“She was beautiful and terrifying,
savage and pure.”
savage and pure.”
A
storm is gathering in her even as there is another above her. A hundred different bolts cleave the space between air, and bone, and muscle. Each bolt strikes crookedly in the pattern of a name. Fantome, Caligo, Vespera, No and others. There are endless bolts of names inside her and each is a crack of power, each a lash of fury that drives her on.The storm runs with her over the meadow and when it's reflected in the lake it looks large enough to consume a world. Calliope runs and she's a killer, and a hurricane and a lion who devours sin.
Maybe if she knew that the old rift was waiting for her, rising like a rotten phoenix in the mountain pass, she would have paused her running and thought of Raymond, Eik and Asterion. Maybe she wouldn't have stopped at all, maybe she no longer cares for anything but retribution and Shrike.
But she doesn't know and she's still running heedless, and feral, with a piece of her soul running beside her. They run like a bear and a lion that don't belong in this world of courts and laws.
Calliope belongs with the feral magic, with blood on her teeth and bones of beasts at her hooves. She belongs in a world that will whisper to her the secret to ending gods. The rift knows this, it knows she wants to end all the rot, and decay, and sin in every world that has ever been. It knows Calliope is running like a reaper through the tall grass.
The rift knows she's running for war.
So it rises up to meet the two mares with violence in their hearts and lighting names branded into their bones. It's a tidal wave of rotten magic that looks a little like water and a little like old, molded decay soaked in like.
Calliope doesn't even pause. She only smiles at her sister. And when she takes that last step into the wild-place where gods and magic die---
When she takes that last step she roars.
@Shrike | "speaks" | notes: Calliope out.
