– Calliope –
let us shed this skin of ours

*

There is nothing that matters as much this moment beneath the bones of a whale large enough to down a war-ship if it had but the violence. It feels as if they have conquered time, the two of them, to rise again on the other side of the Riftlands with nothing more than each other. It feels like a victory to feel his shoulder press against hers, to feel his blade against her tail in gentle enough a way to leave no blood or pain behind.

Gone is the world of Novus, swallowed up by a rift of its own that begins and ends just outside that looming sun-bleached bone and salted brine. Gone too is their suffering, their sorrow, their loneliness. Everything before this moment is gone, faded out like the last flower when the winter comes. All Calliope has now is Raymond and the fierceness of the way they feel like fire when they're tangled together.

Where it not for the starkness of his red against the black of her they might be no more than a shadow of the bones when the sun reaches the point just overheard. When she curls her head about his, and hides his touch so that no gods might see that these two wild-things can 'feel', it feels as if it's not the sun above them but the moon.

A new sun could have risen above them and the tides dragged them down into the deeps for all the care  that Calliope gives to the places beyond this moment, this ocean graveyard.

“I will never let you burn.” The words feel as if they are seared into her flesh by lightning bolt the moment she gives them life and form upon the edge of her lips. The sound of the swallows up the sea, the echo of their heartbeats on bone and blood. It swallows up everything, that pledge of hers, consumes everything.  

Even the past does not survive the words, their promises made by way of sparking weapons and blades resting so restrained against life veins.

The sea starts to turn.

Calliope wonders no more what promises of her past she might be driven to break, what moment might take the wild soul of hers with all the rage and turn it to something brighter, spring rains instead of hurricanes.

She  knows that her promise of Ravos is broken, shattered into stardust. No matter his sins Calliope knows that Raymond is the one thing she could never kill for mercy or justice. Nothing could make her horn taste his blood, no crime that he might commit. Sooner would she throw herself before the Rift and let it tear apart her marrow so that for the first time she might never rise again.

As the sea rises to touch tip of her tail she finally pulls away and touches her horn to his brow like a kiss. Calliope could lament, for as the world returns around them so does that passion that a race down the sea to this victory could not take her from her.