The red stallion did not doubt that Calliope suspected exactly how loaded such a question would be. She was every bit as deliberate as he, if in a different way, and though they'd never really spoken much of all that came to pass before their first fateful meeting in Ravos, she had known him long enough to recognize that he was not simply her muscle.
She would not have suffered his presence for this long if she thought him simply her muscle.
His gaze focused on something far beyond them or the present as he let the question echo in his mind. Who he was was whatever he needed to be to do whatever he believed needed to be done, and often that mantle was neither heroic nor glamorous. He had assigned a price to the secrets of his own kind and fully embraced nihilism as a creative force. He was not a noble man, though his loyalty to the lady of lions gave him leave to play such a role.
"I'll be myself," he murmured with a knife-edged smile as he curled into her mane, drawing in her familiar ozone scent.
The weight of the words straddled the gulf between self-confidence and bitterness. It was the voice of a man unafraid of shame and toil, who knew in the dim twilight hours when both sun and moon slept that he answered to no law but his own, and that life could be valued, bought, and sold in the name of greater goals. It was the voice of a man who lived the life before Calliope. Perhaps she would not like that man so well - but then, he reminded himself, that was the one she knew first. The one that looked her in her ice-shard eye and promised that if he ever saw the need to destroy her, he would tell her first.
Calliope spoke of the dragon and he arched a brow with silently vexed intrigue. Raymond had stopped her from killing herself in the pursuit of dragonslaying before, and were she not presently entangled he was skeptical of her restraint now. To Calliope it was more than a vendetta; to Raymond, it was a math problem - and there were too many unknown variables to solve for X.
His tail constricted slightly around hers, a red serpent with fangs eternally bared begging temperance from the wrathful arm of Zeus himself. "Be patient," Raymond leaned into the plane of her shoulder and breathed for her ears alone. "I will reach out - find out what makes these people tick, and the faces of our foes. Perhaps we will learn how to slay your dragon, if it is the real enemy at all. I trust you've already taken steps to carve out a place for yourself."
Raymond took nothing for granted. The accounts of a few biased individuals did not a full story make, and the swordsman did not pick any side but his own.
The red stallion disengaged, unwinding body and blade from the dark unicorn with only a flicker of hesitation in the way his blade traced the shape of her tail brush bare millimeters from its surface. "I guess I'd better get started." Raymond tilted his head with a jaunty smirk. "Networks don't build themselves." And he had a feeling most of this would be on the final.
Tipping his blade in a parting salute, the red stallion backed away from Calliope and turned toward the heart of all movement within Terrastella: the Dusk Court.
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; exuent stage left
aut viam inveniam aut faciam
