there is no end of me
*
Calliope turns to stone the moment Asterion touches his lips to the first scar. For each one she remembers the blood, the pain, the way that nothing could stop her once the rage and vengeance has taken hold.
One across her face, left to remind her that she has angered a god, betrayed him by giving his own disciples freedom to make their own choices. Even as his wing tore at her flesh Calliope did not bow. She refused to close to her eyes to pain. Those silver eyes never wavered from the god's. The ice that he sent creeping across her skin like an insect could not keep her from vowing to end him, end them all. And with blood coursing down her face and parts of her bone left bare she had watched him fade into the darkness, another marked by the vicious Calliope who never forgets a vow.
Another scar, edged with dragon-fire burn marks, runs across her neck, hidden beneath her mane. It's laid bare before his touch and the rain plastering her hair to her neck. It is a tangled story of a scar and Calliope remembers how she eradicated the dragons in her sorrow. A beast took her sister from her and she she vowed to take the life from each and every one of them. Calliope though it a fitting price to pay for she found other corpses in her hunting, other innocents lost to the mindlessness of beasts.
And the others, stories that are to fresh to share. She's a legend made of scars and brutality and Asterion is a man who isn't ready to know all the things that Calliope has done, all the things she still will do in the name of justice.
“How you felt?” It's a whisper of a question and she quivers at his gentle touches. Asterion is brave to touch to her, to tuck his head beneath her as if she might soothe away all his uncertainty. But Calliope doesn't soothe. She consumes and so she lashes her tail across his back and despite the softness of the touch it cracks against his wet skin like the leather of a whip. “You should still feel as if you will become everything.” Her tail, flicks over his spine. It's a warning, a punishment of her disappointment.
“Your are not done with your story.” Like her tail the words are a whip-crack, made harsher for the lightning that cracks and hisses overhead. Everything about her is made more violent by the storm and the lightning light echoes in her gaze as she pulls away from him, her nose ghosting over his cheek for one final kiss.
She doesn't give Asterion an answer. It's torn from her lips and turned into a rumble of warning as the spotted mare first starts to make her way to them.
Calliope watches her like a lion watching a gazelle (this too she remembers). The fluidity of her steps promises something other than grace and beauty alone. The mare's gaze is too sharp on them, too observant to be nothing more than another fool of Novus safe behind their walls. The mare looks like a delicate animal who has dreamed up enough courage to think they they might trick the lioness on her own hunt.
Before the mare speaks, Calliope is already walking forward, lowering her horn down to point at that delicate neck and where it meets the mare's chest. Everything about her is a promise for a lion does not threaten. She destroys.
Had Asterion not been at her back, perhaps she would have been kinder, more welcoming. Perhaps she would have been anything but this unicorn who seems at the moment to be something far more, something outside the culture of Novus.
“Who are you?” The words and the way they seem like bullets (aimed straight and true) make Calliope seem like she's not a unicorn at all, not a thing that should speak and breath and perhaps even love.
Beneath the storm raging above Calliope is nothing more than weapon. A blade forged in the nightmares of every monster that has ever slumbered.
@Asterion @
