""If she had touched me," he said very softly, "I would have been hers and not my own, not ever again. I wanted her to touch me but I could not let her."
*
Calliope does not dream as her magic cracks weakly through her veins. Only blackness keeps the thready song of her heart company. If there are sparks of white breaking up the black as her lighting runs through her body like a waterfall she never notices.
But if there were dreams to keep her company they would be bloody. Broken wings would float above her head like clouds of massacre. Monsters would linger in her shadows, their massive bodies made of house cats, lions and dragons. Thunder would gallop at her side and each curve of it would both create and destroy the form of her sister. Above it all would be a blood-moon, redder than blood fresh from the veins, redder than red.
Perhaps it's not black that she dreams of but layers and layers of red, piled onto of each other until the entire world looks black with those layers of red.
When she finally gallops out of the blackness (with that lighting bear at her side) it's only to see more scale-darkness broken up only with slim, fractured shards of daylight. Her eyes feel as weak as fireflies, bits of light and darkness and fragile enough to catch and blow away like dust. For the first time Calliope hates her body, hates all the mortal blood and bone that cannot fight until all the beasts of the words are corpses.
And she wonders, when Raymond enters into that slatted darkness, if she should hate the thing in her that looks at him and cannot feel regret (even though she knows she should). Oh there are so many things she should regret, like knowing that she would have happily died to save either of her two loves without pausing to think of the other. Instead she only looks at him and stands, shaking her body like a lioness.
“Of course it was.” She says and thinks again that she should feel something other than this thick blackness lingering over her soul. “War is always a little reckless.” Stiffly she closes the distance between them and lays her nose against his (a kiss if it came from anyone but her). She blinks to hide the feral rage that still boils like lava inside her.
Calliope tries to find the words to say I'm sorry over and over again as she traces her nose across his cheek, his neck, his spine.
The words never come.
@Raymond
