– Calliope –
the name of 'freedom' was chanted across the cause

*
Calliope is relentless in her journey to the newly formed summit. The storm cloud of dust at her back is without end, it rises and falls like ash to cling to all the sweat and froth on her skin. She's no stranger to long journeys, to roadways and deserts that have no break in sight. This path seems like no more than a blink of an eye to her.

Once she had spent seasons watching the trees die and oceans turn to hard, sand. Once the world around her had forgotten who she was. Once, not so long ago, she had traveled through the tangles of time and space to find all the worlds where her sister might still live.

Novus is an easy world to travel. Here there are no beasts to hide in the shadows she casts as the sun starts to hang low in the sky. Calliope has no deaths to deliver on her pathways here, no victims that require the brutal sort of salvation only she can provide.

Only the soft echo of Raymond's hooves as he gains on her slows her footsteps at all. He is more suited to lazy perusal of the dangers ahead of them. His might lies in cleverness and wit. Hers in passion and recklessness.

He is the only council she might listen to and so she relents from her wild hunting gallop to a steady canter.

Calliope gathers herself as she crosses into the summit, chin tucked to her chest and her horn pointed ahead at whatever challenges a god might have left for mortals to face. The magic is thick here. It's strange to feel it again. It was easy to forget such wild things as god-magic where there are courts, walls and laws. Novus does not seem a place for this-- this oil thick air and pillars of trees that act like sentinels to some awful secret. 

Where others might pray, bow their heads in reverence at such power over the very earth, Calliope is instantly distrustful.

Gods have raised mazes before her. They were mazes full of horror, designed not to test but to devour those foolish enough to hope for blessings. She has seen them torment those who thought them holy and stitch their lips shut with fire and malice.

Distrust is not a strong enough word to convey all that Calliope feels in her bones as she beholds yet another creation of gods. 

With all the sweat and dust on her she smells as wild as any magic of the long dead Riftlands.

That silver of her gaze is an inferno of emotion as she taps her horn against a single tree sentinel, testing it for any trickery that might lay Floretine and Asterion low. She turns towards Raymond, too tense to smile at the sight of him ready to follow all her blazing, reckless passion.

“I am reminded of Ravos.” Calliope doesn't smile, there is no fondness for a place full of demon gods that wanted only to hoard their might for petty things. She doesn't even miss being queen of all the heretics of wild magic that knew no gods in their bones.

Raymond surely knows it is no good thing that this wall of trees reminds her so strongly of another world devoured by itself like an ouroboros.



@Raymond @Random Events

There was a spartan quality to Raymond and Calliope that took to outriding like a spark to dry tinder. The trappings and endless intrigues of court life were not for them (even Raymond, who so very easily slipped into the mannerisms of civilized folk), and the only dust that could ever dirty their flesh was the dust of a hard day's travel trapped in the proverbial amber of honest sweat.

Florentine and her entourage might hesitate in the shadow of their stony walls, but Raymond would not. Calliope would not.

He drew easily alongside as the black unicorn slowed and took up a guarded stance as she approached the strange, sealed stand of trees, allowing her to approach them alone as he examined the structure as a whole. The trees seemed simultaneously ancient and young, gnarled with the passage of time but almost hospital-clean, and nothing about their surroundings suggested that such a thing should exist - there or anywhere. It was not the first time Raymond had seen powerful magic at work and he doubted it would be the last, but it set his teeth on edge with a slow-simmering distaste.

Gods had never destroyed anything that Raymond loved. They had never bent him to their will or toyed with his life, because Raymond would not be so handled. But he had known many a good horse turned sour by the dread opiate religion, had exploited the piety of others to his own ends, and knew that gods were all it took for good people to do unspeakable evil.

Meddlesome. Vile.

Calliope turned toward him, and as their eyes met he saw her as clearly as the sealed gathering place: black as an oil spill, shining with sweat and dust from the road, the cuff on her horn glinting in the fiery evening sun. He lingered on the image as she spoke and his mind lingered on it after she fell silent.

He did know the dark portents that followed the mention of Ravos, but he also knew the fickle mortality of its gods and the games they sought to play with the lives of their adherents. They were vain and fallible. The rift had been a greater and more terrible god than they, and it was nothing at all but a putrescent, gangrenous wound tucked between the toes of ten thousand separate worlds.

"I would not mind if it were like Ravos," Raymond replied coolly.

Give him a god he could kill.


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

– Calliope –
the fire is at my feet again

*
“The horses here will survive no maze.” That gaze, steel and stone, lingers on Raymond as she turns from the trees. The darkness between the trunks looms up behind her, gaping and thicker than any blackness has a right to be.

No god will make her scared of shadows.

She's unafraid of the dark and her tail flicks and sways and taunts some beast to brave the open air at her back. Her faith in Raymond is unending as is her belief that the skilled violence in her muscles knows no end. Let the gods come, let them preach and sway and leave open their throats for the tip of her horn.

She wonders how much blood their bodies might hold, if their corporeal might ooze out like mist over a lake if she took away the shape of them.

She glances her side against the red covered ribs of Raymond. It's a touch of dedication, of promise. This god-magic will not take him from her. Not like the sick Rift took Shrike. Calliope would shred universes like silk and blood if any god or magic dared.

After the touch she paces the treeline, restless as a wildcat caged with a hunger made of years boiling in her belly. She's a rabid thing, all flashing edges and blood-lust. Always have the gods made her rage. No thing should hold such power with no trial, no way to balance the folly of immortality.

She's too restless to notice the flash of white and red in the shadows.

Calliope prowls as a wild thing might. She prowls as if a lion might linger still in her bones. And that lion still remembers how to roar in the edges of her voice. “They are tamed by their vices and walls.   All of them have forgotten what it means to be wild. And only wild things are made to withstand the brutality of gods and hold tight their freedom.” The roar in the pauses of her words slices deeper and faster than her horn might. The silence of that black between the trees seems to shatter in that echo of that voice.

But then! Oh but then!

The white in the darkness shifts and speaks and Calliope can no longer let  gaze glide over it like a scepter of her past. At first she think it might be a mirage, a trick of the gods given to enrage the violent  unicorn to the point of madness. But that desert smell drifts in, thicker than all the sand of Novus and Calliope rushes to Shrike in no more than a single leap.

Her hooves have wings for she leaps as only a lion might. Or perhaps as only a unicorn might be able to fly across the ground without a single mark of her passing.

“Do you know who I am?” She whispers, pressing a kiss to that red streak of danger across her sister's gaze. “Do you remember me?” Her tail tangles about Shrike's legs, a chain daring all the god's to try to take a single thing from her this time.

No god in any universe would survive that cruel rage of hers. It's in her gaze as she meets the amber of her sister with blue ice. Reflected in her eyes is a war, not beauty encased in lighting but purpose between the blinking of her eyelids.

Woe to the God's now. Calliope has found her purpose again. The world should tremble for it and the stars should fall like comets before the way the scales of her soul start to tip and level out.



@Raymond @Shrike

– Calliope –
bloodshot eyes, sword in hand

*
“I would raze the world and all the monsters in it,” Calliope promises in a violent whisper, a gunshot in a hurricane, as Shrike presses her lips to that horn upon her head-- a weapon, justice tipped in blood and silver. Just once was it a weapon of mercy, a curse she bore only because she wielded such a thing upon her brown. Her eyes close as she remembers and she holds her horn so very, very still, as if it might shatter Shrike like glass if it but touches her skin.

“just to save you from feeling my horn across your throat again.” She finishes, stepping away to look back at the trees and the dark things that might be hiding between them. Her tail lashes agitated at her back as she thinks of gods and their powers of creation.

Now Calliope has so very much to lose in this world and she's made more dangerous for it. She is a lion to her very core and her soul rages with the need to protect and lay flat any enemy that might surface before her gaze of judgment.

Her body stops in that space between Shrike and Raymond. For a moment there are so many ways one might connect the three of them. With the right lines they connect like an infinity symbol, their souls and hearts crossing over and over and over again with no end in right.

Ravos and the Rift could not sunder them apart (bones nor purpose). Novus will show them the same, Calliope thinks. That same inability to weather and tame warriors who remember what it means to be just a horse, to be wild. Here to they will go on, endless and driven only by that purpose in their bones to claim the justice others are not dark enough, angry enough to take for themselves.

Let gods come in their shining glory and dark, dark pride. Let the dragons and sand monsters come for them when they find themselves hunted for once-- hunted by unicorns and horses that should not track and rage as predators do.

Let universes come for her. Calliope feels unstoppable now that she has Raymond and Shrike once more. None of them will die without leaving destruction and righteousness in their path when the monsters come calling.

Of this Calliope is certain.

That certainty crackles like lightning bolts in her eyes as she smiles at both her war-sister and the only man to make her feel anything but coldness. There is a storm rising in her blood and it singes her inside when it touches muscles that have ever trained for war. It echoes as thunder in her voice when she answers Shrike. “It seems that gods have come to Novus or magic sick enough to possess mere birds and make them talk as a god would. Either way I have little faith in the rightness of the summons. I have yet to see gods call out for anything but suffering and misery, never have I seen them save a single thing.” Oh how the thunder crashes in her voice!

She speaks as a storm might, ready to wipe clean the blood and drown all the devils of Novus.



@Raymond @Shrike

– Calliope –
the price we are willing to pay

*
Calliope listens to the two halves of her soul and her heart races with joy and rage that this is where they are finally reunited. They are the calmness to her reckless passion, the anger that roils beneath her skin like a monster every breath.  They are the tacticians and she the missile fired to consume nations made on greed and sorrow.

Still she paces, an ear cocked back to the trail leading here. Calliope prowls as a predator does, more relentless than any religion might be in their preaching.

“Gods and mortals. Monsters are made from the combination.” Her eyes seek out Raymond, blazing silver-blue, brighter than a comet plummeting for the earth. There is a bond there, a pact made when they taunted all the gods in Ravos and offered freedom and choice. Sealed when he traveled back and returned with the band upon her horn.

There's a different feeling there and it burns, burns, burns.

The look is gone in a blink and Calliope returns to her pacing, restless and wild for the things promised by birds that speak. “And with Dencote some talk of dragons and walls.” She could froth with the rage she's known by dragon-fire and wing.  Calliope could count the scars on her body left by fang and hook. She's a map of suffering and death, rivers of raised flesh and mountains of burns.

Those scars glitter in the forest low-light. They glitter as only gore and war might, with black and red, raw skin.

“We came for the Dusk Court, to see what horrors a god summons might offer.” Calliope and Raymond did not come with but for. They came for Asterion and Florentine and the others who knew what Ravos and the Riftlands turned them into. Like the times of Velius, Calliope is full of defensive rage, a hunger for the survival of those she considers hers.

Sometimes she's wonders what the lion left behind in her bones, what is predator made and what is unicorn.

“I would like to watch all the courts arrive, to see what crimes their eyes might hold.” That grin is all lion, toothy and feral and it's easy to forget that here is only a unicorn again (mortal and dangerous for the way she welcomes death to serve any just purpose). Her hooves turn from the trees and back towards the path.

Let all the courts and their leaders walk before her to heed the call of the gods and let them look in those iron-fire eyes and know that it is not only religion that watches them in the world of Novus.



@Raymond @Shrike