– Calliope – the name of 'freedom' was chanted across the cause
*
Calliope is relentless in her journey to the newly formed summit. The storm cloud of dust at her back is without end, it rises and falls like ash to cling to all the sweat and froth on her skin. She's no stranger to long journeys, to roadways and deserts that have no break in sight. This path seems like no more than a blink of an eye to her.
Once she had spent seasons watching the trees die and oceans turn to hard, sand. Once the world around her had forgotten who she was. Once, not so long ago, she had traveled through the tangles of time and space to find all the worlds where her sister might still live.
Novus is an easy world to travel. Here there are no beasts to hide in the shadows she casts as the sun starts to hang low in the sky. Calliope has no deaths to deliver on her pathways here, no victims that require the brutal sort of salvation only she can provide.
Only the soft echo of Raymond's hooves as he gains on her slows her footsteps at all. He is more suited to lazy perusal of the dangers ahead of them. His might lies in cleverness and wit. Hers in passion and recklessness.
He is the only council she might listen to and so she relents from her wild hunting gallop to a steady canter.
Calliope gathers herself as she crosses into the summit, chin tucked to her chest and her horn pointed ahead at whatever challenges a god might have left for mortals to face. The magic is thick here. It's strange to feel it again. It was easy to forget such wild things as god-magic where there are courts, walls and laws. Novus does not seem a place for this-- this oil thick air and pillars of trees that act like sentinels to some awful secret.
Where others might pray, bow their heads in reverence at such power over the very earth, Calliope is instantly distrustful.
Gods have raised mazes before her. They were mazes full of horror, designed not to test but to devour those foolish enough to hope for blessings. She has seen them torment those who thought them holy and stitch their lips shut with fire and malice.
Distrust is not a strong enough word to convey all that Calliope feels in her bones as she beholds yet another creation of gods.
With all the sweat and dust on her she smells as wild as any magic of the long dead Riftlands.
That silver of her gaze is an inferno of emotion as she taps her horn against a single tree sentinel, testing it for any trickery that might lay Floretine and Asterion low. She turns towards Raymond, too tense to smile at the sight of him ready to follow all her blazing, reckless passion.
“I am reminded of Ravos.” Calliope doesn't smile, there is no fondness for a place full of demon gods that wanted only to hoard their might for petty things. She doesn't even miss being queen of all the heretics of wild magic that knew no gods in their bones.
Raymond surely knows it is no good thing that this wall of trees reminds her so strongly of another world devoured by itself like an ouroboros.
There was a spartan quality to Raymond and Calliope that took to outriding like a spark to dry tinder. The trappings and endless intrigues of court life were not for them (even Raymond, who so very easily slipped into the mannerisms of civilized folk), and the only dust that could ever dirty their flesh was the dust of a hard day's travel trapped in the proverbial amber of honest sweat.
Florentine and her entourage might hesitate in the shadow of their stony walls, but Raymond would not. Calliope would not.
He drew easily alongside as the black unicorn slowed and took up a guarded stance as she approached the strange, sealed stand of trees, allowing her to approach them alone as he examined the structure as a whole. The trees seemed simultaneously ancient and young, gnarled with the passage of time but almost hospital-clean, and nothing about their surroundings suggested that such a thing should exist - there or anywhere. It was not the first time Raymond had seen powerful magic at work and he doubted it would be the last, but it set his teeth on edge with a slow-simmering distaste.
Gods had never destroyed anything that Raymond loved. They had never bent him to their will or toyed with his life, because Raymond would not be so handled. But he had known many a good horse turned sour by the dread opiate religion, had exploited the piety of others to his own ends, and knew that gods were all it took for good people to do unspeakable evil.
Meddlesome. Vile.
Calliope turned toward him, and as their eyes met he saw her as clearly as the sealed gathering place: black as an oil spill, shining with sweat and dust from the road, the cuff on her horn glinting in the fiery evening sun. He lingered on the image as she spoke and his mind lingered on it after she fell silent.
He did know the dark portents that followed the mention of Ravos, but he also knew the fickle mortality of its gods and the games they sought to play with the lives of their adherents. They were vain and fallible. The rift had been a greater and more terrible god than they, and it was nothing at all but a putrescent, gangrenous wound tucked between the toes of ten thousand separate worlds.
"I would not mind if it were like Ravos," Raymond replied coolly.
Give him a god he could kill.
Raymond. and at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
when the man comes around
like a fresh cut flower promises sure to wither up
Like her brethren from Ravos, Shrike had not hesitated long after seeing the god’s messenger before making her way toward the gods’ peak. Mount Corenth, Veneror Peak – always the gods sought the high ground, though nothing she had seen here suggested that these were real enough to bleed.
But she could not be kept from the promise of magic, not when she had little else tying her to the desert. After the Davke attack, in the heat of the Solterran summer, there had been nothing for her but to stay and learn what she could. Now, though, the dog-hot days were over and each autumn breeze swept in the promise of change.
Her passage through the canyons was uneventful but strange; they reminded her too much of the place of her birth, wind-carved buttes and rock striated red. Never had the riftlands created such an echo and Shrike passed through them as quickly as she could, glancing up only to be sure the shadows she saw belonged to hawks and vultures and nothing more.
When at last the world turned from sand to dirt, from scrub-brush to grass and trees, Shrike tried to tamp down the anticipation that built in her blood. It had so often led to disappointment. But there was no denying of the magic of the place, a dense, electric quality to the air that did nothing to fill the now-hollow places of her where once something similar had lived.
The paint was not often given to fanciful thought, but she wondered now what places magic occupied in a body – was it the bones, was it the blood? How was it gained, how lost?
But all such thoughts were forgotten when she comes upon the half-circle of stones and trees. Even the familiar scent of foliage was bitter on her tongue as she examined them, describing a slow circle from one point of the arc to the other.
It was no magic that made her at last fall still.
Even her breath held as first the scent and then the sound of the black unicorn reached her, and the only thing that moved was her lips as they shaped a slow smile. No beast, no battle, could make her heart beat as it now did, and even the gods were forgotten for this moment.
Slowly she stepped further into the open, her head high and her eyes hungry to devour the sight of her sister.
“The horses here will survive no maze.” That gaze, steel and stone, lingers on Raymond as she turns from the trees. The darkness between the trunks looms up behind her, gaping and thicker than any blackness has a right to be.
No god will make her scared of shadows.
She's unafraid of the dark and her tail flicks and sways and taunts some beast to brave the open air at her back. Her faith in Raymond is unending as is her belief that the skilled violence in her muscles knows no end. Let the gods come, let them preach and sway and leave open their throats for the tip of her horn.
She wonders how much blood their bodies might hold, if their corporeal might ooze out like mist over a lake if she took away the shape of them.
She glances her side against the red covered ribs of Raymond. It's a touch of dedication, of promise. This god-magic will not take him from her. Not like the sick Rift took Shrike. Calliope would shred universes like silk and blood if any god or magic dared.
After the touch she paces the treeline, restless as a wildcat caged with a hunger made of years boiling in her belly. She's a rabid thing, all flashing edges and blood-lust. Always have the gods made her rage. No thing should hold such power with no trial, no way to balance the folly of immortality.
She's too restless to notice the flash of white and red in the shadows.
Calliope prowls as a wild thing might. She prowls as if a lion might linger still in her bones. And that lion still remembers how to roar in the edges of her voice. “They are tamed by their vices and walls. All of them have forgotten what it means to be wild. And only wild things are made to withstand the brutality of gods and hold tight their freedom.” The roar in the pauses of her words slices deeper and faster than her horn might. The silence of that black between the trees seems to shatter in that echo of that voice.
But then! Oh but then!
The white in the darkness shifts and speaks and Calliope can no longer let gaze glide over it like a scepter of her past. At first she think it might be a mirage, a trick of the gods given to enrage the violent unicorn to the point of madness. But that desert smell drifts in, thicker than all the sand of Novus and Calliope rushes to Shrike in no more than a single leap.
Her hooves have wings for she leaps as only a lion might. Or perhaps as only a unicorn might be able to fly across the ground without a single mark of her passing.
“Do you know who I am?” She whispers, pressing a kiss to that red streak of danger across her sister's gaze. “Do you remember me?” Her tail tangles about Shrike's legs, a chain daring all the god's to try to take a single thing from her this time.
No god in any universe would survive that cruel rage of hers. It's in her gaze as she meets the amber of her sister with blue ice. Reflected in her eyes is a war, not beauty encased in lighting but purpose between the blinking of her eyelids.
Woe to the God's now. Calliope has found her purpose again. The world should tremble for it and the stars should fall like comets before the way the scales of her soul start to tip and level out.
Calliope's energy built upon itself as though stoked by the magics permeating this holiest, unholiest of summits, vibrating through her skin and into his bones as she brushed along his side. Did these foreign gods know what fires burned in Calliope's breast, what need drove her?
Such a pretty trick as remodeling a mountaintop might awe the zealot or the agnostic, but the wildlings of Velius had learned to seize power at its source, free of interpretation or filtration. They authored their own fate and built their own legacy.
And Calliope was their queen.
The swarthy mare's words were building to a crescendo as she paced and spoke, and he could nearly see the lioness of her tugging at the sinews just beneath her oil-black skin, but he was not so enthralled by the display as to miss the flash of white just out of frame, soft and insistent as an upwelling of memory. Raymond knew Shrike's fate only by Calliope's word and by the expression on her face when he interrupted the rampage that would have claimed her life as well. That was a raw, red day, written in the ruins of edifice and fiend alike as the price of the painted mare's suffering was exacted from anything and everything that could feasibly die.
And now she was here, because the Rift binds all places and times into a single discordant melody, and death in such a world is far more complicated than it ought to be. Sometimes you stay dead, sometimes you become unstuck in time. Sometimes you become a bear and forget who you are.
The red stallion saw her - recognized her - only a moment before Calliope, and watched with a veiled expression as Calliope's mounting fervor flowed at once in a new direction like kerosene taking eagerly to flame. He said nothing - for now. Shrike's death had not been his burden to bear, and the torch of reunion was not meant first for his hand. But after a moment, as he listened for the affirmation that Calliope so desperately craved, a dark smile pulled at the corners of his mouth and eyes.
"Great time to get the band back together, I think."
Shrike feels no shame for the relief that flutters in her heart like a battlement flag when Calliope returns to her side. How long, how long had she hoped for this reunion?
“You are the last,” she answers, “you are the only one of your kind.” She closes her eyes against the whisper of Calliope’s muzzle on her skin; she presses her cheek against the dark unicorn’s, the white of her skin all the starker for the black it rests against.
She is not aware that her words are only a half-truth; she is not aware that some part of her rift-splintered soul walked first as a bear and later, in a world much changed, as something far stranger. It is a mercy, then, that the last thing she recalls is her death.
Every troubled thought that has gathered like a storm in her heart is swept away, leaving only sorrow for the pain that has passed between them and joy for the future that stands before them now, shining in new sun.
It is almost with wonder that she pulls away – only enough to touch her muzzle to the black arc of Calliope’s horn, a reaper’s scythe that has cut down so many monsters. That has cut down more than that.
Shrike does not close her eyes then, for she knows what she would see: the face of the unicorn, despair and wrath, standing over her in a pocket between worlds. The paint had failed, had failed, had failed – and even so found mercy. “I remember everything.” Her gaze lingers on the electric blue of Calliope’s and her words are low as a secret.
She does not say forgive me, but it is there in her eyes all the same.
And then she turns away, casting her dark gaze over Raymond from nose to tail-tip with a smile that grows and grows until it mirrors his own. “Raymond,” she says, and inclines her head, a scant nod. (She does not guess what has passed between them; she does not yet see).
But it is Calliope she turns to – she always will turn to – for direction.
“It seems we have a foe,” she says, and pulls in a breath of the god-heavy air. “What do you know of this?”
“I would raze the world and all the monsters in it,” Calliope promises in a violent whisper, a gunshot in a hurricane, as Shrike presses her lips to that horn upon her head-- a weapon, justice tipped in blood and silver. Just once was it a weapon of mercy, a curse she bore only because she wielded such a thing upon her brown. Her eyes close as she remembers and she holds her horn so very, very still, as if it might shatter Shrike like glass if it but touches her skin.
“just to save you from feeling my horn across your throat again.” She finishes, stepping away to look back at the trees and the dark things that might be hiding between them. Her tail lashes agitated at her back as she thinks of gods and their powers of creation.
Now Calliope has so very much to lose in this world and she's made more dangerous for it. She is a lion to her very core and her soul rages with the need to protect and lay flat any enemy that might surface before her gaze of judgment.
Her body stops in that space between Shrike and Raymond. For a moment there are so many ways one might connect the three of them. With the right lines they connect like an infinity symbol, their souls and hearts crossing over and over and over again with no end in right.
Ravos and the Rift could not sunder them apart (bones nor purpose). Novus will show them the same, Calliope thinks. That same inability to weather and tame warriors who remember what it means to be just a horse, to be wild. Here to they will go on, endless and driven only by that purpose in their bones to claim the justice others are not dark enough, angry enough to take for themselves.
Let gods come in their shining glory and dark, dark pride. Let the dragons and sand monsters come for them when they find themselves hunted for once-- hunted by unicorns and horses that should not track and rage as predators do.
Let universes come for her. Calliope feels unstoppable now that she has Raymond and Shrike once more. None of them will die without leaving destruction and righteousness in their path when the monsters come calling.
Of this Calliope is certain.
That certainty crackles like lightning bolts in her eyes as she smiles at both her war-sister and the only man to make her feel anything but coldness. There is a storm rising in her blood and it singes her inside when it touches muscles that have ever trained for war. It echoes as thunder in her voice when she answers Shrike. “It seems that gods have come to Novus or magic sick enough to possess mere birds and make them talk as a god would. Either way I have little faith in the rightness of the summons. I have yet to see gods call out for anything but suffering and misery, never have I seen them save a single thing.” Oh how the thunder crashes in her voice!
She speaks as a storm might, ready to wipe clean the blood and drown all the devils of Novus.
And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder
One of the four beasts saying,
'Come and see.' and I saw.
***
Somehow, the three of them together again put Raymond at ease even here amongst the volatile god-magics. Rarely did he find himself fearful or without a plan of attack, but there is an assurance here in their presence that a victory greater than simple survival might be possible, that free will and the tenacity of mortal races may yet triumph as they had before.
Calliope had faced gods toe to toe. Shrike had defied death itself. And Raymond...well, if you asked him, he would have freely admitted to being the weakest of the the trinity, but at the very least he had a cockroach's outlook on survival. There was no crack he couldn't squeeze into, no den of filth and iniquity into which he couldn't waltz with the confidence of utmost belonging.
Their individual differences fortified the whole; anyone, god or mortal, would be right to worry.
"I am not concerned about the gods so much as I am about their followers," Raymond mused. In his experience, gods were predictable. With all their great power they tended to color inside a well-defined set of lines. But their presence would inspire zealotry, and even good people could perpetrate great evils for the love and adoration of their patron deity.
In such a highly political atmosphere as Novus, emotions criss-crossed the kingdoms like exposed nerves as it was. Throw a god into the mix, and you've got a powder keg.
"This land is rife with tension as it is. I doubt the presence of their mascots will make any of that better." He nodded contentedly at Shrike. "From what I've been able to hear, trouble may come from somewhere in the east."
***
Raymond
And at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
When the man comes around.
It is another mercy that she does not deserve that she remembers so little of the battle that left her desperate for death, sides split neatly as a fish to reveal pale arcs of ribs, flesh torn deep into fat and muscle.
It is a mercy that she remembers little of her bleak search afterward, driven on and on only by the desperate need to find her. How many stairs she’d stumbled down, how far below the roiling world she’d been.
“Better than dying by some other,” she says, equally row, rough as the dry desert, “but I will try to keep it from being necessary again.” Her gaze follows the unicorn as Calliope steps away, and she does nothing to disguise the smile the grows as she watches each agitated movement, a storm that builds and builds.
The paint listens with dark intent as Calliope explains. There is only faint amusement at the fact that she has never heard the unicorn say so much at once; the sum of their conversations had always been in glances, in laughs that cracked like lightning and rolled rough as rockslides, in the knowledge of the other’s presence at their back or side in battle.
But she listens well, and as she does her gaze wanders the thick, god-made copse of trees, and she inhales the mingled scents of the mountain. Summer-dry grass, recently disturbed stone and earth, the sharp-low smell of ozone.
When Raymond speaks, Shrike shifts to watch him, and privately she agrees. She will never forget Fantome’s arrogant questioning, or Calliope’s defiance – but neither would she forget when the fire-horses stole her from Velius, or the peculiar gleam in the eye of a horse who thought they were serving the gods’ will.
A thousand new enemies, then, and yet they were always the same.
“I come from the east,” she answers him, and her smile is dry and faint as a desert streambed in summer. “But I have heard mention of Denocte from others in the desert. Did you two come with a court?”
Calliope listens to the two halves of her soul and her heart races with joy and rage that this is where they are finally reunited. They are the calmness to her reckless passion, the anger that roils beneath her skin like a monster every breath. They are the tacticians and she the missile fired to consume nations made on greed and sorrow.
Still she paces, an ear cocked back to the trail leading here. Calliope prowls as a predator does, more relentless than any religion might be in their preaching.
“Gods and mortals. Monsters are made from the combination.” Her eyes seek out Raymond, blazing silver-blue, brighter than a comet plummeting for the earth. There is a bond there, a pact made when they taunted all the gods in Ravos and offered freedom and choice. Sealed when he traveled back and returned with the band upon her horn.
There's a different feeling there and it burns, burns, burns.
The look is gone in a blink and Calliope returns to her pacing, restless and wild for the things promised by birds that speak. “And with Dencote some talk of dragons and walls.” She could froth with the rage she's known by dragon-fire and wing. Calliope could count the scars on her body left by fang and hook. She's a map of suffering and death, rivers of raised flesh and mountains of burns.
Those scars glitter in the forest low-light. They glitter as only gore and war might, with black and red, raw skin.
“We came for the Dusk Court, to see what horrors a god summons might offer.” Calliope and Raymond did not come with but for. They came for Asterion and Florentine and the others who knew what Ravos and the Riftlands turned them into. Like the times of Velius, Calliope is full of defensive rage, a hunger for the survival of those she considers hers.
Sometimes she's wonders what the lion left behind in her bones, what is predator made and what is unicorn.
“I would like to watch all the courts arrive, to see what crimes their eyes might hold.” That grin is all lion, toothy and feral and it's easy to forget that here is only a unicorn again (mortal and dangerous for the way she welcomes death to serve any just purpose). Her hooves turn from the trees and back towards the path.
Let all the courts and their leaders walk before her to heed the call of the gods and let them look in those iron-fire eyes and know that it is not only religion that watches them in the world of Novus.
