– Calliope – she will remember your heart long after the world ends
*
Calliope is on the hunt and her nose flares as she lifts it into the night wind. Her breath rises like smoke from her, it makes her look like a dragon, like the steel skin she wears cannot possibly hold the fire of her. She's a shadow as she tracks, lithe and slick with sweat, and she blends flawlessly into the darkness. If it were not for that flash of white across her shoulder any eyes would slide over her as nothing more than a strange, fleeting thickening of the night.
The few that see her, the unicorn that moves like a lion, are wise to turn away back to their fires and families. But it is not them she hunts and even if they called out a welcome she would not have paused. The city outskirts hold nothing for her and were if not for that scent on the wind she would not spare a second thought for that looming castle ahead.
On she goes and the sound of her hooves on the cobblestone are hushed and quiet. She stays close to the edges of the street, letting the raucousness of those too far into their sins muffle the whisper of her body through the night breeze. Even her horn fails to gather the starlight, content for once to let only the band around it to flash and glitter.
It's better that way, that the tame horses of this place cannot see the way blood is crusted into the cracks of her horn. Better that they can't see the patch work of scars across her body, left by dragons and sirens and beasts infected with dark, broken magic. There's one, less healed than the others, that was left by the beak of a foolish phoenix that dared challenge Calliope and those she protected.
They are safe for now, the others that she slips by so easily, unaware of the vicious, determined unicorn that has made her way to their haven.
Only when she reaches the castle does she slow. She boldly walks past the door, concerned in a way that what she hunts is so alone, so tucked away in a half empty castle. But the air does have a touch of Gabriel on it so she's not overly surprised that it is so easy for her to move undetected in the halls.
In the courtyard she finally comes to a stop, tucking herself away below a willow tree that's bold enough to thrive between stone walls. It's strange, the way she blends so well into the flowers and willow branches, a lion in a garden of lambs.
And when the night starts to fade, giving way to the sun and a thick humid kind of heat, Calliope is still there-- waiting. Only her tail moves, twitching back and forth, back and forth until all the flowers beneath her are trampled and headless.
Still she waits. The lioness has come to Novus, tracking the boy she knew so very long ago and the girl that smells like a certain gazelle she captured so long long ago.
Calliope wonders if they'll remember her at all, or if like time they too have forgotten who she is.
i'm a pretty flower girl
check out my pretty flower curls
This hour before dawn is the blackest Florentine has ever known. And of course it is, for this is the day the leonine unicorn is to return.
The night had been ink and the whole of Terrastella the well that had held it, deeper, darker and thicker than any before. Even Florentine, with her skin as gold as the sun, was shadow that night.
But it is dawn now and damp cobblestones glitter in the new, blue light. Moisture steams and hangs, thick and metallic, in the air. It tangs deep in the girl’s lungs, trickling cool and sweet across the back of her tongue.
Beside her brother, the Dusk girl wanders. They are in no rush, for the dawn is sleepy too. Their meeting, it is to be a trigger for events that even Florentine cannot predict. So they roam until the time comes for the events of Dusk to change. Florentine and Asterion are ghosts of the Riftlands traversing the weaving streets of their citadel home. But more ghosts are stirring too with old, wild magic clinging to their skin.
This morning, Flora should have known there was something different in the Court’s tired corners. It is the same thing that calls her eyes to the black and the shadows that hang there, thick drapes into a nether world through which anything might crawl.
There is only one thing that will pierce the walls between worlds this day, and it a thing leonine and wild. It is a horn and a wicked look in a silver eye.
Florentine looks, but she does not know. Is it Calligo that draws her eye? Is it the phantom love of a Night King lost to night’s shadows and such terrible sin?
No, not this morning. For this dawning day has plans for something more. More, more, more it whispers for she will always be more.
So it is that Florentine begins to seek without looking. She begins to listen without hearing. From the darkness, her gaze sweeps back to cast a sidelong glance to her brother. Does he know it too? He is serenity beside her, deep as earth and as wayward as the stars, but… does he know?
So long the girl studies the gleam in his eye and waits. With her breath trapped in her lungs Florentine waits for him, for awareness to flash like star-fire in his sea-born eyes. This girl is electric, sleep has been blown away from her like cobwebs in the wind. She knows what the day now hides and it creeps like claws along her spine.
Florentine knows.
So she does not wait for him. Not when dawn’s shadows seethe and creep... Her amethyst eyes flash into the darkness. There is a shadow that crawls and stalks belly low over rough stone with whispering feet. Florentine’s heart is a staccato beat against her breastbone, her breath a flutter in her lungs.
In moments she has peeled from her brother’s side and out of the lamplight she steps. Light falls from her like the sea once fell from her brother’s skin.
Wayward, Florentine rushes into the black. She is so suddenly ungainly on four limbs and feels the cold of a chain within a grubby hand she no longer has. Her mind is full of skin, too much skin and a night as deep and dark and strange as this. There is a broken horn that, even then, claimed starlight across its ridges.
Leaves whisper along her gilded skin as she nimbly, steps around it the dark veil of a willow. The darkness is angular and sharp, it gleams like silver and blood and brandishes a horn righteous enough to pierce the sky.
A breath slips past the flower girl’s lips as she finally drinks in the silver and black of Calliope at last. “At least you’re not naked this time.” The girl remarks lightly, her lips curling into a smile. “And you are wearing your horn too, congratulations.” But, there is an emptiness in Florentine; a part of her is absent. A part of her soul aches for what Calliope has not brought and for a moment Florentine’s lips draw straighter. Someone is missing and the girl’s heart knows it all too well.
Slowly she steps back, away from the tree and its imposing shadow, and out into the rippling light of the torch-lit courtyard. “I think you should come out before I have to explain to the gardener why his flowers are all ruined.”
He could not forget; Calliope lives in him still, slow and dark beneath the deep water of his soul. Like its counterpart of flesh and blood and sinew the memory of her never slumbers, only waits – for the moments he is alone, the moments he is afraid, the moments he begins to forget himself. Be brave, says each flash of her silver eyes. Braver than that.
He will never be worthy of even the memory of her.
But such thoughts are far enough from him now, as the relative cool of the summer night begins to give way and silver limns the horizon. It had been (of course it had been) Florentine’s idea to wander the winding streets before the heat and light of dawn, and Asterion was glad enough to follow. Still he sought any excuse to avoid the inside of those gray walls that remind him too much of a certain maze. Out here, at least, he can smell the sea.
He is weary, taciturn, by the time they wind back toward their quarters. It is still thick with shadows, but already humidity is rising, curling their hair, deepening the scent of the queen’s flowers – the ones that bloom in her hair as well as along her streets.
Their hooves echo on the cobblestones and it is the only noise as they slip into the courtyard, where the leaves of the willow are beginning to turn silver, to turn rose. Overhead a bird calls, welcoming the morning, and Asterion turns his gaze skyward to find it. When he looks back, it is to find his sister vanishing beyond the willow. “Flora,” he says, but his voice is still soft with night, and she does not hear, and she does not turn. Asterion can only follow.
So he does, and his skin shivers when a last cool breeze touches him. It shivers again as the long branches of the willow caress it, slipping over his dusky coat; he does not know, yet, that he walks over cloven prints. But there is a smell in the air, now, that his nose wrinkles as it catches: ozone and animal, nothing like the flowers of his sister and her gardens.
There is a wild thing there, and it makes Asterion’s heart race as though he knows it’s hunting him.
He knows it by the time he finds Florentine again, gold against the shadows that still cling to the walls, to the space like a sanctuary beneath the tree. Only for a moment does his gaze touch the trampled flowers that bleed the smell of bright summer from their broken stalks; his mind is still slow to put it together. Florentine speaks and what she says wouldn’t make sense to him even if he were listening properly (this is nothing new, his queen has always talked in riddles) but her words might as well be the laughter of a creek for all he hears them now.
Because oh, it is her, it is her.
How many times has he imagined their reunion? How many times has he remembered their first meeting, when he was the one who waited beneath the boughs, unaware his fate was coming for him?
Any words he might have imagined fall away. He must pull in a breath to keep from swaying and then he steps forward, unaware he is trembling like a boy, to press his nose to the dark cheek that feels like satin and smells like a summer storm.
“You’re here,” he says, and his voice is soft with wonder.
He does not yet consider what her arrival in this world might mean.
“Am I not?” Calliope asks the queen, her voice all lightning bolts and memories. Her smile, when she looks to Florentine is nothing more then a feral slash on white across the steel of her lips. It's a predator smile, safe until those teeth part and the hunger comes.
Idly she looks back at her ribs, her tail, her hooves cloven and chipped and that stark white, electric pattern across her shoulders. “You and he cared for the sanctity of flesh more than I.” Something keeps her from saying his name, Kearn. A kindness perhaps (she remembers more of it than she thinks) for she too has lost a sibling, a friend, a soul that has left her lacking, brutal and colder than she had once been.
Calliope doesn't need to mention that her horn is made more dangerous in this world, for the way it's attached to her. The blood on it promises enough, and already the horses that pass them stray away, away, away from the glimpse of that wicked weapon. It's too strange for this world, too tainted with blood for a world of walls and lights and kingdoms. It is more than a unicorn's horn, more than a thing to look pretty draped in hollow wealth. It is a thing that kills and tame eyes, cultured eyes could not truly understand what monster that steel horn makes of Calliope.
She doesn't say anything else, little does she care for whom takes care of flower and petals and beautiful, empty things. But still she moves from beneath the willow tree and the branches barely linger on her flesh. It is happy to be rid of her, that trapped tree in a garden of stone walls and civilized things.
The willow had no need for Calliope and the wild, feral sting of her flesh and how the smell of her swallowed up all sweet flower perfume beneath her hooves.
When she moves froward it's easy for Asterion to touch her, easier still for her to lean into that press of stardust on her scarred cheek. Where someone to look at just the right moment it would be startling that a stallion so dusted in twilight and sleek, unmarred skin could touch such an untamed mare, one with scars where jewels might be in this world. Calliope is a black-hole to the pretty galaxy of him, had she trained him (she is weary enough to admit it now) he would not have been able to stroll so carelessly through cobblestone walkways at dawn.
“Asterion,” She tries to whisper against his neck, but she's too fierce for such gentle things. A whisper from her is a soft rumble, a scratch of steel against a star (white sparks that burn where they land). “Do you still dream of adventure?” There's a promise there, in the hidden places where her words say more than they sound. Follow me, they seem to say, and I will tell you of all the things I have seen. I will teach you.
They should have called her a siren of war, a lioness of victory. They should have called her anything but Calliope, it's too mortal a name for all the things that are held together inside her dark unicorn skin.
Calliope doesn't stop as she moves between them, instead she presses on, back to the walkways where her hooves don't make quite the right sound. There is a lion in her bones still, tethered and tame and too weak to crawl across her bones, but there. And a lion cannot be still for so long and so she walks on, twitching her tail to gesture Florentine and Asterion onward with her.
“Tell me of this place,” She makes no effort to hide the scorn in her voice, one developed world was enough for her. “and why there are so many walls.” Already she longs for the wild places in the world where the shadows hold monsters and purpose and the world is alive with reckless beasts that might be foolish enough to try to kill the wicked Calliope.
i'm a pretty flower girl
check out my pretty flower curls
Florentine looks where Calliope does. She drinks in the skin, gunmetal gray in the low light of the struggling dawn. But it is the white, branching like claws of lightning down her shoulder, that captures the girl’s attention most.
You and he cared for the sanctity of flesh more than I. Slowly, curiously, that wild amethyst gaze lifts to drink in mysterious Calliope. “I suppose you are right.” Flora says with a hum and the roll of a shoulder that smoothes the words away like tumbling silk caught in the wind.
They were all naked now, true. But Calliope speaks a truth that sinks deeper than their exposed flesh. It sank into the heart of Florentine, it revealed a soul tainted and sinful. She had never been a perfect child, but she was an even worse adult. She wore sin like jewelry and it glittered in the darkest parts of her. Age was brutal and fierce, it broke her and remade her, over and over. Ah, childhood, how careless she had been. To return to then is a thought so sweet it wets her lips and fills her bruised, bruised heart. But one look at Calliope and Flora remembers where the world is fierce, she remembers the bite and sting of death. It is as terrifying in childhood as she imagines it might be in adulthood.
Away she blinks those terrible thoughts, and turns herself towards her brother. Like her, he is enchanted by the Rift’s dragon-killer. The greeting he shares with the warrior girl is warmer, it is a balm over chafed wounds Florentine did not even know Asterion possessed. Relief unfurls beneath her skin, like gilded thread Flora unspools before them. Her strides are no longer staccato and sharp, no longer full of a wild energy. No, Florentine becomes silk, a banner rippling in a wind. She sways, she moves, at once relaxed, at once eased with grace.
Calliope and Asterion share a kiss. But it is a touch more intimate than a mere kiss could ever afford. Their connection runs deeper. It might have been older than her, were Florentine not that time-traveller girl; a creature from the past and the future both. “Ravos.” She breathes, surmising the common history between them. Oh, Ravos was a mysterious land she had heard about only in tales. What entertainment it would be to stray there one day and walk the lands that had been lost to circumstance and time. They are kept in the past, wrapped in paper and stowed away where only the fingers and eyes of history can reveal the treasures kept there.
Do you still dream of adventure?
Oh.
Bright and wide Asterion’s sister watches him with her honeyed lips that curl up, up, up. “It seems adventure runs in the family, no?” She asks of her brother, brushing past him to fall in step beside the unicorn. Calliope walks like a reckoning, her skin a storm brought down to earth. She is as fierce as a wall cloud, as loud and brilliant as anvil lighting. To be near her is splendor, to be near her is terror. Florentine trembles like a flower before this storm. Metal is sweetly bitter upon the air and she looks up, expecting a tempest, but the clouds are falling open, a sky as blue as the sea appearing within their midst.
So many walls.
“They never change.” Florentine adds with lamentation. “These lands are just as they were the day we came.” And such a comment makes sense when it comes from a girl who was born in the Rift and travelled to a hundred different worlds.
This creature, of flowers and gold and Time, is restless here, bereft of a world ever changing, of time slipping by like water through her fingers. She does not grasp it, she lets it run away, down the stream and off into nothingness.
“This is Novus.” Flora identifies at last, “and it is lacking...” everything The word is a whipcrack that is not spoken, though the air is charged and bruised with its phantom blow. “Why are you here? Is Calliope not made for more than citadels and politics?”
“I came to Velius,” he whispers against her skin, “but you were not there—” and his voice is as fierce and rough as a boy’s, and as close to shameful tears of frustration. But he bites them back, and shakes his head, and puts on a smile like a man might wear. It is a little sad, and a little sorry, and old and young all at once. But it keeps his memories back, those sharper things, memories of mazes and fires and magic so thick you could taste it.
He eases back from her, then, relinquishing his eyes of the sight of her; he looks instead to his sister, and wonders if she remembered the day they met, they day he asked if she had met that lion from the rift, the one her mother followed.
And then Asterion chastens himself not to live in memories. He has no need of them, after all, not when it is no memory that stands before them now but living flesh, scarred and dark and poised as a ready blade. With her here, the present has become a fairytale, and the bay listens to his sister talk to the unicorn, and walks just a little behind them, and wonders if the world of Novus trembles, knowing it holds Calliope.
Why are you here? It is a question he longs for the answer to, too, but Calliope had bid them tell her of this place, and oh! There is so much more to tell.
“There are no gods here,” he tells her, because he knows the unicorn (at least a little, at least as much as a man like him can), and he remembers what her purpose was in Ravos. His heart remembers what it was to sing with it, all her power, all her promise. “Or if they are, they are nothing but ghosts. The men act as gods instead, and built walls to keep each other in and keep each other out, and few of them are righteous.” His gaze, dark with apology, slips to Florentine; it is a story he will only hint at, for it is not his to tell.
“It is so strange here, Calliope,” he says, as though they had not come from a world where beasts roamed, and gods gave quests, and mazes rose up out of bare ground and tested each who dared to enter.
Novus is a test, too, but Asterion is not sure that there can be a winner.
To walk in a garden, where walls tower around her like a cage, makes her skin feel as taunt as a live wire sparking with a current that needs only somewhere to go. She remembers all the places she has been and all the bodies her soul has shifted to fit. There is no world, no universe, no magic nor beast that could tame and tether that wicked and wild soul of hers. Even her bones bend to the will of that ancient old soul and she needs nothing but her fierceness to tear through galaxies as if they are made of nothing but smoke.
The look on her face becomes a dangerous thing, to hear them talk of change, walls and rulers who know little of righteousness. It gathers in the shadow of her horn like a storm and her eyes flash like lightning as she looks back to them.
It is not hard to see death in that gaze of hers. She is a queen of judgment and a war that has no end while her heart still beats in her chest.
“Give yourself a new name then.” Her voice is no less a war-bell for the way it lowers as she turns to Florentine, no less a weapon than her horn. “Let them call you change if you crave it so.” She doesn't tell them why she has come, why there are countless worlds wasting away in her wake.
The answer is in the way she moves like a beast let loose in a city of sinners with blood on their hands. It's in the way Calliope is built for a hunt, her nose lifted to the sun as if she can smell the rotten metal of crooked crowns.
She is nothing like them. How could she be? There is no mold she could bend to fit. She would break them all, shatter them to suffocating dust. Novus cannot contain her and ghosts of dying gods should rattle in the cages of their altars for the once god-hunter has come.
Her hooves slow as Asterion speaks and she looks back at him, swinging her tail across the stones like a whip. That dark gaze of hers brightens as she smiles. Her smile is the curved blade of a scythe, poised on the shadows of her face. “And do these wall-builders call themselves gods? Do they rule as if they are? As if they are righteous and kind?” How bright her eyes glow beneath the daylight, stars of destruction that only promise some end.
There could be a meteor in her bones.
“Tell me everything.” Calliope's voice is a spark and her muscles turn to steel. She could be a battering ram as she pauses, waiting, one foot in the air like a hound on a blood-trail.
They should have known better than to tell her of a jail of a world, of a place parched for change.
Florentine and Asterion should have known just what cage their words would have unlocked and what beast would leap out from those bars.
