oh, the things we are made to be
*
“I am neither man nor monster.” There is a violent thing lingering in her voice as she turns sharply towards him. As Lysander lifts his nose from the moss her horn is there, waiting. It traces along the curve of his neck, sangs on his hair where the edge of it is chipped and worn from slaying. Her horn is a wicked thing and it suits the low growl of her voice well.
That low rumble of a lion that echoes in her words seems so natural here in the woods with all the other wild things that hunger and kill. “And if they come they will find not a dog waiting for them. All they will find is a unicorn.” There is no denying she is something other in a land of civilized horses, a legend of a creature, half-forgotten but not gone.
Calliope has always knows exactly what she is, what she is made to be.
The way her horn flashes in the low, forest light whispers that there is no hunt too long, too hard, too full of terror and pain for her.
She is unlike the rest. She is the last of her kind. The last unicorn who knows how to channel that purpose in her bones into something more than greed. She is the last and she is more, more than any monster, man or dog could hope to hunt.
Calliope's gaze is steel as she meets his, plain and hard with no lightning sparking in the silver of her eyes. And when he ask of magic she only shifts her gaze back to the useless, sharp curves of his antlers. There's judgment there, glacier cold. “The magic is gone, yet my bones are no weaker from the loss of it. I fear yours may have turned hollow and as thin as butterfly wings.” It is a very good thing she doesn't know to call him a god, another potential monster of the broken, dead Ravos.
When he pauses her hooves follow and all of her is poised as if to leap, as if she is balanced precariously on the very air itself. She looks so very like a scale there, frozen at his side, and the way that her horn sits higher than the rest of her suggests that it might need blood and balance to keep her from collapsing upon the moss and grass.
“Blood is to be paid in blood.” Calliope doesn't say more, doesn't need to do more than sink her weight down into the soft, wet ground.
She doesn't say that she alone has paid death back with eradication more times than one.
@Lysander
