His eyes are filled with judgment
And his heart is filled with pain
***
And his heart is filled with pain
***
Do you think this is 'right'? Calliope asked. Ruth shifted slightly where she lay, the spines on her lower jaw biting into the soil as she tilted her bright blue eye toward the mare.
Some cultured believed that odd eyes like that could pierce the veil of the spirit realm, and feline mystique came with an almost necessary suggestion that such superstition was true. If so, would the Rift have destroyed such a gift, or would she see now only horrors? Raymond had enough of her to worry about without wondering if she saw demons wearing the skins of those she had once adored.
So he didn't.
The red stallion's ears flicked back loosely at Calliope's question, and for a moment he turned his gaze away from both unicorn and beast as though to shield his face from view. Were that his intent, the gesture would have been pointless: Calliope knew him too well and Ruth was closer even than that, separated only by the barest shade of a bridge between their scarred souls. "I would have happily buried her memory," he replied with almost surgical sterility.
The tarrasque did not react. She'd had many nights now to digest the conflicting ideas that Raymond could love her, accept her, and also prefer her to have died.
When Raymond looked again at the dark unicorn, it was with steel in his eyes and pain seeping into his words like blood welling up through hastily-wrapped bandages. "But it's my fault she survived, and that makes her my responsibility now. No one else's."
His fault. His fault that he had not put a runty, naked kitten out of its misery in the riftlands. His fault that he had taken it in, given it a name, gotten attached. His fault that he thought an enchanted collar around her delicate neck could protect him from the fallout of such attachments with the Rift so close at hand. His fault that she had spent a thousand years on a dead planet, dreaming of destruction and forgetting the face of her father. Certainly it was Florentine who had brought her back, but penance for her sin had been paid swiftly and most exactingly.
Who would make Raymond pay for his?
Some cultured believed that odd eyes like that could pierce the veil of the spirit realm, and feline mystique came with an almost necessary suggestion that such superstition was true. If so, would the Rift have destroyed such a gift, or would she see now only horrors? Raymond had enough of her to worry about without wondering if she saw demons wearing the skins of those she had once adored.
So he didn't.
The red stallion's ears flicked back loosely at Calliope's question, and for a moment he turned his gaze away from both unicorn and beast as though to shield his face from view. Were that his intent, the gesture would have been pointless: Calliope knew him too well and Ruth was closer even than that, separated only by the barest shade of a bridge between their scarred souls. "I would have happily buried her memory," he replied with almost surgical sterility.
The tarrasque did not react. She'd had many nights now to digest the conflicting ideas that Raymond could love her, accept her, and also prefer her to have died.
When Raymond looked again at the dark unicorn, it was with steel in his eyes and pain seeping into his words like blood welling up through hastily-wrapped bandages. "But it's my fault she survived, and that makes her my responsibility now. No one else's."
His fault. His fault that he had not put a runty, naked kitten out of its misery in the riftlands. His fault that he had taken it in, given it a name, gotten attached. His fault that he thought an enchanted collar around her delicate neck could protect him from the fallout of such attachments with the Rift so close at hand. His fault that she had spent a thousand years on a dead planet, dreaming of destruction and forgetting the face of her father. Certainly it was Florentine who had brought her back, but penance for her sin had been paid swiftly and most exactingly.
Who would make Raymond pay for his?
***
Raymond
Who is there to stand against the rider on the range?
Raymond
Who is there to stand against the rider on the range?
@Calliope
aut viam inveniam aut faciam
