This hour before dawn is the blackest Florentine has ever known. And of course it is, for this is the day the leonine unicorn is to return.
 
The night had been ink and the whole of Terrastella the well that had held it, deeper, darker and thicker than any before. Even Florentine, with her skin as gold as the sun, was shadow that night.
 
But it is dawn now and damp cobblestones glitter in the new, blue light. Moisture steams and hangs, thick and metallic, in the air. It tangs deep in the girl’s lungs, trickling cool and sweet across the back of her tongue.
 
Beside her brother, the Dusk girl wanders. They are in no rush, for the dawn is sleepy too. Their meeting, it is to be a trigger for events that even Florentine cannot predict. So they roam until the time comes for the events of Dusk to change. Florentine and Asterion are ghosts of the Riftlands traversing the weaving streets of their citadel home. But more ghosts are stirring too with old, wild magic clinging to their skin.
 
This morning, Flora should have known there was something different in the Court’s tired corners. It is the same thing that calls her eyes to the black and the shadows that hang there, thick drapes into a nether world through which anything might crawl.
 
There is only one thing that will pierce the walls between worlds this day, and it a thing leonine and wild. It is a horn and a wicked look in a silver eye.
 
Florentine looks, but she does not know. Is it Calligo that draws her eye? Is it the phantom love of a Night King lost to night’s shadows and such terrible sin?
 
No, not this morning. For this dawning day has plans for something more. More, more, more it whispers for she will always be more.
 
So it is that Florentine begins to seek without looking. She begins to listen without hearing. From the darkness, her gaze sweeps back to cast a sidelong glance to her brother. Does he know it too? He is serenity beside her, deep as earth and as wayward as the stars, but… does he know?
 
So long the girl studies the gleam in his eye and waits. With her breath trapped in her lungs Florentine waits for him, for awareness to flash like star-fire in his sea-born eyes. This girl is electric, sleep has been blown away from her like cobwebs in the wind. She knows what the day now hides and it creeps like claws along her spine.
 
Florentine knows.
 
So she does not wait for him. Not when dawn’s shadows seethe and creep... Her amethyst eyes flash into the darkness. There is a shadow that crawls and stalks belly low over rough stone with whispering feet. Florentine’s heart is a staccato beat against her breastbone, her breath a flutter in her lungs.
 
In moments she has peeled from her brother’s side and out of the lamplight she steps. Light falls from her like the sea once fell from her brother’s skin.
 
Wayward, Florentine rushes into the black. She is so suddenly ungainly on four limbs and feels the cold of a chain within a grubby hand she no longer has. Her mind is full of skin, too much skin and a night as deep and dark and strange as this. There is a broken horn that, even then, claimed starlight across its ridges.
 
Leaves whisper along her gilded skin as she nimbly, steps around it the dark veil of a willow. The darkness is angular and sharp, it gleams like silver and blood and brandishes a horn righteous enough to pierce the sky.
 
A breath slips past the flower girl’s lips as she finally drinks in the silver and black of Calliope at last. “At least you’re not naked this time.” The girl remarks lightly, her lips curling into a smile. “And you are wearing your horn too, congratulations.” But, there is an emptiness in Florentine; a part of her is absent. A part of her soul aches for what Calliope has not brought and for a moment Florentine’s lips draw straighter. Someone is missing and the girl’s heart knows it all too well.
 
Slowly she steps back, away from the tree and its imposing shadow, and out into the rippling light of the torch-lit courtyard.  “I think you should come out before I have to explain to the gardener why his flowers are all ruined.”

@Calliope & @Asterion

Florentine looks where Calliope does. She drinks in the skin, gunmetal gray in the low light of the struggling dawn. But it is the white, branching like claws of lightning down her shoulder, that captures the girl’s attention most.
 
You and he cared for the sanctity of flesh more than I. Slowly, curiously, that wild amethyst gaze lifts to drink in mysterious Calliope. “I suppose you are right.” Flora says with a hum and the roll of a shoulder that smoothes the words away like tumbling silk caught in the wind.
 
They were all naked now, true. But Calliope speaks a truth that sinks deeper than their exposed flesh. It sank into the heart of Florentine, it revealed a soul tainted and sinful. She had never been a perfect child, but she was an even worse adult. She wore sin like jewelry and it glittered in the darkest parts of her. Age was brutal and fierce, it broke her and remade her, over and over. Ah, childhood, how careless she had been. To return to then is a thought so sweet it wets her lips and fills her bruised, bruised heart. But one look at Calliope and Flora remembers where the world is fierce, she remembers the bite and sting of death. It is as terrifying in childhood as she imagines it might be in adulthood.
 
Away she blinks those terrible thoughts, and turns herself towards her brother. Like her, he is enchanted by the Rift’s dragon-killer. The greeting he shares with the warrior girl is warmer, it is a balm over chafed wounds Florentine did not even know Asterion possessed. Relief unfurls beneath her skin, like gilded thread Flora unspools before them. Her strides are no longer staccato and sharp, no longer full of a wild energy. No, Florentine becomes silk, a banner rippling in a wind. She sways, she moves, at once relaxed, at once eased with grace.
 
Calliope and Asterion share a kiss. But it is a touch more intimate than a mere kiss could ever afford. Their connection runs deeper. It might have been older than her, were Florentine not that time-traveller girl; a creature from the past and the future both. “Ravos.” She breathes, surmising the common history between them. Oh, Ravos was a mysterious land she had heard about only in tales. What entertainment it would be to stray there one day and walk the lands that had been lost to circumstance and time. They are kept in the past, wrapped in paper and stowed away where only the fingers and eyes of history can reveal the treasures kept there.
 
Do you still dream of adventure?
 
Oh.
 
Bright and wide Asterion’s sister watches him with her honeyed lips that curl up, up, up. “It seems adventure runs in the family, no?” She asks of her brother, brushing past him to fall in step beside the unicorn. Calliope walks like a reckoning, her skin a storm brought down to earth. She is as fierce as a wall cloud, as loud and brilliant as anvil lighting. To be near her is splendor, to be near her is terror. Florentine trembles like a flower before this storm. Metal is sweetly bitter upon the air and she looks up, expecting a tempest, but the clouds are falling open, a sky as blue as the sea appearing within their midst.
So many walls.
 
“They never change.” Florentine adds with lamentation. “These lands are just as they were the day we came.” And such a comment makes sense when it comes from a girl who was born in the Rift and travelled to a hundred different worlds.
 
This creature, of flowers and gold and Time, is restless here, bereft of a world ever changing, of time slipping by like water through her fingers. She does not grasp it, she lets it run away, down the stream and off into nothingness.
 
“This is Novus.” Flora identifies at last, “and it is lacking...” everything The word is a whipcrack that is not spoken, though the air is charged and bruised with its phantom blow. “Why are you here? Is Calliope not made for more than citadels and politics?”



@Calliope & @Asterion