If they were any other horses, if they were not a bear and a lion, if they had not lived as sisters and queens blood to blood (and horn to throat) Shrike would have said oh, I have missed you.
Instead she only tells Calliope by the press of her shoulder, the flash of her teeth, the way she will match her stride-for-stride wherever they run. When the unicorn looks to the sky Shrike turns her own dark gaze upward, and watches a bolt of lightning cleaves the sky in two. When she closes her eyes, for a moment afterward the image lingers, a world gone white and shadowless and stark.
Thunder is quick to follow, rumbling at the border of the mountains, but it is the black unicorn’s words that echo down and down. “Guiltier still,” she says, and remembers the way they stood outside the collapsed rubble on the summit, the way the gods voices echoed as they bickered, the way the disasters and monsters followed. “For they chose these actions that resulted in the deaths of those that prayed to them.” Her voice is bitter, her ears laid back. The Rift, at least, had no gods to speak of. It was only magic eaten by disease.
But these gods -
Shrike’s gaze shifts to the mountains, to a cleft in the stone where she knows their monuments wait. It does not matter that she has no magic of her own, does not matter that the bear waits no longer in her bones, does not matter if her fury and her righteousness will never be enough.
She begins to run anyway, pale as an after-image of lightning, a burning mark upon the world.
don't do much these days
keep the wolves at bay
keep the wolves at bay
