the fire is at my feet again
*
“The horses here will survive no maze.” That gaze, steel and stone, lingers on Raymond as she turns from the trees. The darkness between the trunks looms up behind her, gaping and thicker than any blackness has a right to be.
No god will make her scared of shadows.
She's unafraid of the dark and her tail flicks and sways and taunts some beast to brave the open air at her back. Her faith in Raymond is unending as is her belief that the skilled violence in her muscles knows no end. Let the gods come, let them preach and sway and leave open their throats for the tip of her horn.
She wonders how much blood their bodies might hold, if their corporeal might ooze out like mist over a lake if she took away the shape of them.
She glances her side against the red covered ribs of Raymond. It's a touch of dedication, of promise. This god-magic will not take him from her. Not like the sick Rift took Shrike. Calliope would shred universes like silk and blood if any god or magic dared.
After the touch she paces the treeline, restless as a wildcat caged with a hunger made of years boiling in her belly. She's a rabid thing, all flashing edges and blood-lust. Always have the gods made her rage. No thing should hold such power with no trial, no way to balance the folly of immortality.
She's too restless to notice the flash of white and red in the shadows.
Calliope prowls as a wild thing might. She prowls as if a lion might linger still in her bones. And that lion still remembers how to roar in the edges of her voice. “They are tamed by their vices and walls. All of them have forgotten what it means to be wild. And only wild things are made to withstand the brutality of gods and hold tight their freedom.” The roar in the pauses of her words slices deeper and faster than her horn might. The silence of that black between the trees seems to shatter in that echo of that voice.
But then! Oh but then!
The white in the darkness shifts and speaks and Calliope can no longer let gaze glide over it like a scepter of her past. At first she think it might be a mirage, a trick of the gods given to enrage the violent unicorn to the point of madness. But that desert smell drifts in, thicker than all the sand of Novus and Calliope rushes to Shrike in no more than a single leap.
Her hooves have wings for she leaps as only a lion might. Or perhaps as only a unicorn might be able to fly across the ground without a single mark of her passing.
“Do you know who I am?” She whispers, pressing a kiss to that red streak of danger across her sister's gaze. “Do you remember me?” Her tail tangles about Shrike's legs, a chain daring all the god's to try to take a single thing from her this time.
No god in any universe would survive that cruel rage of hers. It's in her gaze as she meets the amber of her sister with blue ice. Reflected in her eyes is a war, not beauty encased in lighting but purpose between the blinking of her eyelids.
Woe to the God's now. Calliope has found her purpose again. The world should tremble for it and the stars should fall like comets before the way the scales of her soul start to tip and level out.
@Raymond @Shrike
