a war is nourished on her horn
*
The forest is a place made for unicorns. All the flowers and tall, butter-soft grasses could not hope to hold the wild edges of them, all the dangerous things that are promised by the tips of their horns.
Unicorns are made for the trees, for the shadows beneath their gnarled and ancient trunks. They are creatures to be whispered of and rarely seen.
Calliope too is made for the darkness and she's there, hidden from sight, watching the coming and goings of her court. She is not made for flowers and children and all the lovely, soft things that can be found at the festival.
Raymond (as she watches him sharpen his wicked blade) is better suited for this festival than she.
Calliope is made of war and justice. She is a downpour of righteousness and all the harsh edges of her body promise battle and stories too dark and full of death to share beneath the gentle dusk. She's too wild for the world of Novus, 'other' even in a world full of horses more fantastic and bright than anything she has ever seen.
It is not a good thing that Novus still holds a unicorn that has never been held by worlds and walls and crowns before. Nor has that long faded lion her bones known any cage strong enough to hold back the hunger when it takes.
Nothing good comes from the feral storm of Calliope once she's set her sights and let loose her rage.
She does them a kindness by keeping to the shadows and setting her scarred and silver gaze far, far from the children and the peaceful horses of the dawn. This land is not made for her and so she only watches, tight enough to snap with the way she has nothing to do here but think back, back, back...
Back to a time she has smoked out the dragons and tore them to pieces, to the way she lured sea-monsters to the shore so that she might flay them. Calliope remembers too well finding a underworld from the top of a staircase and the way she had to take the last breath of her sister in a merciful death. She has hunted sick, infected horses and electrified a river to save the healthy.
Oh, Calliope remembers the monster she's had to become over and over again to save those who are too weak to kill, to take their vengeance swifter and harsher than any wild, winter storm.
There is no shame in being the unicorn who lingers in the dark, who welcomes the blackness to flush out the monster too gruesome and grotesque to behold. Calliope regrets nothing, fears nothing. She is the reaper and death the blood-crusted tip of her horn.
And perhaps it's because she's thinking back to all the universes that have tried to hold her and could not that her voice is a little too much like a lion's rumble when she turns to the gray unicorn as she wanders across her path. “The forest suits you more than the glitter upon your cheek.” Calliope's smile is a little too fierce as she walks closer. It is the smile of a wild thing, of a unicorn untamed.
“All the fun is found out there.” She tosses her nose towards the fields where children scream and frolic and stories are whispered with touches and looks in the low firelight of bonfires. “Why do you not join them?” There is something in Calliope's deep silver gaze that promises more than she asks.
There is a world far beyond Novus and any possible reality in that bright, violent gaze of hers and the way it's framed only by dark skin and brutal scars.
@Pavetta
