a war in the age of our kind
*
Calliope for the first time truly laments the loss of her lion skin and predator teeth. She misses the body that might climb up the rubble and break into the meeting area by way of tooth and claw. That body would have lunged for freedom, for justice and it would have tested how much a god might bleed if they stood before her as flesh and bone instead of specters and rumors.
Her horn might still test that fact after this day. Nothing is exempt from justice, nothing free from the tip of her horn when she's set her passion towards a purpose.
Now, with the horses gathering beneath her to clear the rubble with magic and might, Calliope feels her heart turn to fire and lightning. It feels like a weapon of war, this heart of hers. Each beat is a battle-cry, each trip of blood through her veins a cry for freedom.
How raw her throat feels! And yet the gods who summoned the courts do not come, do not respond to that fury on her lips that promises to bleed their religions dry until only dust and free-will is left in the wreckage.
“There is no freedom in this.” Calliope cries a clarion call and her words ring out over suffering and another shriek of a unicorn's horn on rock. Unicorns have always known better than most the price immortals must pay when hubris reigns over mercy.
“There is no justice in trickery, magic or whatever god-power rules this summit.” Her horn plucks loose a smaller rock at the top of the pile and it bounces down the collapse. The echo sounds like a gunshot in the silence of their shock. It goes on and on through the strange newly ancient trees until once more she can only hear the huff of exhausted horses working together to free all the regimes.
Here, now Calliope has but one enemy and they should tremble as she does for she feels as mad with righteous rage as she did in the Riftland and Ravos. Her darkness has been set loose for freedom, for vengeance, for mortals who have been ignored for centuries only to be trapped like a foxes before the hounds.
“Even gods must be held accountable for their sins by the many that have been slighted.” She thinks back to Eik, to his story, his suffering. She remembers Iago of Ravos and the way a god of wind wanted to blood-let him for choosing freedom over religion. Like Asterion she remembers all the fires that raged and destroyed because gods could not to bothered to stop the consequences of their powers.
Mortals have always been many and gods have ever been so very few.
Finally she descends, leaning her shoulder against a larger rock and pushing hard enough that it feels as if her shoulder might shatter against the force of that effort.
Calliope feels as is she might be more hydra than unicorn. She promises to rise up again and again (with more force and hate than the last time) until the god's cease giving a hundred sufferings for each miracle.
And still she pushes until her hooves make small canyons in the dirt, driven deep by her unstoppable determination and rage.
@Raymond @Jericho @Pavetta @Quinn @Acton @Shrike @Indra
