Novus
an equine & cervidae rpg
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Novus closed 10/31/2022, after The Gentle Exodus

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Calliope
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#1


“She was beautiful and terrifying,
 savage and pure.” 

C
alliope finds herself at the lake not because it's beautiful or because it glints like steel on either side of those glass walls. She's knee deep in the marsh grass as far from the gold and wood pathway as one can possible be.

The lioness could care less about beauty or about the way fish flit like birds and other horses gasp and wonder at the secrets of the deep. She's here because of the glass feather that's clasped tight between her lips and the drops of blood it steal from her tight lips.

Here there was a war here that never came to a end. Here there is the almost dead trail of an immortal who still has secrets to spill (by blood or tongue). Calliope is here to hunt and hunting has never had anything to do with beauty and wealth. It has everything to do with black unicorns and white mares who live by vengeance and by blood.

The feather splashes into the water and sinks when she catches the scents lingering on a summer wind. Her eyes eyes spark with a storm and her lips clench like a lion's, as if there are fangs behind her smile instead of flat, rough teeth. Along her back lightning licks across her skin like a monster that lives only inside the scarred skin of Calliope.

Tonight she feels reckless and wild with the way parts of her skin don't feel like they belong to her anymore. She itches and she burns and she wants rivers of blood. Blood enough to drown a hundred gods in. 

And so she's not surprised when Shrike joins her, surely they both feel the same hunger rumbling in their hearts-- the hunger of a bear and the fury of a lion. Calliope doesn't doubt that Shrike needs no words to read that spark and dance in her dark eyes to know what it is she has come here for.

Calliope, the black unicorn, the last of her kind, has come to hunt.




@Shrike | "speaks" | notes: <3
rallidae










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Shrike
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#2



When the maze is finished with her, Shrike wanders the outskirts of the Night Court, alone beneath the stars, the distant bonfires reflecting crimson and gold in her dark eyes.

She is not the kind for festivals; she has never been, not even when she made her home alongside more than just a unicorn with a lion in her bones. Instead she haunts the edges, restless and watching, and the music that drifts to her does little to soften her heart.

Shrike doesn’t know what she is looking for until she finds it - but of course she should have known, because it is Calliope.

The paint hadn’t meant to return to the lakeshore, a crimson crescent that would go to silver as soon as the sun set behind the rim of mountains. It is the source of her shame and her fury and nearly her loss; when she sweeps her gaze across it now it is Raymond’s expression she sees, eyes tight on her like a blade to her throat. Shrike chuffs a breath like a bear into the hot summer night, and then lifts her head again and sees the unicorn.

Of course she joins her, running like a ghost across the whispering grasses, heedless of the tame horses across the shore. When she reaches the black mare she thrusts her muzzle roughly against her shoulder, a kiss with teeth, a reminder (to herself alone) of what they owe one another, and what they will yet give.

If she is surprised to find Calliope without the red stallion by her side, she says nothing of it.

Instead she only matches her pace, her gaze casting like a hunting hound’s between the lakeshore and the lion-heart at her side. This time there are no thunder-birds above them, and no black gods beside - this time, echoing across the quiet lake, there are sounds of laughter and joy.

But there are always monsters to be hunted, even on nights like this.




don't do much these days
keep the wolves at bay













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Calliope
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#3


“She was beautiful and terrifying,
 savage and pure.” 

E
ach drum of her heart is a knell, a tolling bell in her chest that sings and screams and chants. Blood and vengeance, rage and retribution, war and annihilation. It sings and screams and howls. Her horn, that old and weary blade upon her brow, sighs and quivers violently like a harp string that almost wants to be sweet and almost wants to be a religion.

Today her skin is nothing but a cage in the gilded prison of this world with its courts and parties and gods. It's the thing beneath it that drives her now, that lion, the dragon killer, the monster who knows that evil tastes like fermented wine and burns when it goes down. There is a dominion of righteousness that boils and smolders and stings inside of her and it...

It wants out.

It wants gods and birds and elk. It wants the flesh of mortals who smile while they have sins in their hearts and blood that runs black, black, black with hatred (black as her flesh). It wants everything.

Calliope aches with her need when Shrike presses teeth into her shoulder. They touch like bears and lions and beasts that devour. She wants to roar and shake down the mountains of this place, shake loose the statues of gods to nothing more than dust and dirt and decay. The clock in her chest has tolled, chimed out the hour and each ticking clang says, kill, kill, it's killing time.

And all the violence is in her gaze, in the fingers of white-hot and hungry electricity that covers in her a storm. Although that's not quite right.

Calliope is the storm.

“Finally,” She growls and it sounds like a prayer form her lips, a hallelujah for a blessing. “the beasts of this world have shown their teeth.” It's a dangerous thing that sparks in her eyes. Like Helen it's a look that could destroy entire worlds. But her look is not beauty and grace and poise. It's fury and determination and thirsty, thirsty blades.

Calliope is a graveyard, empty and waiting and raw.

“Are you as hungry as I?” And she knows she doesn't have to ask. She knows that there is a fury of violence hanging inside Shrike's heart. Calliope knows that each raw thing in her that stings and burns and craves has its mate in the bone and ruby mare.

But she still wants to hear the words.




@Shrike | "speaks" | notes: <3
rallidae










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Shrike
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#4



There is something different about the black unicorn, this night.

It is not a new thing, born of Novus and the time Calliope has spent with queens and goddesses and a red man whose smile curved just the same as the blade he wore. It is an old thing, one of feral magic and crooked gods and a world that shifted and shivered, and it makes a smile bloom on the paint’s lips even as her heartbeat quickens. The magic of the maze is still thick on her skin, in her throat, and beside Calliope the night is electric, a ferocity no swathe of stars could hope to tame.

Shrike wonders if this is what it means to feel homesick - except that there is also contentment curled in her chest, steady as a bear. It is almost a purr in her throat when she pulls away from the unicorn again, and a spark leaps between them. It hisses against her skin and pricks like a blade and does nothing to dampen the smile she wears.

Oh, this is what she has missed, a fire to burn the world clean. Not for the beauty of ashes from castles or to see what a god’s bones might look like picked clean, but to know another monster has paid for its crimes. Calliope is a guillotine, and Shrike a hammer, both of them crafted by blood for this purpose.

In response to Calliope’s words she only flashes her own teeth, and remembers the way it felt to have claws rake down her sides, to plunge into freezing water, to see the unicorn fallen. But she can find no regret in her heart when she looks into the eyes of the lioness, only hunger, only joy.

“I am ravenous,” she says, and laughs like lightning.



don't do much these days
keep the wolves at bay













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Calliope
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#5


“She was beautiful and terrifying,
 savage and pure.” 

T
he three words that fall like hammers and blades and weapons of war from Shrike's lightning laugh knock loose things in Calliope. Her love, her weakness and her loneliness feel like a doe living in her chest. One that has lifted its nose to taste on the air gun-smoke and sweat and simply said in the language of forest creatures and unicorns, no more, no more, no more.

That doe turned and ate the hunter, licked up steel and lead and smiled when it made her teeth ache.

All of those things like love and forever and ever-after rise up from her like smoke and dissolve into the summer air like dew. Only this thing between them, toothy kisses and scars that match like stars and moons, survives. There is only fury in her steps, in the cracks of lightning that work over their skins like whips, only a hurricane in her eyes that turns towards the mountains and then further than that.

Calliope looks at the world as if it is thin as air, thin enough that she might look into the very core of it, to the magma and stone and fire. Far off, perhaps, a thunderbird feels that gaze and ducks behind the shadow of the moon.

Perhaps it already knows that there is no universe in which a lion will not come to strip it like a goose.

She pauses, hoof poised in the air like a doe, like a lion, like a unicorn. Each gleam of moonlight catches on her like a bullet, raw and gold where it should be silver and sweet. It should look like water, like a dream. But Calliope dreams of her lips touching fire instead of river water, bone instead of fruit, fury instead of peace.

Oh, she has learned there is no peace to be had, not for black unicorns, not for her. Not ever.

And so when her hoof falls back to earth it clangs like a meteor, like a dragon falling from the sky (like death). Her eyes blaze when she looks at the sky, hoping that the gods see the thing in her that wants the thing in them-- wants it dead. It batters at her, over and over again.

“The gods here are as guilty as all the others. Guilty for their beasts that they have no control over, guilty for their tricks.” Overhead a summer storm starts to roar, perhaps feeling the fury of Calliope, waiting for her to find the deeper, stronger magic in her that's from another world.

Somewhere too far away to see a Rift trembles, knowing that it has not been forgotten after all.




@Shrike | "speaks" | notes: <3
rallidae










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Shrike
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#6



If they were any other horses, if they were not a bear and a lion, if they had not lived as sisters and queens blood to blood (and horn to throat) Shrike would have said oh, I have missed you.

Instead she only tells Calliope by the press of her shoulder, the flash of her teeth, the way she will match her stride-for-stride wherever they run. When the unicorn looks to the sky Shrike turns her own dark gaze upward, and watches a bolt of lightning cleaves the sky in two. When she closes her eyes, for a moment afterward the image lingers, a world gone white and shadowless and stark.

Thunder is quick to follow, rumbling at the border of the mountains, but it is the black unicorn’s words that echo down and down. “Guiltier still,” she says, and remembers the way they stood outside the collapsed rubble on the summit, the way the gods voices echoed as they bickered, the way the disasters and monsters followed. “For they chose these actions that resulted in the deaths of those that prayed to them.” Her voice is bitter, her ears laid back. The Rift, at least, had no gods to speak of. It was only magic eaten by disease.

But these gods -

Shrike’s gaze shifts to the mountains, to a cleft in the stone where she knows their monuments wait. It does not matter that she has no magic of her own, does not matter that the bear waits no longer in her bones, does not matter if her fury and her righteousness will never be enough.

She begins to run anyway, pale as an after-image of lightning, a burning mark upon the world.






don't do much these days
keep the wolves at bay













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Calliope
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#7


“She was beautiful and terrifying,
 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.
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Shrike
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#8



Shrike knows this world is like the maze.

It is a pretty thing, a twisting thing, a thing with shadows underneath. It makes promises of glitz and magic, it offers wildness and reward, and in the end it is empty, empty, empty.

Even as they hunt them, unaware their prey the gods have abandoned their cathedrals and their country, the paint’s thoughts run faster still until they become memory. The mountain shearing up above them in the distance might be Mount Corenth of Ravos; the gods might be no gods at all but beasts of the Rift, sick with magic and power and oh, so hungry.

When lightning flashes above them Shrike tosses her head, eyes searching, half-expecting and wholly hoping to find the flock of thunderbirds returned. She is nothing without a foe, nothing without something to stand and fight, and beneath her feet the grasses shiver and bow. Everything is silver and strange in the storm-light, and she does not wonder whether the roaring in her ears is only her blood or Calliope’s breathing or something else, something more -

and something does hear them running. Something yawns wide to meet their battle-cry the way the maze had not, the way the gods here would not, and oh! Shrike’s battered, fearsome heart swells to meet it, too.

Step for step she matches the unicorn, and her teeth are flashing wide as a bear’s grin even as Calliope turns toward her, wearing her own smile.

And when lightning sears the sky and thunder follows like a war-drum Shrike’s laughter is lost in the wind and the noise as the unicorn takes a step into the feral magic waiting for them.

As she has before, as she will in every world that her sister asks it of her, Shrike follows.







don't do much these days
keep the wolves at bay













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