alliope finds herself at the lake not because it's beautiful or because it glints like steel on either side of those glass walls. She's knee deep in the marsh grass as far from the gold and wood pathway as one can possible be.

The lioness could care less about beauty or about the way fish flit like birds and other horses gasp and wonder at the secrets of the deep. She's here because of the glass feather that's clasped tight between her lips and the drops of blood it steal from her tight lips.

Here there was a war here that never came to a end. Here there is the almost dead trail of an immortal who still has secrets to spill (by blood or tongue). Calliope is here to hunt and hunting has never had anything to do with beauty and wealth. It has everything to do with black unicorns and white mares who live by vengeance and by blood.

The feather splashes into the water and sinks when she catches the scents lingering on a summer wind. Her eyes eyes spark with a storm and her lips clench like a lion's, as if there are fangs behind her smile instead of flat, rough teeth. Along her back lightning licks across her skin like a monster that lives only inside the scarred skin of Calliope.

Tonight she feels reckless and wild with the way parts of her skin don't feel like they belong to her anymore. She itches and she burns and she wants rivers of blood. Blood enough to drown a hundred gods in. 

And so she's not surprised when Shrike joins her, surely they both feel the same hunger rumbling in their hearts-- the hunger of a bear and the fury of a lion. Calliope doesn't doubt that Shrike needs no words to read that spark and dance in her dark eyes to know what it is she has come here for.

Calliope, the black unicorn, the last of her kind, has come to hunt.

---

ach drum of her heart is a knell, a tolling bell in her chest that sings and screams and chants. Blood and vengeance, rage and retribution, war and annihilation. It sings and screams and howls. Her horn, that old and weary blade upon her brow, sighs and quivers violently like a harp string that almost wants to be sweet and almost wants to be a religion.

Today her skin is nothing but a cage in the gilded prison of this world with its courts and parties and gods. It's the thing beneath it that drives her now, that lion, the dragon killer, the monster who knows that evil tastes like fermented wine and burns when it goes down. There is a dominion of righteousness that boils and smolders and stings inside of her and it...

It wants out.

It wants gods and birds and elk. It wants the flesh of mortals who smile while they have sins in their hearts and blood that runs black, black, black with hatred (black as her flesh). It wants everything.

Calliope aches with her need when Shrike presses teeth into her shoulder. They touch like bears and lions and beasts that devour. She wants to roar and shake down the mountains of this place, shake loose the statues of gods to nothing more than dust and dirt and decay. The clock in her chest has tolled, chimed out the hour and each ticking clang says, kill, kill, it's killing time.

And all the violence is in her gaze, in the fingers of white-hot and hungry electricity that covers in her a storm. Although that's not quite right.

Calliope is the storm.

“Finally,” She growls and it sounds like a prayer form her lips, a hallelujah for a blessing. “the beasts of this world have shown their teeth.” It's a dangerous thing that sparks in her eyes. Like Helen it's a look that could destroy entire worlds. But her look is not beauty and grace and poise. It's fury and determination and thirsty, thirsty blades.

Calliope is a graveyard, empty and waiting and raw.

“Are you as hungry as I?” And she knows she doesn't have to ask. She knows that there is a fury of violence hanging inside Shrike's heart. Calliope knows that each raw thing in her that stings and burns and craves has its mate in the bone and ruby mare.

But she still wants to hear the words.

---

he three words that fall like hammers and blades and weapons of war from Shrike's lightning laugh knock loose things in Calliope. Her love, her weakness and her loneliness feel like a doe living in her chest. One that has lifted its nose to taste on the air gun-smoke and sweat and simply said in the language of forest creatures and unicorns, no more, no more, no more.

That doe turned and ate the hunter, licked up steel and lead and smiled when it made her teeth ache.

All of those things like love and forever and ever-after rise up from her like smoke and dissolve into the summer air like dew. Only this thing between them, toothy kisses and scars that match like stars and moons, survives. There is only fury in her steps, in the cracks of lightning that work over their skins like whips, only a hurricane in her eyes that turns towards the mountains and then further than that.

Calliope looks at the world as if it is thin as air, thin enough that she might look into the very core of it, to the magma and stone and fire. Far off, perhaps, a thunderbird feels that gaze and ducks behind the shadow of the moon.

Perhaps it already knows that there is no universe in which a lion will not come to strip it like a goose.

She pauses, hoof poised in the air like a doe, like a lion, like a unicorn. Each gleam of moonlight catches on her like a bullet, raw and gold where it should be silver and sweet. It should look like water, like a dream. But Calliope dreams of her lips touching fire instead of river water, bone instead of fruit, fury instead of peace.

Oh, she has learned there is no peace to be had, not for black unicorns, not for her. Not ever.

And so when her hoof falls back to earth it clangs like a meteor, like a dragon falling from the sky (like death). Her eyes blaze when she looks at the sky, hoping that the gods see the thing in her that wants the thing in them-- wants it dead. It batters at her, over and over again.

“The gods here are as guilty as all the others. Guilty for their beasts that they have no control over, guilty for their tricks.” Overhead a summer storm starts to roar, perhaps feeling the fury of Calliope, waiting for her to find the deeper, stronger magic in her that's from another world.

Somewhere too far away to see a Rift trembles, knowing that it has not been forgotten after all.

---

storm is gathering in her even as there is another above her. A hundred different bolts cleave the space between air, and bone, and muscle. Each bolt strikes crookedly in the pattern of a name. Fantome, Caligo, Vespera, No and others. There are endless bolts of names inside her and each is a crack of power, each a lash of fury that drives her on.

The storm runs with her over the meadow and when it's reflected in the lake it looks large enough to consume a world. Calliope runs and she's a killer, and a hurricane and a lion who devours sin.

Maybe if she knew that the old rift was waiting for her, rising like a rotten phoenix in the mountain pass, she would have paused her running and thought of Raymond, Eik and Asterion. Maybe she wouldn't have stopped at all, maybe she no longer cares for anything but retribution and Shrike.

But she doesn't know and she's still running heedless, and feral, with a piece of her soul running beside her. They run like a bear and a lion that don't belong in this world of courts and laws.

Calliope belongs with the feral magic, with blood on her teeth and bones of beasts at her hooves. She belongs in a world that will whisper to her the secret to ending gods. The rift knows this, it knows she wants to end all the rot, and decay, and sin in every world that has ever been. It knows Calliope is running like a reaper through the tall grass.

The rift knows she's running for war.

So it rises up to meet the two mares with violence in their hearts and lighting names branded into their bones. It's a tidal wave of rotten magic that looks a little like water and a little like old, molded decay soaked in like.

Calliope doesn't even pause. She only smiles at her sister. And when she takes that last step into the wild-place where gods and magic die---

When she takes that last step she roars.

---