the storm in our blood
*
Of course she finds him in the storm, with lightning raging above their head like a vengeful tempest. For a moment it's as if they are the only two creatures left in the world, mortals made to weather rabid storms. All the others wisely found sanctuary from the heavens as they roil.
Calliope once carried an entire storm in the marrows of her bones and lighting sparked from her skin in a river of violence. There is no storm that could send her running, no earth shaking thunder that can turn her from her course.
She likes to think he's easy in the storm because he's known her, known that storms are made for the righteous. They are made to strike down the monsters, boil their blood in their veins until dust is all that's left.
When she's close enough to taste the sea on his skin and all the memories it's brings she presses a touch to his cheek. The rain tastes like brine on him and she thinks that if destiny didn't have such a need for her he could have been a maelstrom of a man.
Calliope would have made him something harsher than this gentle, dreaming man. He would have been a knight, justice made of star-shine and blood. All his dreams would have turned to reality and it would have been a cold comfort to a man who still holds on to hope to know that a knight who kills for righteousness is still a killer.
Asterion after-all is just a horse. He is not made to become a destroyer of sin, to blood-let monsters with the same fearlessness as a unicorn might.
She is glad she left him, glad the rift didn't take him to the same hell that it brought her. Still, it doesn't stop her from having missed him, for dreaming about that star stallion who could have been something great, something to temper the violence in her blood.
Calliope is not made for Asterion nor he for her. They are two ships passing in the night, one set for distant shores and the other decked out for hunting sea-monsters and conquering evil.
It does not make him less and Calliope is jealous of the way he looks so soft and lovely in the rain. She will protect him, to the death. Never will his skin know the brutal pain that hers has known, never will he become a patchwork story of scars and burns.
“What do you think of when the lightning rages?” Had she known that there was another woman who knows the violence of a storm she wouldn't have asked.
In the silence after her question, the eye of a storm that knows no end, she looks up as a streak of lighting. Her body quivers, missing the echo of electricity in her bones.
@Asterion
