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


Raymond had not yet washed the flower maiden's blood out of his red coat. It stood out in dark, ruddy brown streaks matted through the hair of his face and body where he'd had to get directly engaged. Not that he liked being bloody - it itched, foreign and unpleasant as a needle pressing into the slope of his back - but there simply had not been time.

Time is precious; the ranger had always known that. Lately, though, its value seemed unquantifiable.

It would be nice to learn how to sleep again.

He had stolen through Denocte under cover of darkness, passing like a shadow where normally he would strut, his progress marked only by the slow tumble of the stars and moon far overhead. Where he went, he'd left bread crumbs - small, meaningless scribbles, not even fit to turn a crow's head - tracing an obscure path, decipherable only by two pairs of eyes, to where he waited now.

Not far from here, to the south, he had run across the young Hydra injured by a hungry catamount. Not far in the other direction, the Arma mountains loomed dark and indistinct to the north in the pre-dawn light. He kept watch now in the rolling foothills between both of those worlds, the purple mirror of Vitreus lake laid out in almost sinister silence across the empty distance between him and the capitol. His red coat, dull brown in the twilight gloom and broken up as it was by the shadow of someone else's misery painted into its surface, made him for once nearly invisible against the scrubby backdrop.

But what he awaited would not be hunting by sight alone.

She would hunt with her heart, and by the unwavering grip of a life well-shared.

Calliope
'be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt'


Calliope is walking through the night market when she spots the first weapon made line across the wood of some poor merchants booth. The second is around the corner, another slash of soot and dust that stands out like a drop of blood beneath the moon-glow. The last is at her feet as she walks towards the walls of the court where the wilds call out to that wildcat in her heart.

It's the last mark that quickens her steps to a canter and brings a wild white edge to her eyes that sends all the gentle horses of the court back to the shadows when they hear her running across the stone pathways behind them. She's still no more than a specter in the night court, a feral thing with none of Raymond's charm and all of his violence (and then some).

She feels like a lion among horses, a monster against a backdrop of artists, one who will kill to keep their hands covered only in paint that looks red enough to be blood.

Calliope is reckless as she runs though the tall grasses and her belly sinks low enough as she runs to feel the sharp pricks of thistles and weeds against her skin. She runs like a unicorn, horn flashing in the starlight and hooves near silent on the dirt. But she hunts like a lion, nose flaring wide and her teeth look like pearls in the blackness of her face as she peels back her lips when she smells both blood and her red warrior.

There is not a thing in all of Novus that could stop her from following the trail of blood the lines in the gloaming brought her too. And when she runs along the shores of the lake even the water doesn't slow her down when she lets the lapping of the lake announce to the whole of the night: Calliope this way comes.

Her horn looks like a wicked thing when she finds him and it sighs though the night-chill when she brandishes it as the shadows that swallow up any reflections they might cast under the moon. And her eyes look more wicked when she traces every inch of him with her burning, winter gaze and touches her lips to the crusted blood across his cheek.

“This is not your blood.” Calliope's voice is a scratch of lightning across the sky, the first bloom of blinding brightness in the darkness. It thunders both like war-cry and an promise that anger is so very close to the surface of her unicorn skin when Raymond has more secrets to bare.

Calliope's arrival, swift and sinister as an advancing stormfront, was inevitable. As he never doubted her convictions, neither did he doubt her memory or the habits they had laid down across their bloody history. There was a certain mysticism to the practice. All it took to summon a primal instrument of retribution was a handful of runes scattered ritualistically across the canvas of reality.

This is not your blood.

"It's good to see you too."

The red stallion offered the shell of a quirky smile, unable to shed that customary self-confident flourish even in the grips of his preoccupation. The blood doesn't matter, that look said, and it didn't. If it mattered, she would never have known about it because he'd have washed it off like an offensive stain clinging to the threads of a nice shirt.

At least he had the decency to rein in his driving instinct to lead off with an ice-breaker. He wasn't sure how much line she'd let out for him since his last transgression, and he expected (given their history) that he was bound to transgress sometime in the future. They were both of them too wild for it not to happen occasionally; Raymond respected her enough, however, to push his limits without also trampling them completely.

But he was still Raymond.

"While I was laying low in Manyembo, a local mare asked if I ever considered going back home, seeing what's left. Sure, I'd considered it, I told her," he rolled his shoulders in an emphatic shrug, "but what I went back to would no more be home to me than Manyembo. I had no choice but to keep moving forward." Some stains don't come out. Some thorns pierce too deeply to come out clean. No one can step into the same river twice.

His smooth minstrel's voice dropped like a stone into the bitter (and complicated) curl of his lip. "Our friend Florentine doesn't seem to agree. She thought she could use the rift to bring my cat back from the dead." The anger was still fresh, edging so near anguish but for his own rage that the flower maiden could not help but meddle dangerously in the lives and affairs of others. If she died, it'd be her own fault, and he'd suffer for it anyway.

"I wish I could say she failed, but...you know the rift," he laughed, shaking his head. There was no mirth in the gesture.

Calliope
'be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt'


Calliope stalks him as he talks and prowls all the messages writ in blood that shine darker than his skin. He's a ruby of war, all sharp edges that draw her in as much as they call to her blood to turn back from this fire in her chest that could rewrite universes. On he goes and it feels like a hundred words cross his lips for each beat of her heart and throb of blood through her veins.

And with each word the fire grows and turns to electricity whistling through her. When she looks again at all the blood upon him something surges up between her bones memories. “I know the rift well.” Her voice is charged with sorrow and rage, violence and loss, fury and fury and fury.

The bitter smile on his lips is reflected in her own. She makes the look darker for the way it twists her black lips and flashes her teeth when she grinds them together in agitation. At her back her tail snaps like a whip against her now still feet. It rends the silence after all his words like horn once tore asunder a world made of dark, stars and glass.

Snap, snap, snap.

It's an effort to swallow her fury and draw her eyes from the patterns of blood upon him. It's harder still to blink away the rage and touch her nose to his in a gentle touch that asks instead of demands.“And yet I see neither of them here.” The words taste like ash on her tongue and they are bitter where they hang in the silence between them.

She's so very tired of surprises that come not on the battle-grounds, ones that make her bones feel as fragile as porcelain. Love is a cruel thing, she thinks, to still her fury and impatience when she wants to light universes with storms and turn the riftlands to dust so that no one else will go back to that dark hell.

The rift has taken enough from her and Raymond has taken what was left of her to give. And now she has nothing more to give than silent hope that the end of this tale will not turn to ash all the pieces of her that's she has given him to hold.

“Of course," Raymond replied, answering the question etched into the silent spaces between her words and in the warmth of her muzzle against his. He'd given her the punchline without the joke, the aesop without the fable; of course her tail would snap like a branch in a high wind. But the red stallion always stepped lightly - most certainly around affairs of the heart - and nothing strayed nearer to his heart than family. "Let's take a walk."

The red stallion pulled back and flashed a reassuring smile, brushing his tail across her dark flank as he turned away toward the mountains.

When he was certain Calliope was with him, without lingering long enough on their shared silence for her impatience to flare, he continued. "Florentine paid me a visit yesterday. In case you were wondering, you're not the only one who isn't a fan of getting mail." He cast her a wry look, invoking the memory of their showdown in the Court with but a turn of his lip. The lilt of his voice seemed almost tailor-made for conversations on the road, rising and falling with his strides. Ruthlessly smooth; it did, at least, make the time and the distance pass.

"For context, she approached me before the Summit meeting, adamant that she could find Ruth with that, uh...magical dagger of hers. She opened a portal and went through it before I could stop her, so of course I had to follow." Blah blah, Champion of Battle and all that. Duty's a bitch, but it was not the duty of his office that had hastened him to her defense. "We wound up in the middle of a ruined fortress on a dead world, stayed only long enough to find Ruth's collar broken in the center of some kind of massive footprint." His step slowed. "Broken...and covered in a thousand years worth of grit and tarnish."

The wrinkle passed.

Raymond did not like magic. He did not like things beyond his control, variables that could not be balanced in the complex equations he juggled constantly in his head. But the most insidious variables were those left by the rift - monsters that scorned quantification, that seemed at once sentient and blindly idiotic. The rift was a dangerous bedfellow, and Florentine had been romancing its subtle curves since she was a child.

"She traveled by the same means yesterday when she found me in the Arma mountains. Maybe she got sloppy, maybe the rift got bored with her. Whatever the case, it spit Ruth out after her and slammed the door on both of us." He shrugged, shielding his perturbation behind a veil of devil-may-care frankness. The mountains were before and around them now, and behind them Vitreus lake had disappeared behind the ever-growing foothills. "If the healers of Terrastella are as good as they think they are, she might even live to tell you about it herself. But at least we found out what made those strange footprints. As for Ruth...."

Now the red stallion stopped. However cool and conversational his voice was, his tail had been swaying with the effort to bleed off buried apprehension. This was not a risk he wanted to take, for either of their sakes, but if he loved Calliope he knew that he must. She would never forgive such a transgression twice.

"Do you trust me, Calliope?"

Thunder rumbled faintly somewhere across the sprawling mountains.

Calliope
'the moment for truth and the moment to lie'


Calliope follow him and she pads through the grass like both a lion and a unicorn, silent and deadly. Each hoof falls softer than all the wary weight that bares it down. She follows him like a beast, too raw to stand beside him and brush their shoulders together until they are no more than a single entity prowling through the grazes with a hunter's gaze on the horizon. With each step it's not impatience that rises and licks a fury against the curve of her rib-cage and burrows like a worm inside the chambers of her heart. Each of his words grow something else down in the deep of Calliope--

Judgment rises in her and it feels like it cracks her open in fissures of suffering and rage. This thing feels like a flare of sorrow in all the black violence of her, a throwback to the days when she was the last-- the last of her kind, the last hunter to devour up all the monsters of the world.

This feels like dying, the way she steps in the marks left by his hooves and lets the words of healers and tarnish and the rift crash over her like waves to fill her lungs with brine and blood. Calliope hunted all the beasts of the Riftlands and she knows enough to be leery of what his words don't say. She has burned and bled and almost died again and again for the Rift.

Now perhaps it has taken the small unbroken pieces of her too and she wonders that wreckage of violence will be left in the aftermath of her destruction, what things will die simply because the light of hers has faded to black.

Raymond stops and she does the same, stopping far enough away that his heat is nothing more than a brush of faint warmth against her skin. She hates things beyond her control almost as much as he and certainly she hates with more wildness than he. Calliope hates like the sun hates the clouds and the night; she hates like a storm hates the valley as it lashes and screams and rips trees from the ground.

Her hate is a terrible, terrible thing.

When he turns and looks at her, Calliope thinks that perhaps he will recognize the fissures of judgment flashing like spectral bolts of fury in her gaze. “Always.” The word tastes not like she expected it to taste, filled with a violent sort of love. Always, tastes a little like ash on her tongue, like embers that sting and burn where they fall.

Calliope closes the distance between them, unafraid even though she blinks and buries those fissures in her gaze. But for the first time she thinks that instead of saying always she should have simply said what blazes through those tiny cracks of fury and suffering in her heart---

She should have said no.

I'll be a stone, I'll be the hunter,
The tower that casts a shade

***

The red stallion turned his head to regard Calliope, searching her face for a context to underpin the peculiar tone of her voice. She was unsettled - he did not need to love her to tell as much - but it was the gnawing disquiet of staring blindly into an uncertain abyss. He knew what awaited them, and however practiced he was at maintaining his composure, he was terrified.

An acknowledging half smile flashed across his lips. "Stay by my side," he said, his self-assured veneer eroding a bit, then added, "I don't know what she'll do."

The vulnerability in that truth hurt him nearly as much as the horror of what might happen should things go wrong.

Raymond looked out toward the slopes where he could feel the Tarrasque lying in wait, so catlike and serene in her preternatural patience. Another thousand years could pass waiting for his word and her boredom would only just begin to itch. Would that a thousand years could pass and they could die without facing such unquantifiable risk - but then life was never fair. He learned that early on. His muscles were taut as drawn bowstrings, straining for release with nowhere to leap. For all he knew, his body was all that would protect Calliope from the titan's violent inquisitiveness.

With a deep, steadying breath, he beckoned both telepathically and audibly with calm he did not feel, "Ruth?"

A low keening answered. The rhythmical thunder permeating the air crystallized into something comprehensible as the beast uncurled herself from where she lay beyond the rise, spines jutting up over the crest like a forest of curved blades. She lifted her head, fixing the pair with one bright blue eye beneath the shadow of her horned brow, necked torqued this way and that as she studied the dark shape beside Raymond with puzzlement strong enough to bleed through the link.

She towered, ill-fitting against the mountain tableau behind her owing to the sheer unreality of her size. In but a few strides she drew near; in a few more she would overtake them. Raymond stepped forward, willing his body to be a shield.

That will do, he cautioned for her alone with enough severity as to give the Tarrasque pause. Ruth crouched nearly to the point of cowering, hands placed palm-down upon the stony ground as she strained to catch wind of Calliope's scent in an effort to find meaning in the half-finished jigsaw of her own memories.

I know her.

The beast's conclusion came with evident uncertainty, as though the sum total of her experiences could not wholly be trusted. There would always be part of her that remembered the cat only as a dream, and it was that part of her that had struck Florentine out of the sky.

"You remember Calliope," he instructed as much as explained, and after a tense moment of consideration the Tarrasque huffed and curled her sinewy limbs beneath her, sending a tremor rattling through his bones as she laid relaxed into a placid feline sprawl. Raymond let slip a single bark of nervous, relieved laughter.

"What a world we live in, eh?" He stepped back, allowing the dark unicorn free rein to approach if she so chose and quietly hoping she would choose otherwise. "It should be safe."

If it wasn't, at this point she'd be as good as dead anyway.

***

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

Calliope
“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”


She almost misses that wavering, once-confident look that Raymond gives her. The moment he speaks his uncertainty Calliope is no longer a unicorn, a thing of legends. All her fissures feel wider, each word cutting her as a jagged knife would. She could be a storm for all the white hot violence that rises like a wave between her ribs.

It's a lion that lifts her head to the air and almost snarls for the taste of rotten magic that comes just before the world trembles. She can feel the mountains shivering in her bones and she watches the trees bend and sway and open up to a curve of scale with something almost like anticipation. Surely he didn't think she would stay behind him (like a mare might) or that she would be afraid to look at something that whispered death to her.  Even the name he called, Ruth isn't enough to stop her from lowering her horn and shifting all her weight on to her haunches.

Perhaps the size of the beast that's more monster in the look of it should quell that whirlpool of violence in her breast. Perhaps if the blood and the feeling that she's missing bits of a story didn't already rend her into cracks and pieces of herself she would have paused at the name of Raymond's once familiar.

Perhaps if she didn't still feel the word no, no, no running through her blood like ice she would have seemed more like a unicorn than a lion eager for the hunt.

And when the monster stops and folds like like chastised kitten Calliope wants to smile a bitter smile, full of fury and rage. Her eyes linger on the blood, then the monster and she looks inwards to her memories and she stalks not towards Raymond but towards this beast named for a feline.

“Strange indeed.” She says before she's closer to the rift-magic creature than Raymond. Calliope wants to feel joy that Raymond found once more his cat but she can't help but look for tender spots in the scales and wonder if lion claws could scale up the side of this monster of a beast like a mountain made of stone.

She looks up, up, up to find the end of this monster and asks loud enough for the words to crack like lightning, “Do you think this is 'right' “? And the words sound like a low growl that seems almost like it never wants to end.

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

***

Do you think this is 'right'? Calliope asked. Ruth shifted slightly where she lay, the spines on her lower jaw biting into the soil as she tilted her bright blue eye toward the mare.

Some cultured believed that odd eyes like that could pierce the veil of the spirit realm, and feline mystique came with an almost necessary suggestion that such superstition was true. If so, would the Rift have destroyed such a gift, or would she see now only horrors? Raymond had enough of her to worry about without wondering if she saw demons wearing the skins of those she had once adored.

So he didn't.

The red stallion's ears flicked back loosely at Calliope's question, and for a moment he turned his gaze away from both unicorn and beast as though to shield his face from view. Were that his intent, the gesture would have been pointless: Calliope knew him too well and Ruth was closer even than that, separated only by the barest shade of a bridge between their scarred souls. "I would have happily buried her memory," he replied with almost surgical sterility.

The tarrasque did not react. She'd had many nights now to digest the conflicting ideas that Raymond could love her, accept her, and also prefer her to have died.

When Raymond looked again at the dark unicorn, it was with steel in his eyes and pain seeping into his words like blood welling up through hastily-wrapped bandages. "But it's my fault she survived, and that makes her my responsibility now. No one else's."

His fault. His fault that he had not put a runty, naked kitten out of its misery in the riftlands. His fault that he had taken it in, given it a name, gotten attached. His fault that he thought an enchanted collar around her delicate neck could protect him from the fallout of such attachments with the Rift so close at hand. His fault that she had spent a thousand years on a dead planet, dreaming of destruction and forgetting the face of her father. Certainly it was Florentine who had brought her back, but penance for her sin had been paid swiftly and most exactingly.

Who would make Raymond pay for his?

***

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

Calliope
“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”


Everything inside her burns and sparks like bits of fury caged in organ. She feels alight with a thousands things that unicorns are not made to feel. Things like regret and when she licks her lips and turns back to Raymond she tastes blood and sweat. Her eyes are more black then blue in the shadow of the beast called Ruth. She's grateful that the darkness swallows up that spark of fury, that bolt of dead magic from a dead world.

Calliope looks at Raymond and looks at Ruth and feels more like Death than she has ever felt before. Her horn trembles to remember sipping blood from Shrike's throat and her teeth sting to remember the tang of iron. The world around her feels like nothing but rot and decay, as if nothing will ever grow from the violence of her heartbreak when Raymond turns from her his face.

Thunder breaks in her heart as she steps towards him and blinks away the trembling of her horn and the fury in her belly. “The fault might lie with many things.” Her memories flash back to a tower that rose in the sky only to go down below the loam. Calliope thinks of shrouds of silk that parted before her to reveal Shrike parted like that same silk with red organs and gore spilling from her like rotten wine.

She thinks of many things as she touches her lips to the hollow bellow his eye (as if he would ever have any tears to shed for this fault of his). Everything is in her voice and it's heavy like oil and sand when she walks away from him and the Rift monster. “But it will always be partly with you must decide how to balance that.”

She knows what she would do.

Calliope's already torn her heart out again and again for justice and righteousness.