"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
She assumes the memories are hers, and hers alone.
She is the bearer, the keeper of them – the last thing left alive of those memories, sweet as hazel, bitter as blood. They replay constantly, over and over again, taking on a hazy, ethereal quality.
They say memories repeated too often become warped. That the purest memories are the ones not thought of at all.
If that’s the case, well – her memories are ruined.
Ruin is nothing new to her. She walks ruined - is ruined. Too much has happened. To her. Because of her, maybe.
The lightning is tight to her skin. It never leaves, these days. There’s no reason for it to. She does not want to be touched, not by anyone living.
(Maybe her children. But they are scattered to the winds. They have not come looking for her, and she understands why. She was never much of a mother.)
She does not look older. Magic keeps her young, keeps her as beautiful as it can. She gleams, in the sun, under the cage of lightning.
She’s silver. The color of swords. Metal forged sharp.
Once, she rested against gold. Alchemy and electrum. Metals merged.
(It was everything. A flashpoint of perfection.)
Now, it’s just silver.
Except – a flash of gold catches her eye.
It’s not the same.
Yet – a hint of sameness. An echo. Warped and distorted, just like those over-worn memories.
A woman who spent years or decades or centuries memorizing the architecture of her lover knows when it’s replicated.
(Warped.) Almost.
The girl is gold. Gold runs in the family.
(Just like silver runs in hers. Both her daughters were silver.)
She chokes when she looks at her. Such a warped familiarity. There’s no river. And she’s already dressed in lighting.
Still – she cannot walk away. Of course not.
She goes to her. She catches the sun, blinding. The lightning crackles static in her ears. Her hearts pound. (I carry your heart, I carry it with me)
“You…” she says, almost accusatory, almost reverently.
“You look like someone I knew.”
The past tense of it knifes her. It always does. She is so used to bleeding.
c o r d i s
I’ll touch you all and make damn sure
that no one touches me
HIIII
disclaimer this post was written post-multiple glasses prosecco and drunk me loves the enter button
09-23-2018, 10:14 PM (This post was last modified: 10-04-2018, 01:20 AM by Glassheart.)
In the winter she lost herself.
Or, rather, she lost what little was there to start with.
Like the snow itself had buried her, only it hadn’t. The chrysalis was crafted by her own hand. She was bound by memories that didn’t belong to her, true, but she chose to be consumed by them. She chose to let them in.
Because in the beginning they were weaker, slower, but she gave them footholds when she wandered the meadows looking for hazels, and rivers, and wildflowers. She’d wanted to know what was happening to her, like it was some great prophecy wrote out into the stars, and she’d thought, stupidly, that if she could unravel more memories that the answers would come with them.
She was a fool.
Because the memories came in fragments. They didn’t make sense. They didn’t answer anything. They only took, and took, and took - until they’d infiltrated more, and more, and more of her, spreading in her veins like poison or disease. Some of them, the memories, are beautiful. Most of them are toxic.
(She isn’t real. She’s only a feeling, or rather, a mixture of them - discordant, rattled together until the edges of each one are indistinguishable from the rest; a symphony of all the pieces she was once, lain out across the river. An orchestra turned spector, almost tangible, almost flesh and bone save for the wisps and curls of her hair that smoke out into the fog.)
And when, at last, the snow melted she was someone different, and there is nothing concrete about her save the memories.
Today, she’s drifting along the rivers edge but wading through the grass until the glint of metal catches her eyes. She feels her heart slam against her ribs, but will never know why.
(“Are you alone?”)
(“Are you alone?”)
(“Are you alone?”)
And when the sun dips behind a lazy cloud Cordis will come into focus, and Glassheart will recognize her immediately. She knows the planes of her face already, as though she’s drawn them out by hand herself - and why shouldn’t she? She’s seen her in a thousand different places, under a thousand different lights. She’s seen her every time her eyes are shut.
“You look like someone I know,” she says when she approaches, and Glassheart is at war with herself. A notable silence stretches out between them, and then:
History echoes. She knows this. God, but she knows this.
(Or, more crassly – history is damned to repeat itself.)
Repetition is nothing new to her, the cyclical nature of her life. Once, she lived for those cycles, for the best parts of them – the parts when they came together. Those brief instances before someone left.
Circles are broken, though, spilling bones and hearts into the river, and now her life is a different kind of repetitive – nothing grand, just the aching stupid cycle of survival. Moving and breathing and thinking. Wishing.
Replaying those memories until they’re worn thin, to the point of translucence. Well loved. Well warped.
She doesn’t know this girl – this ghost – or her story, but she does. Like reading in a language she has only passing knowledge of, she recognizes the glint of gold there, the shape of her crest here. Words, but not the story.
Does she want to know?
Curiosity is a morbid thing, and one she is unused to, lately. Nothing has mattered much to her, she views the world in a haze of lighting and hurt, and nothing looks flattering in such a light. Nothing looks worth investigating.
Until something does.
Until this girl, with her golden haze of memory, looking at Cordis in a way that feels familiar, feels awful.
Are you alone, she asks. Of course she does. Maybe Cordis knew she’d ask it.
She still doesn’t know how to answer. She thinks of the other heart beating in her chest. She thinks of lightning striking, begging, don’t leave me here alone.
“I’ve never been sure how to answer that,” she says.
(Of course she is alone. Of course. Two stupid hearts don’t mean anything in the awful midnight hours when the world’s asleep and she’s not, because she doesn’t need to sleep, because her dreams are all too fraught with memories and she is fucking sick of waking up crying, so she just doesn’t sleep, and she’s alone, she’s alone, she’s alone.)
“Are you?”
c o r d i s
I’ll touch you all and make damn sure
that no one touches me
09-29-2018, 12:40 AM (This post was last modified: 10-04-2018, 01:22 AM by Glassheart.)
(There is no time to discern the weight of the promises it
took to reach this salvation, the necessary evils that she buries in her bones. There is no
time for anything but her, but to stand, nose-to-nose, sharing air and gravity and worlds.)
“I’ve never been sure how to answer that,” the stranger says.
Glassheart finds herself nodding gently in agreement.
“Are you?”
“Am I sure sure how to answer that, or am I alone?” A deflection, and a poor one, but she isn’t ready to reveal herself just yet. It’s been months now, and she had echoed that phrase (“Are you alone?”) again, and again, to more than a handful of passersby like the cordial, obedient puppet she’d become. They’d always direct it back to her, and even after all the rehearsal each time she’d been left speechless.
She doesn’t know why, but she can’t help noticing the way the wildflowers hug the slopes of her hips, or how easy it might be to draw maps with her lips across her skin. The thought confuses her, but it’s nothing compared to the cacophony and rattle of voices and memories that the intruder wants her to feel now; a kaleidoscope of beauty and horror, magnified, surely, by the proximity of her skin to this strangers.
Everything is suddenly loud, and on fire.
(“You are beautiful, you know,” she says against a silver cheek, because even when the
future sits neatly before them she is always looking into the sunsets and riverbanks of their past.)
“Who are you?” Glassheart asks, because it feels as though she knows everything else already - like the way she could look soft in the river, if she wanted to, when the water and light reflected off her skin. Like the way it could feel like everything when she looked at you and saw her whole world (earth, ocean, and air). Like the way the heat of her body could feel against your skin. Things she couldn’t possibly know.
And then it happens - her curiosity eats through her resolve, and her cards are on the table when she asks: “Who is she?”
She’s a fool for standing here.
A fool for pushing, for wanting answers or importance, or both.
Because to know Cordis is to lose yourself; it’s to burn, slowly. She doesn’t know that yet. The memories did not show her (would not, in fact), because their source had made her choice eons ago - to burn, again, and again, and again.
There’s a moment where she tries to stop herself, a moment where she draws her curiosity inward and thinks better of it, but when she exhales she finds herself reaching out to touch the stranger anyways - like her skin might be braille, like she might read the stories and decipher their meanings all through only the skin of her lips. She should heed the lightning on her skin, but she doesn’t.
She should leave, but she doesn’t.
(“Touch me,” she says then, pleads, when the gravity between their noses feels too
heavy.)
The mare looks at her in a way that leaves Cordis unsteady. Adrift in a sea of thought with no lighthouse guiding her home. It’s a knowing look, a weighted one, and Cordis is unused to being looked at in such a way. She has grown so used to being untouchable – she talks only to strangers, and only fleetingly, and in those talks she divulges little. They are not permitted to know her.
Even He does not know her, not really. Not now. He knew her once, because He knew the network of her veins and arteries, he took things apart and pieced them back together, He killed her a thousand times. But even He might not recognize her now. Not this lightning-thing, embossed silver, with steel in her gaze and such tremendous weight in her hearts.
She almost wants to confront her, but doesn’t know what to say. Why are you looking at me like that? or What do you know?
(Why do you know it?)
“Cordis,” she says, soft, as if she is unsure of herself, “I’m Cordis.”
“And she…” she sighs, wistful. It will never not hurt to say her name.
“She was Spyndle.”
For all the strangeness of this, she does not expect the girl to reach out. No one touches her, now, she makes it plainly obviously, the lightning like barbed wire around her, a warning sign.
Keep out.
Yet there’s no hesitancy in the movements, the girl moves closer, and Cordis shifts the lightning back. She wouldn’t burn her, not yet.
She’s too curious as to how this story ends.
c o r d i s
I’ll touch you all and make damn sure
that no one touches me
10-04-2018, 01:16 AM (This post was last modified: 10-04-2018, 01:18 AM by Glassheart.)
When the beautiful stranger (because she suddenly notices the lines of her body, the dark of her eyes, though she cannot say why) says her name, Glassheart takes it and folds it up, swallows it to keep forever. She likes the way it feels on her tongue, like a secret. It doesn’t answer why they’re here, why she is wrapped in lightning, why her eyes look like they’ve seen too much, but it fills her all the same - keeps her satiated until the next piece of information is fed to her. Cordis tells her that the gold one is Spyndle; her intruder has a name, after all.
And then everything is loud.
So loud.
(A river. A mermaid. A hazel.)
(A bloodied shoreline. A sunset. A beacon.)
The memories are wild, now.
Overhead a sunset calls the moon into the mountains, and veils of fractured orange light stretch down from the skies to touch them like fingers. And once that light met the gold of Glassheart’s skin the memories became urgent, looping again, and again, and again, louder at each repetition. Every tick beneath the floorboards drives her more and more mad, until she’s reeling backward (but still outstretched to touch her skin, because she cannot let go) and feeling every blow, every assault that these memories make upon her.
(A river. A mermaid. A hazel.)
(A bloodied shoreline. A sunset. A beacon.)
And then they meet, skin against skin, and everything is hushed.
Everything is still, and quiet.
It doesn’t make sense.
It doesn’t make sense - that Cordis draws her lightning back like the moon can beckon its tides, that an insatiable gravity falls between them, that worlds can somehow be born into and die in the space existing between their touching skin. She touches her, gold against silver, and even if it’s not quite right it’s still cataclysmic. The feelings are raw, and huge, and tangible, and they invade her. Wholly, and completely, they invade her - and she knows what she chooses without ever really knowing the question: to burn.
“Cordis,” she says at last, collecting her breath beside her courage and holding it tight. She knows that what she’ll say next is dangerous, that it could label her unwell, or worse. She knows also that she has to say it. And so, with her lips still against Cordis she says:
They’d met at death’s door, once, perched on the threshold of it like some sick marriage. Spyndle, eviscerated and dying, children torn from her, His doing. She’d come in time, then, in time to kneel in the viscera, in time to plead, to strike lightning and life back into her.
She’d lost the memories, after, and the woman Cordis so loved regarded her as a stranger. But it hadn’t mattered, because she was alive, and Cordis would be forgotten a hundred times if it meant pushing one more breath into her lungs, one more beat into her heart.
The memories were restored, in time, the part of a deal Cordis never learned about, but she never forgot the way Spyndle had looked at her, polite but blank, a clock reset, and she’d wondered then – as she wonders now – how things might have played out if the circumstances were different. If it was another universe.
Would they have found each other, fallen in love? Would they have been happier, less wrought by tragedy?
She likes to think they will always find each other, across every timeline, every universe. She likes to believe in the idea of fates and fated, that there in an inevitability to them, but she would never know for sure.
She shivers under the girl’s touch, and whether because it’s been years since she was touched or because there’s something else – an ember, a memory – in the contact, she doesn’t know.
Against her neck, the girl murmurs - I think she’s here, I think she might be me.
Cordis hisses through her teeth, as if the words burn (embers, again, a metaphor of fire to balance those rivers she loves so much).
“Don’t….” she says – begs – but she doesn’t withdraw because there is such painful comfort in the girl’s touch, “you didn’t even know her name. You don’t know her. Us.”
She says this as if it’s proof. As if the world isn’t full of wild, ridiculous things.
c o r d i s
I’ll touch you all and make damn sure
that no one touches me
Glassheart can feel Cordis’ body folding in on itself under her touch. She’s recoiling without moving even an inch, and it feels like earthquakes - like the world around them rattles, breaks, and splits. This shouldn’t feel so huge, a stranger meeting another stranger, but it feels like there is nothing more colossal in this world and the next.
And when at last the silence ends, she says: “Dont…”
Nearly pleads it, and something inside of Glass suddenly recognizes their closeness as strange. Of course it’s too much. Of course it would be strange for Cordis. It was strange enough for her, too, and she’d had months to come to terms with the idea that something about her was not wrong, but different. The truth is that in this moment, in her own body, she feels like the intruder.
“Of course,” she apologizes, reeling backwards to place distance between their skin.
Even if it hurts her to do so.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
And then her eyes roll backwards and close.
(They’re standing there at the ends of the earth, and both would go further if the other only asked her to.
The willow is still slanted. The river still spills out into a violent ocean. Spyndle stands across her bones not knowing at first that they are her own, that this is what ghosts do (they come back). Static and gold, Spyndle is flickering softly as the ends of her hair wisp out into the frost and fog, and her dark, wildfire eyes seem vacuous and omniscient all at once. Cordis is all bright light, a beacon like the first time, but this time she’s too late.
If you listen closely you’ll hear the quiet thump of two hearts in her chest.
The clouds of their breath are tangled; the vapours find and fall into one another, again and again and again, and it only serves as an agonizing reminder of what cannot be. Of what will never be again, of a touch once made up of electricity lost into the abyss.
“You found me,” says Spyndle.
“Of course,” says Cordis. “I have your heart.”
Spyndle isn’t crying, she isn’t capable of it in this form, but she sees the tears on Cordis’ cheek and wonders silently if her heart is aching in her lovers ribs now. If it were really hers it would be, and she doesn’t envy Cordis for carrying the weight of it now; her heart has always been a burden.
“I missed you,” Cordis says, but just as she does the wind rolls out across the water and Spyndle falls away like ash. Her mouth had parted as though she meant to speak just before, but she fell to dust before the words ever came.)
When the memory ends she takes a moment to collect herself. She hears a voice in her head, and she counts to three to settle herself. She opens her eyes then, because hot tears are welling up in them and stinging. If Cordis had her heart, too, she's sure that she would hear it breaking.
“I’ll find a way to come back to you,” Glassheart offers, weakly.
“That’s what she was trying to say the last time.”
Maybe they would always come back to each other.
Maybe just not always in the ways that they’d expect.
10-27-2018, 02:29 PM (This post was last modified: 10-27-2018, 02:30 PM by Cordis.)
She almost hates that the girl listens to her plea. It’s cruel either way, of course – either she keeps the contact and Cordis’s touch-starved body riots beneath it, or she withdraws.
It’s better, this way.
It’s better not to know too much what the girl feels like, lest it feel familiar, or like something she wants or deserves. Better not to know at all, so that she can continue on, unburdened of that knowledge.
Glassheart stumbles out apologies, and Cordis is overwhelmed with the bizarre urge to comfort the girl, to touch her again.
“It’s okay,” she says, more stable now that she is not threatened with her closeness, then, “I’m sorry. It’s hard.”
The understatement of the year, that – it’s a waking agony, this, her own meager existence made empty, filled only with grief and memories and one extra beating heart that offers no comforts on endless nights.
But before she can finish her apology, or make amends in some way, the girl’s eyes close, and she is gone, briefly, to a memory, or a world, that Cordis doesn’t witness.
(Yet she was there, too.)
She waits, breathing deep, trying to steady herself, when Glassheart’s eyes flutter open and she looks at her, something different in the gaze now, like she’s learned something. Cordis doesn’t know if the flutter in her chest is fear, or excitement.
I’ll find a way to come back to you, she says, and Cordis doesn’t breathe, for a moment, because the sentence strikes home in a way little else has, it’s her, and how does she have any right to know this?
She’s almost angry at her, as if this is somehow her fault, as if she chose to bear these things.
“I still have your heart,” she says, and her voice grows thick, layered in grief, “but I’d give it back, if I could.”
Then –
“It hurts.”
c o r d i s
I’ll touch you all and make damn sure
that no one touches me
