Isra in broken pieces
"collecting memories of loss, like chains wrapped around my veins"
The day, as it starts to rise, does nothing for the tenseness of Isra's spine or the burn of her lungs. The pink streaks across the mountains and the golden taint across the lake are nothing more than new shadows to dip and tease in the corners of her vision. Isra still only has eyes for the thunderbirds and the way their beaks glint like sharpened blades in the dawn-light.
It's not until the first of them takes wing that the air in her lungs finally rushes out like a tide. More and more take flight and more and more air rushes out of her lungs. Some part of her, not living only in thunderbird shadows, wonders if she really breathed for the entire night. The burn in her chest suggests that she had not.
So like all great storytellers who tell stories of blood and rot she almost wilts in the silence. Adrenaline, like a beast, eats up all her remaining strength. The legs she rises onto are almost as wobbly as fawn legs, all knees and hocks and fragile tendons. Isra sways, as the last bird steps closer and breathes air hot enough to belong to a dragon across her face.
She both loves and hates the how the heat of it chases away her chills.
“But are the other courts safe from them? Where will they go now?” Her eyes blaze across Caligo's and for the first time her gaze feels colder than the surface of the moon. Frost and crystals could grow from the frozen fury and fear in her blue eyes. And when she sighs her gaze flits away to Raymond and there's a silent question there. She only hopes that the red-stallion of retribution will read the silent, sentient words in her winter eyes. Find them, they cannot be dragons for anywhere in Novus.
When she returns her gaze to the goddess and Katniss, she only smiles a smile that feels as brittle as a snowflake and says, “Thank you, but I only had to give words instead of flesh.”Isra will always remember that others already gave a pound of flesh (to the sea and to the birds) and all she's had to give so far is words and slivers of her heart. Already she's not sure what will be left of her after it's all done.
She only knows that everything about her will be changed, for better or worse nothing will remain the same.
Calliope “Your body is full of rage. Every sinew. It is easy to read. You speak volumes with a clenched fist.”
“Always for now,” Calliope says, leaving the grounding comfort of Shrike's skin. Each step has her gaze tracing thunder-bird wings, the curve of an immortal's spine, the last bird to leave and the way his beak seems wicked even as he bows. She wonders if she killed a relative of his, if his mate was the one foolish enough to try and take Shrike from her.
Lightning licks at her spine and it's as white as the center of the sun, hot enough to melt flesh from bone. Her eyes are molten silver and steel. Calliope wields them like weapons as she stalks into the center of the group. The only time she pauses is to flash a look at the queen and at Raymond. The look promises that she will still hunt them. Until the end of world if she must go that far to ensure no other horse's blood runs in rivulets down their claws.
The end of the world is nothing to her, not with all the things she's seen and all the things she's done.
“I've never know a god to promise safety for more than a moment. Can you tell me why?” Each word is a blade and Calliope wants to push them until she finds blood. Upon her brow her horn quivers and the cuff around it glints like a star in the sunlight rising about the mountains. “Why are there floods and birds?” Closer she steps, until she's the shadow of the goddess-- black without moonlight, black with only fury.
More words boil and smolder behind her teeth and she presses her lips together tightly enough that they ache. What she really wants to say, give me a reason, tell me it's the gods, give me a war. And below that, deeper inside her soul another question waits, eating away at her skin.
Why should I not run my horn through your heart and see if you can bleed just as we did when the sea and the birds came?
12-19-2018, 10:27 PM
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Odeen [PM] Posts: 175 — Threads: 29 Signos: 1,315
Raymond. and at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
when the man comes around
Isra's beseeching eye met Raymond's as she spoke and he flicked an ear attentively her way.
He would have kept watch for the bastard beasts without her insistence, but there was some small comfort in the affirmation that his queen did not fully trust to the platitudes and assurance offered her by the night goddess. The birds might fly from Denocte, but they were no less predators for the story she'd spun them. Like him, like Calliope, they were armed and hungry, ever-hunting, ever-wandering. He tilted his head toward Isra and blinked slowly with silent understanding.
As long as their winged shadows darkened the lands of Novus, they would remain a threat. As long as they were a threat, the red stallion would be prepared to hunt them - with a lion-hearted lady at his side, no doubt.
As if on cue, Calliope advanced upon the star-marked goddess. Where Raymond approached the idea of divinity with distrust and apathy, she stood ready to accuse and demand, to hold even the gods accountable for life's injustices, and he wondered as he looked on if even the immortals might be inspired toward their greater selves by the fire and conviction that burned in her eyes.
“It no longer matters,” Caligo tells Katniss, with a look that suggests she’s only half-there, and half with the thunderbirds still. “They’re gone now, flying away for good.”
There’s a finality to her tone, as if she knows with a certainty that the creatures are gone from good. But the demi-goddess gives no hint as to why she knows, simply turning away from the lake and, subsequently, away from the thunderbirds.
Turning to meet Calliope’s violence and anger and pain.
For a moment Caligo is silent, listening to the unicorns speak, so very different from one another. She listens to the wind and the sea, always comparing, always relating the living to the nonliving.
“Some gods don’t mind betting your lives in their games, for they have nothing to lose from it.” She meets Calliope’s gaze, a spark in her eyes, fed by the flame the other mare so freely provides. And there’s a dare unspoken within them: am I one of those gods? Or am I more like one of you?
Caligo is only half-immortal, after all; maybe, just maybe, if they were to cut her with their horns, she would bleed the same red blood they did.
But Caligo doesn’t give her the chance. She walks past the unicorns, both the calm and the furious, and for a moment it seems that’s all the answer she will give them. Until she turns back, her dark eyes suddenly full or moonlight and star dust.
“One day, I will tell you both a story of my own.”
Then the demigoddess disappears, dissipating into the wind.
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As Isra’s voice moved on and the stars turned overhead and unicorns paced and thunderbirds flapped their wings and goddesses listened, Acton wondered where he’d be if not for the queen at his side.
Surely not here. The buckskin had never been the patriotic type; no promise of meeting a goddess could draw him out to meet homicidal birds. The Crows had always come first, and any loyalty he’d felt toward Denocte came from his brotherhood with Reichenbach and his time spent among the merchants and barkeeps, the alley-rats and sailors.
Now he looked at Raymond and Calliope, at Katniss and the others. There was no stirring in his breast for them, no love or even really curiosity; as far as Acton was concerned he owed them nothing. And yet, and yet.
At last came the dawn, light creeping up the edges of the mountains and making even the unnatural lightning seem less bright. As it arrived the birds left, and Acton only rose after Isra did, shaking out his coat, blowing a silver breath into the cold morning air. He still held his tongue as the goddess spoke, so dark and lovely she was almost painful to look at; he held it as first Isra and then Calliope questioned her.
Caligo’s answer settled nothing, but the buckskin had never put his faith in gods. After she disappeared he only stepped toward Isra, grimacing at the way his muscles groaned, his bones creaked like an old man’s. He ghosted his muzzle across her cheek, murmured “Well done, queen,” and was gone, too, vanished not in a scattering of particles to wind but in a slow lope back to the castle, and an escape from his tangled thoughts, and sleep.
Isra who slowly burns
" I have survived, but I have not been spared."
The look in Caligo's eyes settles upon Isra like a jagged, rusted blade. It cuts at her flesh and scrapes at her bones and leaves little shards of iron and tetanus behind. To swallow the pain of it feels like shoving a fire-coated sword down her throat.
Every piece of her that's still left behind after her story aches with betrayal. The sea-foam and scale blue of her gaze blazes with sadness and a little bit of rage that she pulls from the black unicorn like a tether to the real world. “That is no answer at all.” She wishes her voice could spark like a storm instead of fall from her lips like the bleat of a sad lamb who has just discovered a fence behind the rolling hills.
Caligo brushes past them as if they are no more them shadows to be chased away by the silver-light of the moon. Something in her breaks then, shatters into small sharp pieces as if that jagged, rusted blade finally reached through to the core of it.
Isra feels as if she's been cleaved.
“How could you?” She cries and she's not sure if she's asking why Caligo allowed this or why she took part it in. All she knows is sorrow and the slow boom of hurt and rage that all broken, torn apart things feels. Caligo offers no answer and soon Isra turns to head back to the keep and her people who need to know that gods can be cruel as much as kind.
And when she looks one last time at the unicorn with a storm in her skin she wonder if she's looking at her own future.
