'the moment for truth and the moment to lie'
Calliope follow him and she pads through the grass like both a lion and a unicorn, silent and deadly. Each hoof falls softer than all the wary weight that bares it down. She follows him like a beast, too raw to stand beside him and brush their shoulders together until they are no more than a single entity prowling through the grazes with a hunter's gaze on the horizon. With each step it's not impatience that rises and licks a fury against the curve of her rib-cage and burrows like a worm inside the chambers of her heart. Each of his words grow something else down in the deep of Calliope--
Judgment rises in her and it feels like it cracks her open in fissures of suffering and rage. This thing feels like a flare of sorrow in all the black violence of her, a throwback to the days when she was the last-- the last of her kind, the last hunter to devour up all the monsters of the world.
This feels like dying, the way she steps in the marks left by his hooves and lets the words of healers and tarnish and the rift crash over her like waves to fill her lungs with brine and blood. Calliope hunted all the beasts of the Riftlands and she knows enough to be leery of what his words don't say. She has burned and bled and almost died again and again for the Rift.
Now perhaps it has taken the small unbroken pieces of her too and she wonders that wreckage of violence will be left in the aftermath of her destruction, what things will die simply because the light of hers has faded to black.
Raymond stops and she does the same, stopping far enough away that his heat is nothing more than a brush of faint warmth against her skin. She hates things beyond her control almost as much as he and certainly she hates with more wildness than he. Calliope hates like the sun hates the clouds and the night; she hates like a storm hates the valley as it lashes and screams and rips trees from the ground.
Her hate is a terrible, terrible thing.
When he turns and looks at her, Calliope thinks that perhaps he will recognize the fissures of judgment flashing like spectral bolts of fury in her gaze. “Always.” The word tastes not like she expected it to taste, filled with a violent sort of love. Always, tastes a little like ash on her tongue, like embers that sting and burn where they fall.
Calliope closes the distance between them, unafraid even though she blinks and buries those fissures in her gaze. But for the first time she thinks that instead of saying always she should have simply said what blazes through those tiny cracks of fury and suffering in her heart---
She should have said no.
