh. If only Isra truly knew her. Antiope, who has killed gods, claimed by the sea. That would be laughable indeed, a truly pathetic end to the life she has lead. Or perhaps a poetic one.
A girl, who killed something that should have been immortal, killed by something as endless and deep and wild as the ocean. Killed by the thing that is the color of her eyes.
“I am not so easy to claim, Isra. Don’t worry, you are not rid of me yet,” she says, taking a few steps closer to the queen. Her now-blue eyes follow the path laid clear by the unicorn down the cliff and across the beach. “Do you always leave rubies wherever you go?” It is the second time, she’s noticed. Rubies, like drops of blood, like fields of poppies, spread out behind her.
But in a moment, there is more than just a path of rubies. Soon the whole beach is rubies and gold and white. For a moment, Antiope feels like she’s looking at some abstract representation of herself. She exhales, a little short, a little tight, and turns back toward Isra and the sea, where Fable rides out in the waves with his fish. It makes her glad that she managed to get free herself.
The redness is still spreading over the water, she cannot help but see it. Like blood, like the burning of a sunset And something inside the woman still feels trapped out there, tumbling and rolling beneath the waves. She pulls her hair strand by strand away from where it clings to her body, wrings the seawater from it and twists it high up into a bun on her neck.
“I miss them,” Antiope says, and her lungs are tight with the admission. But she has to learn to say it. She has to learn to let them live in her heart, instead of trying to forget that they existed because it hurts to remember them. The striped woman thinks back to that first day that Isra and she had met. She thinks that, of all the rings she had drawn broken that perhaps hers should have been it.
Isra listening to a song
" and while the waves crash in an ivory glance; "
For a moment there is only this--
Two women on the beach with something as black as the bottom of the sea in their eyes. A dragon in the water with only his head rising above the ways. A storm in the distance, roaring softly enough that they think it nothing more than a sea kissing the shore. Brightness dotted with rubies that gleam in the soft light like blood on the skin of a god.
And then the rest of the world starts to trickle in like rain through a broken window on an old house.
Isra realizes all at once that she's laughing like a wild thing (or like something gone mad). She swallows it when Antiope speaks and turns her eyes back towards the sea. One of her ears strains towards the waves. For a moment she looks as if she's listening to a song, a siren-song, that only she can hear. It's still ringing in her ears when she looks towards the shore glimmering in the moonlight. Magic hums in her veins-- louder, louder, louder-- until it drowns out the deadly song of the sea. “I am glad for it.” She offers instead of saying all the ways in which the ocean never gives a choice to stay or to go.
The sea takes everything in the end. Everything
Far past what she can see of the horizon is the land she was born in-- a land where mares are still praying to drown.
Fable dives back beneath the waves streaking across the horizon like comets instead of white-froth riptides. Isra's ear turns back towards the cliffs and her city flower-smoked and lit up with rows and rows of bonfires. She remembers herself, remembers that there is magic enough in her blood to make the sea a field of roses and the salt diamonds. “Sometimes,” She says between the roar of the sea and the distant storm. “when I think about death I do.” Isra brushes their shoulders together and each bloody ruby turns to amethyst and opal.
“Who?” And she does not pull their shoulders apart when she asks the question. Instead Isra leans into Antiope as if to say, stay with me
Antiope cannot help but wonder what it says about her that the queen seems to leave rubies behind whenever they meet. Is it because of her, or is it because of their circumstance? She thinks of death a lot, it is a difficult thing to break herself of. If she is not thinking of Rezar or her daughter she is thinking of the gods or the lioness in her bones is prowling, prowling, prowling.
Antiope was made to create death, even if that is not what the gods had tricked themselves into believing.
But when Isra brushes her shoulder against the striped woman’s own, she can almost forget that. When the rubies beneath their hooves turn purple and shimmering white she can almost remember that she does not want to fight here, in this world. That she does not want to succumb to the lioness’ hunger, or the starving of black things like loss and oceans big enough to swallow even her.
She takes up Isra’s weight easily, the darkness of their coats blending together in the night. She takes up Isra’s weight as if to say, I will. Because she has no plans to leave, and nowhere else to go. Denocte is her new, her start again, her atonement. “Rezar,” his name is easier to say, always so much more willing to ride the edges of her thoughts, “I loved him. If I had had him long enough I would have made him my husband.”
Her heart catches on the words, like a hoof on a root or a rock. She trips over it, very ungracefully, very un-Antiope. She never had the chance to do such a thing, back then wouldn’t have even truly understood marriage or what it meant to make him her husband. But now she knows, and if he had suggested it she would have done it readily.
“Our daughter,” Antiope has to prepare the word, has to let it sit upon her tongue long enough to protect herself from the pain of it before she releases it into the world, “Chara.” Her sapphire-bright eyes close, shrouding the sea and shore and the sky in blackness. All she can see is her daughter, so small and fragile and innocent.
Antiope breathes in deeply, and her stomach swims in anger so deep like the ocean. But it is only a fraction of the anger that drew her to Corellon, that carried her to the steps of the temple on a river of self-righteous fire, that fueled her in a battle that ended with the death of 4 gods. And this, she thinks, must be why Isra turns the world to rubies when they are together, because she is a harbinger of the end.
Isra and the words on the wind
“The past beats inside me like a second heart.”
I know, oh I know, it's a terrible thing I'm doing. Pushing our shoulders together like this-- like we're sisters. Like I'm asking her to stay here when there is this endless hunger gnawing at our stomachs like acid creeping out of the earth's core. Like I'm not looking at the sea, listening to it sing and roar and remind me over and over again there is a world waiting.
And I know--
I know it's terrible that I'm asking her to tell me the names of all her sharp places and how exactly the drops of blood fall from the wounds. Is it like rain? Or is is like ash falling from the sky thick enough to blot out the sun?
All my blood is like ash now and something more like oil when the new moon hangs too low by my window, like it's looking at me and waiting (or is it wanting) something just like the sea is.
Fable thinks it's just pieces of the sea, our sea, leaking though but I know better. I've always known better.
When Antiope stumbles over the words, like her throat has moths pooling in it instead of sound, I understand. There's sharpness in the sound of her voice and maybe a little of sea-salt too. The way I learn against her now doesn't seem so terrible, not when I'm drawing a line of their names through her tangled mane. If I ever lost my children I would want someone to do this, paint my skin in their names over and over again until there was only ink on my skin, black and shining like blood at midnight.
Of course I would devour the world then and no one would be left to braid all the names of my sharpness in my mane.
I'm still braiding names into her mane when I remember a story I heard once back in that old life that's just now starting to creep back in like winter through the broken windows of my soul. It's been long enough that I can't remember the mare's name, but I know that the color of her chains was golden instead of silver. Dandelions, she told me when I would curl into a sliver of moonlight and beg it to dry my tears, are for more than wishing. They can send messages to other worlds too. And I remember taking the seeds she gave me. I remember blowing them out the window and watching them float away like diamond-dust, to what I hoped then was another world.
It's easier than breathing to turn the shore into a field of dandelions, petal-free plumes of seeds waiting for the wind. I can feel it gathering, the storm wind in the distance like it's my heartbeat. Soon it will howl and Fable will tell me it's time to go home so that the sea can't pull me a little deeper in the tide like it always does.
But for now I'm still here doing the terrible thing of leaning against Antiope like I'm begging her to stay even when the winter draft in my bones is starting to scream at me like it's time go. “If you could tell them anything again and you knew there was a way for them to hear it, what would you say?” My ears feel like they are aching against the sound of the sea, and the promise of the howling wind. The answer is too important for me to miss.
It feels, this pause where I've stopped braiding names into her hair, like this is the secret to blocking out the draft and making the fires roar even in the dead of winter.
The feeling of Isra’s touch in her hair is as rhythmic as the sea, as their breathing. Each strand of hair that drags across her neck is like a prayer, or a ballad. Like the strings of an instrument, Isra plays with gentle care and purpose. Antiope stays there, with their shoulders pressed together and the reminder of her hate pulsing deep inside her and all of her missing things spilling from her like a river.
There are things that she knows: what she is and what she is not and what she wants to be. That the press of their shoulders feels something like kinship, that she would stand here all night and allow Isra to braid every fallen soldier and lover and child into her mane. That something about here feels foreign and right in all the best ways. But her sapphire eyes look at every seed spread out before her and she isn’t sure she knows what to message to give them.
Antiope thinks of the hundreds of things that she would say to them if she could. That she loves them, which they would know. That she’s sorry, even though she knows there’s nothing she could have done to stop the gods and nothing for her to be sorry about. That she wishes they were here, even though its impossible and they are anyway, in her heart, if she will only let them be.
There are so many words on her tongue, so many wishes in her thoughts and wants in her heart. She looks at the field of dandelions at her hooves instead of the beach that had been there moments before. Her blue eyes are too bright and too sharp and the warmth of Isra leaning against her shoulder is more comfort than she could ever ask for. Antiope breathes.
She wants to be poetic. She wants to be thoughtful and witty and poignant. But as the storm rises up over the sea and the distant wind wails its promise to her ears, Antiope glances at Isra from the corners of her eye, and instead she says the truth. “I would say goodbye,” her voice is softer than the wind and the sea, and drifts like a fall leaf upon the air.
Her heart aches and burns with it, cries with it, because she has never thought about how true it is. She never got to say goodbye to them; one moment they were there with her and then they were all but gone. Stolen away, ripped from her life and this world. Her anger had sought closure in the destruction of the ones who had made her, but when everything inside her became sharp and black and red, all the soft parts of her were lost.
“I never told them goodbye.” In the end, it’s the one thing that hurts the most.
Isra and the taunting horizon
“We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.”
This reminds me of what sorrow should feel like. It used to feel like this: touches in my hair and sea-salt crystallizing like snow in the corners of my eyes. Sometimes it even felt like winter piling up on my spine until I'm as heavy as the mountains and dipped in bone-white. And it still feels like weight, but it doesn't feel like drowning to me. Not anymore.
It feels like walking into the sea and drinking until a desert stretches out bloody all around us.
I want to tell her that she's still softer than me, better than me to turn away from war when the sorrow comes to call. I'm always turning towards all that blackness reaching out for me from a place across the sea with a smile on my lips and a spark in my ocean eyes. The sea brushes against our hocks, calling me home and onward and deeper, deeper, deeper. Antiope is looking out towards the roiling sea and the roaring storm and I wonder if it's going to call her home or push her home like a tide. I want to ask her if she can hear it, the way my magic and my fury and my want is howling back at the thunder. But instead I push my nose into her mane and hum instead of scream.
“There is a place on the other side of this sea where the gods of death wander among the mortals.” The words tumble out of the place where my lips meet her skin. I want to swallow them like it's an accident, like I'm not telling her all the ways in which I plan to take that awful world from them. I want to pretend that I'm not telling her that if I can I'll pass along the message as I walk through the darkness and devour it. There's more to say but I leave it alone even though it cuts on the way down when I swallow it.
There are a million things I should have said to her instead. Maybe I'm sorry or I understand would have been better.
Lightning streaks across the sky, highlighting the lines of Fable as he rockets from the waves. He looks almost terrifying like this, like he's not full of longing and a hundred dreams of all the stories I've raised him on. In the storm he looks like he could consume an entire world (just like the one across the sea). Let's go home, he says, the sea is too cold tonight. I say nothing back through those wonderful, awful lines between us. Instead I brush an invisible line down his wings when they blot out the moonlight. He understands.
My skin feels just as cold as the sea when I pull away from Antiope. It aches when the wind streaks through my mane like needles seeking blood. “Let's go home.” The lighting is starting to reach for the cliffs and each time there's thunder I can feel it humming in my blood like I am up there in the clouds instead of half in the sea and half in a war. If I stay here I'll have to answer the call of it and neither of us is ready for that. Not yet, not yet.
“I'd love a fire.” I don't say that I am a fire; I know I don't need too. She'll know. “There's a story I'd like to tell you once there are walls holding back the world.” Maybe she'll know that the need the walls to remind me that there are other in this world besides two women with suffering and hate in their hearts. Maybe she'll know there are parts of me that need a cage.
I turn towards home and do not look back towards the sea because I know what I'll see there twinkling on the horizon like a dare. My eyes still blaze though as I look at my, our, city shining like a sun in the night-dark.
“There is a place on the other side of this sea where the gods of death wander among the mortals,” Isra says and her words are like a whisper of wind upon Antiope’s skin, warm and soft. It passes over her like a shudder, like a delight and a thrill and a chill all at once. Gods who walk among mortals as death sounds all too familiar to her, only the gods that she thinks of can no longer walk among the mortals they had once controlled.
The thought eases her, if only a little. What she had done, at least means that they will never hurt anyone the way they had hurt her, again. She wonders where this place is that Isra speaks of, and what sorts of deeds these gods of death have committed against the mortals they wander among. Some part of her aches for them, and another part angers. Both are the parts of her that have lost something.
The Queen pulls away from her and Antiope’s sapphire sharp eyes turn to follow. The chill rushes in where the other woman’s warmth had been. She is cold, colder than the sea and the sky and the breeze. Let’s go home, she says, and the striped mare is not startled to find that when she thinks of home now she thinks of this place, rather than the jungle that had once claimed that title. “Yes,” she agrees, turning her back to the sea.
Yes, to home. To remembering and learning and, just maybe, letting go. If her heart can bear it, if she can bear it. “I would love to hear it,” Antiope says. Soon, they will be sitting by a fire, but only for light, only for warmth. They are already burning enough to set whole worlds ablaze, time and time again. She can’t help but think that, for all the things she has left behind, there are more important things in front of her, just waiting.
Perhaps the first step home with Isra will help her find them.
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