Little waves our bodies break - Cordis

[Alight]

‘Are you all right?’

She ceases humming, those childhood melodies she had filled thick, piney air with as a girl – those she had waltz to, under flushed skies, with her keeper. Her man. Her guardian. Her Giver. It had been only the two of them, then, tied together by the twine of their indelible blood-share. (In her dream, it had been chains. 
Beautiful, shining, silvery links securing him down to the floor of their tower room.
Securing him so happily down to the floor of their tower room.)

Him and his stars, her and her melodies.
Perfect together. So perfect.
(He’ll see. He’ll have to see, 

and then he’ll never leave.)

She waits for a moment, for the dizzy blur of her pirouetting to pass, the dim light of the sky and the brighter blaze of her wings setting the stranger’s odd skin agleam. “Why is everyone asking me that?” her voice is soft and singsongy, as it has always been, like the dawn chorus of birds, he would say.

“I’m just fine. I can never be harmed, again.” Her smile is a proud, almost gloating one. Because, she does not know and because, she is at her core, vain.

She had not even noticed. Not when she had run – tumbled! – down the steep ribs of that gluttonous mountain, scraping her knees raw. Not as she dashed, wild-eyed, through the thick, new underbrush, her legs and belly whipped mercilessly bloody. It had not been until she found her poor, dear father – stopped running, finally – that the pain off all that sloughed off skin revealed to her all that had been taken.

It should be smooth and golden, always, her skin. Free from harm.
The mountain had taken that from her.

(That, and for a time, him. That was the most unkind blow of all.
‘Who is she?’ just like in her dream, she had protected her hurt with mean incredulity. He had shaken his head and smiled, ‘Spark. Ah, you’ll like her.’
Seeding the ache that has blossomed into something slumbering and monstrous. That thing that thinks itself a product of love. It is possessiveness; vaguely, it recognizing its wounded cousin heartbreak in the silver stranger before it. Her narcissism stills her from asking just yet; besides, Giver has always been the perceptive one. 

But she steps forward a touch, compelled.)

Alight tucks her fire against her sides, there is no searing or smoke, just snapping as they spit their sparks. “It hurt, a bit, at first. When they... well. Well, when they came to be,” still a mystery, “but someone saved me. With flowers all in her hair. She gave me my healing back.” She had, in fact, almost died as those flames ate away at the skin and the muscle, boiling her blood. It was quite harrowing. 

“That, and more,” her tone is coy, like a child with a naughty secret they yearn to share. “I’m Alight, by the way.”