'unicorns are not to be forgiven'
*
Calliope has not come to the forest for love. She has come to hunt and her nose is lifted into the breeze as she winds her way through the trees. But even as she tracks she is training and the forest is soon alive with the blur of her, black and strange against the bright green and copper colored wood.
Where the trees have fallen she leaps over them, tucking her knees to her chest. She flies over each dead oak and her hooves make the sound of a summer storm wind when they cut through the dying leaves. Barely do her hooves touch the ground as she floats along, they leave nothing but a trace of passing in the soft dirt and pine-needles.
Someone was here, the forest seems to say in sighs of branches and birds, but already we have forgotten who has come this way.
In the place where a tree twice as wide as her has fallen she leaps upon the trunk. There she balances, light-footed like a lion might be, with her head arched high upon her neck and her horn flashing black, black, black where the sun filters through the thick canopy of summer leaves. Calliope is impossibly wild here and when she rears and leaps upon that fallen tree to perfect her balance it seems she has long ago shed the mortal skin of a horse.
Calliope is more than a horse tethered by politics and gods and lovers past. She is a unicorn, one of old, one of legend. There is no land in the world that can tame the fierceness of her and despite there no longer being a lioness waiting right below her skin all the killing instincts are still there. This place has not taken that from her-- not yet, not ever.
And when she carries on, stepping from the massive tree as if she has wings to float her down to the group, there is a burn on her lips, a sting in her stomach. Calliope has found her prey, his alters announce him far sooner than that smell of grape leaves and old, ancient musk. Strange smells for a horse to hold on their skin, she thinks, especially a mortal, scarred one.
When he turns she could smile for that flash of something vicious in his eyes. Calliope knows the look to well on herself for anyone else to hide it. She too is an unkind, brutal beast of a mortal. There is no dip of her head to greet another of Dusk. She has not forgotten the way the others talked about his story so meekly at the meeting.
It was what made her seek him out soon after. Calliope understands far better than most the idea of vengeance, retribution and justice. She is a reaper of righteousness and it's there in her eyes as she crosses the water to join him where he lingers on the other side.
“I have been looking for you.” Her voice is a bell chime and it rings no louder than a whisper over the bubbling of the creek. Something in the way she stands, hooves barely leaving prints in the ground and her tail twitching over and over against through the water at her back, gives away the blood-lust in her veins.
Never has Calliope been denied retribution for an injustice, not for her and not for the kingdom that lies swallowed up by magic in her past. Universes and dimensions could not stop her.
She moves closer, dragging her tail from the waters, and lifts up her nose to touch the broken antler that is sharp enough to hurt (a weapon given to him unintentionally). There is no tenderness in her touch, only a cold assessment that brings a flash of a smile to her lips when a shard of antler pricks her skin and stings.
“What will you do about this?” Her horn taps against his horn as she asks and it sounds like the faint tap, tap, tap of a war drum that has not yet begun it's song.
@Lysander
