[EXP] Thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone.

[Raymond]

There was something limitless and horrifying about the sea that demanded reverence even from those who would deny the same to gods. It could neither be denied nor defeated; it could not be reasoned with or slain by a thousand swords. All you could do was adapt to its tempestuous moods, the ebb and flow of its roiling and passionate reach.

Like Calliope.

The tide had retreated under a storm-grey sky, at last allowing Raymond access to what he had before studied only from the precarious height of Praestigia cliffs. He picked his way along the treacherously rocky path with a goat's brazen surefootedness, whip-quick and light on his feet, coming to rest with a soupy splash in the newly-exposed foreshore.

Raymond's chest still bore the vague specter of an ache where Asterion had struck him, but the wounds itching most heavily at the red stallion's mind today could not be so easily measured in flesh. Solitude seemed an empty thing now in Ruth's absence, and he struck down the urge to look for her skewbald sleekness darting between the various oddments vomited up by the tides. The thought cast a cloud over his face stormier than the ones overhead.

He breathed deeply of the briny air and glanced back the way he'd come. A dark sheen of sweat like  had broken out across the planes of his shoulders from the climb, painting him more like a bronze sculpture of a horse - all rippling muscle and proud, arch-necked poise - than the genuine article.

With a healthy shake of his head he cast his eye out to sea and started walking, contemplating infinity as he left a single set of hoofprints to dissolve slowly in the intertidal sands.

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

@Calliope <3

[Calliope]

– Calliope –
it came upon a lightning strike

*

Calliope had not expected to see Raymond, to see anyone, from where she stood on the shoreline. She was there when the tides first rolled in. She was still there when they tore back out to sea. Hours have slipped by her in a solitude broken up by only the screams of seagulls and the roar of the waves as they slammed against the rocks.

The violence of the sea had kept her here, content to watch something rage and echo that churning need inside her own bones. Novus is too calm, a garden broken up by walls and religion. All the wild flowers have long since died here, turned to some mockery of beauty that wants only to wither and die.

Calliope refuses to change, to tether that rabidness of her soul. She remembers too well what it means to be free, to take her own fate from the dark places between the stars. And as she watches Raymond move closer to her she thinks that here, painted in red and sweat, is the one man that might understand that feral soul of hers.

When he pauses, the sweat on him turning him to copper and bronze, she feels some old pull on her soul. It's a roar of thunder, a crack of lighting, a lash of whitewater on stone. When Calliope feels it's violently and she feels like her bones cannot contain all the things her soul feels, has felt and still has yet to feel.

One day she will explode and no world will survive the aftermath of her when she's finally unleashed from this cage of flesh and bone.

“Raymond.” His name sounds like a storm on her lips as she joins him, pressing only a single touch of her lips to his cheek. Her tail itches to tangle around his, to dangle just above that blade she knows better than any other. The silver of her eyes seems to blaze as she meets his gaze, an echo of that  violent sea made of justice in her bones that needs something to hunt, to bleed, to destroy.

“Have you come to see what secrets this ocean might have swallowed?” Calliope has seen enough of the world to know that the sea is the only constant in all of them, the great destroyer (greater than even her).

As the two of them walk they leave no tracks, no echo in the sand that this way two warriors have come and found each other.


@Raymond

[Raymond]

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

Raymond straightened. Of course she would be there.

No court in the world could contain the swarthy unicorn's unbridled, savage grace. No chain in the world could hold her. Standing strong and proud in defiance of the inexorable sea, she looked to him as though an image that once existed only in his mind had sprung forth into flesh and blood for all to see. He felt queerly possessive of it, vaguely resentful that it should see the storm-grey light of day even as he waltzed into her midst with a complicated smile.

That expression probably said more than he'd have said to anyone who wasn't Calliope. Caught out like an exposed nerve, his usual unflappable façade had slipped to reveal the wounds that knitted so much more slowly than the clawmarks now vanished from his proud withers and a melancholy pensiveness better suited for a dimly-lit room and a snifter of aged brandy. They warred now with his genuine satisfaction at seeing her thus, and he was not so self-conscious as to correct it.

Lies and pretense did not become Raymond and Calliope. Their friendship had been forged at knifepoint.

He leaned into her touch with a cat-like slow blink and responded by brushing her flank lightly with the flat of his blade before falling easily into step with her.

Have you come to see what secrets this ocean might have swallowed? she asked.

Raymond chuckled softly as he cast an appraising glance down along the beach. "I guess you could say that." In many ways, the ocean and the Rift had a lot of things in common. They could sweep you out to sea as quickly as you'd like, then chew you up and spit what's left of you back out so that even your own mother wouldn't recognize you. The thought stung, but it steeled him too. This was not the Rift; they would not find any such tragic secrets on these shores.

He considered bringing up what they had learned in the space between their two meetings, but it seemed improper. The dread sea demanded a sort of reverence that scorned all consideration of trivialities, and that was indeed trivial. In their path, though, he could make out the beginnings of an imposing, indistinct mass of sand-caked ivory. Intrigued, he pointed it out with a bob of his head.

"That seems promising."

@Calliope

[Calliope]

– Calliope –
made of storms that never break

*

Everything in Raymond's eyes is echoed in her own ice silver ones. They are mirrors of each other, vessels of sorrow and war. But where he is tempered steel, deadly but long since cooled to something battle-ax sharp, Calliope is all molten rage. She's a blade on red-hot coals, hot enough to burn through flesh and ice and leave only ash and steam.

Here, though, walking through the tide she could almost be called tempered, almost tame. She's not sure how cares for the feeling, of the way his blade feels like a lightning bolt across her hip.

Calliope misses the sting of his blade at her throat, misses the sparks they made when they clashed like wild, violent things. Rift is dead, swallowed up by magic, time and sickness. She misses that place too and all the sick, broken monsters that had to be put down to save the innocents. She misses the storms that she alone could trust.

Her sorrow is no less than his though the reasons for it are far crueler, more seeped in blood-lost than loss.

For a moment she wants to lash her shoulder against him, feel anything but this serenity on the shores of a sea that could swallow them whole if the right storm hit. But Raymond speaks, oil smooth, and the feeling passes.

She remembers the looks of bones on the sea. In another life, one of pale skin and two legs, she had met her sister on the dead shores with bones around them like flowers in a meadow. In another life Shrike didn't remember her, didn't know what soul rested inside that black-haired women covered in scars and warpaint.

Back then the bones were a graveyard guarded by the harpy and she had come after them with a vengeance .

Perhaps it's the memory of the past, of her losses and the thrill of battle that makes her hungry. As much as she wants to breathe she need to know what bones lay ahead. What harpies might guard them and offer her that sting and fury she misses so much.

When she turns back to Raymond there's that need in her eyes, a blaze that devours that sadness and tameness of their twin gazes. “Race you.” The words are a darker sort of challenge, something full of a passion that promises more than just a race. Nothing innocent hangs in that whip-crack of her voice, nothing kind, nothing playful.

Calliope needs to burn with something more than the summer heat. She leaps ahead, knees tucked to chest and horn tossed to the wind as if she will tear even the salted wind apart.

And when she leaps she trills out a battle cry, loud enough to rouse any monsters from their hiding.

Calliope screams as only a unicorn might.


@Raymond

[Raymond]

Calliope's challenge cracked like thunder in his ears, her eyes the violent blue of a lightning strike. The red stallion had spent nearly a decade learning to read the intentions of others - through their words, their actions, the little twitches of the lip that they thought they were clever enough to hide - but there was no time to unravel the statement that rang somehow like a command, an invitation, and a threat all at once. As was often the case, she spoke and the world seemed eager to bend to suit her indomitable will.

He did not waste his breath responding. Her need spiced the air around them with frenetic energy that set his hackles up with primal ferocity and overflowed the levees of his usual quiet poise. So often did he don the trappings of civilization that perhaps it was easy to forget that it was not through charisma alone that he had made it for so long on his own.

That beneath the suavity and charm cultivated by necessity burned a brazier of rendari fire, stoked hotter still by the seething passion of one who had valued revenge above the sacred traditions of his people.

If Calliope wanted a race, then a race she would have.

She lunged into action with a battle cry that ricocheted off the cliffsides and pierced the stormy sea; he leapt too, but only with a grunt of explosive exertion as he dug furrows into the wet sand. Even in this they could be branded opposites, two sides of the same fearsome coin.

Too rarely did Raymond afford himself the simple, wild pleasure of sprinting as hard as he could across the open spaces. Now, with the roaring of a tumultuous sea to one side and the thunder of Calliope's heavy hoofbeats to the other, exhilaration bordering on the prey-driven fears of their ancestors quickened his blood. Each breath blossomed from their straining nostrils like plumes of smoke. His ears clamped tightly to his poll as he dug in and reached with every stride. He was built for snappy speed and finesse, and he showed all of it here.

The sand and flotsam strewn about the beach streaked by unremarked as they thundered past, mere yardsticks to measure the progress of their feral contest. Already the whale bones - so small and distant just moments before - loomed grim and macabre before them, a prize perhaps too morbid in its symbolism for anyone but Raymond and Calliope. His muscles burned with a pain that felt proper, each footfall the heartbeat of a creature more alive than the living, each full extension the liberation of an eagle on the wing. Their forceful breaths, their hoofbeats in the heavy sand melted into a rhythmic peal of thunder matched only by the roaring waves at their flank. It no longer mattered to him who got there first.

But even a dead dog could see by the fire in his eye that he wasn't about to let her pass him up without a hell of a fight.

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

@Calliope <3

[Calliope]

– Calliope –
meet me in the middle of the air

*

Calliope feels like a storm as she runs. She could be a lioness bathed in lightning and shadows, a remnant of forgotten legends. Lost as she is to the fire in her veins and the thunderous, tangled pounding of her heartbeat and cloven hooves, Calliope is nothing more than a unicorn. She's eternal and unending as the sea and this challenge is more than a simple race to an archway made of bones.

They are wild things, Calliope and Raymond, throwbacks to underdeveloped universes. They are creatures made to live in worlds where stars are blossoms and the ground is hollow and slick like glass.

Novus is not made for them.

But here, with the sea nothing more than a dull echo against the tidal wave of their footsteps, they are made to hold each other. One tames the other and Calliope thinks if it weren't for the desert sting of Raymond she would let the sea carry her away to a freer world.

Her eyes are full of more than justice when she slows and looks at him. They are full of more than her soul can hope to carry for her bones are made to be ever hungry for violence. Those cloven hooves of hers falter for a heartbeat, a thin and thready throb between her rib cage. Raymond pulls ahead by no more than a shoulder and it's enough to reignite that fury in her blood. When her tail cracks at her back it sounds like a whip as it echos off the stone.

The two of them are a war, blood-soaked sands and victory, carried between mere mortal flesh and bone.

Calliope doesn't surrender or bend as she approaches those arching, sun-bleached bones. She merely turns away, cutting away from their path to curve her footsteps around their discovery. It's larger than them by twenty and she slows when rows of flat-edged spinal bones make her horn seem small and delicate.

She rings her horn against those bones and it sounds like a bell-chime inside a cathedral. The ring goes on and on and on, bounced against the cliffs and the sea until it consumes any lingering throbbing of her Brutus heart.  

The ring feels like a religion as it chimes, something more brutal and true than any gods could be. And these bones could be a shrine made for only Raymond and Calliope.

She slips between two ribs and waits for him underneath a pergola made of vertebrae and draped in dried up seaweed with bits of old, brittle muscle tangled in the dead green. Her gaze is brutal as she watches him, daring him to admit that she left their race unfinished and she pulled up long before a winner was crowned.

It's a predator stare and it swallows up the truth in icy silver; that she curved away only to deny the way the race felt like a apocalypse of more than freedom in her blood.  


@Raymond

[Raymond]

Few sights stir the ancestral spirit quite like the sight of wild horses running free. But to be one of those horses, to be party to the rolling thunder beneath pounding feet and the searing ache of taut sinews, to be swept up in the primal dance of hearts and wills....

They should have sent a poet.

Calliope veered off their narrow course as they neared the remains of the felled leviathan. The spell broke with her departure; Raymond allowed himself to slow almost immediately, muscles leaping like locusts between sweat-sleek skin as his ribs strained against his sides with each swallow of air.

Up close the remains seemed almost alien. Its wide, bowed jawbones looked far less like a rictus than the harp from which a mournful dirge might echo on foggy autumn mornings, and a single eyeless socket stared his way with a sad, unfathomable sort of knowing. Calliope circled the beast and Raymond - a subtle smile pulling at one corner of his lips - marked her progress in the flash of black through the gaps of bone, kelp, and shredded baleen. He wondered what it looked like in life, and whether its majesty befitted the mighty frame that bore it hence.

The beast spoke; its ghostly voice was the echo of horn against salt-dried bone, and from that sound sprang forth a new, different life. Its heart was the elegantly-carved obsidian of Calliope's flesh, and as he carefully rounded the curve of its ribs to join her among the slatted shadows its blood became the sweat from their bodies, warmed by the fires still smoldering in their skin. Its breath poured from their winded lungs as they came down off their runners' high.

He did not bring up their flight across the sands, meeting her lioness's gaze with a pensive smile that walked a knife-edge between intrigue and reverence. It did not occur to him that she might have cut it short to spare herself. They could never have run forever, though he guessed now there would be a small part of each of them that would.

Ghost riders - but their sky was a memory of sand and storms.

The world seemed closer and quieter within the skeleton's hollow breast. Children might play among the arches of this sea-savaged ruin and build such brutal fantasies as to make kings and warlords weep for the future. Calliope seemed almost larger than life, as though her essence resisted even the illusion of being caged.

"I once ran into a bull elephant crossing the Grass Sea of Sharam, not too long after leaving home. I remember thinking 'there's real power', that nothing in the world could possibly be greater or more terrible than that." His smile wrapped around the words, coloring them with mirth at his own naivete and nostalgia for a sense of wonderment so easily piqued in his youth. This was a place for echoes, he thought.

Within its wave-worn belly, the great beast carried past, present, and future.

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

@Calliope

[Calliope]

– Calliope –
a symphony of blood and war

*

There is something beautiful and wild in the way that Calliope and Raymond communicate. They are an orchestra of rasping, winded breaths and the quivering of muscles and flesh that are made to destroy. Each of their eyes hold a novel and she watches that smile twist his lips and thinks it might be the end of her great story.

They talk as ancient horses do.

Touches replace words and sweat paints them in a history that needs no sounds to whisper its weaving tale.  Every part of her leans towards him under that cavern of bones. Only her eyes turn away and shift back towards the sea. An ear flicks at the roaring of the ocean as the tides turn and start to rise. Soon the bones will nothing more than a hint of something fathomless beneath the sea-foam.

To Calliope the sea once felt like a tempest of a challenge. Now it only feels like an echo of the roaring white-water of her heart as she looks away the water and meets that endless, amber gaze.

It feels like a war rises up in dust between them. It's one that requires not blood-lust but dedication and she wonders if there is an end to this weight between them. She wonders if this is to be the one battle that drowns her in sorrow and blood, never to rise again.

He breaks the mortal silence and she silently laments for the way they seem all at once like only horses again. There beneath the bones upon the damp sand they could have been gods. The first to build their own civilization of brutal, violent balance. But then she's swept away by the sound of his voice and the way it echoes even in the open spaces between the bleached bones.

This is a hint of the man Calliope never knew, a man free to follow the winds of change and be what ever the moment called for. What could they have been, had she never felt the edge of his blade at his neck and he never know the fury of her justice?

She is glad the rift and the magic that could have sent her back, back, back is gone. It could have sent her back before he was a flash of blood-red at her side, before her horn was crowned with his creation.

“Do you still see it now when you close your eyes and think of power?” Calliope speaks and it's nothing more than an echo of the sea and her heart froths with a tidal wave of emotion. There is that tempest inside her still. With Raymond here it might be the eye of the that storm that smiles and speaks and closes the distance to lean against him. And when she closes her eyes and thinks of power it's not dragons and lions and karma that she thinks of.

When Calliope closes her eyes all she can see is red, red, red.

And when they open again she sighs and rests her cheek against his.


@Raymond

[Raymond]

and at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns

Raymond never had the luxury of choosing the life he would lead when he was young. He fulfilled every expectation set for him, became the warrior his family wanted, kept the dream of better futures alive as only the young can, and none of it made a bit of difference when the chips were down. Despair showed him what he could be, but such despair can only flourish where once there was hope - and once it takes root, it is ever so difficult to shake. It sets you adrift, hungry, dissatisfied, ever hungering for some indescribable missing fraction of yourself like a man dying in the desert hungers for water.

Who he became when the moment called was rarely good, even if he could be just. No matter how much practice you pump into it a broken piano cannot play a perfect sonata.

Do you still see it now when you close your eyes and think of power?

Calliope leaned in, pressed her cheek to his. Raymond was no stranger The faint ozone scent of her that may well have been a product of his own imagination filled his lungs, but in its presence the distant swell of breakers rolling in against the low-tide shore became the became the dull rush of blood in their veins. As if bidden by her words, his eyes too slipped shut.

They were no strangers to touch. Like the ancients Raymond and Calliope spoke as often with their bodies as they did with words, but under the great whale's solemn and skeletal embrace there seemed something more real about the contact, as though after a lifetime of brushing past one another on opposite sides of a curtain the swarthy mare had in a moment of daring nosed the fabric aside. Tentatively he stepped forward, drawing his muzzle along the sculpted, striped neck, lipping instinctively at the crest of her wild mane.

'Numinous' was not a word he ever expected to have to use, but it suited: one does not simply embrace a hurricane.

"I suppose I don't," he murmured into her hair. The bull elephant of his memories retreated now across the Grass Sea of Sharam with a storm at his heels, cowed by roiling iron-grey skies and retribution writ in forked tongues of lightning through the clouds.

"Who are you, Calliope?" In the time they had known each other, the swordsman had never thought to ask. Time seemed to begin in the moment they laid blades to one another's throats, and like obedient schoolchildren they had never bothered to dig deeper. But the dead leviathan felt heavy around them with the weight of the past and, with the weight of the present smoldering red and black within its breast, he seemed almost compelled to finally ask. "Tell me a story."

@Calliope

when the man comes around

[Calliope]

– Calliope –
i will be your sword and shield
and you will be mine

*

Calliope wonders.

When he touches her, lips to mane and flesh to flesh, she wonders. She is a unicorn with a lion soul. She is the harsh hand of justice. She is a reaper, a queen, a godless mortal who has traveled through a sea of universes on the back of storm-clouds. Always has she been certain of all the things she is.

But here, with him pressed against her just so and her tail rising up to tangle about his, she wonders. Perhaps she is a unicorn, a forgotten queen of a dead world. Perhaps though, she might still be so much more. She will always be justice but might she not also 'more'?

Oh how she wonders as he talks. She doesn't answer his question, doesn't do anything more than lean against him a little harder. It's a strange feeling for her, to give against the sharp, broad angles of him instead of push and push until the entire world gives before her determination. Calliope says nothing as he continues to explore the arch of her neck, nothing still when he asks for a story.

She thinks of Eik and how he was brave enough to ask a unicorn for a story. Like then a hundred different stories lash like electricity against her lips and that old lion in her soul roars for its death. But one rises against the rest like a tidal wave.

Only a single story seems important beneath the bones with their skin tighter than the place where the horizon meets the sea.

“I found Shrike after she died. She was in another world. I didn't tell you when you found me last. I was still too raw.” Calliope says the words like a confession.  His skin is the altar upon which she must atone and ask for forgiveness. Her eyes, still closed, are the veil behind which all sinners hides.

She sighs and it feels like an absolution just to know that words will follow the sound. “My soul was the same but I was no longer a unicorn. I was no lion either. There I was a fragile thing that walked on two legs instead of four. It was a horse that carried me there, with skin as dark as mine and no horn upon its brow. Sometimes it felt like a dream, a nightmare. Perhaps I would have believed it to be no more than a horror found only in sleep if it was not for the remembering.”

Calliope opens her eyes then, meets his gaze with the fire sparking in the silver around her pupils. It's a  bond that gaze of hers, a whisper that he might never know the horror of being trapped in so strange a body. Although she imagines he might still wield his scythe as she had her horn.

There are certain parts of them no universe or god can take.  A soul is one and a weapon that has tasted blood the other.

“She was there in a body as strange as mine. I knew her instantly. How could I forget my sister's soul? Especially when I watched it drift away from her body after I killed her with a mercy blow.” She blinks and the gesture makes the moisture gathering in the corner of her eyes look like no more than a coagulation of humidity against the boiling heat of her. “I found her upon a broken ship with a vicious harpy circling like a vulture. And when she looked at me it was only caution that met my smile. She placed her hand at her throat as if her body knew to fear mine, as if I would kill her.” Lamentation feels strange on her lips. Calliope is not made for sorrow without rage and blood. She is not made to feel things other horses might.

Again she wonders. Raymond makes her wonder.

“Tell me that your soul will always remember mine.” Her lips feel like a sword, as if she will take her retribution for the pain she bears from the sweetness of his blood and sweat. “Tell me that you could never hope to forget me.” And now her body feels like the altar, empty and hollow and bare of any relic that might hold meaning.

No longer is Calliope just a unicorn.

She is Raymond's as much as she is vengeance.

@Raymond