Calliope's Wings

by Guin Archer

  “Later,” I promised primly while snuggling into my prettyboy’s side. He was so warm.

  “Let us return to our discussion,” Ruune pressed on while clearing his throat. He was picking up on Vorch’s two-toned speech quickly and was taking to speaking the same way. I was proud of him for his accomplishments with it so far. “Our Taytani is needed for the harvests. I do not like her being so out in the open. How will we manage this?”

  Eating only a little and interjecting even less, I listened on as two of my men worked together to keep me safe and to see to our people, in that order. A kernel of sadness clogged up my throat, though, and showed in the darkening of the skies outside the many windows over the palace.

  We were missing one male and it hurt a lot more than I thought it would.

  I had flashbacks to the pond and lake as I floated, looking up into the cloudy night sky.

  My wings were stretched out wide around me and felt infinitely heavy on my back. It was a strange feeling because, really, they were nothing more than bioluminescent wisps that weren’t capable of being weighed down by water. Whenever I emerged from a bath or came out of the rain, they were as ‘dry’ as smoke.

  I could hear the light chatter and general sounds of life in Mel’lau as I buoyed myself around the manmade pool. Actually, it was more like a dam which fed into and around the city. I was closer to the veritable wheelhouse at the base of the dam which caught the rushing water that poured from the chutes and tunnels at its foot. It took some doing to get down here, but Sekhmet was more than willing to take me. Hathor tagged along, a kind of midwife for her daughter, and kept a keen eye on us both.

  There was a soft light coming from the windows of the wheelhouse that looked a bit like a stone cottage I imagined in an English countryside. There were elements of Intau that were surprising and welcome, almost homey. Like my little slice of paradise by the sea. I wished I could’ve seen more of places like this when I was first arisen.

  Puffing out a foggy breath, I knew I’d need to go back to the warmth of the palace soon. Back to my warm bed. If I stayed out in this much longer, I was going to get sick. I could just imagine it now; I sneeze and half the continent gets swept away by a tornado. How do you respond to something like that? I’m pretty sure gesundheit wouldn’t cover it.

  Lap, lap, lap, the water’s happy play against my cheeks comforted me as it always did. It would’ve been better if the stars were all out for me to enjoy. Instead, I was stuck in a loop of moroseness and the skies reflected it.

  I didn’t think being without Kor this way was going to bother me as much as it was.

  After lunch, I’d gone back to serving my people like the duty-bound queen I was. Ruune stayed with me that time and all the way to dinner. Dinner, again, where I wasn’t all that hungry. Another meal where it was only three when it should’ve been four.

  I deep low from one of the Xxyx had me stirring. My head was only halfway up and out of the water when a large hand slipped under my scalp and another touched my lower back. A familiar, dark face appeared over mine and I tremulous smile touched my lips.

  “You will catch sick, kisa-uu,” Kor purred coarsely. He pulled my body into his front and rubbed his bullring into my cheek.

  “So you have said before,” I replied blithely. I raised my hand between us to stroke his hard, square chin with my fingers. His eyes closed and enjoyment radiated from him. He more than liked my freely-given touch. “I have missed you.”

  “And I You.” He pressed his mouth – closed – to my temple. I turned my head so we could meet our brows together. He shivered and I knew it wasn’t from the cold of night and the water.

  “You are upset with me?” I should’ve phrased it as a statement, but my heart was more fragile than I thought it was. It turned a stern word to timid uncertainty.

  “Never at You, uum kisa-uu.” He chuckled huskily. “I correct myself. I can be upset with You. I am upset when You endanger Yourself. I am upset when You do not welcome my touch. I am upset when You return to my arms only to leave me again.”

  “More upset when the arms I leave to belong to a los’kah you hate.” There. That was a statement.

  A deep, tired sigh from him. Kor lifted me higher, shifting my wings with his action, and then wrapped his arms under my body. I rolled into him, my nakedness tucking familiarly into his at least half-naked form. He didn’t have a top on, which wasn’t all that new a state for him. My eyes moved between his scarred nipple and his otherworldly eyes.

  “I am a hard los’kah. I know I frighten You.” When I opened my mouth to argue, he shook his head and summoned one of his sideways, tusk-winking smirks. It shut me up because I finally saw it for what it was. Adoring. “I beg of You, do not argue with me, Biis’a. I am wrong from time to time, but this is not one of those times.”

  I raised my arms to wrap around his thick neck. Gently, he released me so the water could carry me down to dangling from his sturdy body. He coasted his claws down my back before cupping my ass. I used them like my own personal seat, cinching my legs around his hips.

  Earlier thought amended; he was fully naked.

  “I do not like that los’kah,” I noted how he didn’t say Vorch’s name, “yes, but it is more. Ruune cannot take my place. If we are to have shimi, if You are to carry offspring, it would have been uumat. I am the only one who could give You shimi. No more with this los’kah. He can give You all that was once only my blessing.”

  What’d I think about broken souls before? That they drew me in?

  That’s all Kor was. He was broken differently than either Ruune or Vorch, differently than me, but he was still broken. A hurt man starving for affection and belonging. I’d seen it there, lingering in the shadows of his eyes and his aura.

  Yup. I’m doomed. Lock, stock, and barrel, I’m done for.

  Settling more into my man, I dropped my head to his shoulder. My claws scritched at the back of his neck under the heavy weight of his hair and the silver baubles studded throughout. I pulled a few of them teasingly.

  “There is a something I heard in my home long ago. The heart has an endless ability to love. When a los’kah and biis’a of my home mate for life, they speak vows to each other. ‘For better and for worse. In sickness and in health. Until death do us part.’” I kissed his neck and grinned when his kii snuck between us. “Have I not proven that even death will not take me from you?”

  “Aichi,” he rasped hoarsely, not yet making a move to fuck me. I thought I knew why, too.

  I wiggled so I could open my pussy over his dick. His reservations withered away when his kii found my warmth and tucked in. A long hiss slithered between my lips from the bite of it at first, then a moan of thrill and elation when it fitted to me more comfortably.

  “Would you not want me if I could not have shimi? Would you leave me if I could never allow you to lay over me because of the things I have felt and seen? Would you hate me for holding other los’kah in my heart who were as much meant for me as you?”

  “Lo, Calliope. Lo.” He rocked up into me, softer than I thought he was capable of ever being. Sweet and tender. The way the muscles in his shoulders stayed in a perpetual state of granite-hardness told me how much he was restraining himself. “You are in my heart always.”

  “Ditto,” I murmured into his lower lip, rubbing less-than-chaste kisses to his mouth.

  “What is ‘ditto’?”

  “Now is not the time, darling. Not the time.” Grinding into him and around him, we both made feral sounds. The water moving turned louder. Harsher. The cold felt less, too, now that we were together. My wings raised of their own accord, pressing us unerringly together. No water dripping from the wide swaths of them. Just light and warmth.

  “My heart,” he grated out, bouncing me over his lap.

  “My darling,” I returned as heartfelt in my endearment.

  This…this was what I’d been waiting for all this time. My Visivi. My three loves. A sense of completion inside of me th
at I hadn’t had since Mac died.

  Things weren’t perfect. We all still had things to reconcile, but…

  But I was home now, and home was where I would stay.

  Epilogue

  “Innintani,” a grave voice lowered over me where I kneeled before Luci, the pink-aura’d little girl from my final days in Blackburhn.

  I stood, keeping my hand to the top of her scalp. She was beaming the slight distance up at me and had a stretch of my wing clipped between her hands. She was petting it, marveling at the silken texture they carried when I allowed them to be more substantial. She was growing up beautifully, her bright smile winning over absolutely everyone.

  I was happy to have been able to see her again.

  “Yes, Forte?”

  “She is found.”

  Ah. There was no mistaking who the ‘she’ was that he meant. A sinister grin tweezed at the corners of my lips, but I wouldn’t let it show in front of this innocent lamb. She didn’t need that.

  “Run along, my little friend.” I petted her fuzzy head one last time before rolling my hand in a gesture of combined regality and command. She giggled at me, waved exuberantly, then ran back up the gangway to her ship. She had stood from her earlier crouch, her eye level now to my collar.

  Up there, the Irah of the ship held hand-written missives to pass along to the ports in the North. Wherever they went from there, it was all up to the Tauren of the Northlands. They could either heed me or not, but it wouldn’t change the way things were. A revolution was on the horizon and they’d face the same changes. The same upheaval of their lives.

  It wasn’t going to be pleasant.

  And I didn’t think I was going to be the only one to bring that change. Rarely was it a single person dispensed to change the world. There were failsafes. Backups.

  I wasn’t alone.

  “Uum Taytani?”

  “I am coming, Forte.” Flicking my wings, I turned on my boots and strode for the wall.

  The city was teeming again, a whole five years of time allowing the dregs of the Lubrei who’d remained after the fire and raid to rebuild. The glorious part of it was, the Lubrei that were left were better than the ones who’d died. They were the street urchins and the neglected and abused. They’d rebuilt the city to what it could’ve been and not what it was.

  Some of the same children I’d once snuck rations to were old enough to man vendor stalls. Some ran the stables. Some yet were still too young and running the streets, though this time not as pickpockets. Now they were laughing youths playing a native game of ball.

  One such kid crashed into me, but I was made of sturdier stuff than I had been. I swung him up with a single arm, rocketing him several feet into the air, and beaming at the exuberant cheer he let out. The ball he’d caught tumbled from his hands, barely missing my upturned nose as it fell.

  When he came down, I caught him, too. I shooed him off with a pat to the butt and a swift kick of the ball.

  Back on my way, I gave Forte-the-Stoic a side-eye when he scratched at his heavy, hairless brow. I saw that smirk he tried to hide.

  My Lubrei kept a path clear for me, genuinely happy for the beautiful days we were having – you’re very welcome – and not wanting to halt whatever next dire task I had to attend to. Everyone knew the Innintani of Luintak was always a busy queen bee.

  My veil of serah chimed and sang with each step. I had on another of my ‘formal’ dresses. I was well-used to the floor-length sleeves and slitted, layered skirts that tailed me by many inches. My own bridal train for everyday wear. Some days it was a wonder I could move because of all the serah I’d collected on my bakal over the seasons. Gifts aplenty of the incidentally musical variety for the resident fallen angel.

  I tripped my fingers through the water trickling from a fountain, liking the chill since I was swaddled every moment by the warmth of my magics.

  Outside Blackburhn was a smallish camp. A fraction of the Udonak. We’d learned by trial and error that it was best for me to keep entirely away from the main congregation of Zikta if I wasn’t taking respite from my duties. Understandably, no one wanted to encroach on the Udon. They served me dutifully, but they were still a lethal band of nomadic orcs that collected their tithe by fair or foul means. I couldn’t blame anyone for shying away from that.

  It was still something I was working on, but how did one uproot an entire culture?

  I’d figure it out.

  Bastet, the diva princess of Sekhmet, pattered up to me from where she’d been playing with the other juvenile Mahzri. She was at eye-level with me now and I could already see the devious gleam entering the gemstones of her eyes at knowing she’d soon tower over me. She already overpowered me most of the time. Picking me up like I was her favorite dolly and bouncing me across the Udonak until her mother snatched me away for a cuddle.

  I’d been right from the start. I was permanently categorized as the Mahzri’s – preferentially Sekhmet’s – funny-looking, two-legged baby.

  Bastet would be Xxyx like her mother one day, just as Hathor had been before her. She was a powerful girl and obscenely intelligent. We’d developed a form of sign language that pretty much every one of the herd knew. She used it now to pantomime to me that ‘we have nuiji’.

  I was oddly proud of the middle-finger-through-hole-of-opposite-hand gesture to symbolize the derogatory remark.

  “Aichi,” I told her, nuzzling my face against her mouthplates before stepping away.

  I heard them before I saw them.

  Growling, enraged voices. Curses in a bestial tongue I couldn’t master no matter how hard I tried. A simpering female voice pleading in a tone that was grating and disgustingly familiar. The Mahzri barking in their velociraptors tones. If I wasn’t mistaken, snapping bone, too.

  I’d been with the Horde long enough for their darker tendencies to rub off on me. Or maybe I’d always been like this?

  Que sera, sera.

  The Zikta made way. Their abyss-eyes glimmered with malice and bloodlust. They’d been waiting longer than me for this moment. Waiting to enact their revenge.

  Zek, the mealy-mouthed fuckface, was having his tusks ripped out in the corner of the pillau. Ruune was the one performing the deed, his glee at doing it palpable. Though he had genetics of the supposedly gentler sex, he was a savage at heart. He was as much warrior as his ‘brothers’. And he had a bone to pick against the Muir that’d tried to claim me and him.

  I blinked and turned away. Zek wasn’t going to die yet.

  Uptip looked…like shit. Scrawny. Tired. More than a little bit crazy. She was being held on her knees between Vorch and Kor. My men weren’t looking at the female. They had eyes only for me. Blue-back and lavender auras…both seeking out mine and enveloping its greater mass. They wanted to make sure I was okay.

  I was more than that.

  “Rocho, Uptip,” I greeted her cheerily. I took the low stool offered to me which put me comfortably in front of the other female. I folded my legs under me and smoothed out my skirts.

  “I-I-I-…” She was at a loss for words. I let her stutter herself out.

  A glass of Sky-nectar found its way to my fingers.

  “It has been long since I have seen your face, Uptip. The seasons have not treated you well.” Sip. “Or, I think, it is your manner that treated you poorly? I do not imagine that you were welcomed anywhere after what you did to me.”

  “I did nothing to you, Innintani.” Pathetic, deceitful bitch that she was, she continued to cry her innocence. Hadn’t she known that I was well aware of the facts? That I knew from countless mouths before her ‘warrant’ was out that she’d sought the Ohmber to kill me. The Ohmber threw her under the itchto often enough.

  Her striking description did her in. Almost literally.

  “The Ohmber, Uptip.” She didn’t flinch at me mentioning the ruffians, but I didn’t expect her to. She was a good actress. She’d have to have been to conceal her vileness before I came around to Intau. So, takin
g another sip, I asked the question I was most curious for an answer for. “How did you hide for so long?”

  “I would not have had to hide if you had not banished me!”

  “If you had not been a killer of the innocent, you would not have been banished.” Another sip. “I think I should have killed you. You and your brago. I would not have died. But then, I might not have met my Muir. Hmm. Dashka, I suppose.”

  “Do not thank her,” Vorch snarled. His hand fisted her shoulder so tight I imagined her shoulder shattering. It probably would if he kept up his grip. “We would have come together, Calliope. When the One wished it so.”

  “The One wished it so, honey.” Handing the glass back and rising, I brushed invisible lint from my dress. “We must go, Uptip.”

  “Go? Go where?!” She struggled mightily, but she was no match against my two men. She flinched and then shivered when her brother bellowed in agony.

  “You do not need to be here for this.” I jerked my head, motioning for my men to bring her outside. They did so without comment, but a few animalistic sounds of dominance. When they threw the female at my feet, I snatched her up into my arms. My wings snapped, the crowd broke, and we were in the air.

  “Hold your breath, bitch.”

  Through the rift and back out over the frozen wastes of Brudahli. The Mercenaries were no more. The village that’d once been down the mountain was buried under hundreds of feet of ice and snow. There wasn’t a sign of life for miles.

  …well, close to no life.

  I let go.

  As she sunk into the snow, the cry of one of the Hiijak echoed through the rocky cliffs. It was quickly followed by the rest of its pack. They had a keen nose for hot-blooded prey. They’d be here soon on their snowshoe-like feet with their tufted white tails whipping behind them. They were as vicious and uncompromising as horror movies made piranha to be.