'every gesture was one of disorder and violence, as if a lioness had come into the room.'
*
Calliope watched the sea sweep back out to the deep. She watched the whale bones rise up like a splash of dread white against the sands in the distance. The seaweeds swayed in the ocean breeze, gaping for water as plants gape in the drought seasons. All the secrets of the shoreline are laid bare before her, crabs with old scripture on their shells and shells brighter than the sun.
But she is a unicorn who has been a wildcat and the ground feels like a trembling, dying thing beneath her hooves. Her blood sings with the wrongness of the sands before her, for the way the sea sweeps back like the night before the dawn. This is not the sea tide that rose and fell before her and Raymond, a backdrop to the fires in their hearts.
This is a killing sea and she laments that there is no great beast driving back the waves that she might venture down the cliffs for and drag her horn down the rocks until it sparks and smolders like a war-blaze.
For a day she walked the path back to Denocte warning the travelers to head to the high-ground. She walked and felt how the earth seemed to breathe beneath her, great sighs of sadness that whispered to her bones to run, run, run for the hills, the mountains, for any place high enough above the sea that it might look like heaven to the things laid bare upon the sands.
The Riftlands trained them well and she remembers what it feels like to watch the landscape shift before her like a dream-- sea to stone, mountains to shells large enough to be a continent, caves to towers that burrowed down into the sky. This slight trembling feels like a soft thing to her, a disaster with no rabid magic that wants to kill, kill, kill.
For a day it was quiet, but for that sorrow sigh, and as the night came and went the stone walls of the Court rose up like bones from the earth in the distance. Just as she moves towards those walls, loathe to feel the wilderness swallowed up by stone, the sighs turn to screams. It feels as if the dirt might crack open between her feet and swallow the entire world in no more time than it might take her to blink.
And overheard the skies turn dark, darker than her skin and the sun glows behind that darkness a crimson red color that is darker than blood.
Calliope's skin sings for the charge in the air that comes with the crying of the earth and the distant roar of the seas as they sweep back in with biblical violence to devour what they briefly offered like an apology. The horror calms her even as her blood sparks as if that overhead lighting rages not in the sky but through the rivers of her veins. The fury of the sea as it comes for her is nothing more than a spark to the wildfire of the fury that roars like a lion between her bones.
Let the sea come, let the lightning crack and raze against the prairies and turn the world to nightmare. This will not be the end of Calliope who knows what it feels like to have electricity run through her like whitewater, who walked on a frozen sea and challenged a monster beneath the waves.
She screams for the storm, for the death coming for them from the crumbling cliffs that rises and rises unstoppable even by the power of her mighty will. Calliope's clarion call for the stragglers to come to the court and the higher grounds sounds like a roar as it echoes against the sea rising across the lower prairies. It echoes almost endlessly behind her as she runs for the walls, slow enough to let her darkness flash like a banner in the bright bursts of lightning white.
A boulder looms up before her, a pillar of salvation above the waters starting to lap at her knees and the brine that stings as it sinks into her pores. It's to the top of that boulder that she leaps and her hooves sound like screams as they scramble where the bottom of the stone has become wet.
And when she's atop that boulder, a hoof raised like a starving lion who has seen the last antelope left in the wild, she calls out for the stragglers and waits to hear an answering call to know who she must come for.
Above the lightning rages and the dry air feels like kindling against the fury that promises to come. Calliope blazes like faith in the brightness that flickers like dying stars and she's almost darker than the places where the sea roars under black storm clouds.
Her eyes look like a storm of their own when she glares in the darkness and watches for a glimpse of red and one of white, bright enough to be bone. There is no sea, no thunder storm, no disaster that can hold her back if either Raymond or Shrike are out there in place where the ocean is high enough, fast enough or angry enough to drown.
