“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
She almost misses that wavering, once-confident look that Raymond gives her. The moment he speaks his uncertainty Calliope is no longer a unicorn, a thing of legends. All her fissures feel wider, each word cutting her as a jagged knife would. She could be a storm for all the white hot violence that rises like a wave between her ribs.
It's a lion that lifts her head to the air and almost snarls for the taste of rotten magic that comes just before the world trembles. She can feel the mountains shivering in her bones and she watches the trees bend and sway and open up to a curve of scale with something almost like anticipation. Surely he didn't think she would stay behind him (like a mare might) or that she would be afraid to look at something that whispered death to her. Even the name he called, Ruth isn't enough to stop her from lowering her horn and shifting all her weight on to her haunches.
Perhaps the size of the beast that's more monster in the look of it should quell that whirlpool of violence in her breast. Perhaps if the blood and the feeling that she's missing bits of a story didn't already rend her into cracks and pieces of herself she would have paused at the name of Raymond's once familiar.
Perhaps if she didn't still feel the word no, no, no running through her blood like ice she would have seemed more like a unicorn than a lion eager for the hunt.
And when the monster stops and folds like like chastised kitten Calliope wants to smile a bitter smile, full of fury and rage. Her eyes linger on the blood, then the monster and she looks inwards to her memories and she stalks not towards Raymond but towards this beast named for a feline.
“Strange indeed.” She says before she's closer to the rift-magic creature than Raymond. Calliope wants to feel joy that Raymond found once more his cat but she can't help but look for tender spots in the scales and wonder if lion claws could scale up the side of this monster of a beast like a mountain made of stone.
She looks up, up, up to find the end of this monster and asks loud enough for the words to crack like lightning, “Do you think this is 'right' “? And the words sound like a low growl that seems almost like it never wants to end.
