"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
And just like that Cordis is breathing again — no longer collapsing in on herself as though Glassheart is some benevolent thing that could suck the warm air straight from her lungs and push down on her chest and her ribs with all the gravity of Jupiter. She isn’t used to wielding power like this, to making beings quake in their bones with just the feel of her skin against their own. It leaves her reeling, rattled because she is the one who caused the gentle furrow between this strangers brows, because she is the one who in these moments is making her heart ache.
She is the one unburying the dead.
“I still have your heart, but I’d give it back, if I could.”
“It hurts.”
Of course it does, she thinks.
Of course it does, because she’s read every page in their story, soaked the pages with her own salty tears more times than she can likely count. Of course her hearts are burning; Cordis breathed it — she lived it. Until this moment Glassheart has been so transfixed by the idea of what was happening to her, bound by a sense of duty and a hidden gravity, that she hadn’t stopped to wonder what it meant for anyone else. She’d wanted so desperately to know who she harboured inside her bones that she forgot herself.
And she forgot just how quickly the intruder could take her over.
So, she closes her eyes again for a moment, for distance between Cordis and Spyndle and all of it that wasn’t her. Only instead of space as her dark eyelashes fall against the tops of her cheeks she only feels a warm breath spill out across the plane of her right shoulder that raises the flesh and hair and leaves it standing. She doesn’t need to open her eyes to know who is beside her, but she does.
“Don’t leave me here alone,” Spyndle says, perfectly golden, her wings soft and white against her sides. Glassheart sees that her nose is stretched out to touch Cordis just across her cheek, like she has done so a thousand times before this morning. It feels like walking into bedrooms that aren’t her own. It feels like this is not meant for her, like it was never meant for her.
It isn’t.
“Cordis,” she says, a beautiful apparition; the name becomes honey on Spyndle’s lips. She turns her face towards Glassheart then, her eyes expectant, patiently awaiting her translator to bridge an impossible gap between worlds.
It’s too much.
It’s asking too much.
“I can’t.” Glassheart says, stumbling backwards with her eyes suddenly wild and white around their dark edges.
“I’m sorry. I can’t.”
...
And so the summer fell away, too.
The wildflowers withered, then died. The trees lost their leaves and looked as naked as Glassheart had felt in the moments she’d fled. She didn’t want to return to the meadow, or wade in the winding river. She didn’t want to see hazel trees, or think about mermaids, and when the sun fell into the mountains each evening bleeding out the colours of the day into the sky, Glassheart turned her head and looked elsewhere. She’d decided that she would make her own way, that against a nagging instinct she wouldn’t trigger the memories or offer them refuge any longer — at least for a while. She had to learn who she was apart from them, apart from Cordis and her gravity, too.
She didn’t want to be devoured.
The thoughts came creeping in regardless of what she wanted though.
Because one day she dreams a wild dream among the thistles and long grass, and when she awakes from it she is changed somehow in ways she cannot quite decipher.
The difference isn’t tangible, but it’s there beneath her flesh, brewing in the pit of her very existence. She feels it in her bones, and sewn through the very strands of her DNA; a promise that she is better, more capable, more enduring. For so long she’d been apprehensive about the memories and what they meant; if they made her important, or they were only a burden — if they would waste her. The truth is that they were both, and maybe she could be, too.
It feels like fire. It feels like a rebirth.
It feels like she is big enough now to house the both of them inside her skin.
So, she returns to the meadow to wade the long grass and look for the glint of silver in the autumn sun. There’s an ache along the ridge of her spine, and as she walks she’ll never see the wave of spiked scales that roll for a second along her back before they disappear.
Glassheart
i'll always love you the most
@[Cordis] I started a new thread because ~timelines~ I hope that's okay! <3
Fool that she was, there was a moment when she saw light.
It wasn’t hope, not exactly. She’s not sure she’d even recognize hope, anymore. But there was a moment of lightness, a brief lifting in their exchange at the notion that someone might bear some of this burden, that she is not so completely, wretchedly alone.
A lie, of course.
Because she makes her confession, admits a piece of her hurt in words that do the depth of pain no justice, and –
I can’t.
Of course she can’t. It was never her burden to bear. And so once again it sits on Cordis’s shoulders, and she is an Atlas with shaking knees and a world of hurt and memories, watching a golden back turn.
It would have been her chance, then – to go after her. Like she should have gone after Spyndle all those times.
But Glassheart is not Spyndle, whatever the memories suggest otherwise.
So, she lets her leave.
She lets her leave and she drifts, rudderless, and seasons change but she doesn’t, the same miserable silver thing she’s always been, and sometimes she thinks of the girl she met, the one who knew too much, and sometimes she doesn’t.
More change comes, and Beqanna falls ill. She fears the illness, because it is partially His doing, as most wicked things are, though she does not fear dying of it, she simply fears falling to anything of His doing again.
She is thinking of sickness when she sees her, and she wonders if it’s a hallucination, the onset of a fever. But she breathes, deep, and can catch the scent of her.
It would be better, to turn, to not wander this path again. It only hurts, to do this, reopening wounds, memories spilling like pus from them.
But she is so used to hurting.
So, she steps toward her. There’s no lightning, this time, she is uncaged, bared.
“Hello again,” she says.
c o r d i s
I’ll touch you all and make damn sure
that no one touches me
@[Glassheart] is infected, by request.
A roll of 3 means she will show symptoms.
A six means she will not express a trait.
@[Cordis] since this thread started before the new version, I will not roll automatically for you. Please let us know if you'd like her rolled for infection.
Along the ridges of her vertebrae where the spiked barbs had sought existence to fruition, had rolled out of her like wave after wave, a wound has been opened in her skin. It is nestled between two hills, and in the shape of this meadow if you were to see it from the sky. If you look closely enough you can likely see the hazel, and the river, because history often has a way of repeating itself in strange and terrible ways. Glassheart doesn’t see it, but she does turn her cheek to look aslant the gentle curve of her shoulder as the ache sinks heavy into her bones.
She doesn’t know about the contagion, had missed the events that transpired to release it but she will learn soon enough.
It touches everything — taps, again and again and again, asking to come inside. It wants to enter. It wants to curl up inside her bloodstream like a hot bath. It wants to leave its belongings in her drawers, and a toothbrush by her sink, and when the holidays roll in it wants to meet her family because it wants to stay forever.
And it will.
A weakness found, at last, in the cut that looks just like this meadow. The sickness spills into her like oil into the ocean and everything is black, and tarry. Everything is ruined.
Of course she doesn’t feel the invasion. This is not the first time she has been usurped, and perhaps she has grown used to it. Perhaps normal, to her, is to feel the presence of something different in your skin that isn’t yours and never will be. Because she is oblivious to the damage inside of her as she walks, stupidly, looking for more — she can’t feel how it winds and twists through every atom of every molecule, growing roots between the finely tangled threads of her DNA where it begins to congeal, and fester like rot.
And it is hardly the most alarming thing about her.
Because when she sees it — the glint of silver — a thousand warning bells sound off inside her head and inside her body.
Because when she hears it — “Hello again,”--- it sounds like more exists than just two words, four syllables.
It calls her home.
“I’ve been looking for you,” she says, stupid.
Even now, she cannot feel her body betraying her again.
Glassheart
i'll always love you the most
@[Cordis] I might have gone ham with the toothbrush metaphor. :|
She had the vision, of course, had shrieked and fallen to her knees when it came – not at the mission (she has few qualms about killing, there is blood on her hands, her mouth), but at His voice. She’d forgotten the stridency of it, the horror of His laugh, and the words had plunged her back into the cave, when she was magicless and mousy brown, broken again and again at His whims.
She’d run the opposite direction, away from His wretched, drowned kingdom and whatever nastiness was planned there, but her run had only had one purpose – to get as far away from Him as possible. She had barely noticed the other visions, telling her of safe places.
She knows well enough nowhere is safe, not really.
(There had been safety in Spyndle’s touch, a feeling of home, warmth, a righting of things gone wrong. She could breathe, with her, and feel like things were all right.)
I’ve been looking for you, says the girl, and Corids almost sighs. She doesn’t quite know how she wants this story to unfold – there are paths, developing, and all of them alarm her quite amply, because they all speak to things she considers dead and hopeless.
Things she considers impossible.
“And now you’ve found me,” she says, soft. She will not admit it, but it is good, to be found. To be seen.
“You seem different,” she says, though she doesn’t know the half of it.
c o r d i s
I’ll touch you all and make damn sure
that no one touches me
@[The Plague] yeah go ahead and roll for her please <3
There it is again, that gravity — the one that steals the air out of her lungs and leaves them shrivelled, flat and empty. The gravity that compresses her ears with such a colossal pressure that the words Cordis speaks out to her then, the ones about being found, they’re lost the second that they leave her lonely lips.
It happens almost instantaneously.
Of course it does, because if there is anything of Spyndle at all that lingers, caged by her bones, it is destined to be bound by all of those same laws she knew while she was alive, isn’t it? Those laws that were etched into ancient stone tablets and read that the cycle could not end, that they must find each other again and again and again even if they are both torn to pieces and with worlds between them. Those laws that were older than time.
“You seem different,” Cordis says.
She hears her this time, and gently nods her agreement while her body screams at her to close the gap between them. Not feeling the illness slinking through her veins, not noticing the way her body changes (is it the gentle wave of pale gold scales? — no, just a beautiful trick of the light), revolting against its previous shape, she is left only to assume that Cordis sees the newly burning fire lit inside her bones; the resolve that she carries with her now after waking that day among the wildflowers. She’s seen the magic that Cordis wields in her memories, knows that she is electric, that she can do strange and wonderful things through the strikes of lightning, but she doesn’t know the extent of it — that Cordis now is seeing past resolve in these moments, even if she doesn’t know it.
It isn’t, though — resolve.
It’s much bigger than that.
“I am, I think.” Comes the answer — naive, stupid, because she doesn’t know, not really. They are standing together, not realizing that a clock has been started; their lives are ticking down second-by-second and grain-by-grain. And it takes her so quickly, this sickness, though she bolsters her defences and her white blood cells are barbed and armoured they are no match for this contagion; they are led to slaughter. She is a dragon, but she is led to death’s door like a wide-eyed lamb as a slow, drop of violent red rolls out from under the rim of her nostril and down her lip.
She only realizes when she tastes the iron of it, but naive, stupid, she doesn’t know what it means and continues.
“I want to help you. I want to give you back what was taken from you, even in this small way.”
That’s what she says. What she means is that she doesn’t want to see Cordis drowning. What she means is that she can’t bear to hear her hearts breaking into halves. What she means is that she wants her to have closure, if that’s what this is.
Because she’s seen the memories, known them when they were only little wild-things with possibility tangled and knotted like galaxies and constellations in the darkest parts of their eyes. And she knows them now, sees one of them at least before her now, with the stars stolen — empty, vacuous, black.
And in some small way, perhaps it will give her closure, too.
“Tell me about her, please.”
“If you can.”
She says these last words softly, with a gentleness to her face that shouldn’t exist. There is so much violence in her now, between the sickness and the hardened barbs just begging to rip open the skin of her spine and see the daylight, that it is a wonder she can look so soft at all.
She doesn’t feel the moment when it happens, when something slips from Glassheart into her, a diseased intimacy. The virus slips into her blood cells, and begins to multiply.
She, of course, is only looking at her. Breathing her in. Trying not to backslide.
She has all but forgotten how wanting feels when it is not so wrapped up in grief. She is used to that particular kind of wanting – the desire to rewind the clock, to set them back to the river or forest or hazel or anywhere, really, any of the places where they’d been together.
(Except for that one time, at the river’s side, Spyndle split open and Cordis kneeling at her side, screaming and wordless, without knowing what the lighting would, or could, do. That time, she never wants to relive.)
She is not so used to looking at someone, their body alive, healthy, eyes bright, voice clear – and feeling her stomach twist in another kind of way, like a bird’s wing, extended and fluttering.
“I feel I am beyond help,” she says, despite whatever she feels in her stomach, because it’s just a fluke, a reflex (she looks so much like her, in this light).
That sentence should end it. She is beyond help. Done.
A smarter woman would walk away. Would not engage this - whatever it is.
(It’s not a bird’s wing stirring, no. It’s smaller. A butterfly’s wing. Delicate. It can be crushed.)
For as much as she thinks of Spyndle, she does not talk of her much. That’s not to lesson her memory, it’s more that Cordis, who has never been a poet, hates that she cannot do her justice. She tries and comes up short every time, to capture her, to capture how bewitched she was, the words that make their way out sound cheap and clichéd.
But the girl asks, and she tries.
“Spyndle…” she says, and just the name hurts, thorns in the mouth, “she had a way of seeing things. Deeper truths than she was shown.”
The first time, when Cordis was wild-eyed with a racing heart, pursued by hellhounds, and Spyndle shouldn’t have bothered. But she did. Persisted with her, persisted her into a river, sunlight on the water, and that was all that she wrote.
“She endured so much. More than was fair. But she never let it ruin her. She was kind, mostly, but there was a cruel streak to her. Her tongue could leave you bleeding, if she so desired.”
She’d left Cordis crippled by it, after Perse was taken from them.
“And she was beautiful, of course.”
There’s more to say, but her throat grows tight, and so she goes quiet, trying to swallow down the memories her own words bring.
c o r d i s
I’ll touch you all and make damn sure
that no one touches me
There aren’t enough words to describe it, but it’s small and fragile; it’s like candlelight, maybe, casting shadows that break and pulse at the faintest hint of disruption. A feeling, and it could be smothered, lost to smoke and wax if even just one of them moves too abruptly. They recognize it in themselves but not in the stranger standing before them, the one drawing them in with the gravity in their skin.
“I feel I am beyond help.”
Glassheart almost answers her, almost tells her that ‘no one is beyond help’, but she’s never felt so helpless as she does in these moments; like she is a single petal in a river, going where the water wants and dreaming of nothing else. Luckily, she doesn’t have to speak. Cordis answers anyways; beyond help, perhaps, but not beyond trying.
“Spyndle… She had a way of seeing things. Deeper truths than she was shown. She endured so much. More than was fair. But she never let it ruin her. She was kind, mostly, but there was a cruel streak to her. Her tongue could leave you bleeding, if she so desired. And she was beautiful, of course.”
And what an answer it is.
Maybe she isn’t a poet, but if her answers are not poetry then poems must not be beautiful or meaningful — because her words drip with both. To be loved like that would be everything, she thinks. The description alone, however, is enough to put into perspective the impossibility of the two of them because there is nothing extraordinary about Glassheart. No one will write poems about the way she comes together like constellations aligning, because she doesn’t.
Everything that she is made of has belonged to someone else first.
And it shouldn’t matter, because Cordis is not hers, because she’s never wanted anyone or anything before (and so why should she start here, now?). Somehow it does, though — matter. Somehow this gravity is pulling her, beckoning her forwards and into a false sense of recognition when in all reality Cordis is just a stranger, should be, anyways. So, she stands there, comparing herself to all of the pieces that Cordis loves about someone else, wondering if the fact that she is withering is visible, if Cordis can see her folding in on herself realizing that she will never amount to enough because she is so certain right down to the marrow of her bones that there is nothing new or cruel or passionate concealed inside her skin.
Oh, but how wrong she is.
It is rising, out of ashes and sickness alike, scaled and treacherous. There, rippling just below the surface. She closes her eyes as a second drop of blood streaks across her lips.
( Of course she has endured so much. She has been stupid, again and again and again. And this wreckage, this ruin, it is of her own making with perhaps some aid from each of the monsters she has loved at one moment or the next. She has always been a reckless, wild thing. How many times now has she been led to slaughter? How many times has she acted the gentle lamb as they trod her through the blood of those before her? Their faces flicker alive in her mind now; Belgarath, Isami, Carnage, Weed.)
With her eyes still closed, she says:
“If you tried, do you think that you could see what she shows me?”
In truth, she has not plumbed the depths of her power. She is content enough to wield lightning, to exist for days or weeks without eating or sleeping, if necessary, but she does so little else with it. She is not like those grandiose magicians, making deals, performing tricks. Power does not tempt her, not in the traditional sense.
It doesn’t matter, anyway – her power couldn’t bring Spyndle back, not a second time. She could not remake that pile of bones on the riverside into the body she’d so cherished, her magic had been as worthless as her screams of grief.
She watches the girl’s eyes flutter closed. She watches her. The resemblance is muted, muddied by generations and other bloodlines, but she can still see it so well, picking out those echoes of Spyndle that are etched in her body.
Glassheart asks the question, then: do you think that you could see what she shows me?
Cordis fears the answer.
Her magic still feels like a failure, unable to do what she’d needed most (it had not saved her from Him, it had not saved Perse, it had not saved Spyndle a second time). She is scared to test it.
But this isn’t life or death.
(Though it might feel like she’s dying.)
She is not skilled at this, touching their minds. She aches enough in her own mind, has had no desire to touch others’. It’s invasive, and strange, and she can barely hold on to her own thoughts, much else to someone elses’.
But she has been asked, and, for this girl, she might do it.
“Perhaps…” she says, faint, and even as she says it she tries.
She touches her – it seems easier, that way – nose to her crest, a spark of painless lightning between them, jumping from her body onto Glassheart, like a newly created synapse.
She does not prod into her, but when she closes her eyes she feels a strange doubling, feels a ghost-pressure of her nose against Glassheart’s neck, the toucher and touched all at once. I’m here, she thinks, show me.
c o r d i s
I’ll touch you all and make damn sure
that no one touches me
