Passing safely through the rift three times was not enough to grow complacent. It was a treacherous road - a steep cliff made of nothing but steeper cliffs folded in on themselves and woven into a web of unnatural misery - and if there'd been another way he would happily have considered it.

Creep around outside a bear cave long enough, eventually the bear will wake up.

But the world was moving on, taking Calliope and her fires with it. Raymond could either join her or die in the collapsing riftlands with Ruth. He had sharpened his blade for the occasion, seeking serenity in an old whetting tune. The calico peered wild-eyed at the rhythmic sway of blade against stone and pawed at the trailing hair on every third stroke. So passed the morning, much like any other, but mornings end.

- - -
Raymond stumbled into the open field under the night's watchful eye, the drone of Summer insects breaking across his consciousness like a rogue wave after the nightmare of silence that preceded it. He whirled where he stood, menacing darkness with a swing of his tail blade, sucking in air through the unbearable tightness in his chest. Beads of blood welled up along shallow claw marks tracing both shoulders.

Awful pragmatism (and a healthy dose of shock) stayed the urge to shout her name. The rift, ever a cruel mistress had with the wave of a proverbial hand torn out whole sections of the tapestry of reality as he knew it, letting the frayed threads flutter free like exposed nerves. The red stallion's battle-ready muscles twitched and jumped with no foe to cut down.

So he did nothing, made still by the weight of his own powerlessness, and wrestled together a sense of composure through shallow breaths and the ruthless utility of reconnaissance.

The field unfolded on all sides like a plush carpet, dotted with the bulbs of dormant summer flowers; the night sky seemed equally vast - but infinitely colder - overhead. Nocturnal sounds receded to white noise buzzing in his skull. He caught the scent of someone familiar on the warm air, but all that remained of Ruth clung to his flesh the way that Ruth herself could not.

Calliope was somewhere close. There was much to be done before he allowed himself the privilege of mourning, so he turned his back on the smoldering remnant of the riftgate and started walking through the unfamiliar territory, tail blade at the ready.

Movement advanced out of the stillness, a black velvet shadow against moon-grey prairie grass. Raymond's neck arched in unison with the purposeful rise of his blade only to loosen again as the familiar form of his lion-queen took shape. Even expecting her to be waiting for him - even having caught her scent on the alien air - the red stallion's heavy heart twinged with complicated relief at the sight of her hale and healthy before him.

Complicated because he had risked - and lost - in her name and felt the sting of that half-formed resentment like a wicked thorn in his throat. Because given the chance he could not promise Ruth he would have done anything differently. Her loss seemed preordained, and for someone who believed in neither fate nor coincidence it was a bitter pill to swallow.

He valued very little beyond his own principles, and this moment here reminded him why.

Raymond didn't have to say the crossing had gone gone poorly. She knew by his naked solitude in Ruth's absence, how his muscles spoiled for a fight when he would not. He straightened, retreating behind the obfuscating correctness of a soldier's stance, and offered a perfunctory salute with the flat of his blade. She pressed past sparring reach and into killing range, the touch laid against his wounded shoulder a queer mixture of remorse and her usual brazenness. His skin shuddered as though fly-bitten.

Clearing his throat, the red stallion tried to win back the momentum of a debate they weren't having. Calliope's softness - so different from her usual predatory silk - caught him off-guard.

"So it goes," Raymond replied, the adage delivered perhaps a touch more harshly than the spirit in which it was meant. He brushed a reassuring lip along her striped shoulder.

She felt solid enough.

"Do you know anything about where we are? I hope you haven't been waiting here on my account." In that, he sounded almost cheerful; a stranger would never sense the fire beneath his skin.

I would always wait for you.

The words bring a smile - fleeting, perhaps, and shadowed by the grieving steel of his heart, but genuine all the same. Calliope waited for no one. Her agenda was her own, her convictions a constant flame, and one could sooner lasso the wind than contain them. Such a statement was high praise indeed from a woman who had little patience for such things.

Don't worry. Raymond wouldn't let it go to his head.

He quirked a brow at the dark unicorn's description of Novus. Political intrigue was either a great hobby of his or one of his oldest nemeses, reaching as far back as the coup that had shaken him loose from the comfort of tradition and into Calliope's orbit in the first place. He indeed reveled in the frantic spinning of cogs in a society's sprawling, over-complicated clockwork, but inevitably someone would get caught in the gears.

That usually sucked, unless it was the right person getting minced. The red stallion fancied himself pretty good at stacking the odds.

"Oh, I think they'll figure out what to make of you in due time," he replied blandly. Calliope was a storm sent to wipe the slate clean. She may not have been Raymond, but there are always dragons to slay, always tyrants to bring low, and she would learn where to focus her merciless eye.

The red and the black fell easily into step, a gait born of his military precision and her energetic purpose, and that would have been enough. But her tail interwove with his and he very nearly missed a step but for the almost mechanical nature of his movements in the first place. That he did not immediately reject the touch surprised even him.

Raymond was not often touched. Perhaps because he seemed every bit as sharp as his weaponry, or perhaps because he kept few close friends. Perhaps because there wasn't really any way to address this particular elephant in the room without explicitly making a dick joke. But suffice to say he could not recall the last time anyone - let alone a woman he respected and admired - took hold of his weapon with such easy confidence.

See. Dick joke.

Moving on.

A comfortable silence fell across them as the pair of them parted the grass seas before them, headed...wherever their footsteps would lead them. "If what you say is true, then we need as much information as we can get. There's no use stabbing at shadows."

To swim these waters, they would need allies. For what, he couldn't say. At the moment they were but two old soldiers, bound together by honor and the strangely easy sweep of their tails, marching onward into darkness.

So it goes.

Who will you be here, Raymond?

The red stallion did not doubt that Calliope suspected exactly how loaded such a question would be. She was every bit as deliberate as he, if in a different way, and though they'd never really spoken much of all that came to pass before their first fateful meeting in Ravos, she had known him long enough to recognize that he was not simply her muscle.

She would not have suffered his presence for this long if she thought him simply her muscle.

His gaze focused on something far beyond them or the present as he let the question echo in his mind. Who he was was whatever he needed to be to do whatever he believed needed to be done, and often that mantle was neither heroic nor glamorous. He had assigned a price to the secrets of his own kind and fully embraced nihilism as a creative force. He was not a noble man, though his loyalty to the lady of lions gave him leave to play such a role.

"I'll be myself," he murmured with a knife-edged smile as he curled into her mane, drawing in her familiar ozone scent.

The weight of the words straddled the gulf between self-confidence and bitterness. It was the voice of a man unafraid of shame and toil, who knew in the dim twilight hours when both sun and moon slept that he answered to no law but his own, and that life could be valued, bought, and sold in the name of greater goals. It was the voice of a man who lived the life before Calliope. Perhaps she would not like that man so well - but then, he reminded himself, that was the one she knew first. The one that looked her in her ice-shard eye and promised that if he ever saw the need to destroy her, he would tell her first.

Calliope spoke of the dragon and he arched a brow with silently vexed intrigue. Raymond had stopped her from killing herself in the pursuit of dragonslaying before, and were she not presently entangled he was skeptical of her restraint now. To Calliope it was more than a vendetta; to Raymond, it was a math problem - and there were too many unknown variables to solve for X.

His tail constricted slightly around hers, a red serpent with fangs eternally bared begging temperance from the wrathful arm of Zeus himself. "Be patient," Raymond leaned into the plane of her shoulder and breathed for her ears alone. "I will reach out - find out what makes these people tick, and the faces of our foes. Perhaps we will learn how to slay your dragon, if it is the real enemy at all. I trust you've already taken steps to carve out a place for yourself."

Raymond took nothing for granted. The accounts of a few biased individuals did not a full story make, and the swordsman did not pick any side but his own.

The red stallion disengaged, unwinding body and blade from the dark unicorn with only a flicker of hesitation in the way his blade traced the shape of her tail brush bare millimeters from its surface. "I guess I'd better get started." Raymond tilted his head with a jaunty smirk. "Networks don't build themselves." And he had a feeling most of this would be on the final.

Tipping his blade in a parting salute, the red stallion backed away from Calliope and turned toward the heart of all movement within Terrastella: the Dusk Court.