bring ourselves back from the dead
*
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.
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