'The sun turned black like sackcloth made of goat hair, the whole moon turned blood red '
Calliope doesn't think of survival when the reckoning of the thunderbirds comes to call due some debt they will have to take from the very marrow of her bones before she'll give it. Only rage comes to mind, only that still fury that falls across her vision like snow and makes the entire world seem as if it slumbers before the violence of her thoughts.
She's too calm before the monsters, still enough to be stone as they come closer and closer and her tail flicks at her back slower,
and slower,
and slower.
The world crawls before her and each beat of wing through the storm is slower than a blink of her eyes and she breathes with the roar of thunder and hunger and all the terrible things in all the worlds. Everything feels frozen and the world feels like a memory of the Rift when time let go its hold on reality and let things move at whatever pace they wanted.
Then Ruth roars and the air around her feels sharp with the smell of Raymond's blood as a beast dives with wide open claws for the red stallion and Calliope simply explodes. She bursts into a supernova of reckless violence and blood-lust and there is not a thing but death that will stop her from chewing at the membranes of the bird's wings as a lion gnaws on meat and bone.
Her horn is a battle cry and as it cuts through the air and her scream is louder than all the death-knells any monster has ever been able to cry. Every inch of her screams come, come, come and her horn sighs out bleed, bleed, bleed as it slashes at he belly of a beast that tries to lower down upon her with claws that are so much smaller than a dragon's claws.
They bleed together, Calliope and that demon of a bird and its blood tastes like rot when she licks it from her lips and smiles to feel the slice of a talon sting across her neck. She's more alive than she's ever been in Novus, a galaxy of retribution and hunger and madness.
Calliope doesn't care about grounding them. She only cares of death and it's only death that will find either her or the birds this night. The night feels like oblivion, the dark space between the stars and the moon where the air is too thin to breath and she thinks perhaps that she can take survival from the lungs of the beasts as she takes everything from the dark places.
Above her the bird circles back and blood falls from it like rain and it runs in small rivulets down her face and makes a river when it drips down her neck and across her wounds. She smiles and beckons again with her horn, taunting it with the way that weapon shines like sharp steel in a flash of lightning that makes gruesome both her and that circling, circling bird.
No, grounding them doesn't matter. Only death will placate the beast that's risen inside her with that first taste of rotten blood on her tongue.
And as another bolt of lightning flashes it might look to the gods like two beasts, two monsters, two demons have risen from the bowels of the deep dark to see who will take the mortal realm.
