'The sun turned black like sackcloth made of goat hair, the whole moon turned blood red '
Calliope at the shore when Caligo rises from the waves like some monster cloaked in stardust and bits of weed. They rain from her in droplets of wealth while Calliope drips only blood and remnants of war. She's nothing more than another shadow along the ocean, cased in darkness, brine and blood.
When she watches the goddess move up the path from the sea she can only help but wonder if Caligo's insides would drip and glow like the light of the moon or if she would bleed as red as the rest of them. Calliope makes no move to follow the goddess. Only her eyes follow that bit of flesh and night-sky as it leaves the shoreline for the court. The horn upon her brow trembles for each step the goddess takes and it chants a song in vibrations she hasn't heard for so very long.
She remembers the Summit and all her fury. She remembers the birds who seems strange enough to be god-made. The battle wasn't enough to take all the violence from her blood and bits of it rise up as the sands rise up her hooves and the sea rises up against the moonlight.
It rises, rises, rises until the Goddess comes back with all the faithful in tow. Bits of lightning dance along her spine, weak and wild and nothing more than the faintest echo of all the things that rage and crack and boil inside her. Only Calliope could make lightning seem like a weak, foolish thing.
They are bleeding and broken and a goddess wants them to look at the night sky.
Her hooves carry her towards Raymond as he breaks the darkness with a glare of red and the taint of sweat and rage. Part of her wants to lean against him, to make their crusted wounds drip again like waterfalls. Calliope wants to many things in that moment but instead she only says, “What would it take to tear them all from the sky?”
And perhaps her horn lowers just a little and it's not the sky that she looks at but something that looks just like flesh and bone.
