“Be the flame, not the moth.”
All her lightning is swallowed up by flesh as she tucks it away and stores it for what comes next. It roils inside her in a maelstrom of rage and electricity. Her bones ache with this need, this fury and her horn feels like fire (as if a star is perched upon the peak of her weapon). Silence is her only answer to Caligo and her eyes blink slowly like a lion who has just realized how hungry it is.
Surely Raymond knows her well enough to see the storm surging between the prison of her skin. Everything about her suggests a star about to implode or a storm about to crest the horizon and devour the world.
The queen, Calliope thinks, is innocent enough to see only stillness, only caution and none of the rage. And Caligo--
Calliope cares little what a 'god' thinks of her.
It's a natural thing for her to brush by the goddess to the head of all the mortals. She only touches Raymond. His skin feels like fire when she brushes her nose across his shoulder. The lightning in her bones goes wild with the contact until bits of it leak from her eyes like tears.
“Always.” She whispers against him, fire to storm, blood to darkness. It's all she says before she heads back to the tunderbirds. Each of her steps feels like a memory of war and that blackness that followed.
And so into the night Calliope goes, towards the old battlefield and never once does fear shiver down her spine.
