the beauty of her brings violence
*
Perhaps it is a good thing that she doesn't remember him from Ravos, doesn't know that he can claim once having god-blood in his veins. Better that she doesn't recall how she promised to drain all the gods of their blood, so that the mortals might be free.
Had she known she might have been temped to pluck his heart from between his ribs just to ensure no depraved Gods might make it back to Ravos to enslave and punish the foolish for being fools.
There has never been a god whose vengeance could compare to hers. It's more immortal than them, that purpose that burns like a star-fire pyre in her soul.
Still she's disappointed in him, for the way he seems so happy to give away his life, to let nature have it's way with him. Some part of her, some brutal part that has been made to be a monster, a sinner, a destroyer of life, wonders if it would be a kindness to kill him now. It would be so easy to slice across a heart vein. Lysander is but a horse and what is a horse to her?
Calliope remembers exactly how much pressure she needed to drain Shrike of her agony, to shred through her neck like silk with that vicious point of her horn.
But follow him she does, stalking his shadow in a way that makes no secret of the fact that she's still something 'more' despite the lack of magic in her veins. It is a god's mistake that he makes, to turn his back to her.
She's content to stay in his shadow, it's the better position in the end and she doesn't trust him, not yet. He is a thing she cannot understand, careless and begging for death. When she looks back she smiles, it's wicked and it stretches the scars across her eyes. Her horn suddenly seems too black, blacker than all the spaces between the stars, blacker than death and it's easy to remember that upon Calliope a horn is more than just a horn.
“A monster is driven by instinct, by blood and need. There is little thought to a monster but survival. I have killed enough of them to know better than you, stallion.” It's there, in the flash of her silver eyes in the sunlight the memories of dragons and wraiths and phoenixes. Her eyes are white enough, in that light between the trees, to look like the bones of her kills picked clean and bleached by the sun.
“But a man,” She says, and all the branches seem to sway away from her in the pause of her words, away from the unicorn who holds too much violence in her bones. “A man knows what it is he does and what price he might pay for his sins, however much he forgets it in the moment. They always remember..” There is nothing gentle about her when she speaks, no whisper of salvation, of wondering philosophy.
Calliope has always known exactly what the world is made of.
“And I have always known the difference between what payment I must collect from them.” Finally she draws up beside him, that tail of hers flicking in that small space between them. It's a promise that tail-- a promise and a warning.
The creek doesn't seem like it's made by the gods, not now. With Calliope so close the water seems like it is made only for drowning.
@Lysander
