the price we are willing to pay
*
Calliope listens to the two halves of her soul and her heart races with joy and rage that this is where they are finally reunited. They are the calmness to her reckless passion, the anger that roils beneath her skin like a monster every breath. They are the tacticians and she the missile fired to consume nations made on greed and sorrow.
Still she paces, an ear cocked back to the trail leading here. Calliope prowls as a predator does, more relentless than any religion might be in their preaching.
“Gods and mortals. Monsters are made from the combination.” Her eyes seek out Raymond, blazing silver-blue, brighter than a comet plummeting for the earth. There is a bond there, a pact made when they taunted all the gods in Ravos and offered freedom and choice. Sealed when he traveled back and returned with the band upon her horn.
There's a different feeling there and it burns, burns, burns.
The look is gone in a blink and Calliope returns to her pacing, restless and wild for the things promised by birds that speak. “And with Dencote some talk of dragons and walls.” She could froth with the rage she's known by dragon-fire and wing. Calliope could count the scars on her body left by fang and hook. She's a map of suffering and death, rivers of raised flesh and mountains of burns.
Those scars glitter in the forest low-light. They glitter as only gore and war might, with black and red, raw skin.
“We came for the Dusk Court, to see what horrors a god summons might offer.” Calliope and Raymond did not come with but for. They came for Asterion and Florentine and the others who knew what Ravos and the Riftlands turned them into. Like the times of Velius, Calliope is full of defensive rage, a hunger for the survival of those she considers hers.
Sometimes she's wonders what the lion left behind in her bones, what is predator made and what is unicorn.
“I would like to watch all the courts arrive, to see what crimes their eyes might hold.” That grin is all lion, toothy and feral and it's easy to forget that here is only a unicorn again (mortal and dangerous for the way she welcomes death to serve any just purpose). Her hooves turn from the trees and back towards the path.
Let all the courts and their leaders walk before her to heed the call of the gods and let them look in those iron-fire eyes and know that it is not only religion that watches them in the world of Novus.
@Raymond @Shrike
