'Move swift as the Wind and closely-formed as the Wood. Attack like the Fire and be still as the Mountain.'
The world around Calliope still roars. It's a lion of a storm above her head, as dark and full of flashing bolts as the reckless and violent heart beneath her flesh. On and on and storm rages and Calliope looks ever onward to the sea that seems to be almost done rising. The waves, the eddies of water where they ripple and slap against her boulder are as black at the storm clouds above.
There are no others out here in the wilds of the storms. She's alone in the dry lightning and still she smiles when the first shadows of the beasts crest through the black horizon. The look both like birds, strange and twisted as and wickedly made as the dragons of the Riftlands.
When she smiles, it looks like a cruel twist of an ivory blade across her black, black lips. Her horn whistles through the suddenly still air. It's as if the world pauses on that inhale of her lungs, that clap of her hooves against the rock when she leaps down into the black water, the way downed sapling trees float almost silently by her like corpses.
And then she calls both a warning and a challenge to those winged creatures the world lets loose it's breath and just--- explodes. Everything is a cacophony of sound, thunder and waves and over it all the whisper of mighty wings in the distance. All her focus for a moment boils down to that one point on the horizon, the flock of beasts framed in flashing lighting and reflected in the flood.
Raymond is nothing more than a shadow at her back when he leaves the walls, red enough to be blood glistening in the storm-light. The pegasus at his side is another reminder that sometimes she's not a unicorn or a horse at all, sometimes she is so very different from all of them (the last).
Sometimes she is a mad lioness, a monster that feeds on the suffering of the unjust, the demons of the under-lands. Callope doesn't step back towards them, doesn't want Raymond to see the recklessness in her gaze that drowns out the love and the memories of racing along a sea.
This is the Calliope of the Riflands, the killer of dragons and the hunter of the sick and when she speaks the words sound like violent rumblings of rage as they echo across the water like stones. “Until the very end.” It is the only warning she gives the mare beside Raymond to let her know that she stand with things who do not know how to fear death.
Calliope welcomes death. Her horn dances in a bolt of lightning that streaks above her head from cloud to cloud. All her darkness looks stark and dangerous when it's edged in that blinding white and it looks almost as if death welcomes her, adores her, loves the way her skin is blacker than black.
Perhaps she is a monster now, a beast of killing but she still reflects on the waters like a unicorn when she rears and warns those coming beasts that if they come to kill she will make them bleed a river for each drop of blood they dare to take from what is hers.
