Rock of ages, rock of ages
Still rolling, keep rolling
***
"With all due respect," Raymond interceded softly, his voice colored yellow by the odd upward tilt of his lips, and neither by his words not his actions could one say for certain how much respect he truly felt he owed the night mother in that fleeting moment, "I have seen what happens to societies who dream of making peace with their invaders."
Before his mind's eye danced the memory of their combat with the Thunderbirds, their desperate reckoning with the wanton savagery of storms made flesh. Their talons had carved reminders into his flesh of the dangers of domestication and the greater perils of attachment. The one warning, perhaps, he could heed, but even for him the second had come far too late. He could never bring himself to trust beasts that had seen fit to assail them unprovoked, could not sleep soundly with such vipers coiled beside his bed.
He could not do more than smile that odd surface smile at the knowledge that the goddess of night should clamor so swiftly after such avatars of destruction so close on the heels of despots who would have seen her kingdom burn for the sale of their vicious, self-serving vanity.
Perhaps in that smile was something we innately recognize but have not yet named: the happy anticipation of being able to feel contempt. His tail blade itched, held in it's easy arc only by a lifetime of careful discipline.
"Turning the other cheek may be a noble gesture, but it's a mistake that mortals only get to make once."
The red stallion glanced smoothly at Calliope, ignoring the urge to remember her eyes blossoming with the morbid flowers of her sacrifice. She would want their blood, for certain, and while Raymond didn't share her battle lust he shared every inch of her survivor's spirit.
What game was Caligo playing? What part did she see them playing in her grand design?
***
Raymond
And at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
When the man comes around.
aut viam inveniam aut faciam
10-15-2018, 10:23 PM - This post was last modified: 10-18-2018, 08:12 AM by Raymond
Calliope 'It is best in the end to let women see to their own vengeance.'
Calliope watches the goddess intently between the sparks of her smoldering rage. She looks to the new queen and her tenderness. They both carry their words, their bated sorrow with a temper she could never master. One is tender and gentle. The other is almost as cautious as a child and Calliope cannot help but to compare her to the old-gods and find her meek and uncertain in comparison.
Where is the rage of the gods? The fury of the immortal when something that belongs to them is taken?
Her smile then is a vicious thing, a scythe of white and blue lightning bolts as she looks back towards the lake. There is a promise in the curve of her lips, drawn out in the cracks of dried blood that still lingers in the creases of her face. Nothing good lives in that promise. It's only justice and vengeance that live in the line of her face when she turns and walks a few step away from the sea and the goddess.
Idle talk does not suit her well and when she turns to Isra her voice is a low growl of impatience. “I vote now, before the morning.” She's eager to start and pick out which beasts hold traces of her blood between their feathers (which of them was the first to drink with their talons her blood).
And when Raymond speaks her smile turns to him and that promise blazes hotter than before. Surely he will understand out of all of them what the thunderbirds almost dared to take from her, what sins they will have to account for whether friend or foe.
Forgiveness feels so strange when the monsters already took from her mercy.
“None of those societies had us.” Bits of electricity spark around her in spirals of bated rage that lick between her horn and her eyes. There is no thing in the world that could keep her from returning to the lake to count the all the glass feather one by one and pluck out each one with mortal blood upon it.
Woe to the birds if they turn once more a hungry eye upon her for she will meet it with a starving, hollow need.
10-15-2018, 10:40 PM
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Caligo is about to nod, about to take her leave from the outcrop beside the sea - when Raymond intercedes her.
She turns to him, her eyes full of stars and moons and the fever of the night.
“The thunderbirds might think the same of you.”
She looks to the skies again, and where others might see stars or targets or opportunities, Caligo sees the Court of Dreams and Dreamers alike in the moonlight reflecting off feathers and talons. On one end is Raymond and Calliope, heated and fiery and ready for action. And on the other end is Isra, always watching, always waiting. Between them are a hundred others, as unique as the stars in the heavens, as misunderstood as their equine kin upon the ground. The stars are Caligo’s friends, perhaps her only friends - and they live in both the sky and on land.
She doesn’t say what she is thinking; either she is right or they are, and they will find out soon enough. Instead she turns to the Lake, where their battle had and would continue to take place.
“We will go now,” she echoes Calliope then, beginning her descent from the rock.
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Raymond. and at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
when the man comes around
The red stallion met the night-mother's gaze with that lingering, unblinking smile, head cocked to one side in his usual self-assured way. What lurked behind his stone-grey eyes and confident swagger was far more difficult to elucidate.
Raymond hadn't not been an invader since his youth. Not with an army, but always as a pathogen - a little breath of insidious air in whose ethereal folds rested the quiet malaise that, once inhaled, invited rot into the bodies and souls of the unrepentant. All things considered, he was fine with that. He was no monster hunter, except in Calliope's company, and he drew blade against the beasts because they threatened individuals that he would prefer to keep safe and there was still plenty of himself that found life to be preferable to death.
When the star-marked goddess turned her eyes away, Raymond looked again toward Calliope, a curious arch creeping into his brow, and then met Isra's eye.
The reality that Caligo's retort had not even begun to approach was this: in this moment, choice was a luxury he did not have. Calliope would never abandon valor for prudence or yield ground to savage beasts, and Isra (he hoped) would not let fear buckle her spine before the barest needs of her people.
And Raymond, the lone ranger, the bearer of red tidings and retribution, was now tied willingly or otherwise into their yoke.
So he looked toward them with eyes carrying wishes for vigilance where his lips did not. Ruth's consciousness stirred against his, a reminder of the price he paid and continued to pay for decisions made many moons hence.
All her lightning is swallowed up by flesh as she tucks it away and stores it for what comes next. It roils inside her in a maelstrom of rage and electricity. Her bones ache with this need, this fury and her horn feels like fire (as if a star is perched upon the peak of her weapon). Silence is her only answer to Caligo and her eyes blink slowly like a lion who has just realized how hungry it is.
Surely Raymond knows her well enough to see the storm surging between the prison of her skin. Everything about her suggests a star about to implode or a storm about to crest the horizon and devour the world.
The queen, Calliope thinks, is innocent enough to see only stillness, only caution and none of the rage. And Caligo--
Calliope cares little what a 'god' thinks of her.
It's a natural thing for her to brush by the goddess to the head of all the mortals. She only touches Raymond. His skin feels like fire when she brushes her nose across his shoulder. The lightning in her bones goes wild with the contact until bits of it leak from her eyes like tears.
“Always.” She whispers against him, fire to storm, blood to darkness. It's all she says before she heads back to the tunderbirds. Each of her steps feels like a memory of war and that blackness that followed.
And so into the night Calliope goes, towards the old battlefield and never once does fear shiver down her spine.
Isra of the ink blood
“I want to drag knives over my skin, just to feel something other than shame, but I'm not even brave enough for that”
Silence and the sea are her only companions as she watches the others debate and share secret stares. Calligo looks to the stars and perhaps speaks to them and they to her. Calliope and Raymond look at each other and speak of passion, fury and doubt in gazes and breaths that scald something in her soul to witness it
Isra then looks to the sea and hears only waves crashing against the rock and shoreline. And when she turns to look at her shadow, cast by moon-light and starlight upon the sand, she can see only blackness. It looks like a pool of ink at her hooves and she wonders if they would all even notice if she bled out all her insides and her blood was black as space.
And at that thought something cracks inside her. The sea seems a little louder against the rock, as if it pulls from her the violence of the crack across her soul. “Perhaps the night holds a miracle for all us.” But it's not hope that taints her voice but doubt and the first blooms of something dark and endless.
Caligo steps down from her rock but Isra is already moving, already slipping through the shadows of the shore beyond Calliope and Raymond. Part of her wants to whisper something to Raymond even though no words come to her. It's a strange feeling to be on the outskirts with nothing but shadows in her wake and faint scales on her side that must remind all her citizens only of the sea that tried to swallow them whole.
So when more words still don't come and she watches the two warriors touch Isra only tightens her lips until they sting and quickens her steps towards the lake.
Raymond. and at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
when the man comes around
So the die was cast, not by a show of hands but by a promise of action. Each mortal heart carried its own private carnage - goodness knows what toothed shadows lurked in the night mother's heart - but they moved forward anyway.
And Raymond let them because he was tired.
Always, the dark unicorn murmured and Raymond's lip twitched upward just for her. He leaned into Calliope's electric touch, tail swaying in an arc to rest the blade against her swarthy flank. It lingered there only long enough to truly linger before swishing away to offer a languid salute to Isra as an afterthought.
To market, to market they would all go, to buy a fat pig or become one.
But if this was to be their end, it would be such an end as to make the mountains tremble.
