He walks now beneath the summer boughs, bending low their arms to caress him with dark leaves veined in silver. The stream tumbles alongside him, laughing over the sound of birdsong, the sound of wind in the branches. His coat is sleek and copper-gold and if it were not for one of his antlers, snapped just after the first tine, or the thin scar just behind his ribs, he would look as at home as a god in the shadows of the trees.
Oh, but Lysander knows by now how far from immortal he is. It is not a lesson he will forget. It is not a lesson he will forgive.
But there is nothing in him now that suggests such mortal thoughts as vengeance. His eyes are bright and green as leaves just unfurled and the breeze combs its fingers through his unruly mane, tugging him forward, further into Amare.
It is not love he seeks at the creek, where the willows make small sanctuaries and the stream conceals small sounds. Love has not been kind to him here, where the courts and festivals are more savage than the wilds. He is not sure, in fact, that he seeks anything at all – but he listens nonetheless, his ears turning, his eyes watchful as a raven’s.
When the birds fall quiet, when there is the whisper of feet moving through underbrush thick with vines, when the small waterfall seems to warn him hush, Lysander lifts his head and waits. Something flickers in his eyes, too quick to read – but it isn’t love. It is nothing kind at all.
Calliope has not come to the forest for love. She has come to hunt and her nose is lifted into the breeze as she winds her way through the trees. But even as she tracks she is training and the forest is soon alive with the blur of her, black and strange against the bright green and copper colored wood.
Where the trees have fallen she leaps over them, tucking her knees to her chest. She flies over each dead oak and her hooves make the sound of a summer storm wind when they cut through the dying leaves. Barely do her hooves touch the ground as she floats along, they leave nothing but a trace of passing in the soft dirt and pine-needles.
Someone was here, the forest seems to say in sighs of branches and birds, but already we have forgotten who has come this way.
In the place where a tree twice as wide as her has fallen she leaps upon the trunk. There she balances, light-footed like a lion might be, with her head arched high upon her neck and her horn flashing black, black, black where the sun filters through the thick canopy of summer leaves. Calliope is impossibly wild here and when she rears and leaps upon that fallen tree to perfect her balance it seems she has long ago shed the mortal skin of a horse.
Calliope is more than a horse tethered by politics and gods and lovers past. She is a unicorn, one of old, one of legend. There is no land in the world that can tame the fierceness of her and despite there no longer being a lioness waiting right below her skin all the killing instincts are still there. This place has not taken that from her-- not yet, not ever.
And when she carries on, stepping from the massive tree as if she has wings to float her down to the group, there is a burn on her lips, a sting in her stomach. Calliope has found her prey, his alters announce him far sooner than that smell of grape leaves and old, ancient musk. Strange smells for a horse to hold on their skin, she thinks, especially a mortal, scarred one.
When he turns she could smile for that flash of something vicious in his eyes. Calliope knows the look to well on herself for anyone else to hide it. She too is an unkind, brutal beast of a mortal. There is no dip of her head to greet another of Dusk. She has not forgotten the way the others talked about his story so meekly at the meeting.
It was what made her seek him out soon after. Calliope understands far better than most the idea of vengeance, retribution and justice. She is a reaper of righteousness and it's there in her eyes as she crosses the water to join him where he lingers on the other side.
“I have been looking for you.” Her voice is a bell chime and it rings no louder than a whisper over the bubbling of the creek. Something in the way she stands, hooves barely leaving prints in the ground and her tail twitching over and over against through the water at her back, gives away the blood-lust in her veins.
Never has Calliope been denied retribution for an injustice, not for her and not for the kingdom that lies swallowed up by magic in her past. Universes and dimensions could not stop her.
She moves closer, dragging her tail from the waters, and lifts up her nose to touch the broken antler that is sharp enough to hurt (a weapon given to him unintentionally). There is no tenderness in her touch, only a cold assessment that brings a flash of a smile to her lips when a shard of antler pricks her skin and stings.
“What will you do about this?” Her horn taps against his horn as she asks and it sounds like the faint tap, tap, tap of a war drum that has not yet begun it's song.
Lysander watches her break from the trees and cross the stream with the single-minded intent of a predator, and thinks that he should not be surprised.
But he is, just a little, and pleased as well – though he does not show it, except for a secret in his eyes. Oh, she does not belong in this world; she reminds him of Artemis, of Athena. She reminds him of the summer storms that would sometimes roll in over the sea, lightning flashing like teeth.
The once-god has never met the lion-hearted unicorn, but he remembers her nonetheless. She is (it only wounds him a little to think it) more of a legend than he, no matter his lives, no matter his deeds.
“I don’t know whether to be frightened or flattered,” he says in return, and the grin that creases his cheek never makes it to his eyes. They are consumed instead by a curiosity that verges on hunger. Ah, she is a ravenous thing; even standing there in a setting fit for any unicorn she cannot hide the lion that waits, starving, in her bones. She is as distant from the domesticated, jewelry-draped citizens of this place as he is. More so, perhaps, and Lysander is not ashamed to admit it.
He watches the water shed from her skin like rain, like tears. Once he had met a unicorn from whom poinsettias sprang, bright and new, from each cloven print; what might spring from hers?
Lysander says nothing as she touches her muzzle to antler, splintered and pale as a broken bone, as though she is knighting him or blessing him. He watches her through dark lashes like he’s watching through a thicket, and a smile blooms on his mouth at the sound the weapons they wear make together.
“They will fall away in winter,” he says, leaning away when she is finished with her examination, and begins to pick his way along the stream, all nonchalance. “And be reborn in spring, whole once more.” It is not an answer to the question she has asked and he knows it.
From over his shoulder he watches her, the darkness of her swallowing up the little light that filters through the canopy. Almost, almost, he asks why she left Velius. (He wonders, had she stayed, if she would have hunted him for a very different reason).
Instead, he flicks his tail and says, mildly, “Do you know the difference between a man and a monster, Calliope?” When he licks his lips, he remembers the taste of copper and iron. When he breathes, he remembers anticipating the last of those breaths. “Both of them are beasts. But they cannot be punished the same way.”
Perhaps it is a good thing that she doesn't remember him from Ravos, doesn't know that he can claim once having god-blood in his veins. Better that she doesn't recall how she promised to drain all the gods of their blood, so that the mortals might be free.
Had she known she might have been temped to pluck his heart from between his ribs just to ensure no depraved Gods might make it back to Ravos to enslave and punish the foolish for being fools.
There has never been a god whose vengeance could compare to hers. It's more immortal than them, that purpose that burns like a star-fire pyre in her soul.
Still she's disappointed in him, for the way he seems so happy to give away his life, to let nature have it's way with him. Some part of her, some brutal part that has been made to be a monster, a sinner, a destroyer of life, wonders if it would be a kindness to kill him now. It would be so easy to slice across a heart vein. Lysander is but a horse and what is a horse to her?
Calliope remembers exactly how much pressure she needed to drain Shrike of her agony, to shred through her neck like silk with that vicious point of her horn.
But follow him she does, stalking his shadow in a way that makes no secret of the fact that she's still something 'more' despite the lack of magic in her veins. It is a god's mistake that he makes, to turn his back to her.
She's content to stay in his shadow, it's the better position in the end and she doesn't trust him, not yet. He is a thing she cannot understand, careless and begging for death. When she looks back she smiles, it's wicked and it stretches the scars across her eyes. Her horn suddenly seems too black, blacker than all the spaces between the stars, blacker than death and it's easy to remember that upon Calliope a horn is more than just a horn.
“A monster is driven by instinct, by blood and need. There is little thought to a monster but survival. I have killed enough of them to know better than you, stallion.” It's there, in the flash of her silver eyes in the sunlight the memories of dragons and wraiths and phoenixes. Her eyes are white enough, in that light between the trees, to look like the bones of her kills picked clean and bleached by the sun.
“But a man,” She says, and all the branches seem to sway away from her in the pause of her words, away from the unicorn who holds too much violence in her bones. “A man knows what it is he does and what price he might pay for his sins, however much he forgets it in the moment. They always remember..” There is nothing gentle about her when she speaks, no whisper of salvation, of wondering philosophy.
Calliope has always known exactly what the world is made of.
“And I have always known the difference between what payment I must collect from them.” Finally she draws up beside him, that tail of hers flicking in that small space between them. It's a promise that tail-- a promise and a warning.
The creek doesn't seem like it's made by the gods, not now. With Calliope so close the water seems like it is made only for drowning.
Lysander has been taught fear, now (one of many lessons he is sure he will learn from this mortal body, this bloody beating heart), and so it is strange that he is unconcerned with the devil at his back. Maybe he is just a fool – wasn’t that the other lesson they’d meant to teach him, with their hooves and their teeth and their knives, their breath reeking of wine and petty hate?
Not even he knows why he isn’t afraid of the unicorn, though he would never admit as much. He was not made to care much for mortal things; was it not the touch of magic, wild as a maenad, within Florentine that had first drawn him to her, that birthed his fascination?
Calliope is not so different from a maenad, either. She knows the taste of blood, the sight of it on snow or sand or new green leaves.
And so he ignores her disappointment, ignores the gaze that burns on his back in favor watching the ground along the stream as though searching for a secret. (It is something of a secret he looks for – a secret with leaves gathered in fours, and a particular pattern in pale green, and small pale blooms).
But he listens well to the rough smoke of her voice, as she talks of monsters, and he does not forget the smile she shows him.
“And which are you?” he asks softly, never questioning her knowledge (he knows she is right). As she draws up beside him he pauses, and bends his head low toward a patch of fuzzy moss pale as gossamer. A useful thing, but not what he is looking for.
When he straightens again it is to meet her eye, as her midnight tail whispers against his copper skin, and her horn is strikingly dark against his antlers of bone. “I know which they’ll call you. And that they would hunt you like a dog if you gave them a reason. Has your magic left your bones the way mine has?”
Again he starts forward, with something like a sigh as the grasses bend and shiver beneath them.
“All men are sinners, Calliope. It is what makes them men.” If she were to hunt them for it, she could not stop until she had slain them all, eradicated the courts for new owners: blood, and death. But here he pauses once more, and tilts his head toward her, and there is something darkly curious in his eyes – a keenness Florentine has never seen. “But how would you see these punished?”
“I am neither man nor monster.” There is a violent thing lingering in her voice as she turns sharply towards him. As Lysander lifts his nose from the moss her horn is there, waiting. It traces along the curve of his neck, sangs on his hair where the edge of it is chipped and worn from slaying. Her horn is a wicked thing and it suits the low growl of her voice well.
That low rumble of a lion that echoes in her words seems so natural here in the woods with all the other wild things that hunger and kill. “And if they come they will find not a dog waiting for them. All they will find is a unicorn.” There is no denying she is something other in a land of civilized horses, a legend of a creature, half-forgotten but not gone.
Calliope has always knows exactly what she is, what she is made to be.
The way her horn flashes in the low, forest light whispers that there is no hunt too long, too hard, too full of terror and pain for her.
She is unlike the rest. She is the last of her kind. The last unicorn who knows how to channel that purpose in her bones into something more than greed. She is the last and she is more, more than any monster, man or dog could hope to hunt.
Calliope's gaze is steel as she meets his, plain and hard with no lightning sparking in the silver of her eyes. And when he ask of magic she only shifts her gaze back to the useless, sharp curves of his antlers. There's judgment there, glacier cold. “The magic is gone, yet my bones are no weaker from the loss of it. I fear yours may have turned hollow and as thin as butterfly wings.” It is a very good thing she doesn't know to call him a god, another potential monster of the broken, dead Ravos.
When he pauses her hooves follow and all of her is poised as if to leap, as if she is balanced precariously on the very air itself. She looks so very like a scale there, frozen at his side, and the way that her horn sits higher than the rest of her suggests that it might need blood and balance to keep her from collapsing upon the moss and grass.
“Blood is to be paid in blood.” Calliope doesn't say more, doesn't need to do more than sink her weight down into the soft, wet ground.
She doesn't say that she alone has paid death back with eradication more times than one.
He falls still as a figure carved from marble as her horn traces its deadly edge against his skin. Oh, it is still not fear that his heart stutters and jumps with, not fear that makes his flesh prickle when her horn passes by, light as the touch of a spirit.
If he is lucky, Lysander will never find himself at the killing point of this creature again again.
No; she is not man, not monster. She is a woman and a weapon and more frightening than either.
He does not attempt to answer her words. Instead he only meets her stony gaze, one eyebrow raised, and inclines his head just barely, just enough. Lysander cannot help but wonder then (out of cold curiosity and keen interest both) what form her death would come in, some day, years and miles and scars from now. Perhaps it would never come at all.
Once again her judgment fails to stir him; the copper stallion has long been comfortable with what he is. Just as she could be nothing else, he is well set in his ways, a wheel that’s been turning for centuries. He knows well the scent of blood, knows even what it is to die (if such a death as his have been can be considered that at all, impermanent as they are) but battle was never his way.
“My body has only ever been a vessel for more important things, regardless of what world I walk in.” With a shrug he steps forward again, though he is ever mindful of her horn, her eyes. But then a corner of his mouth pulls down, wry, and he tilts his head as if testing the weight of those curving antlers. “Though perhaps you are right, and that is true no longer.”
Blood is to be paid in blood, she says, and for a second he allows himself to imagine it: crimson gilding his antlers, scarlet flecking the bronze of his coat. Would the night king fall as silently as he had? Would his companions? Lysander thinks of a knife half-hidden by the snow, a broken blade reflecting a thin gleam of moonlight.
There is something satisfying in picturing it, and he lets the pleasure curl low in his belly, deep and dark and cool.
But then, at last, his gaze is snared by something that creeps across the ground like a dying man’s hand. Carefully, slowly, he eases forward, examining what grows there in the dappled shadows and sunlight. The blossoms were tiny, translucent as moth’s wings, and they shivered beneath his breath. The plant has four leaves, patterned like the back of a snake. Contractorium mortem - devil’s lace. Lysander grins, and it is a private, savage thing.
Delicately he bends his antlers to the soil, and he is grateful indeed for telekinesis as he gently plucks the blooms and leaves and winds them around the pale tines. Once he’d worn a crown of ivy – this does not feel so different, though it is far more deadly.
When he straightens again, it is to turn toward Calliope, toward the Dusk Court. His smile lingers, his eyes as bright as the leaves that crawl along his antlers. “Well, I have found what I came for. I hope that you do too, unicorn.”
He does not think he will mind the long walk back.
@Calliope closing this one here, but I'd love to see them talk again
There is a coldness to her focus as she watches him. For a moment she's all predator and he's nothing more than a sly fox. All the shadows and cleverness cannot save him, not now with her so closer.
The longer he talks the more she thinks he is something wrong, something that should not be. Lysander reminds her of those gods back in Novus, with their apathy and crooked smiles that say more than their words. Only the adoration of Flora saves him now as she watches him lower to that wicked, deadly flower. Perhaps her curiosity too save him.
Calliope is curious as to what end he plucks death from the forest floor, what gravestone he plans to bless. If it's the wrong one there will be no gentle touch of her horn to the tines of her antlers. The only way her horn will point then is straight at his heart.
His would not be the first heart to feel the end of her horn and Calliope doesn't know that she'd want to save his.
“Careful.” The words are a blaze of warning and her smile turns to some leonine sneer of tooth and rage. There is a thunder of a roar behind those teeth of hers as she turns to watch him go. His plant is too sly to be called justice, too underhanded.
As he fades into the forest she only watches, horn pointed low with a promise he'll never get to see. Not yet, not until he too shows himself to be nothing more than a man made to sin .
One day, perhaps, she'll tear him apart just to see what devils he holds inside that vessel of his flesh.
Distantly she follows, far enough away for the forest to devour the sounds of her hunt with birdsong.
