a titan that is rising
*
Another smiles blooms on the dark lips of Calliope. It's a brutal twist of a smile and when her teeth flash between the black it looks like the grin of a wildcat, a lion or some predator that has found in a poor, lonely mouse a rabid survivor.
Had she been a different type of unicorn she would have laughed. Soon enough the gray will learn to guard her words. Those weapons of language are weighty blades, swung far to easily by most. They rarely touch the flesh. Calliope has learned well that every inch of her is a weapon. Her silence, her words, the deadly tipped horn and every muscle on her body all are weapons honed to deadly perfection.
The young unicorn would learn soon enough. Even their scars are weapons they must learn to wield.
“A ghost might be a treasure to some. But for me she's more.” The smile lingers in her voice, all curved steel and war-sirens. A ghost waits for her somewhere in Ravos and she will crumble every wall and law in this world until those broken shards of her soul are made whole.
She says nothing more as the gray unicorn continues. Her eyes harden to steel as she speaks of a man, of their foolish rituals that they themselves could never hold upon their own flesh. Calliope doesn't say it, doesn't need to voice those words spoken so silently in her gaze as they linger on the scars of the younger unicorn.
Calliope would gut the man who tried to initiate and mark her. She would rend him from nose to hip and let his foolishness rot and decay with the rest of his petty ideals. Her flesh is not made for a man to shape, to claim and mark as something that belongs with him.
Everything about Calliope is made to consume, to swallow up shallow men who think they have a right to bend and mold a body other than theirs.
That too the other unicorn would learn.
When she asks Calliope 'how' her smile only deepens and darkens and flashes like white fire in the forest shadows. “Find me and I will show you.” Her voice is a bolt of lightning, heavier than any religion or war. There is an entire world in her voice. A place full of change lingers in her syllables. A place made of sand, bone, fire and a vengeance that knows no end.
“Tell them that you look for Calliope.” The last she whispers into the gray's ear. Her breath is hotter than any dragon's. That leonine tail is gentle though as she lets it tangle briefly about the younger unicorn's legs. It could have been a snake or a whip against any other but beneath the trees she lets it be nothing more than a caress, a promise.
This is the first task Calliope gives: to hunt down the hunter herself.
And then Calliope is gone, faded into the forest and returned to her ghost that Novus cannot keep from her. The smell of her, feral and metallic, is all that lingers in the darkness she once filled so completely.
It lingers as if to say, this place held two unicorns and now it shall never be the same.
@Pavetta
