[P] Beaten paths are for beaten men [Complete]

[Raymond]

Passing safely through the rift three times was not enough to grow complacent. It was a treacherous road - a steep cliff made of nothing but steeper cliffs folded in on themselves and woven into a web of unnatural misery - and if there'd been another way he would happily have considered it.

Creep around outside a bear cave long enough, eventually the bear will wake up.

But the world was moving on, taking Calliope and her fires with it. Raymond could either join her or die in the collapsing riftlands with Ruth. He had sharpened his blade for the occasion, seeking serenity in an old whetting tune. The calico peered wild-eyed at the rhythmic sway of blade against stone and pawed at the trailing hair on every third stroke. So passed the morning, much like any other, but mornings end.

- - -
Raymond stumbled into the open field under the night's watchful eye, the drone of Summer insects breaking across his consciousness like a rogue wave after the nightmare of silence that preceded it. He whirled where he stood, menacing darkness with a swing of his tail blade, sucking in air through the unbearable tightness in his chest. Beads of blood welled up along shallow claw marks tracing both shoulders.

Awful pragmatism (and a healthy dose of shock) stayed the urge to shout her name. The rift, ever a cruel mistress had with the wave of a proverbial hand torn out whole sections of the tapestry of reality as he knew it, letting the frayed threads flutter free like exposed nerves. The red stallion's battle-ready muscles twitched and jumped with no foe to cut down.

So he did nothing, made still by the weight of his own powerlessness, and wrestled together a sense of composure through shallow breaths and the ruthless utility of reconnaissance.

The field unfolded on all sides like a plush carpet, dotted with the bulbs of dormant summer flowers; the night sky seemed equally vast - but infinitely colder - overhead. Nocturnal sounds receded to white noise buzzing in his skull. He caught the scent of someone familiar on the warm air, but all that remained of Ruth clung to his flesh the way that Ruth herself could not.

Calliope was somewhere close. There was much to be done before he allowed himself the privilege of mourning, so he turned his back on the smoldering remnant of the riftgate and started walking through the unfamiliar territory, tail blade at the ready.

Raymond.
and at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
when the man comes around

@Calliope

[Calliope]

– Calliope –
here we are, turn away now

*
There is a shiver in her flesh as the night settles around her in the meadows. The air smells like smoke and oil and she can taste magic on the breeze-- old magic, sick magic, rift magic. First she thinks it has found her here, those monsters she marked for death and buried in their own  caves. Calliope quivers for the battle she thinks is to come, happy that the lighting doesn't lick across her spine at the promise of pain.

Their deaths will be more satisfying when she delivers them with her horn, hooves and teeth. She misses the lion in her bones enough to crave feasting on the flesh of the damned and dying.

But then, oh but then.....

The weight on the air changes, shifts and it smells like the color red, red, red. Suddenly her hooves are flying across the grasses, swift as a storm and as silent as a lioness. Her body is feather-light as she runs but her soul is heavy and she feels like the distant fires might sense her guilt and burn down to soot and embers.

Calliope deserves it,  for the many times has she left him, lost to her hunt, her vengeance, her heartbreak. There was always Shrike and Raymond and now he is all that is left of her kingdom. They are the last of their kind, the last of Velius, of her broken and forgotten kingdom. When she finally finds, him that wicked blade lifted high and ready she wants to smile, to feel a thrum in her heart for the sight of him.

All she can see though, is the shallow claw marks filled with blood and no calico cat in sight. The only taste on the breeze now is fading rift magic, sweat and the sharp, bitter tang of sorrow. Calliope closes the distance slowly, as if approaching a wild creature who will fight to the bitter end. Even now she has not forgotten how the loss of Shrike made her mad with blood-lust, how she killed every dragon she came across.

When she's close enough for him to see the sorrow in tightness of her body, the sadness, the guilt, she presses her muzzle to the claw marks across his shoulder. “I'm sorry.” The word chimes like a bell, one that rings endless and alone over the wasteland of all the things that could have been (should have been).

She's reckless with the blade of his tail. Raymond is the only one left that she trusts to care for that wicked, frozen heart of hers.

Her touch lingers, saying all the things she cannot bring herself to give sound too. She's sorry for being a hard queen to follow, she's sorry that she has been so careless with his devotion. Calliope is sorry for everything and it's there in her sliver, scarred eyes as she tucks her black shoulder against his.

@Raymond

[Raymond]

Movement advanced out of the stillness, a black velvet shadow against moon-grey prairie grass. Raymond's neck arched in unison with the purposeful rise of his blade only to loosen again as the familiar form of his lion-queen took shape. Even expecting her to be waiting for him - even having caught her scent on the alien air - the red stallion's heavy heart twinged with complicated relief at the sight of her hale and healthy before him.

Complicated because he had risked - and lost - in her name and felt the sting of that half-formed resentment like a wicked thorn in his throat. Because given the chance he could not promise Ruth he would have done anything differently. Her loss seemed preordained, and for someone who believed in neither fate nor coincidence it was a bitter pill to swallow.

He valued very little beyond his own principles, and this moment here reminded him why.

Raymond didn't have to say the crossing had gone gone poorly. She knew by his naked solitude in Ruth's absence, how his muscles spoiled for a fight when he would not. He straightened, retreating behind the obfuscating correctness of a soldier's stance, and offered a perfunctory salute with the flat of his blade. She pressed past sparring reach and into killing range, the touch laid against his wounded shoulder a queer mixture of remorse and her usual brazenness. His skin shuddered as though fly-bitten.

Clearing his throat, the red stallion tried to win back the momentum of a debate they weren't having. Calliope's softness - so different from her usual predatory silk - caught him off-guard.

"So it goes," Raymond replied, the adage delivered perhaps a touch more harshly than the spirit in which it was meant. He brushed a reassuring lip along her striped shoulder.

She felt solid enough.

"Do you know anything about where we are? I hope you haven't been waiting here on my account." In that, he sounded almost cheerful; a stranger would never sense the fire beneath his skin.

Raymond.
and at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
when the man comes around

@Calliope

[Calliope]

– Calliope –
everything I touch isn't dark enough

*
Raymond is anything but a stranger to Calliope.

She knows the pragmatism of him as well as she knows the quick and violent vengeance of her horn. He is all that is left of her old, weary bonds. The last connection of Velius, the last horse alive who remembers the maelstrom of her rage, the way her mourning was no quiet sorrow but a wave of blood and bones and fire. Raymond alone knows the scales of her morals, the way she tips and teeters and welcomes the monster she must be to met out payment after payment.

The world is a dark place, full of sinners and monsters that kill in the name of joy and a nameless sort of hunger. He knows her in a way no one else here will. Are they both not comfortable killing in the right name, for the reasons they think are just? He is the courtroom to her gallows walks, necessary but delivering of the same end.

There is a beast in Calliope, a lion of judgment, and there is no world that can tame her as much as their connection might one day.

But today is not the day and she allows him to slide back into that soldier stance, to lift that blade high to distract from the tension of his shoulders and the sadness that is nothing more than a fleeting comet in his eyes.  

Calliope promises in a gaze, in a touch to this sharp angle of his cheek, that she will find Ruth for him if she can.

“I would always wait for you.” There is no obvious tenderness in her words, she hides it well with a toss of her head towards the castle not too far away. They are the words of a sword to its shield, an echo of their blades that teased and clashed back when they first met.

She can still remember the way their weapons sparked like a sun in the darkness of a world turning upon itself.

“We are in Novus. Here the monsters wear the same faces as we do and hide their follies and sins behind crowns, laws and love.” Her smile is bold, a flash of teeth that is no less fearsome for the way it's between the lips of a unicorn rather than a black lioness. “This world is better suited to you than I to it. They will not know what to make of me.” Another might have laughed, smiled in a way that suggests she knows exactly what to make of this world, but Calliope has not laughed in years and she wonders if her amusement might sounds like rust and rot.

It has been a long time since she as felt as content as she does walking across the fields beside Raymond. Not since Shrike, not since the whispering promise that this world might hold another mystery of the way her sister does not feel like a forever kind of loss in her soul.

Yet the way her tail tangles about his as they walk is far simpler a promise than all the secrets Novus might hold for two warriors who have long since lost all the things they thought they knew. And for a moment, as brief as the blink of her eyes, that is enough for reckless Calliope.

@Raymond

[Raymond]

I would always wait for you.

The words bring a smile - fleeting, perhaps, and shadowed by the grieving steel of his heart, but genuine all the same. Calliope waited for no one. Her agenda was her own, her convictions a constant flame, and one could sooner lasso the wind than contain them. Such a statement was high praise indeed from a woman who had little patience for such things.

Don't worry. Raymond wouldn't let it go to his head.

He quirked a brow at the dark unicorn's description of Novus. Political intrigue was either a great hobby of his or one of his oldest nemeses, reaching as far back as the coup that had shaken him loose from the comfort of tradition and into Calliope's orbit in the first place. He indeed reveled in the frantic spinning of cogs in a society's sprawling, over-complicated clockwork, but inevitably someone would get caught in the gears.

That usually sucked, unless it was the right person getting minced. The red stallion fancied himself pretty good at stacking the odds.

"Oh, I think they'll figure out what to make of you in due time," he replied blandly. Calliope was a storm sent to wipe the slate clean. She may not have been Raymond, but there are always dragons to slay, always tyrants to bring low, and she would learn where to focus her merciless eye.

The red and the black fell easily into step, a gait born of his military precision and her energetic purpose, and that would have been enough. But her tail interwove with his and he very nearly missed a step but for the almost mechanical nature of his movements in the first place. That he did not immediately reject the touch surprised even him.

Raymond was not often touched. Perhaps because he seemed every bit as sharp as his weaponry, or perhaps because he kept few close friends. Perhaps because there wasn't really any way to address this particular elephant in the room without explicitly making a dick joke. But suffice to say he could not recall the last time anyone - let alone a woman he respected and admired - took hold of his weapon with such easy confidence.

See. Dick joke.

Moving on.

A comfortable silence fell across them as the pair of them parted the grass seas before them, headed...wherever their footsteps would lead them. "If what you say is true, then we need as much information as we can get. There's no use stabbing at shadows."

To swim these waters, they would need allies. For what, he couldn't say. At the moment they were but two old soldiers, bound together by honor and the strangely easy sweep of their tails, marching onward into darkness.

So it goes.

Raymond.
and at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
when the man comes around

@Calliope

[Calliope]

– Calliope –
The wrath in me explodes and the sins of men are found

*

Everything about this moment is a new feeling for Calliope. Her skin burns where it touches him and her muscles quiver like a coil wound too tight. The meadows are too kind for them. The flowers are too soft with out gemstone and metal edges. Dusk is too gentle a place, too lovely to hold the two of them and the way their bones promise righteousness and blood.

Raymond is perhaps the only one who knows the violence of Calliope's beauty, of the way there is a war in every step she takes. Even here, calm as she is with her tail twisted about his there is a blaze in her a eyes, an inferno of a promise.

It's a fire of a storm in her gaze as she turns to him, pressing her lips to his cheek. “What information will you gather?” Calliope doesn't promise to join him. She has always been the one to  lunge at the shadows and see what monsters might be driven out from the darkness at the tip of her ravenous horn.

Calliope is a shark and she has never pretended to be anything than a predator. There is no current she can pretend to swim, no tide she has not tamed.

Perhaps that is why she has ever needed Raymond. He is the killing that hides, a viper in the grasses that strikes quicker than her lightning. Calliope likes her lightning too much to hide. Always has she wanted the monsters, the sinners and the crooked kings to know exactly what is is that comes for them.

“Who will you be here, Raymond?” Besides mine, she wants to whisper against the place where his crest blends into that mighty spine of his. To her he will always be of Velius and the only man who could brave the viciousness of her storms. Calliope wants to ask so many things of him now that her vengeance has settled and her sorrow whittled down to a dull ache.

In the end she only whispers with the rumble of a coming storm that is still too far off to feel in the bones. “There is a dragon here.” The blaze of her eyes drifts away, both in a dangerous sort of hunger and so that she will not be tempered by the cool logic of Raymond's gaze.

Her horn flashes in the moon light and the fires crackle and hiss all around them. The bonfires are too confined for her. Calliope prefers her fire to bite so that she might swallow them up with the ice of her purpose and rage.

Only the twist of their tails stills her and holds her body here in the soft fields with Raymond. Anyone else could never have stood a chance of holding her back from storming the gates and tap, tap, tapping the war drum ring of her horn against stone.

Only Raymond.

@Raymond

[Raymond]

Who will you be here, Raymond?

The red stallion did not doubt that Calliope suspected exactly how loaded such a question would be. She was every bit as deliberate as he, if in a different way, and though they'd never really spoken much of all that came to pass before their first fateful meeting in Ravos, she had known him long enough to recognize that he was not simply her muscle.

She would not have suffered his presence for this long if she thought him simply her muscle.

His gaze focused on something far beyond them or the present as he let the question echo in his mind. Who he was was whatever he needed to be to do whatever he believed needed to be done, and often that mantle was neither heroic nor glamorous. He had assigned a price to the secrets of his own kind and fully embraced nihilism as a creative force. He was not a noble man, though his loyalty to the lady of lions gave him leave to play such a role.

"I'll be myself," he murmured with a knife-edged smile as he curled into her mane, drawing in her familiar ozone scent.

The weight of the words straddled the gulf between self-confidence and bitterness. It was the voice of a man unafraid of shame and toil, who knew in the dim twilight hours when both sun and moon slept that he answered to no law but his own, and that life could be valued, bought, and sold in the name of greater goals. It was the voice of a man who lived the life before Calliope. Perhaps she would not like that man so well - but then, he reminded himself, that was the one she knew first. The one that looked her in her ice-shard eye and promised that if he ever saw the need to destroy her, he would tell her first.

Calliope spoke of the dragon and he arched a brow with silently vexed intrigue. Raymond had stopped her from killing herself in the pursuit of dragonslaying before, and were she not presently entangled he was skeptical of her restraint now. To Calliope it was more than a vendetta; to Raymond, it was a math problem - and there were too many unknown variables to solve for X.

His tail constricted slightly around hers, a red serpent with fangs eternally bared begging temperance from the wrathful arm of Zeus himself. "Be patient," Raymond leaned into the plane of her shoulder and breathed for her ears alone. "I will reach out - find out what makes these people tick, and the faces of our foes. Perhaps we will learn how to slay your dragon, if it is the real enemy at all. I trust you've already taken steps to carve out a place for yourself."

Raymond took nothing for granted. The accounts of a few biased individuals did not a full story make, and the swordsman did not pick any side but his own.

The red stallion disengaged, unwinding body and blade from the dark unicorn with only a flicker of hesitation in the way his blade traced the shape of her tail brush bare millimeters from its surface. "I guess I'd better get started." Raymond tilted his head with a jaunty smirk. "Networks don't build themselves." And he had a feeling most of this would be on the final.

Tipping his blade in a parting salute, the red stallion backed away from Calliope and turned toward the heart of all movement within Terrastella: the Dusk Court.

Raymond.
and at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
when the man comes around

@Calliope; exuent stage left

[Calliope]

– Calliope –
there is no surrender to be found here

*

“I would expect nothing less from you.” Calliope doesn't hide her approval of him. It's there in the way she presses her nose against that sharp edge of his cheekbone. Had that lion still lingered inside her chest it would have purred for his honesty.

It's the reason Calliope is glad Raymond has stood through the storm of her. Calliope is too passionate to tolerate his trickery, too full of her blazing righteousness to stand for lies. Long ago Raymond made a promise and Calliope made one right back.

They have always known exactly what it is that they are. She knows he's more self-serving than full of ravenous justice. Raymond is the water to cool the fires of her, no less deadly for the way it too boils when her fires run too hot to stand. The rift was unkind when it lead them down, down, down through all the possible worlds and ended where Novus began.

But perhaps, they are made to discover worlds together and tear down the walls that do not suit them and all the ideals of freedom they hold to.

Perhaps they are made for each other. The way she feels adrift when he untangles his tail from hers suggests that Calliope, for the first time, doesn't want to feel so alone or forgotten.

Patience, he said. “Until then.” She offered back as he promised to seek out those who deserved to be marked by her.

When his shoulder was pressed against hers and his nose tucked to her neck it was easy to feel patient and restrained. It was easy to forget that a forest burns and Flora waits back at her castle with a heart that knows what it feels like to shatter.

It was easy to forget that she burns.

The moment Raymond crosses the last hill and fades from sight Calliope is again an inferno of need, hunger and rage. Patience is nothing more than a passing whisper, a word her blood won't let her remember.

She turns towards the wilds, the distant smoke and the desert that promises monsters. Calliope lifts her nose to the wind, inhales just once and lets her hunting begin.

@Raymond
<3 until next time