It is the story of warriors that brings Calliope to the desert in the heat of the day.
Only the stories stop her from chasing the sand beasts that clack their teeth and whisper promises of blood at her shadow. Had they crept a little closer, scraped their teeth on the tight skin of her hocks there would not have been a dune in the desert that could have kept her from them. Or perhaps if she had smelled the blood on their breath (of a horse, not a monster) she would have turned from her path just to tear the beast asunder.
I will come for you, yet. He horn promises as the sun lights upon the steel of it, as the point glares like a star in the blinding daylight. That lion tail taunts them too, casting a trail outside the line of her shadow, daring them to follow closer, closer, closer. I am a unicorn, and I do not forget. All of her is a silent promise, a gallows blade hanging poised and ready and too sharp to defend against.
Her blood is solar flare hot and it burns for a battle, for blood, for something more that the politics and lover's quarrels of this place. Calliope always hungers for more, that lion in her soul will never be tame, never be free of that need.
Perhaps that is the reason the sand monsters come no closer to her. Surely they can smell the death that follows her as well as the corpses of fools that lie in their wakes. There is no easy kill to be found in the fierce Calliope, no easy death.
Alone now (the beasts turned from her trail) she carries on towards the Day Court. Her hooves speed up across the sand until she running across the sands, smiling as her muscles burn more and more the deeper she goes into the desert. She's covered in sweat and froth far before her lungs scream for more air than they can hold. Calliope's been training far to long for the desert to defeat her.
Had she not known Florentine and Asterion were to be found in Dusk Calliope made have made a home here, in the hot sands with monsters that hunt and kill so unchecked. She would have loved the sting of the sun on her flesh that the night has always loved so well.
Finally she finds the castle and she instantly approves of the plainness of it, of the way it blends into the sands as if to say, there is nothing here but death, but sand that might go on and on and on until only madness is left..
Calliope waits on the steps of that castle, blacker than night but for that lighting bolt of white on her shoulder. Even her horn denies the sun and it glares bright under the windows, alerting them all that she is waiting.
A lioness has come to the castle, to the desert where in another life she could have belonged.
And despite that darkness of her skin that suggest only nightmares, only moonlight there is no denying that she is more brutal than the desert at her back. That nighttime skin tells only tales of battles and wars in the harsh words that only scars and blood know how to say.
all you have is your fire and the place you need to reach
The Day Court burns. The Day Court is reborn.
This is always its cycle.
Has she been reborn with it? Perhaps, she thinks, as she walks sandstone halls with broken-out stained glass windows; the shards still cling to the frames, jagged and sharp like rows of teeth, casting fragments of colorful light on the worn floors. Black scorch marks cling to the ground, and all around her she sees broken beams and heaps of ash. All the grandeur that had rotted within the sandstone walls had burnt with the city, with the corpses, with the window dressings of a hundred year’s history – but the infrastructure was left standing. They build up around it. Simpler, this time. More efficient, and far easier to protect; it is growing into a city that can withstand a siege. As it always should have been. They are left with the ruins. They are left with the bones. They are left godless, discarded by the sun that had once been their patron.
Scraps are enough. She is no beggar – no longer does she bow her head to the divine. No longer does she bow her head to the specter of Viceroy, to the legacy of the old nobility, to those that would see her people reduced to ashes in the wind, to those that see her as nothing more than a shattered remnant of a bloodstained, ugly history, to those that would rather turn their eyes away from the sight. No longer does she bow.
What is she now, with her eyes no longer bloodshot, the white tangles of her hair no longer falling out of the curves of her braids in wisps? What is she now, with the bloody gashes of the Davke’s assault reduced to nothing but scars, invisible beneath the sleek quicksilver of her coat? She stands in the ashes – of her kingdom, of her past, of herself. She has always known herself, or so she has assumed. She has always known who she should be.
She does not know what she is becoming.
A girl rendered hollow and cold is now twisted into something barely contained – there is something savage and white-hot beneath her skin, a ferality that threatens to eat itself out of her even as she tries to extinguish it. Her life is not choice. Her life is not wanting. She was another corpse to the war machine, another body to feed the sea; she has never been troubled by rage before. (But perhaps that was only ever because she pushed it down deep and let it fester. Now it looms, ominous, on the horizon, the murky grey tendrils of a storm that is about to break.) What she is becoming is many things, but it (she cannot yet call it her) is no longer hollow.
Darkness stirs beneath the windowsill – it swallows the sun. She cascades down the stairs of the battlements in a flood of metallic silver, pausing at the base of the steps that lead into the palace.
Seraphina faces the reaper.
Midnight stands at the base of the steps, a gaping darkness carved into the shape of a mare; the horn that sprouts from her forehead is the curve of a scythe. There is something about her – in her stance, in her expression, in her perpetual and consuming darkness – that feels of death and rage. The reaper. Justice unyielding. She does not know what to think of this darkness standing at her doorstep yet; it does not chill her, in the wake of such brutal violence, and she meets it with an unreadable expression, eyes of twin flame and ice thoughtful as they regard the darkness in her path. She descends the sandstone steps, cool and composed as a marble statue, and makes her way down towards the unicorn, pausing a few steps away. The mare smells of sand and sweat, but, beneath it, she catches the wild sweetness of Dusk.
She speaks with a thick accent that rolls like the sand across the dunes. “Greetings, Terrastellan.” She is calm, unreadable – but not unwelcoming. Those who wear Florentine’s colors, after all, are welcome in the desert kingdom. “What brings you to Solterra?” In the wake of the Davke attack, the capitol has been flooded with visitors. She never knows what they hope to find within burnt walls and bloodstained streets, and, as they leave, she always wonders if they have found what they were looking for among the ashes.
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
There is something eerie in the way Calliope remains still as stone when the mare alights down the steps. Her eyes are bright and heavy and they slice through the distance between the two of them like a blade. Only that hiss of her tail across the sand hints that she is made of more than legend and rage.
They are predators, the two of them (she can see it in the mare's icy eyes). They are females baptized in blood and power and if Calliope were the kind to believe in a fate higher than her she would have smiled for the way they are a flash of black and gray against the sandstone.
But she has never believed in a karma that might be mightier than her own justice and so Calliope only nods, her horn flashing in the desert light. “Call me Calliope.” Her voice sparks like twin blades (so different from the roll of sand dunes) and it suggests that perhaps there is no kingdom here, no walls, no civilization that can quite hold the syllables of her names in quire the right way.
Calliope moves closer, her hooves barely echoing over the steps. She moves like a lion, the sway of her spine feline and feral. There is a promise in the way she moves as if all those muscles are nothing more than lighting and war caged in flesh. Gone is her magic but her bones and tendons still remember the way they moved; they still remember blood and claws and war.
Perhaps another horse would have stopped besides the queen, bowed and waited to be welcomed into the kingdom. But Calliope-- violent, dark Calliope-- is not a horse but a unicorn and she waits for nothing.
She moves past the the queen, past her sword that lingers wicked and sheathed at her side. What is a sheathed sword to her, but a mockery of the weapon upon her brow? Her hooves never pause until she's at the threshold, before the burns and the blood that still mark the stone as nothing more than a single gravestone.
Calliope could smile for the blood, smile for the way it smells like ash more than earth. She could smile for the way it promises things that sing, sing, sing like blood-lust and war drums in her veins. There is death here. She can smell it on the breeze, thick and cloying like wine.
It's reminiscent of the monsters that lurked in her shadows as she ran across the desert and she looks back past the queen, past the dunes that rise like mountains. Her gaze is lightning as it sweeps over the way she had come and it sparks as she shifts her eyes to the mare at her back. She taps, taps, taps her horn against the stone wall.
The sound echoes out across the desert as if to say, this too is a thing I will not forget. Glorious is the sound of her horn against the desert kingdom wall and the way it rings out like a call to arms. It echoes and echoes in all the empty, treeless space here.
When the echo finally fades her face darkens and it's a reaper, a lion, a slayer of monsters these horses could not comprehend, that does not blink as she meets the dark gaze of the queen. She doesn't ask for her name (she knows the mare is the queen, it's in way she stands and in the stories). It's not a name she's after here. Not yet.
It's not even a question that she offers. Calliope offers only the judge's gavel of her voice, dark and full of terrible, terrible promise. “Tell me what has happened here.”
all you have is your fire and the place you need to reach
“Follow me,” Seraphina says, simply, of the reaper. She does not ask for her name – she does not ask her what she is, or from where she comes, or why. Instead, she takes her inside the Capitol, onto winding, uneven sandstone streets, cracked from years of abuse and neglect; scorch marks line the walls, and many of the once-proud buildings that lined the sides of the streets, some of which had stood for a hundred years, lay in collapse. Even those that remained were not free of damage. Gaping holes ripped open the walls, and some had caved in upon themselves. This land – this kingdom – had withstood a siege, and they were still standing – but barely.
When she spoke again, her voice held a storyteller’s cadence; the rhythm of her words fell into time with the click of her steps. “When I was a girl, the king of this land was named Zolin. He was a monster.” Simple enough. So many kings were. “He drove the kingdom further and further into a war against the Night Kingdom, started by his father – they were provoked by nothing but glory and a desire to please the gods.” Gods. God. God - the sun god that seemed to have abandoned her. He hadn’t lived within these walls in a long, long time, if ever at all. “Denocte was the stronger kingdom; they had far greater resources than we. However, Zolin and his father were foolish. They continued to prolong the war, and their people suffered for it. They starved in the streets while the nobility sipped from golden wineglasses. Any opposition was hunted down and slaughtered methodically by the warden. Those that were capable were stolen off to war, and, as they died, he collared our children with Solterran steel and sent them to fight in their place.” She turns a corner, and the steel trap around her throat catches in the light of the sun; the light that the woman beside of her swallows whole. It is a comfort, in a sense, to move at her side, to see her swallow her god’s creation with such darkling ease – even the sun is not unconquerable. “He was a monster, but he was a creature of folly. Whatever intrigued him, he desired – and he became intrigued by a tribe of horses known as the Davke. He captured and enslaved two of them, and he killed most of the rest when they attempted to save their queen’s favorite daughter…Avdotya.” Her voice catches, slightly, on the name. Avdotya. She knew what she was. She should have known better. “When Avdotya defied him, he tried to have her killed…but she fought her way to freedom and killed him. Afterwards, the capitol exploded in rebellion and flame.” For a moment, she stares down the street at scorch marks and gashes – she had seen something similar, once before, but tempered because so many of the participants lived in the capitol. The Davke had no such inhibitions. “…When the situation finally cooled enough for someone to take over what remained of Solterra, it was a foreigner who stepped up – Maxence. He appointed Avdotya his Regent.” Simple enough. Some part of her still stings to think of Maxence; Maxence, who believed in her, unlike anyone ever had before. Maxence, who she’d failed so terribly. “After his death, I took the crown, rather than she. I should have known then what she was planning when she said that she did not desire it.” She was nothing if not ambitious. A long pause, silent save for the thunderclaps of their hooves along the streets; wherever her gaze is, it is not on the stretch of landscape ahead of him. In her mind’s eye, she sees fire and blood, and, briefly, the corners of her lips twist in a rage. “Zolin’s death had not been vengeance enough for her. Perhaps I could be understanding if it were merely those compliant in their slaughter or the nobility, but her people seem to blame all of Day – even those who suffered just as they did, those who lost their entire family to Zolin’s whims, children who had never even seen his rule. They attacked us, and…even those who were not warriors, who could not fight were not saved from the destruction. Even if they were not met with the tip of a spear, the fire and collapsing buildings…” She trails off. The implication is clear, and likely unnecessary.
She pauses; straightens. They are near the center of the city, now, and she can hear the soft gush of the half-broken fountain that serves as their water source in the near distance. “They plundered what they could from the nobility, and then they disappeared back into the desert – like ghosts. Now, we decide how to proceed.” And how to proceed; to feed the cycle of violence or linger back to lick at her wounds like a coward? Either way, she could not risk too much movement now, among the ashes – but neither could she risk stagnation.
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
Calliope, as they walk on stone through an old, charred battlefields is reminded of Velius. There she walked with Shrike, shoulder-to-shoulder through the mountainsides and rocky rivers. She remembers how they spoke in glances, their bellies brushing against one another to share that rumbling hunger that hollowed out them both.
There they spoke of the downfall of gods and monsters. Then in the Riftlands they spoke of dragons and monsters grown diseased with magic. They spoke of war with touches that held all the barely contained fury of a revolution.
Each broken home, each bloody and burned tapestry reminds her of what it's like to burn with righteousness and rage. Calliope is alive with rage and the flames coagulate like blood as gray warrior continues her story. Vengeance is a flavor on her tongue as she wipes away the dust and grime of the desert from the hard lines of her lips. It takes like death this place-- death and fire and suffering.
Those buried lion instincts rumble and roar and there is a promise of fury clawing deep inside the marrow of a unicorn.
“You are not the first to watch her kingdom burn.” Calliope presses her nose against the queen's shoulder, offering not comfort but understanding. Perhaps it's not all her in imagination that the spot where they touch sparks like lightning. Perhaps the spark she feels is her own passion igniting and razing all her calmness for justice.
Either way it feels like a promise, that touch between them. It could be a baptism when they stop near the broken fountain and Calliope distantly watches the way the water colors the limestone like a tear-stain.
The scales tip. The balance of her fury tips to one side and she sparks like a live-wire with hunger.
Calliope turns, looking back to were they walked, back to where the sand monsters hide in shadows. The desert calls to her, ringing out on the silence of this shared story of theirs. And when she smiles at the other warrior mare it's a fierce and dreadful flash of teeth that remember what it's like to be wickedly sharp. “I've hunted ghosts before and smoked them out from their graves..” Her horn flashes like her smile-- hungry, hungry, hungry.
“I could hunt your ghosts for you.” Calliope's eagerness is terrifying. For the first time she thinks Novus has needed her for a very, very long time. These horses need to learn what it's like to be wild, to hunt as unicorns and lions have always been able to.
all you have is your fire and the place you need to reach
You are not the first to watch her kingdom burn, the woman tells her, and, for the first time, Seraphina finds herself wondering what lies beyond those wildfire eyes, behind that sharp-toothed smile. The gentle press of her skin against her shoulder leaves a burning sensation in its wake; it is not consolation. Nothing could console her of this - nothing would wash the bloodstains from her coat, and nothing would clear the ash from her throat. The weight of all those corpses would linger until her last breath passed her lungs, and, even if she could shed it, she would not want to. Nevertheless, she recognizes the gesture for what it is - understanding, not some attempt to console the inconsolable, and somehow the understanding comes as a quiet comfort. (Perhaps it is because her life has been spent so, so alone, so incomprehensibly alone; she grasps at any connection like a drowning man after a straw.)
Oh, the white fury that possesses the reaper at her tales of injustice and death should have been horrifying – macabre and untamed, like a war tangled up in the shape of a woman. If Seraphina had been a weaker creature – if she had not stared death down time and time again, if she had not felt the quicksilver plunge of a sword through her gut, if she had not spent hours (days? time meant nothing) bloody and broken among muddied trenches, if she had not seen her kingdom reduced to ashes twice over at the behest of a viper - perhaps she would have turned away, but she meets that burning, pale gaze, unflinching. It entices her to burn, too.
If she could have reached into the unicorn’s skull and riddled out her thoughts, what would Seraphina have thought of them? She would have been insulted, probably. Foreigners. Always so quick to rush headlong into her people’s strife, so sure that things would have gone so differently with their intervention, so quick to assume that they could have saved them with their violence and their fury and their wildness, so quick to assume that they even wanted their saving. (But the Solterrans were a proud people, and she was not exempt from it.) Perhaps she would have laughed – but, of course, she does not know that Calliope has brought gods and dragons and kingdoms alike to her knees.
(But not, she might think, the kingdoms or gods or dragons of Novus.)
In any case, she does not know the thoughts that cross Calliope’s mind, so it’s hardly relevant. The unicorn’s white, righteous rage is infectious, but, if she is fire, then Seraphina is still ice; she walks alongside her, frighteningly expressionless even as the woman fixes her with a vicious, leonine smile. They could hunt, she whispers, and promises destruction – for a moment, Seraphina can smell blood and fire on the dry desert wind, and she could hear screams in its whip against the cobblestone streets.
But Seraphina watches her, and she is patient. Oh-so patient.“Oh, we will hunt,” She says, and, though cold and quiet and constrained, it sounds like a promise that has been long coming; vengeance has been a carefully-contained wildfire within her chest since the night of the attack, and she would have her due for what Avdotya and her Davke had done to her people. “It is only a matter of time - the desert does not forgive impatience.” And the Davke, she thinks, are the desert wind – Avdotya has been a step ahead of her, but, in her vengeance, she had loosed her teeth from the silver’s throat. She no longer plays by the rules of her game.
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
They are fire and ice, fury and a freeze. They are two different types of war. One is a blaze with glory that burns like wildfire until the monsters are gone and phoenixes are left to rise and resurrect from the ashes of the new world. The other is a war made of small wins, plotted in the shadows and survival is oft dug out from the shifting sands.
But war is war and differences matter little where there is blood to be paid and justice to be dealt.
“I knew a desert once in another world, another place where lands shifted like dreams and were as dangerous as nightmares. I hunted in that desert, tracking until my lungs craved clear mountain air and my lips thought they would never taste the cool sting of water again.” There is no magic in Calliope's story, only the gunshot rasp of her voice and the way her eyes spark with seeds of lightning fury. “The winds were endless, violent breezes that moved the dunes around like there were nothing more than piles of dust.” Sand is sand it forgives neither impatience or inaction.
It is a fragile thing, to hunt in the desert and while this place is different Calliope imagines sand is sand and monsters are monsters (and she has known both well).
The desert at her back is calling her, a world of dust and tracks already swallowed up by the dunes. But there are monsters out there, beasts that tracked her shadows and she's hungry for the fight. She needs a battle to let a little of this rage out so she doesn't explode. There are other things too she wants to discover in the desert for there's a touch of bear-skin on the breeze that sends her heart thrumming with recklessness.
“Then a sandstorm came and all the trails were buried by the desert as if the monster had never been.” Calliope's smile turns bitter for it's not often that the unicorn can admit to failing in her purpose. The desert is hard for hunting, as unrelenting as she and perhaps that is why she loves the blazing sun and sands so much. But she still loves her thunder prairies more, her seas that spark and glow when the lightning lands.
With one last look at the broken fountain, the charred tapestries and the way the streets could be slumbering in the sunlight Calliope pulls away. There's an invitation in her gaze, a bond when she dips her horn to tap, tap, tap a farewell against the ground. “Do not wait too long to hunt your justice, trails are harder to follow when they are dead.” It's the last understanding that Calliope offers the queen before she gallops through the broken streets, a streak of black weapon stark against the red stone.
In the desert the sand monsters might slumber away the heat of the day, unaware that Calliope is coming for them. A unicorn never forgets and she made them a promise when she ran across the sands for the capitol.
