it goes back, back to the beginning
*
There is something eerie in the way Calliope remains still as stone when the mare alights down the steps. Her eyes are bright and heavy and they slice through the distance between the two of them like a blade. Only that hiss of her tail across the sand hints that she is made of more than legend and rage.
They are predators, the two of them (she can see it in the mare's icy eyes). They are females baptized in blood and power and if Calliope were the kind to believe in a fate higher than her she would have smiled for the way they are a flash of black and gray against the sandstone.
But she has never believed in a karma that might be mightier than her own justice and so Calliope only nods, her horn flashing in the desert light. “Call me Calliope.” Her voice sparks like twin blades (so different from the roll of sand dunes) and it suggests that perhaps there is no kingdom here, no walls, no civilization that can quite hold the syllables of her names in quire the right way.
Calliope moves closer, her hooves barely echoing over the steps. She moves like a lion, the sway of her spine feline and feral. There is a promise in the way she moves as if all those muscles are nothing more than lighting and war caged in flesh. Gone is her magic but her bones and tendons still remember the way they moved; they still remember blood and claws and war.
Perhaps another horse would have stopped besides the queen, bowed and waited to be welcomed into the kingdom. But Calliope-- violent, dark Calliope-- is not a horse but a unicorn and she waits for nothing.
She moves past the the queen, past her sword that lingers wicked and sheathed at her side. What is a sheathed sword to her, but a mockery of the weapon upon her brow? Her hooves never pause until she's at the threshold, before the burns and the blood that still mark the stone as nothing more than a single gravestone.
Calliope could smile for the blood, smile for the way it smells like ash more than earth. She could smile for the way it promises things that sing, sing, sing like blood-lust and war drums in her veins. There is death here. She can smell it on the breeze, thick and cloying like wine.
It's reminiscent of the monsters that lurked in her shadows as she ran across the desert and she looks back past the queen, past the dunes that rise like mountains. Her gaze is lightning as it sweeps over the way she had come and it sparks as she shifts her eyes to the mare at her back. She taps, taps, taps her horn against the stone wall.
The sound echoes out across the desert as if to say, this too is a thing I will not forget. Glorious is the sound of her horn against the desert kingdom wall and the way it rings out like a call to arms. It echoes and echoes in all the empty, treeless space here.
When the echo finally fades her face darkens and it's a reaper, a lion, a slayer of monsters these horses could not comprehend, that does not blink as she meets the dark gaze of the queen. She doesn't ask for her name (she knows the mare is the queen, it's in way she stands and in the stories). It's not a name she's after here. Not yet.
It's not even a question that she offers. Calliope offers only the judge's gavel of her voice, dark and full of terrible, terrible promise. “Tell me what has happened here.”
@
