Calliope kept far from the roads connecting Terrastella and Denocte. Instead she stuck to the sea, the cliffs the places ruthless and dangerous enough that few horses linger in such places. She reveled in the sea-spray that would dust her skin, the rumble of the waves against the rocks that promised a storm was coming, that dared to try to sweep her out to sea.
It feels like a battle of a journey, a challenge, a becoming.
It's not until she reaches the mountain passes that she stops to linger, to carve symbols of justice into the charred gravestones of trees. Calliope is covered in soot as she pressed her nose to scattered bone. She's frozen with hate as she feels the smaller bones of birds crunch like sand under her hooves.
By the time she passes the remnants of the once wilds, she's full of rage again. But understanding just starts to eat way the sharp, violent edges of her anger.
There are more payments than one that she journeys to Denote to collect. They are different sins, each terrible and only one feels like a knife cutting through her heart with a broken, dull edge. One is as red as the setting sun or a blood moon. One has broken Calliope as much as she can ever been broken by a thing such as love.
The city is quiet before her when she finally alights on flat soil again and the road in echoes like a hollow thing beneath her hooves. Ahead there is a flash of red, foolish enough to be so easily found when he surely knew she was coming for him.
Calliope feels like a dragon, a thing that might breathe fire and turn him to ash for leaving her behind. Surely no other unicorn but her might have this sorrow and heartbreak raging inside them. It feels like a mortal wound. She moves to walk against a wall of stone that makes some structure she has little use for. The shadows feel like salvation when they cool her sweat.
She's close enough that he might see the rage sparking in her eyes like comets. There is no smile on her face as she taps her horn four times against the stone. One time for each step she must take to close the distance between them. Each of those taps sounds like a word, a war-drum, a eulogy. How lovely her horn sounds when it talks in her rage.
What.
The first echoes, bouncing off her skin, sharp enough to make her grind her teeth together.
Have.
The second rings like a gong and rises over them like thunder.
You.
The third sounds like an end, a peel of a church bell as it tolls the death of an era and the start of something else.
Done.
The last feels like a touch of lightning, a shriek of a storm, as she drags her blade against stone. Her ears lash back against her skull for the sound of her own rage is stinging and too shrill to bear with mortal hearts.
She feels like she might run him through if she pulls her horn off that wall at her side, so she leaves it there and watches him with rage and demand.
Calliope isn't sure she's even breathing as she waits for him to say anything all. The bones and the beach seem like nothing more than a half-remembered dream. Perhaps she's still stuck in the rabid, hateful rift and Novus is a place that doesn't exist at all.
But this, watching him and feeling like her soul is caving in, feels to real to be nothing more than a nightmare.
BUT THE BEAUTY OF HER FORM BRINGS VIOLENCE
A LONG AND LOVELY FALL NO WILL OR FIRE CAN OPPOSE
Raymond knew Calliope had come before she properly arrived the way one can always taste a thunderhead on the horizon. She crackled and roared like distant thunder in stark contrast with the subdued sounds still clinging to Night Court's neglected atmosphere. And, as he'd felt in the remnants of his note, waves of tumultuous rage came hard on her heels.
Even as she stalked toward him, all lion hunger and aggression, the red stallion stood almost sedately in the place he'd occupied on her arrival, his expression watchfully unreadable as he took measure of her.
The unicorn may have been closer to him than anyone after Ruth, but there was never a moment that passed that he did not view her as a threat. Even friendly dogs bite; even still waters drown - and Calliope was neither of these.
The tapping of her horn against stone counted out the time before the tsunami of her anger broke against his shores. He hardly moved, grey eyes fixed upon blue, the imperiously sharp lines of his body arranged with immovable self-assurance. He gambled that the swarthy mare would no more run him through than he would open her throat, and in that gamble he turned out to be correct.
She halted before him, and for the briefest fraction of a moment the silence between them stretched like a thunderclap, then -
"Calliope!"
The smile stretching over his lips, the jovial tone of his voice were incongruous next to her seething, roiling emotion. He tilted his head invitingly and knew without caring that he was playing with the fires of her temper. He felt wholly justified in his actions, especially given the result, and not even Calliope's fury could provoke him to shame.
"You got my note." Of course she got his note. "This place is something else, isn't it? The decor is a bit much, but I'm sure something can be done about that now."
Raymond. and at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
when the man comes around
He smiles, white breaking up the blood-red of his coat like a flash of a moon between the clouds of a red, red sunset. Calliope imagines, boldly and violently, using her horn to pluck out his smile as she once tore the bones of monsters out of their broken, diseased skin.
Still, her heart beats like a traitor between her ribs. It hums for his smile and the way it makes a masterpiece upon his face. In the end it's her heart that saves him. It hums and keeps her horn against the wall when it clamors for blood and revenge. Her horn wants to tear into his chest and her heart wants to move closer just to see that he's unmarked by dragon rage.
This feels as personal as the killing rage once felt, that beast of a feeling that sent her screaming and hungry across the Riftlands for the eradication of monsters. It feels as if she should turn and go back, back, back to Terastella.
Once, Calliope imagined that Raymond would never falter as the others had. She believed with all the passion of a unicorn that they were the two things that no world, monster or magic could change.
But this red warrior who smiles before her rage is not the Raymond she knew. That Raymond would never be so foolish to send a letter to her as a politician might.
Finally she moves close enough to feel his heat (still she doesn't want to touch him) and her throat rumbles like a lion's might when it faces the wildebeest that thinks it might survive such rage. Her hooves clang on the stone like a gavel. She sounds like a war encased in flesh as she moves closer to him. That horn of hers shreds the stones that have grown weak with age and flakes of earth look like ash where they fall on her face.
Calliope promises violence with every inch of her.
She tries to forget that she knows what his lips feel like when they set her skin aflame more than any bolt of lightning ever did.
“You sent me a letter,” Each word is a growl and all of them a single drag of a hoof. They rattle against the walls. Calliope imagines that she might raze the entire Night Court with this recklessness boiling in her veins like a volcano. “to tell me that you left.” She's close enough now to bare her teeth, to snap at the air beside that smile of his. Part of her wants to drag them down his face, to see what rot might be brought to light (surely it's a sickness that has turned him from her).
Her horn, when she lifts it from the wall flashes like a a gunshot in the light, a starburst of a sword over the killing fields. It hangs in the space between them as if it waits for payment and it shivers when she rears as if that movement is not enough to soften the hunger of that blade.
“I hope your choices bring you peace.” Now she smiles and hers is full of suffering, of blood-lust. It's a smile that promises to savor the pound of flesh she is owed. Her words echo loud enough to rattle down every star that the Night Court might hold dear, to rattle all of Novus down to rubble.
Her heart hums and flickers one last time before she lowers her horn. Calliope aims for his heart, that wicked organ that once dared to mimic the beat of her own beneath a archway of bones.
And on that last hum of her heart it's the love of Calliope that gives him time enough to defend himself before she begins her hunt.
BUT THE BEAUTY OF HER FORM BRINGS VIOLENCE
A LONG AND LOVELY FALL NO WILL OR FIRE CAN OPPOSE
Quantus tremor est futurus
Quando Judex est venturus
***
You sent me a letter to tell me that you left, she said.
Raymond's smile evaporated like rain in the desert, revealing its tenuous nature in its exit. The disarming grin was only valuable insofar as it could disarm, but Calliope carried no weapon to drop. She was the weapon - sharp as any blade, heavy as any hammer, and as relentless as the wicked flail. Her eyes bored into him like awls, and only impressive stubbornness kept him from quailing beneath the onslaught of her disappointment.
He knew what he was doing when he'd done it, and no one living or dead could have convinced him that he had been wrong.
The red stallion's heart ached to see her seethe and twitch like a tethered beast. When they had first met, such rage would have been followed without preamble by a swift and dirty fight to the death. Now Calliope hung between two sides of an ugly coin, a killing beast that could no longer kill, and a part of him wanted to throw himself upon her sword just to give that power back.
Raymond guarded himself slightly, ribs taut against his sides with a prey animal's instinctive indecision. "I sent you a letter because I knew you would come," he replied, his words as forceful and insistent as the threat of her killing horn. How poetic it would be to die now, by a spear wrapped with a token of his own favor.
He could have told her there was no time - but that was a lie. Denocte had suffered quite happily for months since their arrival, and any intelligent horse would have known that there should have been time to regroup and strategize. So why face the dark unknown of the Night Kingdom alone? Why betray the trust of the chosen few he had not left behind in pursuit of a conqueror's ambitions? Why send a message in writing, when all of the stories ever told could not contain the proper depth of what he'd wanted to say to Calliope?
"I needed you to come now, and not before. Because..."
The unicorn's blade remained poised at his breast like a guillotine waiting to fall. Against the weight of a feather for a jackal's appraisal, his heart was an ugly knot of iron - but would she cast her judgment? For once he seemed uncertain, almost pleading in the way his tail blade quivered its reluctance. He wasn't ready to fight her, but he wasn't ready to die, and for that suspended moment he could not bring himself to finish the defense he left half-spoken on his lips.
***
Raymond
And at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
When the man comes around.
“Did you know I would come to hunt you down?” Each word is a crack of thunder, a hiss of lighting, a lion's cry when poachers come with blood on their hands and bodies at their back. Her words are an earthquake and they reshape her heart, her bones, every part of her that betrays the rage and sobs to know that he offered only words on paper instead of touches when he left her.
Raymond had promised to never forget her, never let her memory fade like a tide cast back out to the depths of the sea. Now Calliope wishes that he hadn't spoken vows to her in their palace of dead, sun-bleached things. Perhaps then her horn would not waiver so.
Perhaps she would not feel as if the stones beneath her hooves are cliff rock, brittle and eager to cast her down, down, down. Perhaps she would have been happy to pluck that Brutus heart from his chest cavity like the golden apple of Eden.
He continues and she could roar for the way she knows regret. Raymond's words feel like chains, like iron bars driven through her heart to bleed out all that she is, to leave nothing left of Calliope. His words are weapons, brutal and thirsty, and she blazes against what they suggest.
Calliope lunges towards him, forgoing her horn for teeth, sharp efficiency for the brutal of teeth and rage. Her teeth snap like fangs at his face, hungry for blood. She craves with a white-hot sort of craving a way to show him that she is no mere mare to be left behind when war is to be waged. Calliope is a unicorn, a weapon forged in suffering, made only for war, for justice.
And yet her heart draws her short and her teeth grind only against each other and not his flesh.
Raymond pauses and that weapon upon her brow quivers for his skin, his heart, his pain. It rages to let him know all the things that letter left behind in her heart. The edges of his words felt like razor blades when she read them, just as the excuse boiling silent on his lips does now. “Because.” The way she repeats his hollow word feels no less sharp for the way they are sounded out syllables and not mere ink. Her own voice stabs into her skin, dives deep and leaves nothing the same as before.
“You offer me silence as a reason.” Calliope grinds her teeth like a hungry thing, a lioness starved for centuries. “I should kill you.” Her eyes blaze against his, the lighting storm against the sand storm. They move towards that tail hung cautiously at his side and she snaps her teeth together again both for the threat of the gesture and so that she might feel the stinging pain herself.
Part of her wants to flay the weapon from his tail. Part of her wants to twine her own tail with it and say that she forgives him for not feeling as immortal as she does when they are together.
All of her wants to forget that he answered her heartbreak with silence.
BUT THE BEAUTY OF HER FORM BRINGS VIOLENCE
A LONG AND LOVELY FALL NO WILL OR FIRE CAN OPPOSE
And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder
One of the four beasts saying, 'Come and see.' and I saw.
Calliope's teeth snapped shut close enough for him to feel the hot rush of her breath stir his whiskers, and at last he too began to smolder. He had failed to deflect her rage, failed to absorb it, and now he arched and bristled like a silent dog cornered by the shadow of her retribution and pushed over the brink.
He sidestepped, drawing his blade high over the curve of his back as his ears flattened tightly to his poll. Etched into the aggressive lines of his face was the visage of the feral beast that had survived countless miles of wilderness alone, the primal savage that leapt like a locust and would not shy away from the sword.
"You should kill me? You'd have killed yourself for a memory, if not for me." The red stallion's voice was a rumble of righteous fury, tinged with an odd shade of something that rested far, far away from the realm of judgment. Gritting his teeth, he lashed his tail in a collected arc, blocking her advance as the blade came to rest dangerously near her throat - as it had but once before, at their beginning.
"I know you. I know your fire. And it would be a cold day in hell before I ever gave you the opportunity to climb into that dragon's mouth." Raymond was accustomed to burning things to the ground - often quietly and from the inside, as had been done to his first future - but he knew he could not contain the insidiousness of whatever consequences might arise from her pride.
He did know her - the untamed Fury that would face down time, space, and gods alike in pursuit of her convictions. She knew no limits, but he had seen the cracks in her armor before they had been mended in gold. "There is not enough blood in the world to avenge you."
He paused, grey eyes meeting blue with an electric and unblinking hold. Perhaps if he looked away the court would collapse around them. Perhaps if the whisker-thin margin of control over his tail blade wavered it would be her blood that paid for her pride, but his aim was truer than any arrow, his poise steadier than the most meticulous surgeon.
Raymond let the blade fall, his words sharp and soft and diamond-hard. "I sent you a letter because I love you, Calliope."
Finally he boils as she does, lit alive at the stake of their emotional fury. Calliope welcomes his rage, his blade as it strikes viper quick to that point where her heart throbs the strongest through the curl of her throat. This thing, this rage, this pain consumes her, smolders in her veins.
This is nothing to the dragon-killing rage, nothing to the mad sorrow that tore her alive when she dealt the mercy blow to her sister. It would be a mercy now, she thinks, to feel that sharp edge of his scythe dive into her flesh like a shark to the seas. Calliope feels as if she is torn just as wide open as Shrike was, bones snapped like wheat stalks in an ocean of blood and gore.
“We should have done this together.” She injects like a shot. Her voice roars to make up for all the stillness of her violence while he holds his blade poised to kill. “And if you had fallen there is not enough blood in every universe to avenge you.”
Calliope leans into that blade, just enough to feel the edge of it make pearls of her blood on the black of her skin. The cut stings enough to keep her here, now. She needs the pain to keep from burning them both alive with this suffering she feels. Had she wings it would have felt that he plucked them out one feather at a time to keep her from the war that lives in her veins, stronger than any beat of her heart.
Just as she's ready to lower her horn, to promise that there is no war she will be kept from (dragon or not), Raymond delivers the killing blow.
And Calliope crumbles, shatters to glass-dust.
Her soul knits around his blow, taking the words like surgeon's knives that dive deep to rearrange all her organs. The very fire of her feels changed. It's both an inferno and watered down embers that she burns with now. Her heart thrums like a earthquake even while it turns to dust and decay.
Is this love? It feels strange for her to think, to ponder emotions as one ponders the clouds and the stars. Her horn tip clatters to the ground and her head bows, everything about her melts and reforms to something worn and wrecked.
“My love would not have kept you from danger.” There's anger there, anger and heartbreak, but she can't look at him. Calliope cannot bear to see the love there, love that sends letters and protects when to protect is to destroy.
Raymond is perhaps the biggest monster of them all-- to love the wild Calliope, to tether her with that blazing cosmos of feeling.
“My love would have welcomed danger, baited it as long as you were by my side.” Her blows of words are no less deadly than the blood-thirsty horn between her brow. She wishes she had the hate and coldness to still run him through, to send herself far from this hell of a court and all it's demons that plague the shadows still.
And when she raises her eyes the are hollow as much as they are lightning bolts and ice-cold seas. “We are not things to be saved and sheltered. I love you so much that I would never think of trying.” Calliope delivers her own killing blow and the words are more like falling icicles than the bold and bright offering of her entire being should be.
The words should fall like stars from the sky and dust with him caresses full of space-dust. They should tangle together with the words.
And yet, when Calliope speaks them, the words feel like miles of chasms spreading out between then.
BUT THE BEAUTY OF HER FORM BRINGS VIOLENCE
A LONG AND LOVELY FALL NO WILL OR FIRE CAN OPPOSE
Oro supplex et acclinis,
Cor contritum quasi cinis,
Gere curam mei finis.
***
Calliope's words broke over him like a rogue wave, chilling his ire to the bone.
All his life he had stalked the world a solitary predator, a leopard arrogant in the totality of his own stealth as he cut off and cut down those he scorned like antelope on the open savannah. He had only himself to look after, for the cruelty of life was such that his own skin was all he'd been allowed to take with him and the nature of his own transgressions demanded that he keep it that way. Solitude was freedom and safety. You cannot be compelled to any end when the most valuable possession is your own life, and even that is worthless.
Calliope had broken that cycle. On that first meeting of crossed blades and measured words his interest had been piqued just enough to draw him in, to make him forget why he didn't let himself get familiar. She was his first mistake, and once he tasted what he'd lost he couldn't put it down and disappear again into the wilderness. But old habits die hard: he would do, had done, whatever he thought was necessary to keep her safe.
My love would not have kept you from danger.
Her retort had startled him into a stony stillness, suspended between the self-righteous defense of his actions and the crushing horror of personal revelation. Raymond and Calliope were two shades of the same vengeful spirit: she the swift and sure deliverer of naked justice, he the slippery serpent that slithers in and destroys from within. Together they could have been a force of nature, a thunderhead rolling relentlessly across open plains, but he did not know how to be together. He knew only how to protect, to stalk, to risk his own life and no one else's. It never once occurred to him that there might be someone in the world who could feel deeply enough for him to resent being protected.
That someone might love him enough to risk her life with him. For him. As he was willing to do for her.
And like a bastard making off with a selkie's skin he'd stolen from her the right to choose.
Raymond felt hollow in the turbulent wake of her silence, a ship adrift in the ocean with wind dragging uselessly at its tattered sails. At the peak of her heartbroken fury he had seen his true name reflected back at him through the light in her wild eyes. It pierced him, scalded him, and in a single mighty thrust forced open a network of veiny cracks that cried out to be reforged in her fires.
"I'm sorry." Remorse; his voice trembled. He hesitated toward her, then pressed forward in earnest as his resolve gathered up the grinding shards of his self-righteousness and forced them into the shape of atonement. "Calliope, I'm sorry. Please forgive me."
He brushed the sooty velvet of his muzzle against her iron cheek, traced down along her throat to the place she'd drawn her blood against his blade, smeared it like salt water into his red skin. His body curved around hers, hesitant to touch but intent upon making of itself a space meant for her as his head came to rest alongside the tragic heat of her breast and his tail sought hers. Raymond didn't know how to apologize - he'd never done it before - but in those repeated, tremulous words that mirrored themselves in the repentant shivers in his skin he had felt a lifetime of penance and shared a promise both familiar and infinitely alien: he would do whatever was necessary to keep her, even if it meant charging with her headlong into the maw of hell itself.
How frightful, then, might their love become?
***
Raymond
And at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
When the man comes around.
They crumble with sorrow and regret and she could hate him for all this feeling that boils inside her. It's more like a tempest than her old storms, her shadows, the lion hunger. Skin is not made to hold all the things Raymond brings. This is too much for even unicorn bones that have broken a million times (and reformed more than that) to bear.
They are made to conquer darkness, to wander the lands of sadists and slayers of innocents and met out justice and karmic vengeance. They are not made to carry this light, this fire, this trembling of the heart between the iron cages of their chests. But--
When he touches a kiss to her cheek Calliope feels as if she has been conquered and her heart booms louder that the war-drum chant of her anger. “I will always forgive you.” It sounds like a treaty on her lips and she forgets to scald eventually into his skin by the fire of her teeth.
Calliope, for a moment, has forgotten that a feral beast lives inside this scarred skin of hers. And for a moment she lays her head against him. She smears blood across his withers when she touches him vein to skin. Perhaps then he might feel the way she sparks inside, a thousand lightning bolts charring all her insides. The way she lashes her tail against his perhaps feels more of lash than tender intertwine for the moment is already passing, the beast inside her refusing to be buried in love.
“If you do it again I will come raze all the things you hope to save me from with blood and rage.” When she speaks it feels like the only threat Calliope has left, to sacrifice to save her heart from shattering and turning black, black, black. Novus would not survive Calliope mad with rage and sorrow. There are few worlds that could.
But the words when she presses her lips to his skin and nips at his jagged mane feel instead like a vow that she will always live for him, with him.
It's only now that she's twined around him again that she looks up at the Night Court, at the silent walls that are dusted like the pages of an old, forgotten book. Perhaps it could have been lovely, dusted with stars and silks and other things that promise to be reckless and lovely.
All she can see now is walls, more walls, endless walls and buildings that are made to contain horses and shelter them from the wilds. “Tell me of this Court.” It's the same request she made once of Florentine and like then she looks and sees walls and feels regret that this is world in which she is made to live, to defend. One in which all the mortals have forgotten what is means to be feral and free, free, free.
BUT THE BEAUTY OF HER FORM BRINGS VIOLENCE
A LONG AND LOVELY FALL NO WILL OR FIRE CAN OPPOSE
Raymond. and at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
when the man comes around
I will always forgive you. Relief should have felt like release, a sudden unwinding of muscles wrapped with a white-knuckle grip around the knot in his breast, but it swelled and burned like fever in his blood.
The unicorn's forgiveness cut from both sides: rejection might have been kinder, for ugly scars may be borne with time as a bitter reminder of his mortality, but the mercy stroke raised welts of worry upon his soul to go along with the relief as the breadth of his own vulnerability became clear to him: he could not both love her and shield her from harm, so neither could he fully protect himself.
Was it a risk he could accept?
Was it a risk he could deny, now that they had come so far?
The red stallion's brow furrowed, internalizing this fresh and alien pain as Calliope locked her tail aggressively into his. Her blood marked him like warpaint, dark against his crimson flesh, accentuating the savagery of her promise like a brace of brandished daggers. "I believe you," he replied. The curtness of his words seemed nonetheless loaded with a kaleidoscope of his scarcely-contained emotions: admiration, apprehension, remorse, and adoration leeching into the brief lilt of his words like blood through white linen.
He did not deserve such primeval absolution for his crimes. He deserved to be burned to the ground with all that was left of his kin, to carry the sins he had eaten into oblivion, for Raymond the Red could never hope to be worthy of such devotion.
But there she was, a black thunderbolt dancing neatly along the knife-edge of all he was, a force of nature alight with a grace that he himself learned too late in life.
The ensuing silence left the red stallion aching, drained in spite of his own inaction. He draped his head across her back as she stole a glance beyond them at the court that had played witness to their violent awakening. "There is a story, but there are others who could tell it better. The regime grew complacent with decadence and power, and when tensions rose they responded by turning their might against their own people, imprisoning those that didn't wish to flee their homeland behind the Raven Gates and scorching the mountain pass without regard for the safety of their countrymen."
Isra's story still awoke in him an unsated rash of rage. They had done this and then, at the hour of judgment, had vanished, and he know just how 'perfect' a deity's justice can be. The regime would see no punishment for the evil and neglect they had wrought.
"I thought that I could end the threat without further bloodshed if I challenged the sovereign directly, but they did not return after the summit."
Were it not for the unicorn's living heat at his throat, grounding him, he might have gnashed his teeth in frustration. It was a lonely and dissatisfying story with an bittersweet and dissatisfying ending, and Raymond felt guilty for allowing the guilty to run free even when judgment of the old regime should never have been his burden to bear.
Someone had to speak up.
"The kingdom is wounded, but I can tell there's potential beneath the strife. It just needs to be rekindled." Raymond swallowed. Turning his head, he sought out her lightning-blue eye, keenly aware of the unsoundness of his position so soon after charging pell-mell into a darkened world without her. But if they were ever to stand shoulder to shoulder in defense of each other and their ideals, they could scarcely do it leagues apart.
"Will you stay? I am a better person when you're around."
