The words bring a smile - fleeting, perhaps, and shadowed by the grieving steel of his heart, but genuine all the same. Calliope waited for no one. Her agenda was her own, her convictions a constant flame, and one could sooner lasso the wind than contain them. Such a statement was high praise indeed from a woman who had little patience for such things.
Don't worry. Raymond wouldn't let it go to his head.
He quirked a brow at the dark unicorn's description of Novus. Political intrigue was either a great hobby of his or one of his oldest nemeses, reaching as far back as the coup that had shaken him loose from the comfort of tradition and into Calliope's orbit in the first place. He indeed reveled in the frantic spinning of cogs in a society's sprawling, over-complicated clockwork, but inevitably someone would get caught in the gears.
That usually sucked, unless it was the right person getting minced. The red stallion fancied himself pretty good at stacking the odds.
"Oh, I think they'll figure out what to make of you in due time," he replied blandly. Calliope was a storm sent to wipe the slate clean. She may not have been Raymond, but there are always dragons to slay, always tyrants to bring low, and she would learn where to focus her merciless eye.
The red and the black fell easily into step, a gait born of his military precision and her energetic purpose, and that would have been enough. But her tail interwove with his and he very nearly missed a step but for the almost mechanical nature of his movements in the first place. That he did not immediately reject the touch surprised even him.
Raymond was not often touched. Perhaps because he seemed every bit as sharp as his weaponry, or perhaps because he kept few close friends. Perhaps because there wasn't really any way to address this particular elephant in the room without explicitly making a dick joke. But suffice to say he could not recall the last time anyone - let alone a woman he respected and admired - took hold of his weapon with such easy confidence.
See. Dick joke.
Moving on.
A comfortable silence fell across them as the pair of them parted the grass seas before them, headed...wherever their footsteps would lead them. "If what you say is true, then we need as much information as we can get. There's no use stabbing at shadows."
To swim these waters, they would need allies. For what, he couldn't say. At the moment they were but two old soldiers, bound together by honor and the strangely easy sweep of their tails, marching onward into darkness.
So it goes.
Raymond.
and at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
when the man comes around
and at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
when the man comes around
@Calliope
