'unicorns are not to be forgiven'
*
“Am I not?” Calliope asks the queen, her voice all lightning bolts and memories. Her smile, when she looks to Florentine is nothing more then a feral slash on white across the steel of her lips. It's a predator smile, safe until those teeth part and the hunger comes.
Idly she looks back at her ribs, her tail, her hooves cloven and chipped and that stark white, electric pattern across her shoulders. “You and he cared for the sanctity of flesh more than I.” Something keeps her from saying his name, Kearn. A kindness perhaps (she remembers more of it than she thinks) for she too has lost a sibling, a friend, a soul that has left her lacking, brutal and colder than she had once been.
Calliope doesn't need to mention that her horn is made more dangerous in this world, for the way it's attached to her. The blood on it promises enough, and already the horses that pass them stray away, away, away from the glimpse of that wicked weapon. It's too strange for this world, too tainted with blood for a world of walls and lights and kingdoms. It is more than a unicorn's horn, more than a thing to look pretty draped in hollow wealth. It is a thing that kills and tame eyes, cultured eyes could not truly understand what monster that steel horn makes of Calliope.
She doesn't say anything else, little does she care for whom takes care of flower and petals and beautiful, empty things. But still she moves from beneath the willow tree and the branches barely linger on her flesh. It is happy to be rid of her, that trapped tree in a garden of stone walls and civilized things.
The willow had no need for Calliope and the wild, feral sting of her flesh and how the smell of her swallowed up all sweet flower perfume beneath her hooves.
When she moves froward it's easy for Asterion to touch her, easier still for her to lean into that press of stardust on her scarred cheek. Where someone to look at just the right moment it would be startling that a stallion so dusted in twilight and sleek, unmarred skin could touch such an untamed mare, one with scars where jewels might be in this world. Calliope is a black-hole to the pretty galaxy of him, had she trained him (she is weary enough to admit it now) he would not have been able to stroll so carelessly through cobblestone walkways at dawn.
“Asterion,” She tries to whisper against his neck, but she's too fierce for such gentle things. A whisper from her is a soft rumble, a scratch of steel against a star (white sparks that burn where they land). “Do you still dream of adventure?” There's a promise there, in the hidden places where her words say more than they sound. Follow me, they seem to say, and I will tell you of all the things I have seen. I will teach you.
They should have called her a siren of war, a lioness of victory. They should have called her anything but Calliope, it's too mortal a name for all the things that are held together inside her dark unicorn skin.
Calliope doesn't stop as she moves between them, instead she presses on, back to the walkways where her hooves don't make quite the right sound. There is a lion in her bones still, tethered and tame and too weak to crawl across her bones, but there. And a lion cannot be still for so long and so she walks on, twitching her tail to gesture Florentine and Asterion onward with her.
“Tell me of this place,” She makes no effort to hide the scorn in her voice, one developed world was enough for her. “and why there are so many walls.” Already she longs for the wild places in the world where the shadows hold monsters and purpose and the world is alive with reckless beasts that might be foolish enough to try to kill the wicked Calliope.
@Asterion @
