[P] black holes beneath our skin;

[Calliope]

“Forever.” Calliope says and it's a slice of a promise, made by steel and sword that could cleave in half ever the most mighty of stone. The words are spoken not by a mare but by a unicorn and part of her wonders if Raymond understands what this dangerous thing he does is. To hear the words, forever and always from a unicorn is perhaps a greater bond than any other.

And for Calliope forever will always be full of fury and recklessness, war, justice and vengeance. Perhaps that is why only Raymond would ever get the words from her, need them from her just as she has discovered that she needs the words from him.

The bond between Shrike and her feels different, like blood instead of heart, fate instead of choice. Although part of Calliope thinks that she could never make the choice to leave him and that this fury of love feels stronger than fate, than space, than magic.  

Part of her is content with the unknowing.

Still she is Calliope, the lioness, the unicorn, the reaper of the wrong and she can feel her skin start to itch and burn where they touch. His words echo back at her and now that she's made her choice (this new future over the horses of the past) the words feel like stones dropping, dropping, dropping on a scale to be measured for truth.

There is only so much love she can stand to bear with a ever-present war drum beating between her chest and a breeze whistling around her horn in whispers of death. She feels as if she might be more dangerous now, wild and free with so much more to lose.

Oh how great will her suffering be now if she loses them all to this world? Already the gods and all the monsters seem to make the air thick with premonition and prophecies. Calliope smiles for the weight of the air, the charge that rises her coat like thorns rising up towards the sun. “You were kinder than I would have been.” Her words are the drawing of a weapon, a single sinuous sigh as she pulls away and tosses her horn out to the shadows and silence unfolded and poised before them.

It is no loving beauty that looks back at Raymond, no mare made prettier by the fact that she is loved; for love only rises up Calliope like a war summons, a clarion call to battle. Love only makes her feel like a lioness, fangs out towards the moon in a roar could shake down a mountain to rubble.

Love makes her eyes look feral as she smiles at him and swings her tail like a axe that spins round and round and round until it finds flesh to bed down in. “But I am here now. We are here.” Oh woe, woe, woe to the gods that trapped the regimes and dreamed up the change that makes not dead but survivors.

“And the innocent will not be made to suffer and fear again” That horn upon her brow sighs though the quiet Night Court again and her hooves when she moves to explore all the darkness and decay of place sounds like the beat, beat, beat of marching army that will not be turned away until the last sinner is dead.

BUT THE BEAUTY OF HER FORM BRINGS VIOLENCE
A LONG AND LOVELY FALL NO WILL OR FIRE CAN OPPOSE

@Raymond

[Raymond]

***

Forever was a frightening word from anyone's lips, but from hers it did not need even the ghost of an accompaniment of rolling thunder. In her mouth it was blood and iron and barbed thorns, dangerous even as it flooded him with warmth. He allowed her to extricate herself from his embrace, bending to admit her like water flowing around stone. It was not just their bodies that meshed almost naturally together but their minds, and like a veteran general he felt he could have kept in lockstep with her even should his eyes be plucked from his skull.

You were kinder than I would have been, Calliope said, and when Raymond laughed it carried its usual self-confident richness, soft and amused and meant just for her.

Was it kind to hold a king accountable before the whole of Novus? Certainly the black unicorn would have meant to slay him and his regime and the dragon, spilling whatever blood she deemed a sufficient price to pay for the wounds of despotism. She would not have allowed them to disappear in the night like vagrant children. Perhaps she would have pursued them as he had not, unwilling to be contented by a favorable result if it meant the unjust could go on being unjust still.

Raymond was more concerned with results than with retribution, though retribution had a flavor he knew well. What mattered to him was that the dragon leave, and the dragon was gone. What mattered to him was that Denocte was free, and Denocte was free.

But to call his decision to punish rather than slay kind was perhaps too simplistic.

"Not all kindness is merciful," the red stallion replied through a devil's shadowed smile. "But yes, we are here now."

He watched her go, the lines of her body echoing the lion whose coat she had long since shed. Calliope was beautiful and dangerous and admirably, frightfully alive in a way that he had once forgotten possible. She loved as fiercely as she hated, accepted no limitations, feared no defeat. In many ways they had always been two halves of the same whole - the hidden blade and the army at the gates - and perhaps a lifetime of the Wheel's weaving had all along been an effort to bring those two unruly halves together. If that were the case, pity then the Wheel for its folly.

Now that they had found one another, not even the gods could stop them.

***

Raymond
And at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
When the man comes around.

@Calliope