Few sights stir the ancestral spirit quite like the sight of wild horses running free. But to be one of those horses, to be party to the rolling thunder beneath pounding feet and the searing ache of taut sinews, to be swept up in the primal dance of hearts and wills....
They should have sent a poet.
Calliope veered off their narrow course as they neared the remains of the felled leviathan. The spell broke with her departure; Raymond allowed himself to slow almost immediately, muscles leaping like locusts between sweat-sleek skin as his ribs strained against his sides with each swallow of air.
Up close the remains seemed almost alien. Its wide, bowed jawbones looked far less like a rictus than the harp from which a mournful dirge might echo on foggy autumn mornings, and a single eyeless socket stared his way with a sad, unfathomable sort of knowing. Calliope circled the beast and Raymond - a subtle smile pulling at one corner of his lips - marked her progress in the flash of black through the gaps of bone, kelp, and shredded baleen. He wondered what it looked like in life, and whether its majesty befitted the mighty frame that bore it hence.
The beast spoke; its ghostly voice was the echo of horn against salt-dried bone, and from that sound sprang forth a new, different life. Its heart was the elegantly-carved obsidian of Calliope's flesh, and as he carefully rounded the curve of its ribs to join her among the slatted shadows its blood became the sweat from their bodies, warmed by the fires still smoldering in their skin. Its breath poured from their winded lungs as they came down off their runners' high.
He did not bring up their flight across the sands, meeting her lioness's gaze with a pensive smile that walked a knife-edge between intrigue and reverence. It did not occur to him that she might have cut it short to spare herself. They could never have run forever, though he guessed now there would be a small part of each of them that would.
Ghost riders - but their sky was a memory of sand and storms.
The world seemed closer and quieter within the skeleton's hollow breast. Children might play among the arches of this sea-savaged ruin and build such brutal fantasies as to make kings and warlords weep for the future. Calliope seemed almost larger than life, as though her essence resisted even the illusion of being caged.
"I once ran into a bull elephant crossing the Grass Sea of Sharam, not too long after leaving home. I remember thinking 'there's real power', that nothing in the world could possibly be greater or more terrible than that." His smile wrapped around the words, coloring them with mirth at his own naivete and nostalgia for a sense of wonderment so easily piqued in his youth. This was a place for echoes, he thought.
Within its wave-worn belly, the great beast carried past, present, and future.
and at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
when the man comes around
@Calliope
aut viam inveniam aut faciam
