She’d been a girl alone once, too.
A stupid girl (she’d been mousy brown then, plain) who was left alone – not by choice but by circumstance. She’d gone to sleep next to her father, the fever-heat fo him keeping her warm, but when she woke, his skin had been cool, almost cold.
So she had walked. The stupid girl had walked and when He came, and asked the fateful question,
(are you alone?)
the girl had said yes.

She’d been a girl alone once, in a filthy pit that stank of sweat and sulfur and something else, something less tangible – the precise nature of fear is acrid in the nostrils, but does not have many discernable notes.
He left her alone, often. Enough times for her to starve. Enough times for her to wish and pray for this death to be the last.
(She was denied, every time. In a dark god’s lair, prayers are made a laughingstock.)

She’d been a girl alone once, who ran and ran and ran until she thought her heart would burst from her chest then ran some more, because the chuffing of hellhounds never seemed to cease.
To that girl came a mare, gold like sunbeams made alive. With the mare came many things, came rivers and hazel and the commitment to a life of moments and pieces.

Now she is still alone, but the way the lightning crackles on her skin feels like an embrace and so she lets it be. She walks tall, and although there are ghosts in her eyes, there is something else, too – a spark that mirrors the lightning singing in her skin, the promise of something dark.
(Stare too long into the abyss and it stares back into you, and Cordis is a woman who spent years staring into one abyss after another.)

Above her flies a raven, a mangled thing that is half-ice and half-lightning. It is a remnant from her interaction with the raven queen, a dark and treacherous woman who turned from bird to queen and had not cried out when the birds fell at her feet.
It shouldn’t fly; but then, Cordis should not be alive.
She is crafted from a long line of impossibilities, and the raven is simply another checkmark.

She sees the girl, the red of her like a streak of blood in the forest. A little shimmer crosses over her, and for a moment Cordis thinks she blinked her out of existence, and then she is back again, solid.
Curious.
The lightning crackles on her skin like radio static as she walks forward. She isn’t sure what it is about the girl, only that something about her draws Cordis’s weakness.
(Perhaps the same way wolves smell sickness on a caribou.)
“Hello,” she says to the girl. Her voice is soft. She wonders if she has always sounded so wicked.
“Are you alone?”

she said it was a mistake to let them burn her at the stake

Cordis

(and she learned a lesson back there in the flames)

This is the horror of it: it gets easier.
Easier, to make your voice like milk and honey. Easier, to stand before them with the lightning wrapped around you, all but screaming danger, but to smile and tell them you’re harmless. Easier, to think of whip-cracks, and have the lightning snap out in one swift motion and leave behind a swath of skin, scorched.
And maybe it wouldn’t be easier if it wasn’t so damn gratifying.
(That’s the other horror of it: it is a pleasure to burn.)

With the boy, there had been a part of her that had shouted its dismay. But with this girl, the voice is quieter.
The lightning crackles across her skin. She feels warm and powerful and untouchable. She does not let herself think of anything
(anyone)
else.

She notes with a quiet cunning how the filly steps backward. A tenseness flicks across her own muscles, she is ready to move quickly before she’s even aware. But the filly stills, looks at her.
And there is something in her eyes that a part of Cordis – a part deep-buried, but a part nonetheless – recognizes.
It is a look of a thing hunted. It is a look Cordis knows too well, having worn it for years when she saw hellhounds in every shadow and His mark burned like fire on her hip.
“Who’s after you, child?” she asks, because like knows like, and though Cordis now does her best to shed that particular skin – the skin of the hunted – it cannot be shaken completely.

she said it was a mistake to let them burn her at the stake

Cordis

(and she learned a lesson back there in the flames)

She remembers too well what it is to be hunted.
She remembers with an aching clarity the way the hellhounds had chuffed and bayed. They had been horrible, insidious things, living in the periphery of her vision, in shadows, always seen in the corner of the eye and nowhere else. It left her with a jitterbug heartbeat and a tendency to spin on her heels.
They’d felled her once when she had done the impossible. Like Lot’s wife, she had looked back, but rather than looking back at a city burning she’d been looking back at a woman.
(Truth be told, a city burning would have been cleaner.)
But rather than turn into a pillar of salt the hounds had noted the weakness and she had fallen. But they hadn’t killed her. She still doesn’t know.
She doesn’t like to think about these things.

There is much she doesn’t like to think about, from the particular horrors of His lair to the particular perfection of Spyndle’s neck. There is much she cannot bear to think of.
There is a brand burned on her hip beneath the lightning she wears, His mark, and she does not think of that, either.

A stallion, says the girl, and once more déjà vu strokes its fingers down Cordis’s spine. She knows what it is to not name them.
(“Naming things gives them power,” she’d once said to Spyndle when Spyndle had implored her to speak His name and she had refused. It was one of many things she refused her.)
More things roll out, confessions, and maybe Cordis should feel empathy for the girl – like knows like, after all – but instead she feels a queasy sort of disgust.
You’re so weak, she wants to tell the girl, but she would not be speaking to the girl, she would be speaking to the silver mare she once was, the one who was chased with a brand burnt hot on her hip.

The lightning sinks into her skin as if absorbed. Her skin is still now, though it still glints in the sunlight like a sword. She steps closer. She could almost touch her.
“I’ll protect you from him,” she says. And that’s true enough. If the stallion came forth Cordis could strike him dead where he stood.
(She’s done it before.)
“What’s your name?”

she said it was a mistake to let them burn her at the stake

Cordis

(and she learned a lesson back there in the flames)

Are you alone, He had asked once, and she – the dumb girl, the stupid girl, the girl who was alone and believed He might be kind – had said yes.
Every day, she wonders if the word damned her, even though it’s a foolish notion – if she had said no, He would have surely taken her, just as He would return to her all these years later and take her daughter.
Mostly the memory sits in her skin because the yes meant she had been the one to start it. She had walked into the proverbial lion’s den.
(She’d said no, after that. Over and over. Said it, screamed it, cried it. He never listened.)

(She’d once wondered why He had asked at all, but she knows, now.
It is a pleasure to burn, and the pleasure is all the richer when they ask to be burnt.)

And maybe that’s the game she plays now, as she coxes and hides her lightning as if she is not a force to be reckoned with, as if she is not a magician with a wicked heart who is no longer sure of who or what she is.
“Elve,” she repeats the girl’s name because she can.
“I’m Cordis.”

The filly questions her, which is foolish, for whoever this man is Cordis does not doubt she could destroy him.
“Yes,” she says, and her tone is confident. The lightning aches inside her skin. The girl confuses her.
She wants to protect her, as if she could undo what had been done.
She wants to punish her, for being weak, for saying yes.
Cordis lives in her own duality, and the two parts quibble inside of her.
”I could burn him where he stands.”
I could burn you where you stand, she thinks.
Part of her aches at the thought. Another part breathes heavy, eager.

she said it was a mistake to let them burn her at the stake

Cordis

(and she learned a lesson back there in the flames)

There are times when the roads diverge, when two choices emerge. It had been that way – in her mind if not in reality – when He had asked her if she was alone.
It had been that way when Spyndle asked her to the river, where they waded in baptismal waters and nothing since had ever looked so beautiful as the sight of her in the water.
It had been that way when she held the boy to her chest and let him burn.

And it feels that way now, as the girl lays disgustingly open and easy before her, trying – wanting – to believe that Cordis could be a savior, a protector.
There were so many she could not save – not even her own daughter – so why should it be expected of her?
The roads fork, and on one path is protection. On one path is darkness.
There is a third choice, of course: to turn and flee, leave the girl to the wolves, to the man she runs from.
Forget her name.

But, there is a story to tell.

“My lightning,” she says. This is the story. It used to hurt to tell it. Now it feels good.
“I was attacked and I burned him for it.”
The first time the lightning had come. The stallion had been a vagabond, a strange and rotting thing. He had been stupid, nothing like the man - the god – who had destroyed her.
“Another woman wronged me, hurt someone I loved,” she continues. She doesn’t know if this is true. She remember regretting the girl’s death, the odd prophetess. But she changes the narrative.
“I killed both of them.”
It gets easier, to say it.
“And there was a boy. He was about your age.”
This story is harder.
“He asked to see my magic, so I showed him.”
She showed him lightning, showed him burnt skin. For years she didn’t know if he survived until one day he walks from the woods like a ghoul, body covered in fire like he’d never stopped burning, and he’d said her name while she wanted to scream.

“If you man comes,” she says, “I’d burn him, too.”

I’ll touch you all and make damn sure

Cordis

that no one touches me