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[EXP] Thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone. - Printable Version

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RE: Thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone. - Raymond - 06-23-2018


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



Calliope's gaze was enough to make a lesser horse look away. At a glance there was nothing kind there - it was all ice and crossed swords and violent storms gathering at the dawn of all things - but he knew those eyes, the tilt of her brow, the depth and intensity of her gaze. He knew those eyes better than he knew anything in his life, because only she had given him cause not to move on.

He listened with rapt attention, understanding the weight of her words if not the full thread of the story. It did not demand complete understanding. The rift was a cruel master, a blind idiot god weaving its worlds like textiles on a broken loom, and the mad tragedy to befall Shrike fit perfectly with the relentlessness of its chaotic will. The fervor with which she had slaughtered the monsters among the ruins came back to him along with the image of her exhausted, injured, and bloodied, still ready to fight, still ready to die, and in light of the story she told now all of that pain made perfect sense.

They had both lost everything. They had both killed a thing they loved.

Tell me that your soul will always remember mine, she said.

He drew his tail more tightly toward himself, her tail tangled with it, and his grey eyes fell to them entwined there like a Gordian knot all their own. Certainly there was a threat there, but to Calliope a threat was promise and it was fear, was daring and uncertainty. She threatened because she needed to hear the answer, and he knew this because he knew her.

"Calliope, I..."

His voice trailed off, the vocal fry grating like stones in his throat as he hunted for the proper words. There was never a thing that Raymond said carelessly, but this was more difficult because it mattered. Like the ancient forest gods she had came upon him in a time of private emptiness and offered him everything and nothing all at once in exchange only for himself. Like a fairy tale protagonist he had accepted without question, and now where had such a fateful pact driven them?

Perhaps an echo of whalesong drifted in on the air. Perhaps it was just the whistling of wind through the slats of the mighty beast's ribs and into its breast, where beat two wild hearts as one.

"...A forest would sooner forget burning."

And nothing before had crossed his lips with such iron conviction. He pressed the plane of his forehead into the crease of her throat just behind her cheek, breathing deeply of her scorched-lightning scent. When the tide came back in, they would leave, but for now it seemed a part of them would beat forever in the leviathan's breast, as vast and wild as the sea itself.


@Calliope | why must it eeeeend


RE: Thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone. - Calliope - 06-25-2018

– 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.



@Raymond
an end, you know until I go a day and I require Ray posts in my life again