feel the courage within
*
It feels as if all the lightning above them was born in her blood, her bones, that heart of hers that feels so much that it must bleed just to feel peace. Beside Eik Calliope feels like a wild thing, a unicorn made of worlds far greater than this. Not for the first time she feels strange, a lion in the midst of lambs.
They talk of gods and their faces and Calliope has only ever talked of their blood and sin. They slumber in opiate dreams in seas of fabrics as richly colored as blood and shadow. Calliope has ever only slumbered in the wilderness and rested her horn upon beds of thorn bushes and leaves. And where they play at reapers, at life-takers Calliope can remember the taste of flesh upon her teeth.
All these horses hide their fangs and the god's slumber in statues and text books.
Sometimes she feels like the only real thing that might live in this world, the last wild one, the last unicorn who has known what it means to be a lion.
Other times, when gray stallions look at her with a fury of belief in their gaze, she feels like something new. Calliope might once more be the queen of the godless ones, the free ones, the one to create the path so that others might not suffer from it.
With the storm raging overhead they could be not in Novus but upon the thunder plains of the Riftlands. It feels like magic, that storm above them, as wild and unfettered as all the sick, monstrous magics she has known. “You would have enjoyed my worlds Eik.” Even the way she speaks of 'her' worlds suggests freedom. Unicorns only claim wild places in which no chains have ever been made to hold things that have no desire to be held.
Calliope could watch the entire storm pass here with Eik beside her, promise herself that she isn't the last at all. That there are others who rage and boil with justice as she does. Others beside just Raymond. The downpour when it comes feels like a baptism, a cleansing from the trappings of this fake, broken place.
Ahead a bay with stardust on his skin is highlighted in a flash of lightning and Calliope remembers that neither she nor Eik are the only ones who rage (one silent, one with blood-lust) for justice and righteousness. There is an army of them, wild things trapped behind thrones that long for dust and storms at their backs.
And Calliope has always known what armies are made for.
“Have faith.” She touches just once the crown of his head with the point of her weapon. It's a touch that speaks. Not faith in gods but justice. When she pulls away on a crack of thunder everything about her seems to promise that he could have faith in her too, in unicorns.
The rain runs down her horn, wiping clean the last of the blood from her old, forgotten, dead world. It catches the lightning, just one more time, and then Calliope vanishes into the downpour and darkness like a lion might when it's time to prepare for the hunt.
@
