When one consciously chooses to walk the path of a deity, at what point must one ask oneself questions about religiosity, and about the difference between pragmatism and piety? Is the prudent choice to take note of a powerful being's actions itself a form of worship, tacitly falling in line through mere acknowledgement of the deity's influence? Perhaps it was difficult to say how Raymond felt on the issue.

What he knew, at least, was that in the shadow of murderous wings and under the threat of the sea's depthless wrath, he - the mortal - had perishingly few options, and survival served him better than ideological purity.

So when the night mother came a-calling, the red stallion answered with silent intrigue rather than awed enthusiasm, teeth set on edge by the lingering presence of thunderbirds overhead and the seeming nonchalance with which she moved about in spite of them. Her perspective of the natural and biological disasters that had done their best to bring her kingdom low was wholly alien. Yet more proof, then, that gods could never fully be trusted where the affairs of mortals were concerned, even in times they tried to be inspiring.

I guess that kind of answers his previous line of thinking.

Raymond looked up as he was bidden, watching the occasional occlusion of twinkling starlight by the circling thunderbirds, and for a moment he said nothing. An optimist's heart might have grasped in the exchange some assurance of Denocte's indomitable spirit, how even amongst the stormy threat of death and dismemberment a glimmer of hope persisted in the heavens. Raymond could imagine such an outlook, but his view was far less poetic. He hadn't come this far by virtue of fine poetry.

"Targets," he replied blandly, unconcerned with how unimaginative such an answer might make him seem. Until the thunderbirds were dead or gone, their destruction and the defense of Denocte were his primary concerns, and unless Caligo intended to turn them all into turtledoves now that she had an audience he intended to keep his preoccupations.

Isra of the broken world

“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”



“The belly of the sea looked almost like a desert that had forgotten how the sweet the rain tasted. It looked as if it was a land of dreaming things. Shells void of their masters were turned up towards the sun as if all the mollusks had decided to grow wings and fly in the sky instead of die in the sea. Weeds swayed in the breeze instead of the ocean currents they their leaves looked both brighter and happier to drink of light instead of darkness.” Isra is nothing more than other story teller before the bonfires and all her listeners are nothing more than a wave of dreamers who almost flicker in and out of reality in the red-light glare of the flames. Their wounds are memories and their hope turns to embers as they look up and see bits of moonlight and lighting and nothing of the black devouring sea.

And when Caligo comes like a whisper of starlight that looks brighter than the blue-white core of the fire they all forget their wishes and their hope and they only stare in both wonder and a touch a fear. The air still tastes more of salt than moonlight and Isra remembers that when the walls trembled and some of them died that there was not enough star-shine in any universe to make the ocean look lovely as it consumed all they held dear.

Isra is the first to leave the fires and her body trembles with a cautious sort of hope and her eyes feel almost heavy with dreaming when she blinks and blinks and the body of their goddess never waivers. Some part of her, the one that remember the lash and burning and the cruelty of power, had hoped that when she blinked she would have seen only firelight and nothing of immortals.

Still she follows even though the open skies that seem almost alive with potential violence make her tremble with the need to run instead of walk.  The strange birds (she has no name for them but strange) swoop low enough over head for her to remember she is no warrior and her people are so weary from the sea and all the other betrayals of their world.

Isra instinctively swings her horn in warning as a bolt of lightning flashes between clouds. Her body knows how to be a unicorn even if her soul is still a slave between cages of bone and strange skin.

The group of them stops before the sea and the words of her story rise up like a tide against the tightness of her lips. “And all the sands for the first time looked not like wet mud but like gold when the sun touched the places where ripples of coral jutted out from the earth.” Isra for a moment laments the darkness of the night and the way the winter seems closer to death than spring in the blackness.

Caligo is the only obvious light at all and Raymond when he steps forward looks once more like blood and victory before the silver-glow of their deity. Isra smiles then for the boldness of him and the way he sees the world in bits of black and white, things that are and things that are not. He's the balance to the way Isra sees patterns in the bits of light when she is brave enough to look up.

She can see winged horses in the lines of the stars, universes in the bits of blackness that seem to promises fullness instead of empty darkness. There are words written in the openings of the clouds and between the moons and constellations of Caligo's skin. The world is alive with a religion of dreamers, of things older than this world beneath them.

Isra looks up at the goddess with an echo of all that light across the ocean-blue of her eyes. “They have not fallen even though it felt as if every star tore away from the sky and there were no wishes left to dream of.” Her words feel thick with sorrow, dark enough that there are not enough stars in the sky and upon the goddess's skin to do more than crack through it with tiny bolts of light.


@Random Events

Calliope
'The sun turned black like sackcloth made of goat hair, the whole moon turned blood red '


Calliope at the shore when Caligo rises from the waves like some monster cloaked in stardust and bits of weed. They rain from her in droplets of wealth while Calliope drips only blood and remnants of war. She's nothing more than another shadow along the ocean, cased in darkness, brine and blood.

When she watches the goddess move up the path from the sea she can only help but wonder if Caligo's insides would drip and glow like the light of the moon or if she would bleed as red as the rest of them. Calliope makes no move to follow the goddess. Only her eyes follow that bit of flesh and night-sky as it leaves the shoreline for the court. The horn upon her brow trembles for each step the goddess takes and it chants a song in vibrations she hasn't heard for so very long.

She remembers the Summit and all her fury. She remembers the birds who seems strange enough to be god-made. The battle wasn't enough to take all the violence from her blood and bits of it rise up as the sands rise up her hooves and the sea rises up against the moonlight.

It rises, rises, rises until the Goddess comes back with all the faithful in tow. Bits of lightning dance along her spine, weak and wild and nothing more than the faintest echo of all the things that rage and crack and boil inside her. Only Calliope could make lightning seem like a weak, foolish thing.

They are bleeding and broken and a goddess wants them to look at the night sky.

Her hooves carry her towards Raymond as he breaks the darkness with a glare of red and the taint of sweat and rage. Part of her wants to lean against him, to make their crusted wounds drip again like waterfalls. Calliope wants to many things in that moment but instead she only says, “What would it take to tear them all from the sky?”

And perhaps her horn lowers just a little and it's not the sky that she looks at but something that looks just like flesh and bone.