[P] only beautiful things can die;

[Florentine]

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Florentine looks where Calliope does. She drinks in the skin, gunmetal gray in the low light of the struggling dawn. But it is the white, branching like claws of lightning down her shoulder, that captures the girl’s attention most.
 
You and he cared for the sanctity of flesh more than I. Slowly, curiously, that wild amethyst gaze lifts to drink in mysterious Calliope. “I suppose you are right.” Flora says with a hum and the roll of a shoulder that smoothes the words away like tumbling silk caught in the wind.
 
They were all naked now, true. But Calliope speaks a truth that sinks deeper than their exposed flesh. It sank into the heart of Florentine, it revealed a soul tainted and sinful. She had never been a perfect child, but she was an even worse adult. She wore sin like jewelry and it glittered in the darkest parts of her. Age was brutal and fierce, it broke her and remade her, over and over. Ah, childhood, how careless she had been. To return to then is a thought so sweet it wets her lips and fills her bruised, bruised heart. But one look at Calliope and Flora remembers where the world is fierce, she remembers the bite and sting of death. It is as terrifying in childhood as she imagines it might be in adulthood.
 
Away she blinks those terrible thoughts, and turns herself towards her brother. Like her, he is enchanted by the Rift’s dragon-killer. The greeting he shares with the warrior girl is warmer, it is a balm over chafed wounds Florentine did not even know Asterion possessed. Relief unfurls beneath her skin, like gilded thread Flora unspools before them. Her strides are no longer staccato and sharp, no longer full of a wild energy. No, Florentine becomes silk, a banner rippling in a wind. She sways, she moves, at once relaxed, at once eased with grace.
 
Calliope and Asterion share a kiss. But it is a touch more intimate than a mere kiss could ever afford. Their connection runs deeper. It might have been older than her, were Florentine not that time-traveller girl; a creature from the past and the future both. “Ravos.” She breathes, surmising the common history between them. Oh, Ravos was a mysterious land she had heard about only in tales. What entertainment it would be to stray there one day and walk the lands that had been lost to circumstance and time. They are kept in the past, wrapped in paper and stowed away where only the fingers and eyes of history can reveal the treasures kept there.
 
Do you still dream of adventure?
 
Oh.
 
Bright and wide Asterion’s sister watches him with her honeyed lips that curl up, up, up. “It seems adventure runs in the family, no?” She asks of her brother, brushing past him to fall in step beside the unicorn. Calliope walks like a reckoning, her skin a storm brought down to earth. She is as fierce as a wall cloud, as loud and brilliant as anvil lighting. To be near her is splendor, to be near her is terror. Florentine trembles like a flower before this storm. Metal is sweetly bitter upon the air and she looks up, expecting a tempest, but the clouds are falling open, a sky as blue as the sea appearing within their midst.
So many walls.
 
“They never change.” Florentine adds with lamentation. “These lands are just as they were the day we came.” And such a comment makes sense when it comes from a girl who was born in the Rift and travelled to a hundred different worlds.
 
This creature, of flowers and gold and Time, is restless here, bereft of a world ever changing, of time slipping by like water through her fingers. She does not grasp it, she lets it run away, down the stream and off into nothingness.
 
“This is Novus.” Flora identifies at last, “and it is lacking...” everything The word is a whipcrack that is not spoken, though the air is charged and bruised with its phantom blow. “Why are you here? Is Calliope not made for more than citadels and politics?”



@Calliope & @Asterion

florentine
rocking your pretty flower world