[AW] nothing as lucky, as easy, or free;

[Asterion]

Asterion in sunshine and in shadow*   The humidity came on like a fever, curling his mane dark against his neck, slicking his sides damp.   Asterion thought the first low growl of thunder was just another sound from the festival, but there was no denying the clouds that piled on the horizon, billowing toward heaven. They pressed against the ceiling of the sky, pale towers the color of a bruise beneath. There was no wind at the moment, only the feeling of waiting – a beast with bated breath.   By the time he caught a flicker of lightning and the thunder’s answering groan, horses were beginning to vacate the stretch of meadow. The bay stallion watched them go, watched the clouds swallow up the sun and the world tinge green.   The storm broke like a fever, too.   First the wind rose, sweeping flat the grasses and flowers, making the trees bend their boughs. The rain chased it, a silver sheet that swept like a wave across the prairie. Asterion did not try to outrun it; he only braced himself against the wind that buffeted him and waited.   It was no drizzle, when finally it came, but a downpour. Rain stripped the flowers from his hair and washed the paint from his skin. It soaked him near-black and coursed down his cheeks like tears, like a baptism. It was cool against his skin and surrounded him like the sea and Asterion shut his eyes tight and breathed, and breathed, and felt, for a moment, like he was home. dumb open post for anyone

[Calliope]

– Calliope –
the storm in our blood

*

Of course she finds him in the storm, with lightning raging above their head like a vengeful tempest.  For a moment it's as if they are the only two creatures left in the world, mortals made to weather rabid storms. All the others wisely found sanctuary from the heavens as they roil.

Calliope once carried an entire storm in the marrows of her bones and lighting sparked from her skin in a river of violence. There is no storm that could send her running, no earth shaking thunder that can turn her from her course.

She likes to think he's easy in the storm because he's known her, known that storms are made for the righteous. They are made to strike down the monsters, boil their blood in their veins until dust is all that's left.

When she's close enough to taste the sea on his skin and all the memories it's brings she presses a touch to his cheek. The rain tastes like brine on him and she thinks that if destiny didn't have such a need for her he could have been a maelstrom of a man.

Calliope would have made him something harsher than this gentle, dreaming man. He would have been a knight, justice made of star-shine and blood. All his dreams would have turned to reality and it would have been a cold comfort to a man who still holds on to hope to know that a knight who kills for righteousness is still a killer.

Asterion after-all is just a horse. He is not made to become a destroyer of sin, to blood-let monsters with the same fearlessness as a unicorn might.

She is glad she left him, glad the rift didn't take him to the same hell that it brought her. Still, it doesn't stop her from having missed him, for dreaming about that star stallion who could have been something great, something to temper the violence in her blood.

Calliope is not made for Asterion nor he for her. They are two ships passing in the night, one set for distant shores and the other decked out for hunting sea-monsters and conquering evil.

It does not make him less and Calliope is jealous of the way he looks so soft and lovely in the rain. She will protect him, to the death. Never will his skin know the brutal pain that hers has known, never will he become a patchwork story of scars and burns.

“What do you think of when the lightning rages?” Had she known that there was another woman who knows the violence of a storm she wouldn't have asked.

In the silence after her question, the eye of a storm that knows no end, she looks up as a streak of lighting. Her body quivers, missing the echo of electricity in her bones.

@Asterion

[Asterion]

Asterion in sunshine and in shadow*   Of course it is Calliope who comes to him in the storm. He is stripped down, made new (or perhaps old again, perhaps taken back to a world before castles and walls and candlelight) beneath the water and the wind, and when he opens his eyes to find her there like a goddess in a vision he smiles. It does not matter what he might have been; maybe if he shared Florentine’s power to twist the future and change the past it would. But the only thing Asterion can change is each present moment, and in this one he only feels the drum-beat of his heart when she brushes his cheek. In the storm they aren’t in Novus; they are alone in a new pocket of the world, one carved out for only them. It smells electric, metallic – a charged weapon. It smells like her. At her question he casts his dreamer’s gaze skyward to where the lightning threatens, but it could never linger there when there’s such a storm beside him. Instead he traces the scars along her shoulder, her neck. It is not a hopeful lover’s touch; it is a grounding one, a remembering one. When he comes to the scar across her eye, he pulls away. “I think of a righteousness that would burn down the gods,” he answers her. “I think of what it felt like, to promise to be something more.” He remembers that sureness, passion like a fire that ate away his doubt. “I think of you,” he finishes, and it is the truth and nothing more. There were so many things Aislinn and he had kept from one another, made blind by starlight and fireflies, swept into a softer current. He had only just learned of this other side of the Stormsinger; he is learning it still. Asterion is a slow study, he knows it now, but he will always come around in the end. He wants to ask her, as another flash of lightning gilds her skin, what she had ever seen in him that day beneath a dreaming tree. But the bay is not so sure, anymore, that it matters. It is cold beneath the driving rain, and steam rises from their backs. The edges of the world are worn soft with it, except when lightning paints everything stark. Asterion leans against her, tucks his nose beneath her throat, a lamb to a scarred lion. There are a thousand questions that press against his teeth, a thousand more that wait within his heart. But there is only one he thinks he can ask in this moment alone. Any other, and it would be too much a weakness – but here, cocooned by lashing rain and the low threat of thunder, he does not feel weak at all. “Oh, Calliope,” he says, and though his voice is soft against the storm, it is strong enough. “Have you ever been afraid at all?” @Calliope

[Manon]

M  A  N  O  N

text here

Her opalescent eyes watched the pair keenly through the downpour, her own skin slick with the storms tears. The water pressed each silken hair down to cling to every edge of her razor-boned body, revealing her slender frame with it's knotted muscles — lean and capable, but also lovely and elegant. Manon, The Ballerina Assassin. Her velveteen lips curved coolly at the memory of the title, gifted to her by Helovian's whom had no real idea of her history or her birthright. All they had known was the weapon she had become. 

Her step was fluid and easy as she approached the pair, running a practiced eye over both bodies in appreciation. The woman was a warrior in the classic sense of the word — muscular, scarred... holding herself as if ready for anything, as if the storm that roiled around them pumped through her very blood. Wrath hardened her lips, justice limned her muscular body, scars whispered of the evils she had conquered. 

Delightful.

She was beautiful, too. In her own way. While some might have overlooked a woman who held such capable, controlled fury, Manon could not help but to feel a sensual appreciation for the strength that lay so obviously underneath her skin. 

The boy, though... 

He was lost. A great weariness emanated through the rage of the storm, an inescapable heaviness that settled upon his damp shoulders like a cloak. He was handsome — his lashes long and curling, his skin dark and slick against the natural strength of him, but perhaps more attractive than that was the subtlety to him. He didn't look arrogant or over-bearing, and though the razor boned girl didn't take to men as easily as she did to women, she found herself uncharacteristically interested in the soft spoken bay. She did like broken things.

The storm covered the sound of her arrival, though Manon doubted much would escape the fierce-eyed woman. 

"Room for a third?"

Came her purr of a voice, lower and huskier than most expected. It was beautiful, still, but revealed Manon to be something more than she appeared if anyone had the sense to listen. Most got stuck on her razor-boned face or the curl of her silver lashes, too engaged with the elegant beauty of her to consider her a threat.

---

@Calliope @Asterion hope you don't mind me jumping in! Also apologies for this post, still working out Manon on Novus!

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[Calliope]

– Calliope –
there is no end of me

*
Calliope turns to stone the moment Asterion touches his lips to the first scar. For each one she remembers the blood, the pain, the way that nothing could stop her once the rage and vengeance has taken hold.

One across her face, left to remind her that she has angered a god, betrayed him by giving his own disciples freedom to make their own choices. Even as his wing tore at her flesh Calliope did not bow. She refused to close to her eyes to pain. Those silver eyes never wavered from the god's. The ice that he sent creeping across her skin like an insect could not keep her from vowing to end him, end them all. And with blood coursing down her face and parts of her bone left bare she had watched him fade into the darkness, another marked by the vicious Calliope who never forgets a vow.

Another scar, edged with dragon-fire burn marks, runs across her neck, hidden beneath her mane. It's laid bare before his touch and the rain plastering her hair to her neck. It is a tangled story of a scar and Calliope remembers how she eradicated the dragons in her sorrow. A beast took her sister from her and she she vowed to take the life from each and every one of them. Calliope though it a fitting price to pay for she found other corpses in her hunting, other innocents lost to the mindlessness of beasts.

And the others, stories that are to fresh to share. She's a legend made of scars and brutality and Asterion is a man who isn't ready to know all the things that Calliope has done, all the things she still will do in the name of justice.

“How you felt?” It's a whisper of a question and she quivers at his gentle touches. Asterion is brave to touch to her, to tuck his head beneath her as if she might soothe away all his uncertainty. But Calliope doesn't soothe. She consumes and so she lashes her tail across his back and despite the softness of the touch it cracks against his wet skin like the leather of a whip. “You should still feel as if you will become everything.” Her tail, flicks over his spine. It's a warning, a punishment of her disappointment.

“Your are not done with your story.” Like her tail the words are a whip-crack, made harsher for the lightning that cracks and hisses overhead. Everything about her is made more violent by the storm and the lightning light echoes in her gaze as she pulls away from him, her nose ghosting over his cheek for one final kiss.

She doesn't give Asterion an answer. It's torn from her lips and turned into a rumble of warning as the spotted mare first starts to make her way to them.

Calliope watches her like a lion watching a gazelle (this too she remembers). The fluidity of her steps promises something other than grace and beauty alone. The mare's gaze is too sharp on them, too observant to be nothing more than another fool of Novus safe behind their walls. The mare looks like a delicate animal who has dreamed up enough courage to think they they might trick the lioness on her own hunt.

Before the mare speaks, Calliope is already walking forward, lowering her horn down to point at that delicate neck and where it meets the mare's chest. Everything about her is a promise for a lion does not threaten. She destroys.

Had Asterion not been at her back, perhaps she would have been kinder, more welcoming. Perhaps she would have been anything but this unicorn who seems at the moment to be something far more, something outside the culture of  Novus.

“Who are you?” The words and the way they seem like bullets (aimed straight and true) make Calliope seem like she's not a unicorn at all, not a thing that should speak and breath and perhaps even love.

Beneath the storm raging above Calliope is nothing more than weapon. A blade forged in the nightmares of every monster that has ever slumbered.

@Asterion @Manon

[Asterion]

Asterion in sunshine and in shadow*   The strike of her tail reminds him of the slap of Raymond’s tail-blade against his flank; they are harsh teachers, these fearsome creatures he considers his friends. Asterion steels himself, combatting his instinct to lean away, to open a safer space between them. But he says nothing, nothing to her rebuke, which is echoed by a growl of thunder that could never be as ominous as the threat in her voice. He only withdraws his muzzle, and meets her scarred and silver eye, and nods once, solemn. A raindrop rolls over his brow, down his cheek. Asterion waits with a held breath for her response to his question, but it never comes. Instead he feels her tighten beside him, each honed muscle drawn taught as the storm before it broke. He feels her attention shift, her interest sharpen, and he follows the line of her gaze to see the stranger come walking through the storm. In the mist beaten up from the meadow, she is a lithe figure in red with a pale shroud of hair pressed tight to her skin. Asterion’s gaze is curious where Calliope’s is predatory as lightning carves a path above the stranger and thunder, following, cracks. For a moment the stallion is distracted; when his gaze finds the mares again it is to see the unicorn with her horn angled toward the stranger’s throat. Without a second thought he presses forward, drawing abreast with Calliope, a wilder storm than the one above them. His tail flicks against her hocks, and there is something almost sharp in his dark gaze before he turns it on the stranger. Asterion, too, finds it strange for someone to approach two horses as engaged as they were in the midst of a storm, but he wants to find no threats at this festival. And to have Calliope move forward as though to defend him – it makes something strange turn over in his chest. Is he so weak? You are not done with your story, he hears her say again, and he studies the stranger in the rain. “Just another reveler, I’m sure,” he says, voice low but loud enough over the storm. He wears a slip of a half-smile, and it only feels a little like acting. “Though a bold one, to not wait for the rain to ease. Is there something we can help you with?” Even through the rain, he finds himself snared by her eyes – how keen they were, how they seemed unable to settle on a color. He glances away before he can be accused of staring. @Calliope @Manon  eyyy ladies