made of storms that never break
*
Everything in Raymond's eyes is echoed in her own ice silver ones. They are mirrors of each other, vessels of sorrow and war. But where he is tempered steel, deadly but long since cooled to something battle-ax sharp, Calliope is all molten rage. She's a blade on red-hot coals, hot enough to burn through flesh and ice and leave only ash and steam.
Here, though, walking through the tide she could almost be called tempered, almost tame. She's not sure how cares for the feeling, of the way his blade feels like a lightning bolt across her hip.
Calliope misses the sting of his blade at her throat, misses the sparks they made when they clashed like wild, violent things. Rift is dead, swallowed up by magic, time and sickness. She misses that place too and all the sick, broken monsters that had to be put down to save the innocents. She misses the storms that she alone could trust.
Her sorrow is no less than his though the reasons for it are far crueler, more seeped in blood-lost than loss.
For a moment she wants to lash her shoulder against him, feel anything but this serenity on the shores of a sea that could swallow them whole if the right storm hit. But Raymond speaks, oil smooth, and the feeling passes.
She remembers the looks of bones on the sea. In another life, one of pale skin and two legs, she had met her sister on the dead shores with bones around them like flowers in a meadow. In another life Shrike didn't remember her, didn't know what soul rested inside that black-haired women covered in scars and warpaint.
Back then the bones were a graveyard guarded by the harpy and she had come after them with a vengeance .
Perhaps it's the memory of the past, of her losses and the thrill of battle that makes her hungry. As much as she wants to breathe she need to know what bones lay ahead. What harpies might guard them and offer her that sting and fury she misses so much.
When she turns back to Raymond there's that need in her eyes, a blaze that devours that sadness and tameness of their twin gazes. “Race you.” The words are a darker sort of challenge, something full of a passion that promises more than just a race. Nothing innocent hangs in that whip-crack of her voice, nothing kind, nothing playful.
Calliope needs to burn with something more than the summer heat. She leaps ahead, knees tucked to chest and horn tossed to the wind as if she will tear even the salted wind apart.
And when she leaps she trills out a battle cry, loud enough to rouse any monsters from their hiding.
Calliope screams as only a unicorn might.
@Raymond
