she learned a lesson back there in the flames; pentecost

[Cordis]

She sees her face everywhere.
It’s a byproduct, of grief – seeing what’s not there, her name writ in the sky, her face in the water, muddled.
(She’d once said come back, come back for me, and she had. She had.)
Her one comfort is her lightning, now restored, she walks and her skin crackles. She is a prison, self-made, she is beautiful and terrible and untouchable, and it is the way she likes to be. She is a magician once more, but she’d give up every iota of power just to see Spyndle’s face again.

A flash of silver catches her eye, which surprises her – though the horses here are many colors, silver is less common, especially this particular kind, like tarnished metal. She looks, and sees other colors, too, purple smeared on silver. She is about to turn away when the figure shifts, and she catches a glimpse of his face.
Her face. His - HIS - face.
She cries out, unwittingly, at the way their features have combined.

She goes to the boy. There was no other option. She goes to him even as he r heart sinks. She prays she is mistaken, that is was a trick of the light, but the closer she gets he more he looks like them – the best things of her life, and the worst.
“Excuse me,” she says, voice thick, disused, “but you…”
You look like me. Like her. Like Him.
“You look familiar.”

I’ll touch you all and make damn sure

Cordis

that no one touches me

[Pentecost]

THE SUN WILL BE TURNED TO DARKNESS
AND THE MOON TO BLOOD BEFORE THE COMING 
OF THE GREAT AND GLORIOUS DAY OF THE LORD.

(One begets the other. 
And so on.)

The Son walks the earth in ignorance—innocent to all the things that have come before him; incurious and hungry for nothing, for the Son has lived a simple life as a simple, silver offering. The Son walks the earth, dumb and carelessly, straying further and further from the Mother as every day dies on the lips of another night. 

By night, he watches the vacuum of the Father’s court, where he does his good works and makes light where nothing came first. By day, he wanders and eats and does nothing; passing by so many arrows from his god-quiver, knowing not that they are his kin, for none of them are the same silver cloth from which he and Mother are cut.

They are duller treasures; treasures hewn roughly and without the grace of his own nascency.

(The Father graces the Mother, begets the Son.
The Son is precious; he reads like a warning from a dead tradition.)

He hears her cry. 
It is not like him to stop, but something in it stills him. He thinks (such a thought rises slowly to the surface, through the muck that is his heavy and prosaic psyche) that is is meant for him—caused by him. He hears the faint, sharp crackle of electricity. When the woman comes to him, she is barbed and cloaked; he cannot understand the way she looks at him.

(In his gut—that so-far unanxious and soothed place—he knows to fear her, if not for the barbs… for the way she looks at him.)

“I do?” his voice is high-pitched for his age, sharp and song-like. 
He shifts, the hairs on his neck and chest and head stand on edge, responding to that voltaic mantle.

The Son is incurious, but deep inside, he is not truly stupid. Only uninspired.
He sees his Mother’s face; he sees the same skin, like Christmas stars.

“Who are you?”

@[Cordis]

[Cordis]

There had only been two children, of theirs. Twins, but each carried by their own mother, begat in magic. Spyndle had birthed a boy – Elecktrum (named for the mixing of metals; he was made in their own form of alchemy, gold meeting silver); and Cordis a girl, a girl who was the dead spit of her, silver and bright and unnamed because before there was a name He was there, taking His fair salvage.
She wonders if they’d had more children if she might not have loved the two they did have so fiercely. But god, wouldn’t she love anything Spyndle made?
(There were other children, too, from other unions – her own Ka, a silver-maned girl who lit off for the territories when she was but a year old; and of course, Spyndle had a few, children whose names she never knew.)

It hurts so, to look at him, to see what history had made – he is a legacy of all the things she’s loved and hated most, and the juxtaposition nearly makes her ill.
Who are you, he asks, and rightfully enough – to him, she is nothing but a stranger wrapped in lighting with a quavering voice, he doesn’t know the things she’s done, the things she’s lost. She is a stranger. They are strangers.
“My name is Cordis,” she says. She wonders if he has reason to know her.
She wants to ask a dozen questions but they’re all wretchedly personal, and she is still the stranger. So she sighs, waits, her name given to him, hoping.

I’ll touch you all and make damn sure

Cordis

that no one touches me

[Pentecost]

THE SUN WILL BE TURNED TO DARKNESS
AND THE MOON TO BLOOD BEFORE THE COMING 
OF THE GREAT AND GLORIOUS DAY OF THE LORD.

“Cordis,” he repeats back, clumsy-tongued.

No. He doesn’t know it. 
Mother sings other hymns – of the Father and other earthly things, flesh and so on – but of ‘Cordis’, nothing. Or nothing the man has taken with him, for he discards minor thoughts and recollections daily, leaving them in rubbish heaps along his merry, dumb pilgrimage.

He cannot recognize that she has been touched by the Father, as mother had. He knows nothing of that sacrament – nothing of the signs left behind. His own stigmata is a dead, senseless thing. The Father’s work, to be sure, but it had not been a deliberate labor of His. 
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight extinct stars, bruised purple down his neck, connected by thin lines, like exposed veins – when the Father gave him this, it had not hurt and it had not been with care, but the spilling of spacestuff, errant and hot, into mother.

The Son has never met Him.

He can recognize that she is made of the same expensive, precious cloth as him and mother. He can see that she is an offering, like all of them, though she is a thorny one, thick with angry electricity – so, perhaps, she is unwilling, but the Father has plans for everyone. 

“I am Pentecost. I must know you,” he tilts his shiny, pretty head, purple hair falling across his serpent stars, “everyone else is so dull. Not like me and mother. And you. We are special.”
They are twisted, lustrous, exquisite wreckage. 

They have the free will the Father has no generously given them.

for the record, if this even need be said, you are free to take this wherever <3

[Cordis]

Looking at him still makes her dizzy, but creeping in as well is a feeling of want, heady and hot. She wants to take him, steal him, though he is not a child but something mostly grown. She wants to remake him, purge him of His touch (those stars, god, she knows those, she knows His obsessions, one of the things confessed in those horribly intimate moments when He took breaths in between killing her).
“Pentecost,” she repeats. A beautiful name, though she doesn’t know the meaning of it.
“My daughter-,” she says, and the word hurts, like thorns, “her name is Perse.”
It’s not the name she gave her, but it’s the one Perse used, when she met Spyndle (not Cordis – Corids only knew of the meeting later, when Spyndle used the knowledge like a sword. They fought so much. They loved so much. She bled for her in every way she could). Perse, like Persephone -- His own little joke, no doubt.
‘I haven’t seen her in a very long time,” she says. No, not since Perse was a girl, and He appeared and Cordis watched, helpless on her knees, unable to strike Him (she’d tried, thrown lightning at Him, and He had said she will feel every bit of damage you give to me tenfold and god help her, she couldn’t do it).

She lets the lightning die down on her skin, sinking into her. She is no longer such a weapon (though it slinks beneath her, under the surface, waiting). She steps closer, examining him, the stars, the purple of his mane.
“Can I…?” she asks. She is close, muzzle hovering near his neck, so curious to touch him.

I’ll touch you all and make damn sure

Cordis

that no one touches me