His eyes are filled with judgment
And his heart is filled with pain

***

It was never a delusion of invincibility that made Raymond act with conviction. It was not for immortality that he did not shy away from the sword. He didn't hesitate because he knew with acute certainty that he could die at any moment, and all he could do to maximize his odds of survival was to meet the danger with the bit in his teeth and fire in his heart.

But he knew his limits, too.

A single reflected lightning bolt was enough to deter the thunderbirds overhead from a similar assault. The cost of finding the bottom of his well seemed too great compared to the relatively straightforward approach of strafing with beaks and talons, or simply assailing others in his stead.

He saw Shrike go up, up, beyond his reach, but before he could summon Ruth the sky erupted with light - and again, and again, and the spidery veins of electricity came not for the horses but biting at the heart of the bird that had taken Shrike. The storm vibrated with a new violence, bending its wild shadows to the will of a new master whose heart knew neither mercy nor restraint.

"No," he murmured under his breath, seeking Calliope amongst the fray. She burned with electric heat. "No no nononono, you idiot!"

A thunderbird sailed past him and he sent three of its talons flying with a frantically dismissive flick of his blade and a scream from their former owner as he bounded across the battlefield toward where Shrike leaned over the dark shape were Calliope had fallen. The tarrasque's roar rattled his bones as, sensing his panic, she withdrew from the melee and cast a towering, watchful shadow across them, her mismatched eyes predatory and daring.

Raymond's grey eyes flashed like cold steel as they fell upon the painted mare, cryptic in the grip of his battle fury. Did she remember the words they shared out on the prairie before the storm? Did she know how desperately parts of him ached to blame her for the worst?

None of that mattered next to the sight of Calliope's spent and bloodied body. Roughly he shouldered his way in, heedless of Shrike's urging the unicorn to live, breath spilling over Calliope's face as he hissed, "Calliope, can you hear me?" Clenching his jaw, the red stallion rapped her cheek with the flat of his blade. "Come on, stay awake. Stay with me."

This was not what they had promised each other.

***

Raymond
Who is there to stand against the rider on the range?

Calliope
“No one can say that death found in me a willing comrade, or that I went easily.”


In the darkness Calliope walks upon a pathway of glass with constellations beside her and planets rolling aimlessly above her. Stars fall around her in blazing paths of white fire. They give off the only warmth in this place and when they lick across her rib-cage she feels more alive in the darkness than she ever has in the living realm.

Between the bursts of light the only light comes from the planets. Whenever she looks up (and wonders why she can see at all) they roll wildly, twisting about each other in orbits that twist and twine like a hundred serpents that could circle a hundred different worlds. For a moment they remind her of something. But when another star shoots across the glass pathway the memory floats away from her like flotsam on the tide.

Suddenly though, the walkway trembles and lightning strikes between the planets as if they were clouds. Each bolt rattles something loose in her soul and her eye burn and water when they look up instead of away from those wild, flashing lights. Words are painted across the darkness in a white too bright to be a mere color and Calliope reads them with that new shaken loose thing in her soul.

Live. The darkness says to her and the plants roll in patterns that look like letters. Calliope's soul reads the planets too and her horn aches with understanding. Live. Live. Live. She presses her horn to a star and wonders why this star-fire feels familiar.

Calliope wonder why she's here, remembers that this is not her world, not anymore. This world, this space of stars and planets and glass took from her something. She hates this world.

Stay with me. The plants too start to paint out words with their orbits and now it's not her soul that trembles and her horn that aches. Her heart sobs for the words of those planets and her eyes are wet not from light but sorrow. All her bones ache for those planets until she wants to dissolve to dust and float among them.

And then suddenly the darkness is not so dark and the glass is not so slick and hard. Her eyes flutter both in the real and in the darkness. Her lungs sigh wetly as if a river of blood runs down her throat instead of air. But there is red and there is white and Calliope silently screams at her eyes to open and her heart to beat.

They listen.

Her eyes are an empty, pale silver (almost white) when she looks at Raymond, Shrike, Ruth and the thunderbirds that are just now flying away from the feral hunters that want blood and blood and more blood. For now it seems both sides have gone to lick their wounds and fuel their rage until another day, another night, another dawn, another war.

“Always.” She sighs before the glass, stars and planets take her back again.




@Raymond @Shrike @Pavetta
(ending Calli's roll here and working it so the birds fly away but if anyone wants feel free to bring them back)

Raymond.
and at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
when the man comes around


Ruth growled plaintively as the Thunderbirds flocked farther and farther from her substantial reach, the sound churning like a tumble of boulders in her chest. Raymond took little notice.

Calliope stirred, her breath feather-light around her murmured 'always', and as quickly as the word came the wind snatched it away, carrying her consciousness with it. Worry twitched at the corner of the red stallion's mouth. That it should burrow so tenaciously through the carven stone of his face said something of the way his stomach dropped and trap doors swung open to unleash horrors into the dark recesses of his mind. Again he met Shrike's eye, helplessness flashing in his gaze for the split second before the primal urge to do caught up and surged to the fore.

Raymond marked the birds' dark, retreating stains against the blue-bruised sky and beckoned Ruth through the rising bile-taste of déjà vu in his stomach. "She needs rest," he said aloud, more for his benefit than Shrike's. "I'll take her somewhere safe."

Somewhere far away - from the front lines, from all thoughts of valor.

Neither his tone nor the Tarrasque's massive claws offered room for argument as Ruth cradled the dark mare to her chest like an eggshell. Raymond leapt into her remaining hand with a decisiveness he still did not quite feel and closed his eyes as the ground rushed away beneath him.

With a last warning roar at the retreating birds, Ruth turned toward the most remote reaches of the Arma mountains, where once she had nearly killed a queen.