***
“Of course," Raymond replied, answering the question etched into the silent spaces between her words and in the warmth of her muzzle against his. He'd given her the punchline without the joke, the aesop without the fable; of course her tail would snap like a branch in a high wind. But the red stallion always stepped lightly - most certainly around affairs of the heart - and nothing strayed nearer to his heart than family. "Let's take a walk."The red stallion pulled back and flashed a reassuring smile, brushing his tail across her dark flank as he turned away toward the mountains.
When he was certain Calliope was with him, without lingering long enough on their shared silence for her impatience to flare, he continued. "Florentine paid me a visit yesterday. In case you were wondering, you're not the only one who isn't a fan of getting mail." He cast her a wry look, invoking the memory of their showdown in the Court with but a turn of his lip. The lilt of his voice seemed almost tailor-made for conversations on the road, rising and falling with his strides. Ruthlessly smooth; it did, at least, make the time and the distance pass.
"For context, she approached me before the Summit meeting, adamant that she could find Ruth with that, uh...magical dagger of hers. She opened a portal and went through it before I could stop her, so of course I had to follow." Blah blah, Champion of Battle and all that. Duty's a bitch, but it was not the duty of his office that had hastened him to her defense. "We wound up in the middle of a ruined fortress on a dead world, stayed only long enough to find Ruth's collar broken in the center of some kind of massive footprint." His step slowed. "Broken...and covered in a thousand years worth of grit and tarnish."
The wrinkle passed.
Raymond did not like magic. He did not like things beyond his control, variables that could not be balanced in the complex equations he juggled constantly in his head. But the most insidious variables were those left by the rift - monsters that scorned quantification, that seemed at once sentient and blindly idiotic. The rift was a dangerous bedfellow, and Florentine had been romancing its subtle curves since she was a child.
"She traveled by the same means yesterday when she found me in the Arma mountains. Maybe she got sloppy, maybe the rift got bored with her. Whatever the case, it spit Ruth out after her and slammed the door on both of us." He shrugged, shielding his perturbation behind a veil of devil-may-care frankness. The mountains were before and around them now, and behind them Vitreus lake had disappeared behind the ever-growing foothills. "If the healers of Terrastella are as good as they think they are, she might even live to tell you about it herself. But at least we found out what made those strange footprints. As for Ruth...."
Now the red stallion stopped. However cool and conversational his voice was, his tail had been swaying with the effort to bleed off buried apprehension. This was not a risk he wanted to take, for either of their sakes, but if he loved Calliope he knew that he must. She would never forgive such a transgression twice.
"Do you trust me, Calliope?"
Thunder rumbled faintly somewhere across the sprawling mountains.
***
Raymond
And at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
When the man comes around.
Raymond
And at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
When the man comes around.
@Calliope | <3
aut viam inveniam aut faciam
