it came upon a lightning strike
*
Calliope had not expected to see Raymond, to see anyone, from where she stood on the shoreline. She was there when the tides first rolled in. She was still there when they tore back out to sea. Hours have slipped by her in a solitude broken up by only the screams of seagulls and the roar of the waves as they slammed against the rocks.
The violence of the sea had kept her here, content to watch something rage and echo that churning need inside her own bones. Novus is too calm, a garden broken up by walls and religion. All the wild flowers have long since died here, turned to some mockery of beauty that wants only to wither and die.
Calliope refuses to change, to tether that rabidness of her soul. She remembers too well what it means to be free, to take her own fate from the dark places between the stars. And as she watches Raymond move closer to her she thinks that here, painted in red and sweat, is the one man that might understand that feral soul of hers.
When he pauses, the sweat on him turning him to copper and bronze, she feels some old pull on her soul. It's a roar of thunder, a crack of lighting, a lash of whitewater on stone. When Calliope feels it's violently and she feels like her bones cannot contain all the things her soul feels, has felt and still has yet to feel.
One day she will explode and no world will survive the aftermath of her when she's finally unleashed from this cage of flesh and bone.
“Raymond.” His name sounds like a storm on her lips as she joins him, pressing only a single touch of her lips to his cheek. Her tail itches to tangle around his, to dangle just above that blade she knows better than any other. The silver of her eyes seems to blaze as she meets his gaze, an echo of that violent sea made of justice in her bones that needs something to hunt, to bleed, to destroy.
“Have you come to see what secrets this ocean might have swallowed?” Calliope has seen enough of the world to know that the sea is the only constant in all of them, the great destroyer (greater than even her).
As the two of them walk they leave no tracks, no echo in the sand that this way two warriors have come and found each other.
@Raymond
