always we find one another
*
The storm comes quickly, the thunder barely more than a rumble of her heartbeat before the sky flashes white and green and bright enough to blind. It feels like a super-nova of power above her, stars made not of fire and stone but electricity born between the clouds where the wind grows violent and starts to churn into spirals of clashing air.
Above feels like death, and the darkness glows green, green, green. Calliope thinks that perhaps the heavens should glow red like blood and suffering instead of a green the color of new turned leaves.
It's not the storm that drives her into the caves like it drives the other horses. A memory chases at her, whispers that there is something in the darkness below. She's reminded of the tower that went down below the earth even as it towered into the sky. There were other caves too, filled with sick monsters that wanted only to eat, to spread their plague until the world and the sickness consumed itself.
Calliope is no stranger to caves, to the underground. Below is below regardless of the towers, mazes, storms or plain unchanging earth above.
But there is something here, something tugging on her soul as the past often pulls on the unicorn's soul that forgets nothing. It's a tang of copper on her tongue, of roses, of sickness that no magic could cure that drives her on deeper and deeper into the darkness. There is only one horse that has ever made her teeth quiver in her jaw with metallic sting just by the color of his skin.
Her horn feels like fire as if a star hangs and smolders on the tip of her weapon and the air taste like burning skin when she runs her tongue over her lips. It could be glass that she walks on for her hooves echo and chime out like a bell when she walks on and on and on through the darkness like a hungry wildcat.
And then he is there, faded cooper turned green from age and moisture. His face is no less monstrous than Calliope remembers, three eyes instead of two and skin that reflects strangely what little wet light there is below the earth. He is as lovely and terrifying as ever and had Calliope not once known the sadness of his soul, the way he wanted only not to be lost. It's too dark to see if he still wears the mark of her horn across the skin that protects his heart.
Above the thunder roars again and she wonders if he hears it and thinks of a lion blacker than night when it echoes against the sharp cave edges.
“Are you still sick?” She asks and it sounds as much like a sob as she could ever make words sound. It sounds like blood, like suffering, like the tearing of her soul. Calliope does not want make fresh the memory of his blood drip, drip, dripping upon a floor hard enough to bear all the weight of the universe that gathers whenever the two of them meet.
@Vhet
