"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
Does he think about the way that black feathers fell like ash around their bodies, and spotted their peripherals? Does he know it marked her vision like it stained her skin? When she said that she was poison, and he said that he would let his limbs rot black; necrosis had never been so beautiful before. He hadn’t said it then with words. He’d said it with his closeness. He’d said it when the feel of his flesh kept her near, made her own body quiver aloud it’s betrayal. He’d said it, would he remember?
“I will always find you,” she says, laughing and crying at the memory.
Because they always told her pretty words when the sad quiet in her eyes begged it of them.
Would she remember?
Would she remember her?
Does she think about the way the river cradled them once – when they felt invincible, when the water whispered false forever’s through the molecules? It felt like magic, and it bled right through their skin to fill the hollow spaces in their bones that evil men carved out. Would she remember the passion as deeply as she remembered the venom? They split the earth into halves with both. They fell in and out of love with miles of blown out crater between them.
They were always on the wrong sides.
“Are you alone?” she asks, knowing that now, they both were.
They say those who forget history are damned to repeat it.
So she remembers. She remembers with a haunting, aching clarity all the parts of them, good and bad.
(Good is the river, good is the way they had touched, good is their children. Bad is her dying, her leaving, everything that stands between them.)
She remembers this, remembers her, says her name sometimes (to herself, soft, barely a whisper). She does not forget history.
Yet they repeat it.
They repeat it, this cycle, coming and going and it always hurts and it always fills her heart close to bursting. Because Spyndle makes her feel like she might claw her way out of the spiral, like she is something else – something more - than the sum of her parts, that she is more than lightning and flat dead shark’s eyes, she is more than the power that churns inside her. They are more.
They repeat it and she will always come back (won’t she?) because fate decries it but also because this is love, this terrible thing sown between them, this is love.
This is history, writ across their smiles and sobs. Writ in ink and blood and venom.
(always)
She sees her and it’s like she’s gutshot, her knees feel weak.
(It’s like a natural disaster strikes, when they’re together. Maybe, somewhere, it does. Maybe they are the butterfly wings causing hurricanes halfway across the world.)
She goes towards her and her steps are filled with the inevitability of it, but none of it slows her because Cordis is weak, she’s so fucking weak when the gold girl splays across her vision.
There is someone else – is there? – but Cordis pays no mind, her vision tunnels until it is just Spyndle, just this moment, even as history weeps behind them.
“You’re back,” she murmurs.
Such an obvious thing to say.
She doesn’t touch her.
He has done nothing and in those nothings he has done everything. Both great good and great evil, righteous acts and those self-serving. Once upon a time he would murder, snuff life at a request, perform heinous acts by ever present commands. Once he would love deeply, wholly, and naively.
Once.
Once he would cloak a woman in scales and close-pressed bodies, dark skies falling around them like charcoal snow. The caw of clacking beaks still haunts him and their echos do nothing to still the ache that breaks in his breast now.
Always find her, always.
More than what he was, he is still little against the notions of Gods and Magic. He is fire everlasting, liquid gold of moving mettle and black is the kettle that engulfs him. Once he had been tossed at the edge of life, dying and burning and paying for sin he was sure. Now he eats those fires, tastes the molten rock that makes his skin, that burns brighter as he nears her- as he nears them.
Once she had ran and he had followed. Quick breaths replacing the stillness of the bramble in which she hid, passing voices and promises he meant to never break.
Without good bye she vanished, without hello she appeared and with her apparition she brought the stars, silver and radiant. With her presence she crooned to them without speaking and they came, gluttons for punishment or love- but who’s to say the difference?
Did Cordis know that she had wanted to stay?
She had wanted to stay.
She had wanted to stay for all of her life, and even one death. She had wanted to stay even when the river ate her corpse and the fog ate her memory. She had wanted to stay even as her blood poured out against the river stones, and her children writhed against her own spilled innards. She had wanted to stay even when every moment of their existence together was agony, even if every living god willed them separate, even if one was the sun and the other the moon.
She had wanted to stay.
She would always want to stay.
‘You’re back,’ Cordis says, beautiful because she always would be.
Spyndle flinches like those two syllables are sharp, because even though she can’t see red she knows she must be bleeding.
“That’s what ghosts do,” Spyndle answers.
“They come back.”
Does he know that she had wanted to stay?
She had wanted to stay.
It only took one moment. It was that single, irregular moment when their pulses synced and their breaths aligned and exchanged. She breathed him into her lungs and fell hard instead of logically. This is her curse, blown through her gold flesh, whispered through her bones, and wrought from the strands of her DNA – her beginning and her Elysium. It only took one moment. It only took that symphony of ravens, and her heart pouring water for the holes. It only took a single touch gloved with a few pretty words, and she saw the flicker of hope against the black of everything else. She had wanted to drown in black feathers, to fill her lungs with them and him. She had wanted to lean in tight against his bones – because he was tangible, because he was real, because he had not lied, yet.
And she had wanted him like the need were a sickness.
She hadn’t said it then with words.
She’d swallowed them.
She’d said it with her closeness; how every second that they touched could roll the mountains of her spine like waves on an ocean, and how every quiver of her muscle wrote his name against the sinew of her tendons.
When he appears she looks at him like she did that day, and hopes he remembers all of it.
And she’ll say nothing, because she won’t know where to stay.
Her lips will part softly, but the words will catch in her throat as though they’re barbed – and maybe they are, because these aren’t lovers anymore, because these are familiar strangers. Because she’s mapped out the roads of their bodies, and remembers the smell of fervor on their flesh, because she knows what sweat looks like when it beads and rolls from their furrowed brows like rain, but not where they were yesterday. She won’t know what to say to them, because they told her things like ‘always’, but she does not know them now.
“You’re different,” will be the four syllables she decides on – because they’re violent, because they’re made of electricity and magma, of hurricane winds, and they weren’t always.
She feels heat, from the other – the boy of magma. She doesn’t know why he’s there, but she can guess – she is not alone in this vacuum that Spyndle creates. There is a moment where she considers burning him, pouring lightning into his fire, splitting the earth beneath him. It is a terrible, savage jealousy, because she is a terrible, savage woman, she is poisonous, spoiled by the years.
But she does not. She can’t blame him.
But it is a waste of time, looking at him, it pulls seconds away that could be spent on this – whatever this is – and Spyndle’s voice purrs out.
That’s what ghosts do, she says, they come back.
They come back, and they haunt and leave you cold.
But Cordis is not cold, not in her proximity – she is warmed, heated by the sun reflecting off Spyndle’s skin.
“I missed you,” she says, a stupid platitude that doesn’t begin to articulate the exact pain that skitters in her bones whenever she’s not by her side, whenever her gaze is emptied of Spyndle’s gold body.
There were never words for them, for this, never words that could give it justice, give it rhyme or reason.
She forgives her for leaving. She always does.
But when Spyndle speaks to the boy – who is insignificant, can’t she see it? – Cordis’s skin flickers with lightning, for just a moment. She doesn’t breathe, for just a moment.
He doesn't speak because the words do not come to him as freely as they pass from one feminine voice to another. He does not speak because part of him is unsure of the tangibility of this meeting, was any of it ever real? A wordless, motionless being he becomes in their presence and he does not begrudge her the closeness of the other, for he would not pretend to be untouched by the love of someone else.
Always he said, and always he meant though as the days and months passed he no longer knew how close always was, nor how long. Once he thought that always meant forever, that always meant today yet he had been shown otherwise. Sometimes always meant tomorrow, sometimes it meant never and even still, sometimes always was goodbye. He wouldn’t say it though, he never did, not one single time when they had turned and left him alone and wanting. Goodbye was too indefinite and concrete. And why should he say it when he was already suffocating at their departure on the air he had not spent?
When she speaks she could break him, send his body buckling inward with the damage her voice inflicts and part of him wants her to- if it is easier.
You’re different, she calls and he knows he is. He knows that the Chamber has changed him, has made and unmade him thousands of countless times and mostly without his knowledge or consent. He knows that he burns now, burns unlike the silver woman that speaks between them, that flashes with the light of the sky as he finds his voice. The other smells like the world, like light everlasting and electricity. She smells like he doesn’t want to know her scent but as with trainwrecks go he simply can not look away, it draws and calls him all the same.
Finally the words fall heavy from his charcoal lips, “You are the same.”
Because when she closes her eyes she can almost see the edges blur as she moves to touch them; they melt against the warmth of her skin, warping, twisting, until they’re nearly unrecognizable.
She wants to touch more than just edges.
She wants to reach her palms out against the spaces between their bodies and feel silver skin against her own, but Cordis blurs and warps like edges, too.
‘I missed you,’ she says, a ship in the night.
And Spyndle says nothing, because she would so easily destroy them for something as useless as being right.
Even though she remembers touching her for the first time, and how it felt like lightening hitting water – how it had felt like she could measure the length of it, even if electricity wasn’t tangible, because her current spilt across the surface of her skin and she’d felt her body drawn into quarters.
“I miss seeing you,” she finally answers – “apart from everything else.”
Because once she looked at her without remembering.
Because once she looked at her and thought she was beautiful instead of painful.
Because once she’d felt like instinct.
Once she’d felt like poems and physics, like gravity, and now all that she feels like are handfuls of sand – because she can’t be held, because Spyndle can’t keep her from falling through the cracks of her fingers.
And these seconds are almost dream.
She hears the breath catch in her lungs. She sees the lightening on her skin.
To love her, Spyndle thinks, is to love your own destruction. To love her is to walk in silence toward the flames of a silver alter and lay down across them – to burn, and say, ‘thank you’ – and once those flames have burnt to cinder and ash, to love her is to pour gasoline across the coals and ask for more.
…
‘You are the same,’ he says.
“I wish I weren’t,” she answers, meaning it – not knowing how it’s possible to stay the same when she’s been torn apart and sewn back together as many times as this.
Can he follow the seams of her?
Do they spell out her truths like braille across her hips?
Because she wishes that she were different.
Because she wishes that he found her – that he’d never let her go the day the ravens were hungry for their eyes.
‘I’m less trapped with them closed,’ he’d said once with his eyes shut. She closes her own eyes now. She doesn’t know that she loves him, but she knows that she could. She knows that in his bones exist something that she’s been searching for all of her existence – something that she’d found and lost so many times before this moment.
“I would have been yours. I would have been whatever you needed me to be, if you kept her away.”
Because he held the blackbirds back once, and she’d thought that maybe he was capable of more.
I miss seeing you apart from everything else, Spyndle says, and Cordis cringes. There is no unmaking the everything else.
“Someday,” she says, “I’ll learn how to build worlds. And then we can leave everything else.”
There is no undoing, but there is renewal, there is creation.
It would be easier, to exist in a vacuum, without the weight of all their experiences. And if she thought it would save them she would do it in a heartbeat, create a world for them somewhere, somehow.
(Ah, but she is not a god. Not yet. Maybe not ever. Even if Spyndle makes her feel like one.)
Instead they are both stained, dripping with all these experiences, history a thick and leaden tapestry on their backs.
Death and family and betrayal and leaving, always leaving.
(But always looking back. Always loving.)
(always always always)
She’d say the words enough that they become nonsensical, as language ultimately is. What’s left is a purer language – their bodies, near but not touching, two metals, lit by fire. What’s left is a queer dryness in her throat because she imagines this, every time she imagines this and every time she comes up short, she is unable to keep this, keep her.
(As if she was something that could be kept.)
Worse now, because her wickedness has floated to the surface like a corpse on a river, because she finds it a pleasure to burn, to strike with her lightning, and she’s told her as much, spit the words like venom because sometimes venom tastes like honey in the right moment.
(Love your own destruction, indeed.)
But it’s always (that word, again) been destructive, built on metaphors of shipwrecks and more natural disasters, and it’s perfect, in its own terrible way.
Love her like radiation, poison in your bones making you sick.
Love her like an apocalypse, burning every city down just so they might find a home.
Here’s another disaster: the way she speaks to the other man. A familiarly that excludes her and thus paints lighting on her skin because she is jealous, she is terribly jealous even though she has no right to be, Spyndle is no more hers than the water is.
She flayed him wide with the truth of it. Laid this revelation at his feet like it were a gift but he regarded it as though it was his very death, boxed and wrapped and presented to him with a bow.This then, this woman between them, this herald of the sky and the fire that split across it was his undoing was she? She was the ‘She’ that Spyndle had asked him to keep at bay, She was the unknown danger and with this knowledge his sooty skin crackled. His fire and Hers were different, very different and when he acknowledge the root of Her scent he knew that Hers was more and he was a mere mortal compared to Her plane of existence. Still he broiled for moments as he took it in, this information bestowed upon him heavy as the weight of his proverbial crown.
Again she meets his words (little that they are) with her own and is this what bends him most to her will? Is there power in what she speaks or how she speaks it? Is it nothing but words and the influence she holds merely that of his own making, of his own allowance? I wish I weren’t she says and his eyes fall solemn with her truths as he inhales them as deeply as he does her. For her they dim, darken until they are flat, as if she has snuffed the flame from them as she exhaled breath to make her tangled trap. Once he might have held her close, wrapped himself up with her in his wings of scale armor, once he might have kept the proximity of their bodies so entangled that none would be able to discern two from one. Now he burns because she isn’t finished breaking him, he doesn’t move because the pressure is far too much for retreat and because he rather revel in the misery it causes him- like it did so many days ago. He is still as his insides beg him to burn the She that stands between them, he is still as his mind warns against this, as his nose reveals it knows better and as he is torn in two inside.- on the outside he is motionless to their eyes.
Does he know better? He does.
Still, when she says she would have been his he remembers the promise, the offer to keep her safe. He remembers the way she fell into him, trusted him with his word, he remembers that she ran. She ran, left him alone in a circle of crows, was he still in debt to her then, did he still owe her his word? Killdare looked down, his eyes lost focus on the world around him. “Yes,” he whispered, assuring himself that they still meant something, that he still meant something. He was a King, he was the Chamber. Perhaps he could not offer her the romance that he once intended but he could keep her if she wanted him to. He could try to offer her the safety she sought, even if it was a safety short lived and made by the promises of a fool man. A man, he was nothing more.
“Come then, as you would have then. Come and I will keep you, She will keep you- if that is what you want.” It is not the silvered woman ‘She’ that he refers to now. It is the one and only true mistress that had ever held him, the only She that he felt they could ever hope to hold against him as unfaithful. In his heart he felt he had not spurned Dacia or Malis with the flesh of one another. If he were to be emblazoned with the scarlet letter then it would be because of the Chamber, and not matters of the physical, nor the carnal realm- this he had decided.
