"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
05-04-2015, 03:25 PM (This post was last modified: 05-05-2015, 08:19 AM by Cassi.)
They are my everything, she’d told the boy, the one of rain and cryptic words, and it had not been a lie.
She may have left them, the pain of losing their daughter too fresh and raw in her to face them, but she loves them. It’s the one constant in her life – the one good constant, at least – and it’s the thought of them she clings to in her aching nights, where her thoughts crowd too large in her mind, when she thinks she should sleep but can’t for the nightmares it brings.
Time has grown strange to her and she doesn’t know if days or months have passed. She wonders how old their son is now.
(She wonders if their daughter is alive, or if He was merciful enough to kill her.)
She feels guilty for it, now – she was selfish, to leave them, but she had been the beacon calling Him to them. She is the one who forgot, who looked away, who let Him creep in.
She is the one who bore the girl, her dead spit, who birthed herself in miniature, whose heart swelled too much with love and who forgot.
(“I creep, Cordis.”)
She finds her. She will always find her. She knows Spyndle in every iteration and her body knows where she is the same way birds know to fly south in the wintertime. Spyndle is her magnetic field, always calling her home.
She does not see their son. She does not know if this is because he is grown or is simply off elsewhere.
(She does not fret over this, she thinks she would feel it if He had come about again.)
“Spyndle,” she says, the name sweet in her mouth even as her voice is low, meek. In her name she says ‘I’m sorry,’ because she never wants to leave her but she understands now that sometimes leaving is all they can do, that the foundation they laid for each other in these years is both terribly fragile and astoundingly strong.
“I missed you.”
c o r d i s
she said it was a mistake to let them burn her at the stake
and she learned a lesson back there in the flames
She shut her eyes against her cheek and pretended to sleep while everyone else fell away, because it would be easiest without reminders.
It would be easiest to wake in the daylight reeking of wet dirt and dew, rather than passion and fervor – because it would be easiest to open her eyes and be met with the morning, rather than the glint of metal and the sting of memory. ‘Take it then,’ she had spat at a God who was so much bigger. ‘Take it then,’ she had said, calling a bluff that she had thought would never see fruition. ‘ Take it then,’ she had said, and he had laughed.
He had laughed, and thanked her for her stupidity like Gods thank mortals all the time.
But she left them, too.
She left them in kinder ways. She let the gaps between their bodies grow, and did not a thing to stop the distance, because it is easiest without reminders, to shut eyes and pretend that things will be okay even when they won’t. She shut her eyes that night, pulled her lashes to the tops of her cheeks, and feigned sleep while Cordis feigned flight, because it is easiest to pretend instead of let the guilt eat you alive.
So why can she still feel the teeth?
Why are there holes torn through her skin? Why is there blood? Why can she see the gaps between her bones, the sinew, and the tendons? She dug her feet into tongue, threw her claws into throat, so how has it still swallowed her? She would be wondering still if it were not for the glint of metal, of memory, that rounds the bend and burns her eyes.
‘Spyndle,’ memory says, and though the part of her lips is slight, somehow there are rivers, and sunsets, and hazels that pass between them (slip over her tongue and through her teeth like lyrics to a lullaby). How can any one being feel so magic? She is more than silver. She is more than an element. She is more than titans, and more than gravity. ‘Spyndle,’ is all she says, but it feels like poetry.
Loving Cordis is a lot like loving poetry, because she is beautiful in the way that poems are, and she is sad in the way that poems can be. Loving Cordis is like loving poetry, because the lines of her body roll and rise like prose.
Because how can you touch poetry? Because how can you hold it in your hands and call it yours?
“How could you…” is all that she says, when she can fathom words. But it is not what Cordis might think. She left, too. She left, too.
“How could you come back to me, after what I’ve done?”
She knew something had passed between her lover and her tormenter, some promise. His smell is distinct and it clings to Spyndle each time they exchange words (or other things). It’s horrible when it happens; to have them mixed just so, flashpoints of memory combating each other – pits and rivers, smoke and hazel.
You were promised to me; he’d said to their silver girl, the one lost, the one she hopes desperately is dead.
It’s almost a parody, him demanding the firstborn (not the first for either woman, but the first for them, the fulfillment of promises years in the making). Almost a parody, except no matter how stereotypically villainous the action may have been, it was still her daughter who walked away at his side.
How could you come back to me, asks her darling, after everything I’ve done?
She returns to her because she must, because they are magnetic, because they are tides. There is a rhythm to them, one she could not break even if she wanted.
She does not blame her. Maybe she should. But she is the one who brought Him into their lives, she is the scent that drew Him in.
She is the one who forgot.
He would have come regardless, the promise he extracted from Spyndle was just to hurt her, hurt them. He would have come regardless because He knows the children are their hearts made flesh, and nothing would stop the tsunami of Him from ripping those hearts from them, from the glee of their pain.
“You’ve done nothing wrong,” she says, touching her lips to the gold crest, the feelings sharp and raw and beautiful.
“It was…”
She trails off, chasing the word.
“It was inevitable.”
He will always hurt us, she thinks, because He wants to hurt me.
c o r d i s
she said it was a mistake to let them burn her at the stake
and she learned a lesson back there in the flames
The night that was full of pretending. The night that she left her eyes shut tight against the tops of her cheeks, and pretended not to feel her slip away into the night. But how could she have missed it? How could she have ignored two hearts becoming one, or the absence of heat that she left in her wake? That night will eat her alive, because she had noticed, tight-lipped, with sweat that she could feel bead down the back of her neck. That night will eat her alive because she watched her leave if only because she could not bear to see her eyes that morning.
And she should feel relief.
It should flood through her flesh and break through her bones like rivers through dams. It should drown the guilt. It should empty her cells of anything but water. Here she is, the love of all loves, and she has nothing but kindness in her heart when she kisses her forehead and says: ‘You’ve done nothing wrong.’
But everything is wrong.
Every moment is wrong without the only child she has ever brought herself to love, and it’s a wrongness she never thought could devour the magnitude of Cordis.
“I think this will consume us,” she says, because she can already feel the acid of some ancient creature’s gut biting at her skin. She feels like she is dissolving. She feels like she is watching Cordis dissolve, too, as though her skin is sloughing off before her eyes, and she knows that this is precisely what He has always intended.
“We should have run like the wild things,” she says then, because it would have been easier than what is to come. And what is to come? A pair of downcast eyes, too ashamed to look her lover in her own. She will not. She cannot. It will kill her to look into the fractures of her irises and tell her: “He could let her go if we had something to offer him.”
Because Cordis will know what she is asking.
Because Cordis will know that her lover has forsaken her for the love of something else. Reality will burn through her bones, and her flesh, through the brand hot on her hip – because Cordis will know that she is asking her to trade a life for a life.
That night will eat her alive, but so will this one.
Back in His lair, she’d never thought it would be like this. She’d thought of escape, abstractly, the way grounded creatures think of flying. She’d never thought beyond the possibility of sun on her skin.
(She hadn’t even known the way the sun would come to reflect off of her like she is a scimitar, for back in the pits she was a mousy brown.)
She’d never thought of love. The idea itself never even crossed her mind. Love, to her, had been the one night spent curled against her father-mother, the way he’d called her Mahala (a name she would come to reject, after hearing it poured from His lips), their breaths turning to smoke. A body burning fever-hot and then not being warm at all.
And then this, all this, pain and beauty and a love so sweet she would
(she did)
kill for it.
I think this will consume us, says her love, says the woman who was a thousand times better than sunlight on the skin.
The girl, the silver girl, the reckless promise made in exchange for memory, in exchange for this. The girl who was damned, because He would have always come and Cordis would have always fought Him and she would have always lost.
We should have run like wild things, continues Spyndle.
“Yes,” she says. Yes, this will consume us. Yes, we should have run.
(“I creep, Cordis.”)
“She’s his prize,” she says, the words like cyanide in her mouth. Their girl is not a girl to Him. She is a symbol. A slap in their face. A show of His prowess.
“He doesn’t let go of prizes easily.”
It would take so much.
c o r d i s
she said it was a mistake to let them burn her at the stake
and she learned a lesson back there in the flames
This was written in the earth and the stars. This was written on their flesh by the rain, once. This was written like the gravity between them, like the river, like the hazels. This is inevitable, and she hears the word in Cordis’ cadence. This is inevitable. This is a sunset. This is the last sunset. This is the last.
This is an ending.
She wants to melt into her like gold is meant too.
She feels soft like gold. She wants their skin and their bones to fuse. She wants to be one, but she knows where that leaves them. She knows that passion and magic and sunsets on rivers by hazel leave them with more of the innocent that they cannot protect. She knows that they cannot even protect themselves. But she also knows that they were beautiful as children, that she was burning silver, and he, the perfect alchemy. She knows that he is beautiful still even if she has run him out into the woods to keep him safe.
She knows that he will be better as a wild thing.
They all could have been.
‘She is his prize,’ her lover says and Spyndle wonders how many deaths she has suffered already in this moment, how many times her skin has been peeled off her bones, how many times her innards spilled out in tribute to the great evisceration. She wonders if it had been thousands. She wonders if it has been thousands for the cost of one promise.
‘He doesn’t let go of prizes easily.’
“She was our prize,” comes a hiss that does not belong between her lips; it reeks of venom and feels like sharp edges.
And when she meets her lover’s eyes at last, hers will seem clouded and dark and sadder than they’ve ever looked before, and she will say: “I know.”
It will feel like she is gasping.
It will feel like she is dying.
It will feel like everything that is wrong in the world, and she will say: “I know it won’t be easy.”
But he will always want her. He will always want to wrap his hands around her throat, dig his nails into her hips. He will always want a piece of her, to be the snapping jaws at the ends of her heels.
“He wants you, Cordis,” she’ll say, like the coward that she is and there will be pain that rattles like metal in her throat, because it would be easier to give herself to him, because she has been lost in fog and poison before and she could manage it again. Because she could die for them. Because it would be easier to die for them than to sacrifice her.
(“Are you alone?” He asks the foal, but it is a hypothetical question. Of course she is alone, because her father-mother had died, gray and lifeless in the cold and she is alone, she is alone with only a memory of his fever-warmth curled around her, telling her I love you, I love you, I love you.
Are you alone, He asks and she shakes from cold and says yes and it is a question she will replay in her mind a hundred times, a thousand, because she wonders, in the way we all wonder on our worst decisions, if things would have been different if she had lied, had said yes.
She wonders if He, like a vampire, needed to be invited in.)
(“Are you alone?” Spyndle asks, years and years ago when they were both wild things, hearts undomesticated by the beautiful chains and shackles of each other. Cordis stops running from her. Spyndle stops offering herself to the wolves for her, although there are entirely different wolves waiting for her, for both of them.
Are you alone, she asks and Cordis shakes from fear and says yes and it is a question she will replay in her mind a hundred times, a thousand, because she wonders, in the way we all wonder on our best decisions, if things would have been different if she’d lied and said yes.)
She cannot imagine life without either force now; they have both shaped her, for good and bad.
“She wasn’t our prize,” she says, and her own words are sharpened, made dangerous by the whetstone Spyndle lays her against, because this is them, they run and fight and love and it is too much and it is never enough.
“She was just ours. Not a prize, not a trophy. Just ours,” and her words are softer now, thinking of the silver girl and how much she had loved all of them (but Elecktrum most of all, in the ways twins are bound to love each other), how her laughter had sounded.
If asked, she would say she would do anything for them, for her family.
If asked, she would say she would do anything to never go back to His lair.
Her heartbeat quickens and replays its jitterbug tune. She is not the fearful running wild thing she once was, the one windblown and terrorized, but there is enough of that woman in her bones to dry her throat and widen her eyes, because she can’t, she can’t.
“He wants me,” she echoes, hollow, because she is thinking of everything He did, of the memories she can recall and the ones she knows are buried deeper, the ones she is afraid to unearth because she cannot faces them without going mad.
She loves Spyndle, loves their children more than anything and she would die for them in a heartbeat but going to Him would be nowhere so pleasant as dying.
c o r d i s
she said it was a mistake to let them burn her at the stake
and she learned a lesson back there in the flames
She will remember the river, when the water combed through the ends of her silver hair and made it heavy, slick, and glistening, against her skin. She will remember the starlight reflecting off her skin and the beads of water along her back that seemed more like pearls then. She will remember the first touch; lips so soft against her forehead, her cheek. She will remember their bodies intertwined, and how the space between their bodies had never been less and still it was not close enough. She will remember, and it will have to be enough.
‘She wasn’t our prize,’ Cordis answers, and she is too busy thinking about the things that she will remember to realize the malice wrought through her sentences. Their daughter had felt like a prize. She had felt like the conclusion the deserved, the one that they had scraped, and fought, and clawed to get. She had felt like the conclusion that was right. This one feels so wrong.
“I think this will consume us,” Spyndle reaffirms, beneath her breath, as soft as the spring breeze through the eyelets of the leaves, so soft it is nearly lost.
Every second matters, and every second feels eternal.
She is dying with every wasted breath that they take. She is dying in the fractions of seconds that exist between the heaves of their chests, and the sounds of their words. She is dying; skin peeled back and bones laid bare. She is dying, and every second buries her deeper. She was theirs. She is theirs.
So, Spyndle makes the only choice she can.
She makes it for both of them, because they both know where this road leads even if neither has been willing to say it aloud until now: “I don’t think that I can let myself love you knowing what I’ve done for you.” Loving Cordis is dangerous, but never in the ways she had expected it to be.
