Cordis doesn’t quite know what to do with herself.
That old adage - time heals all wounds - is disgustingly true, she supposes. As many times as she’s picked her wounds, made them bleed over and over and over again, they scab and heal and when she picks again, there’s a little less raw flesh than the time before. The pain of it just a little less sharp.
That, of course, is terrifying in its own way. The pain trickles away in agonizing slowness, but so too do the memories. She remembers Spyndle – god, of course she does – but everything is softer, blurring, and small things escape her. She is less and less sure what is memory and what is the memory of a memory, a thing replayed so much that she cannot be sure it happened at all or if it’s since become purely part of her imagination.

She is past mourning. Past the sharpest part of it, at least. She isn’t sure when it happened, which is terrifying in its own way. She did not wake up one day healed, she was simply moving and she realized that somewhere along the way grief had stopped stabbing her every motion.
It’s a strange feeling. She is lighter and heavier at once. She doesn’t know what to do with the time that’s opened before her, what to do without wounds to claw open.
She experiments with her magic in a way she has never done before. She changed landscapes and never mind if they shift back in a day or so. She shifts into monsters. She freezes a bolt of lightning and walks up to its endpoint and looks at the storm-ridden world below.
She still doesn’t quite know who she is, in this new, emergent form. But she knows that whatever or whoever she is, she is powerful.

And so she returns. Back to her homeland, to the familiar yet not-familiar land. Things have changed – so has she.
Besides, the meadow is there, and it is familiar enough. So to the meadow she goes, a silver woman with lightning crackling across her skin and something almost like a smile on her lips.

I’ll touch you all and make damn sure

Cordis

that no one touches me

She has worked hard to escape the past. Not to forget it, but to shed some of its weight. She’s learned time and again how easy it is to drown there, in the molasses-thick waters of memory. She is the queen of this type of drowning, until she finally learned to stop filling up her lungs.
So it would only seem right, in the cruel irony the universe seems so fond of, that a piece of her past would walk the tree line and come into her view.
Cordis doesn’t remember her well, but she does remember her. Remembers the crows, leading her to the girl – dead, and not-dead. Child of a monster.
She’d helped her. Or tried to. She doesn’t actually know if the girl was better off for her, but she remembers her intent.

She looks at her and for a moment her jaw tightens. Not at seeing her again, but at the audacity of anything from her past coming back now. She is too full of scars from her past to welcome seeing much of it again.
None of this is Caw’s fault, of course.
So Cordis relaxes her jaw. She doesn’t smile, but she doesn’t scowl, either – only looks at the girl. The lightning flickers briefly across her skin and then quiets. She does not make a show of protecting herself before her – she trusts Caw well enough not to hurt her.
“Caw,” she says, her own voice soft.
It’s been a long time, says Caw, and Cordis isn’t even sure how long it was, exactly. Decades, certainly.
“I did wonder what became of you,” she says, which was true enough – the girl had crossed her mind on occasions, especially when her own heart felt too dark and ugly to bear. Caw was a reminder that Cordis could save them, sometimes.
Assuming what she had done had been saving, and not making things worse.

I’ll touch you all and make damn sure

Cordis

that no one touches me

She doesn’t like this story.
She doesn’t like it because it is too much like a mirror, albeit a funhouse one, something stretching and distorting.
I made a family, Caw says, and Cordis remembers her own family, their twins, the short, brief, wonderful period when it had been the four of them.
I lost a child, Caw says, and Cordis remembers her daughter – silver, the dead spit of her – being taken by Him, and her helpless to stop it. Perse had lived, but there was a horrible part of Cordis that wished she hadn’t, because death was far more swift and finite than the tortures that lay before her.
There is more – words in her head, loud, and Cordis catches bits - I ran and shame and too much to bear and these, too, are things Cordis knows all too well.
She is sorry for her. It is a terrible pain, and she knows Caw, like herself, is no stranger to pain. She wants to comfort her, to heal the invisible wounds, but Cordis has never been someone who knows how to comfort. She steps closer, though, closer than she’s been to another in months – years, maybe -and speaks softly.
“I’m sorry,” she says, and knows how hollow sympathies are, but feels compelled to offer them anyway.

Caw still admits her gratitude, which Cordis is oddly relived to hear. She is glad that Caw still sees everything as worth it, despite the pain, the loss. Cordis is trying to do that, too.
“I’m glad,” she says, “that it’s been worth it.”
She’s done many terrible, regrettable things in her life, so there is a small light in the fact that Caw is not one of them.

I’ll touch you all and make damn sure

Cordis

that no one touches me