“No one can say that death found in me a willing comrade, or that I went easily.”
In the darkness Calliope walks upon a pathway of glass with constellations beside her and planets rolling aimlessly above her. Stars fall around her in blazing paths of white fire. They give off the only warmth in this place and when they lick across her rib-cage she feels more alive in the darkness than she ever has in the living realm.
Between the bursts of light the only light comes from the planets. Whenever she looks up (and wonders why she can see at all) they roll wildly, twisting about each other in orbits that twist and twine like a hundred serpents that could circle a hundred different worlds. For a moment they remind her of something. But when another star shoots across the glass pathway the memory floats away from her like flotsam on the tide.
Suddenly though, the walkway trembles and lightning strikes between the planets as if they were clouds. Each bolt rattles something loose in her soul and her eye burn and water when they look up instead of away from those wild, flashing lights. Words are painted across the darkness in a white too bright to be a mere color and Calliope reads them with that new shaken loose thing in her soul.
Live. The darkness says to her and the plants roll in patterns that look like letters. Calliope's soul reads the planets too and her horn aches with understanding. Live. Live. Live. She presses her horn to a star and wonders why this star-fire feels familiar.
Calliope wonder why she's here, remembers that this is not her world, not anymore. This world, this space of stars and planets and glass took from her something. She hates this world.
Stay with me. The plants too start to paint out words with their orbits and now it's not her soul that trembles and her horn that aches. Her heart sobs for the words of those planets and her eyes are wet not from light but sorrow. All her bones ache for those planets until she wants to dissolve to dust and float among them.
And then suddenly the darkness is not so dark and the glass is not so slick and hard. Her eyes flutter both in the real and in the darkness. Her lungs sigh wetly as if a river of blood runs down her throat instead of air. But there is red and there is white and Calliope silently screams at her eyes to open and her heart to beat.
They listen.
Her eyes are an empty, pale silver (almost white) when she looks at Raymond, Shrike, Ruth and the thunderbirds that are just now flying away from the feral hunters that want blood and blood and more blood. For now it seems both sides have gone to lick their wounds and fuel their rage until another day, another night, another dawn, another war.
“Always.” She sighs before the glass, stars and planets take her back again.
@Raymond @Shrike @Pavetta
(ending Calli's roll here and working it so the birds fly away but if anyone wants feel free to bring them back)
