It's not the fire that brings her hunting across the plains, not at first.
The rabbit screams summoned her. The sound is a common one, perhaps of some owl seeking to fill a hunger that could not compare to Calliope's. But here in Novus, in a world of politics and walls and strange horses that drink from cups, the way the scream goes on and on is enough to turn her head towards the sound.
It sounds like pain, like torment and the sound is familiar enough to bring a cold, frozen smile twisting across her black lips. No hunter kills so cruelly.
And once she has turned and made her way into the tall grasses, moving slow and low enough to be more wildcat than unicorn, the fire is what brings her closer. Once she's seen it, once she's spotted that poor twitching rabbit upon the flames the rumble of coming thunder is nothing more than a after thought. No storm could turn her away, no snap of lightning could instill fear in blood that remembers the sting of that electric violence so well.
Calliope moves from the grasses, watching the old stallion writhe upon the dirt like a snake. Instantly she is reminded on the sick things of the Riftlands. He looks like one of them, the tainted ones, laid low by his disease and foolish enough to think that he will rise up greater in the aftermath of his decay. Perhaps they could have risen as monsters to claim the leftover wasteland of that world.
But Calliope had trapped them in an electric river and collapsed all their passages to salvation and food. She left them to die, to wither away to nothing but bones and give their plague back to the earth. There is no regret in her for that choice, the one that others couldn't bring themselves to make.
Sometimes creatures cannot be saved and blood is the only peace left to claim.
She is near silent as she moves closer, her steps muffled by the storm, the cracking of the flames and the mindless groans of his madness. To her he is not so sacred and the bones and blood upon him are not holy or worthy of praise.
The stallion is nothing more than other mad horse, lost to all the things he thinks might ring true. This is not the first religious zealot she has found, nor the first sacrifice she has witnessed.
Calliope only stops when she is close enough to watch the blood fleck from his face and feel the force of his laughter like pin-pricks on her skin. Her horn is swift as she lowers it to the ground and flicks dirt and grass into his flames. The dead grasses snaps in the fire and the her horn as she lifts it up into smoke of her offering hangs in the air like a nose, silent and coarse and waiting to meet that tender curve of his throat.
He will find only silence in her face, a still sort of blackness that consumes far more than any mortal should. She stands over him poised like a lion, waiting for him to offer another innocent woodland creature to the flames so that she might toss him onto his own pyre instead.
And in her eyes he will see judgment, brighter and sharper than the lighting that lashes above their heads.
Compared to her, the way she oozes brutality and needs no words to make her promises, the last summer storm seems tame.
BUT THE BEAUTY OF HER FORM BRINGS VIOLENCE
A LONG AND LOVELY FALL NO WILL OR FIRE CAN OPPOSE
Perhaps another would have been startled to see the grotesque beneath the bone. He's a thing of weathered flesh and bone that has long since lost any form of elegance. There is a world in his hair, bones woven into dreadlocks. Everything about him is a grim, patchwork altar to religion and a tombstone for all the animals unlucky enough to meet this monster.
Unicorns are less easy to startled and Calliope is harder than most. Others might see something to fear, to flee or to follow. She only sees the mortal curl of his crest beneath the tangles. She only sees flesh that would hold a grave dug out by the tip of her horn.
Had she known there were darts waiting beneath his tangles she would have carved all his hair out from the apex of his spine to this withers.
When he rises she only watches him as a storm might watch the sea swallow up the shore by the kiss of its winds. She only lifts her horn up high enough so that she doesn't touch his crown. Calliope isn't ready to give up her weapon so soon, not to a blind beast foolish enough to approach a unicorn (just a mare to him) that smells like ozone.
Only her silence greets his words. She nether denies or affirms his questions. It's death that lingers in the silence of her, only that deathly stillness that suggests she has come for him at all.
And when he touches her as another wild thing might she breathes once into his nose. Calliope wonders if he can smell the violence of her on her skin. Her flesh is heavy with a rage that would put every god to shame and shatter all their altars to diamond dust.
Perhaps he can only know by the way that she greets him as no other horse in Novus might that she is something more blooded and wild than he, with all this bones and decay, could hope to be.
All he gets is a single touch of her nose to his and then she replaces her lips with her horn. The tip rests gently against that wide, flat spot between his eyes. Now she is ready to reveal the wicked, brutality of her horn.
It's a gavel against his skin, justice made ready and it could almost feel like a tremble of a noose as she speaks loud enough to challenge both the fire and the thunder. “What is is that you sacrifice for, Turhan?” Calliope leans closer, no more than a single expansion of her vertebrae. The gesture is enough to let him feel the blade of her justice just a little more. Only retreat from her will save him from bleeding-- just a little, less than that rabbit had in his flames.
“Do you think the death of a mere, innocent rabbit will gain you any favor?” The rage is in her voice now, muted to no more than a low rumble of displeasure. It sounds like a lion might, a soft warning of the death that might follow if another trespass is made.
Calliope dips her tail in the fire, just long enough for embers to cling to her hair. When the tips start to smolder and burn she lifts it up and flicks the clinging embers toward him. The gesture and that smell of singed hair seems to suggest what that low growl in her voice doesn't put to words.
That should he say the wrong thing she might drive him back, back, back into the embers of his pyre. It suggests that he might burn, smolder and scream as the rabbit had.
Even religion is not beyond the reach of justice and karma.
BUT THE BEAUTY OF HER FORM BRINGS VIOLENCE
A LONG AND LOVELY FALL NO WILL OR FIRE CAN OPPOSE
It is a terrifying thought that Calliope understands this madness of his, this sickness of the brain. She has known bones that speak, beasts and stones that made words ring like a storm from forms that held no lip, so soul. Turhan is like the things of the Riftlands, consumed by magic and belief until it rots and festers in the body like a plague.
Perhaps had she been anything but a unicorn dressed in black with a storm soul she would have rotted from all the terrible things she has seen and the terrible things she has been made to do in the name of justice.
“I have come from all those places, thrived in places that are made of sea, fire, cliff and between. I have walked between moons upon a floor of glass. My horn has plucked a star out of the night-sky for love. Under a dragon's wing I have walked through a wildfire to promise justice where none were brave enough to do what is right.” Calliope leans closer, close enough to smell the smoke and death upon his skin. She can taste the rotten things in his hair, bones not left to bleach in the sun long enough to dry out the scent of sorrow.
The pressure spreads to that tip of her horn, just enough to feel the way his flesh caves before the gavel of her blade. She doesn't run him though, not yet, not with the madness in him so wild that she falters in passing her judgment.
But oh, how the next worlds make her rage and boil. It festers like his madness and crackles with fury along every cold, steel inch of her soul. This stallion speaks as the gods do and Calliope has every hated how gods are known to speak.
So she leans a little more, enough to make him bleed, enough to part the dreads of his forelock around her horn like a sea parting before a hurricane wind.
There is eradication in her voice now, rage muted only because it must come from mere mortal lips and she has no lightning now to carve the words into the very air about her form. “I am no rabbit, a thing caught and made to burn just because some devil thought to take the right of choice from it. There is no justice in that death. It suffered and burned for no reason at all.”
Calliope drags her horn down his old, gnarled face, turning the pressure of it light enough to sting instead of tear his flesh from his skull. “But tell me,” The words could be a noose for the tightness to them when they blaze from the sneer upon her face. “If you are a rabbit will you choose to burn? Will you chose to suffer just to serve mystics who have no appreciation for true sacrifice and misery when it is be taken from their flesh one piece at at time?” The storm almost seems to rage overhead as nothing more than an mere mirror of the fury that sparks white and hot, hot, hot inside her chest.
“Of course time has need of me in the now. I am no rabbit but a unicorn made to take justice in a world lacking it-- a world where there are killers like you.” The thunder roars like a lion and it trembles in her bones like an earthquake.
In that heavy, humid silence of both the storm and Calliope she turns to horn to run it down his cheek towards that tender, delicate curve of his throat.
A rabbit with no choice but fate indeed.
BUT THE BEAUTY OF HER FORM BRINGS VIOLENCE
A LONG AND LOVELY FALL NO WILL OR FIRE CAN OPPOSE
@Calliope So this is a painful history he cannot bare to reveal to anyone - not even his presh Ilati .. if you can even understand him. I certainly cannot. I love you.
Turhan is as rabid as the sick magic, as feral, reckless and foolish as the monster who attacked her on a lightning sea. Surely it is madness to foam and spit like a beast before a unicorn, to rear and attack her with poisoned quills and teeth too ground down with age to do more than sting and bruise. It's pity that keep hers from flaying him wide open from shoulder to hip when she watches the quills fall short and his spit fall like acid rain against her skin.
“And still it screamed, loud enough to bring me.” Calliope doesn't move as she speaks. Her rage needs no movement now. It's an inferno that needs no wind to breathe, to devour up the world with a cleansing more powerful than all any flood might be. “Your poisons are not strong enough to spare a rabbit.”
The rain isn't enough to cleanse him now not when she knows what the paint and bones and tangles cover up. He could be black, black, black for all the sin she sees when she looks at him now.
Calliope thinks back to Shrike. How she tore her neck open quick enough that the end was no more than a shooting star, lovely and gone too quickly to think of a single wish. Turhan does not know mercy, not the kind that a unicorn should understand.
So she has little pity when the forest of his hair and the fallacy of his paints wash clean to reveal the mangled scar. She feels no sorrow when the thunder echoes just a little bit off the edges of her own horn. Even the lash of ash and ember against her feral features do little to move her hooves towards him to offer comfort for that empty, hollow space upon his brow.
Surely he cannot think he was the same as her, that even if he had a horn he might stand a chance of killing her. There has never been a creature such as Calliope, a unicorn who has held a lioness in her skin and lightning in her veins. A mortal who dissolved into shadows, traveled between worlds just to hunt justice.
She doesn't need to say that no army of kings and soldiers could hope to hold her down and carve out her horn. Calliope would kill them all, let her blood run with their own until there was nothing left but death and gore. Nothing would be left in the aftermath of her rage. Nothing can capture a unicorn and hope to find anything but corpses in the aftermath of such avarice. There would be only bones left in chains in the end, bones and blood.
“I hope you killed them all Turhan.” Her words are not gentle. Calliope is not made for gentle judgment or forgiveness. She is not made for horses like Turhan to understand, to think that they might fathom all the things that Calliope might be. “But if you can poison a rabbit and call it mercy when it feels enough to scream I doubt you had the will to claim your justice.”
Perhaps it's gentleness after-all that turns her from him, that sends her fading into the downpour as nothing more than a nightmare of an old beast, come to rattle out his sorrows and sins. Certainly it's mercy that promises in nothing more than a whisper of fading thunder. “The next time I hear screams around your fires, you will know that you're not dead. Not yet.” Like the storm she's gone.
Turhan is not the only one that causes flashes of suffering and calls it mercy and prayer in Novus.
Calliope has come for them all.
BUT THE BEAUTY OF HER FORM BRINGS VIOLENCE
A LONG AND LOVELY FALL NO WILL OR FIRE CAN OPPOSE
@Turhan, let's do this again soon. I love getting weird with you.
