everything I touch isn't dark enough
*
Raymond is anything but a stranger to Calliope.
She knows the pragmatism of him as well as she knows the quick and violent vengeance of her horn. He is all that is left of her old, weary bonds. The last connection of Velius, the last horse alive who remembers the maelstrom of her rage, the way her mourning was no quiet sorrow but a wave of blood and bones and fire. Raymond alone knows the scales of her morals, the way she tips and teeters and welcomes the monster she must be to met out payment after payment.
The world is a dark place, full of sinners and monsters that kill in the name of joy and a nameless sort of hunger. He knows her in a way no one else here will. Are they both not comfortable killing in the right name, for the reasons they think are just? He is the courtroom to her gallows walks, necessary but delivering of the same end.
There is a beast in Calliope, a lion of judgment, and there is no world that can tame her as much as their connection might one day.
But today is not the day and she allows him to slide back into that soldier stance, to lift that blade high to distract from the tension of his shoulders and the sadness that is nothing more than a fleeting comet in his eyes.
Calliope promises in a gaze, in a touch to this sharp angle of his cheek, that she will find Ruth for him if she can.
“I would always wait for you.” There is no obvious tenderness in her words, she hides it well with a toss of her head towards the castle not too far away. They are the words of a sword to its shield, an echo of their blades that teased and clashed back when they first met.
She can still remember the way their weapons sparked like a sun in the darkness of a world turning upon itself.
“We are in Novus. Here the monsters wear the same faces as we do and hide their follies and sins behind crowns, laws and love.” Her smile is bold, a flash of teeth that is no less fearsome for the way it's between the lips of a unicorn rather than a black lioness. “This world is better suited to you than I to it. They will not know what to make of me.” Another might have laughed, smiled in a way that suggests she knows exactly what to make of this world, but Calliope has not laughed in years and she wonders if her amusement might sounds like rust and rot.
It has been a long time since she as felt as content as she does walking across the fields beside Raymond. Not since Shrike, not since the whispering promise that this world might hold another mystery of the way her sister does not feel like a forever kind of loss in her soul.
Yet the way her tail tangles about his as they walk is far simpler a promise than all the secrets Novus might hold for two warriors who have long since lost all the things they thought they knew. And for a moment, as brief as the blink of her eyes, that is enough for reckless Calliope.
@Raymond
