meet me in the middle of the air
*
Calliope feels like a storm as she runs. She could be a lioness bathed in lightning and shadows, a remnant of forgotten legends. Lost as she is to the fire in her veins and the thunderous, tangled pounding of her heartbeat and cloven hooves, Calliope is nothing more than a unicorn. She's eternal and unending as the sea and this challenge is more than a simple race to an archway made of bones.
They are wild things, Calliope and Raymond, throwbacks to underdeveloped universes. They are creatures made to live in worlds where stars are blossoms and the ground is hollow and slick like glass.
Novus is not made for them.
But here, with the sea nothing more than a dull echo against the tidal wave of their footsteps, they are made to hold each other. One tames the other and Calliope thinks if it weren't for the desert sting of Raymond she would let the sea carry her away to a freer world.
Her eyes are full of more than justice when she slows and looks at him. They are full of more than her soul can hope to carry for her bones are made to be ever hungry for violence. Those cloven hooves of hers falter for a heartbeat, a thin and thready throb between her rib cage. Raymond pulls ahead by no more than a shoulder and it's enough to reignite that fury in her blood. When her tail cracks at her back it sounds like a whip as it echos off the stone.
The two of them are a war, blood-soaked sands and victory, carried between mere mortal flesh and bone.
Calliope doesn't surrender or bend as she approaches those arching, sun-bleached bones. She merely turns away, cutting away from their path to curve her footsteps around their discovery. It's larger than them by twenty and she slows when rows of flat-edged spinal bones make her horn seem small and delicate.
She rings her horn against those bones and it sounds like a bell-chime inside a cathedral. The ring goes on and on and on, bounced against the cliffs and the sea until it consumes any lingering throbbing of her Brutus heart.
The ring feels like a religion as it chimes, something more brutal and true than any gods could be. And these bones could be a shrine made for only Raymond and Calliope.
She slips between two ribs and waits for him underneath a pergola made of vertebrae and draped in dried up seaweed with bits of old, brittle muscle tangled in the dead green. Her gaze is brutal as she watches him, daring him to admit that she left their race unfinished and she pulled up long before a winner was crowned.
It's a predator stare and it swallows up the truth in icy silver; that she curved away only to deny the way the race felt like a apocalypse of more than freedom in her blood.
@Raymond
