She emerges something new.
The womb is scarred, even still.
Scarred from where the child clawed his way out.

But that was years ago, wasn’t it?
And she is something new now. Something whole.
Something impenetrable.

She sways beneath this new weight.
How long was she dead? She has no memory.
And she does not know, either, that the child that killed her is now also dead.
How could she know?

But she is restored. Put back together with gold.
Every inch of her, gold.
Protected from horns and claws and teeth.

She could not save her own life then, but she is something else now.
She is alive and she will not be so easily destroyed.

Not that there is any piece of her that is worth keeping.
No part of her that is worth protecting.

And yet, here she is. Gold.
And she must get reacquainted with being alive, with moving as an alive thing might move.
While also acquainting herself with what it means to be made of gold rather than flesh and bone and sinew.

She draws in a long breath. Long and low, as if she is worried she might overextend the lungs.
And she releases it just as slow, careful.

She surveys the landscape and thinks about how much has changed since she was last here.
How much she has changed since she was last here.
again.

She had been coy once.
Or, at least, she thinks she must have been.

She must have been because she smiles when the stallion wanders closer.
She smiles like a reflex, though her eyes stay dark.
Like there are generations of secrets hidden behind her pupils.
And perhaps there are. She had been dead a long time.

She had been dead and now she is not.
And he’s laughing, though she cannot tell if he’s laughing at her.
Or just the strangeness of the way she has been rebuilt.
She looks at him and thinks, you could have torn me apart once.
She thinks, you could have sunk your teeth into my flesh and I would have bled.
But she doesn’t say these things out loud.
She just smiles like a reflex.

She breathes, which is strange because she had been dead so long.
Because it does not seem that something unbreakable should have to breathe.

He smiles back at her and her own smile slips.
Has she ever wanted the things that wanted her?
She cannot remember now but she is unaffected by his flattery.

Can something made of metal be gorgeous?
She ducks her head and presses her mouth to her own chest.
She cannot feel the heart beating underneath.

She has not spoken in centuries.
She does not know if, should she open her mouth, any sound will come out at all?
But she lifts her head and blinks at him, tilts her golden head.

“Where were you going?” she asks.
The voice is not as metallic as she might have expected.
It is not lyrical, no, she had never been that kind of soft thing.
But it is not gritty or abrasive either.
She does not sound like a thing that has been dead a long time.

“Someplace better than here?”

She does not see the appeal in going anywhere that isn’t nice.
Perhaps it is because she had been dead so long.
But she cannot imagine doing anything she does not want to do.
She is the master of her own fate.
She will not know happiness until she digs it out of the earth herself.

It occurs to her that she should say something.
She should ask him why he’s going if it’s not nice.
She should ask why he should bother to do something that does not please him.
Though, perhaps, these are the things that please him.
The ugly and dreadful things.
She understands the impulse to surround oneself with filth and rot, she thinks.

She tilts her golden head and watches him, unblinking.
The eyes had been closed so long that she does not want to close them now.
She wants to keep them open forever.
She does not want to miss anything.
Not because she is sentimental but because she is curious.
Curious about all the ways the world has changed in the time that has passed.

His question is easy to answer.
She smiles a metallic smile and nods.
“Yes,” she tells him.
“It looked different the last time I was here.”
The whole world had looked different then.
She cannot tell if it has been rebuilt with better or worse stuff.

Certainly she has been rebuilt stronger.

She had been dead so long that the fear she feels when the ground begins to shudder is muted.
Weak.
Hardly there at all.
She is not afraid to die again.

But a strange, abrupt darkness descends upon them and she turns her gaze to the sky.
The shadows move. Clamor. Reach.
She does not flee.

She turns her gaze then in his direction but cannot see him through the terrible darkness.
She is only vaguely aware of the sound of his voice through the dense shadows.
She is much more aware of the sound of suffering.

“Are you there?” she asks the darkness.
She is not afraid but she says, “please don’t leave” all the same.

Would she have told him?
Would she have told him what life had been like?
If the darkness had not so suddenly descended upon them.

She cannot remember now.
Cannot remember what she had been like in her last life.
Before the child had killed her.

Had she been the sort of woman who volunteered information even when she wasn’t asked?
She cannot remember herself, cannot remember who she had been.
She can remember only the things that had happened to her.
The violence.

And the violence is here again.
But she does not fear it.

His voice comes swimming at her out of the darkness.
His touch finds her, too.
(How peculiar it is to be touched by something warm when you are so cold.)
Does she choose to move toward him?
Or is there some unseen force that pushes her closer?
She cannot remember making the conscious decision.
But in the space of a breath she is pressed against him.

Has she ever been handed a promise like this before?
Certainly this is the kind of thing she would remember.
To ask someone not to leave and have them tell her they won’t.

Could this be considered a weakness?
She doesn’t care much about weakness, though.
Not when the sounds of suffering still close in around them.

And she bends her head close to him.
Leans a golden ear against his shoulder.
Asks, “have you ever died before?”
Pauses only briefly before she exhales and tells him,
“I died and I was reborn something so much greater.”
Although ‘reborn’ is perhaps not the right word.
She sprung forth from the earth fully formed, gilded, spectacular.

“Are you afraid to die?”