and the thunder rolls
*
The dawn when it comes feels like more than just a brightening of the sky. All the pastels between the sky feel darker, tinged with the faintest of greens. Calliope too feels different, more like herself, more like the lion queen who sold her soul to fight for freedom. She feels alive, awake, aware as the storm rumbles in the distance and a long buried roar echoes in her soul.
And when the stallion joins her she feels strongly that there is something 'more' promised by this dawn. Even her eyes seems brighter, sparks made of sunlight reflecting off them when she tilts her dark, feline grin towards him. “Oh?” She says, as if her eyes have looked anywhere but at that darkness just now brushing out where their gazes can see.
Her tail flicks, agitated and restless, at her back, crushing all the grass down to dirt and rock. “There is more than a single storm on the horizon.” Calliope doesn't close the distance between them, doesn't reach out to smell the sand and blood on him. She's too alive to touch, too restless. She thinks that her touch now, with the storm making the air seem like a wall of waiting electricity, that she would burn him alive with nothing more than a whisper of her breath.
So she only lets silence fall between them, her eyes to caught by the promises on the horizon. All her edges seem to shiver and fade and fold into that hot, summer air that's too still. Calliope is barely contained. She strains and boils like a maelstrom inside this unicorn skin of hers.
She feels like she's been waiting here, poised on some cliff of tame, cultured Novus waitng to leap down to ruin all the things they think they know about wild things, about gods. Even the muted, quiet song sounds like a war-drum in her ears. Calliope longs to answer it's call, promise that she has not forgotten what payments she is honor bound to collect.
Only when the silence feels thicker than the air and more oppressing does she turn to the gray stallion. He's a simple man, gray and plain in a world full of scales and vanity. He lacks the boldness of Calliope, the inherent danger promised by that hungry blade upon her brow. However he is not so simple to brave the black unicorn on the hill with her skin that's darker than the coming storm clouds.
Calliope thinks there is a braveness to him and she has ever approved of bold, quiet men. “What do you know of storms, stallion?” The words are harsher than the sound of them on her lips, her sudden smile turning them into a gun-smoke whisper.
The smile though, stretches the scars across her eyes so that the sleepy sunlight reflects on them just enough to draw attention to them. Calliope is fearsome even when her smiles reach her eyes, deadly even when she's distracted enough to greet a stranger with words rather than the tip of her horn.
@
