He did not waste his breath responding. Her need spiced the air around them with frenetic energy that set his hackles up with primal ferocity and overflowed the levees of his usual quiet poise. So often did he don the trappings of civilization that perhaps it was easy to forget that it was not through charisma alone that he had made it for so long on his own.
That beneath the suavity and charm cultivated by necessity burned a brazier of rendari fire, stoked hotter still by the seething passion of one who had valued revenge above the sacred traditions of his people.
If Calliope wanted a race, then a race she would have.
She lunged into action with a battle cry that ricocheted off the cliffsides and pierced the stormy sea; he leapt too, but only with a grunt of explosive exertion as he dug furrows into the wet sand. Even in this they could be branded opposites, two sides of the same fearsome coin.
Too rarely did Raymond afford himself the simple, wild pleasure of sprinting as hard as he could across the open spaces. Now, with the roaring of a tumultuous sea to one side and the thunder of Calliope's heavy hoofbeats to the other, exhilaration bordering on the prey-driven fears of their ancestors quickened his blood. Each breath blossomed from their straining nostrils like plumes of smoke. His ears clamped tightly to his poll as he dug in and reached with every stride. He was built for snappy speed and finesse, and he showed all of it here.
The sand and flotsam strewn about the beach streaked by unremarked as they thundered past, mere yardsticks to measure the progress of their feral contest. Already the whale bones - so small and distant just moments before - loomed grim and macabre before them, a prize perhaps too morbid in its symbolism for anyone but Raymond and Calliope. His muscles burned with a pain that felt proper, each footfall the heartbeat of a creature more alive than the living, each full extension the liberation of an eagle on the wing. Their forceful breaths, their hoofbeats in the heavy sand melted into a rhythmic peal of thunder matched only by the roaring waves at their flank. It no longer mattered to him who got there first.
But even a dead dog could see by the fire in his eye that he wasn't about to let her pass him up without a hell of a fight.
Raymond.
and at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
when the man comes around
and at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
when the man comes around
@Calliope <3
aut viam inveniam aut faciam
