"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
She is not meant for motherhood.
What fruit has spilled from her loins has turned – Ka, to nothingness (she thinks of her, her silver-maned daughter who grew up too fast and left without looking back), Electrum, lost to her (he drifts in and out of space in ways she cannot wrap her mind around), and Perse, to Him.
(She prays Perse is dead, and prays forgiveness to forsaken gods for thinking such things. It is blasphemy to want her dead and it is blasphemy to hope she survives the hellhole that is His lair.)
Indeed, it seems love sours at her touch, curdles. She spent too long painted in ash and screaming her throat dry, too long with the sounds of hellhounds at her heels, that she is impossible to love.
(Someone did it once but we can’t say her name, there’s too much there, the name is an incantation, a spell to drive her mad.)
(‘Naming things gives them power,’ she said once, speaking of Him. In truth, she had just been too afraid. In truth, the gold woman who took her heart has all the power Cordis can give. She is still afraid. )
She swears celibacy and it is easy when she lets no one touch her. She lets herself grow fierce. She has always reflected the sun, silver-bright like a sword. Sometimes the lightning crackles across her skin like a shudder and her hair raises on end. She likes it. She waits for the thunder that never comes.
All around her the children are brought forth into the world. She can smell it in the air, the fecundity of their births. She dwells on her own children, lost. She shakes her head. She tries to forget their names.
She is a woman long past redemption.
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
i love the way that your heart breaks with every injustice and deadly fate
The fruit of a thousand loins spill across the land. Great, lumbering beasts that trample the earth and live their lives. Some are kind, faithful, good, a service to the land they live upon. Some are not. Some are like him. Loosed upon the land with strange concepts and stranger convictions. Perhaps they should not have been born, those set loose to destroy. But they are, and they will live, remaking this land until it is there’s.
He stumbles into the meadow that day. Unaware and oblivious, he pays little attention to where he wanders. He has never needed to. The land has been his home, and he goes where the land takes him. There is little thought as to what part of the land it might be, who it might belong to. Of this, he has little concept of yet. And even had he, there is little doubt that simply would not care. So he walks, spindly black legs carrying him through the long, swaying grasses of early summer.
He walks until he is suddenly blinded. His gray eyes squint against the sudden brightness, his bland gaze searching for that which had shone so. Most would glance away from the pain of the brilliant reflection, but not he. Oh, most definitely not he. It would not be far off to say that he basks in the discomfort, seeking out that which hurt him. The flash suddenly is gone as a body shifts, and he sees her there: the silver bright mare that had blinded him so.
He approaches her then, a fly drawn into the alluring light. The fly does not know that the light will zap him and he will die. The fly does not care. Neither does he. He approaches, no knowledge of this mare. Of who she is, of what she could do. And still he approaches.
He does not say a word as he steps close. He merely looks at her, gray eyes large and placid. He is intrigued, but he does not say it. He is delighted, but he does not show it. She, unknowingly wielding her bright skin like a weapon, is just what he is looking for.
Perhaps it should have been foreseen, with her own queer becoming – she was born from a magicked womb to a father who lay dying. Her only memory of him is a fever-warmth, a smoky exhale of breath, a night growing cold.
(Come morning, he was dead. Come morning, she set off and met Him.
‘Are you alone?’ He asked, a smile peeled across his face, and she, too stupid to know any better, replied the word that begun it all: ‘yes.’)
Perhaps it should have been foreseen that whatever fruit she would bear would be damned, poisoned.
She sees the boy from the corner of her eye – a young boy, moving towards her with a strange resolution to his gait. She moves to face him, head high, neck taut (she is not good with strangers, whether they are foals or full-grown, for strangers have never been good to her).
She exhales once, sharp, watches him. He is placid, quiet. He is not a threat. She finds herself noticing things, like the fragility of him, the smallness.
“Are you alone?” she asks, an echo of words once said before, and she is in a daze, does not realize how history has written itself across her lips.
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
08-17-2015, 06:43 PM (This post was last modified: 08-18-2015, 10:15 PM by Raelynx.)
i love the way that your heart breaks with every injustice and deadly fate
He is as normal as she is not. You would be hard pressed to find one of more ignoble birth than he. In that respect, he takes after his mother. The one who had borne him, given him life. The one he had left and never looked back at. He looks like her though, even as a scraggly, scrawny youth. His frame promises height and musculature, a thick mane and tail, and feathery legs. So very much like his unremarkable birth mother. With his solid black frame covered in tufts of baby soft fur, his dull gray eyes, his dark mane falling in unkempt clusters along his lean neck, his black puff of a tail swatting at his haunches, he is nothing remarkable either.
He regards her with those mild eyes, staring at her with an unnerving, unblinking gaze. She is stiff, eyeing him with undisguised discomfort. He basks in that discomfort. But it does not last. In response to his quiet mien, his lack of words, of pressure, she breathes. A sudden breath of release. His delicate, downy soft ears tip forward, gray eyes unchanging. And then she asks him a question.
Are you alone? He doesn’t recognize the significance of those words. Even if he had, his answer would not change. Because he is alone. For her, he was always meant to be alone.
”Yes,” he says. An unwitting, unintentional echo. Yes, he is alone.
She realizes her mistake too late, and her throat tightens – all of her tightens, a bowstring drawn tight. Yes, he says, stupidly normal, just as the mousy brown foal had once been.
(“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?” Spyndle 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.)
A thing she learned, in time: it was a pleasure to burn, to make them pay for their sins, real or imagined. It was a pleasure to burn, and perhaps she caught a sickness there, a cancer – His radiation.
She touches him, softly. Like a mother might.
She can feel the electricity under her skin. She touches him. She tries to ground herself. She tries.
(It was a pleasure to burn.)
“I could stay with you,” she says. She doesn’t know what it is about the boy, the way something about him begs to be broken
(burnt)
but she remains there, touching him like a mother might, thinking of how she was once alone, thinking of the lightning in her skin, of what it might sound like hitting flesh.
She tries to shake the thought. He has done nothing to her. He is alone and adrift and she is not a monster.
Isn’t she?
He is alone and she can hear his heart beating and a part of her knows she could tear it out of his chest before he even knew what happened.
He is alone and so is she, but she has been alone ever so much longer.
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
i love the way that your heart breaks with every injustice and deadly fate
He does not know how this scene has replayed itself, again and again. Does not know that the question, the answer, is always the same. And he certainly does not know what he has stumbled into, cannot possibly comprehend. But he is not afraid. Perhaps he is foolish for his lack of fear. He does not fear pain, nor the hollowness of death. He does not fear life, not the sharpness it brings. In the end, he is just a daft, fearless boy.
I could stay with you. Her voice rings in his ears, offering words he had not known he longed to hear until they whispered through him. And then she touches him, her silvery muzzle brushing his dull black skin. Her touch is excruciatingly exquisite, a touch designed to bring him to his knees. But his limbs do not buckle, his knobby knees locking into their upright stance. His entire body shudders, his skin rippling, her touch a pebble dropped into a pool. His gray eyes shutter, the dark lids dipping before widening in wonder. He stares at her, the dim light in his eyes changing, brightening, for the first time since he had glimpsed her from across the arid grasses of the meadow.
He cannot speak at first, the words catching thickly in his throat. The sweet agony of her touch still trembles through his body. When finally the words are forced past, they are whisper quiet. ”Yes… stay.”
His quiet gaze is unknowingly, unwillingly pleading. With his silent supplication, he offers her the only other thing he can think of, the only other words that will come to his lips: his name. ”I am Raelynx. “
She forgets that others are not so burdened with history as she is. She forget there are creatures who exist without worlds on their backs, Atlases with shaking knees. She is selfish, in this way, narcissistic, so deep in the trenches of her own pain, her own torments, that she forgets they don’t know the story.
(There are creatures who have not heard His laugh, great and terrible. There are creatures who do not know what it feels like to have every bone broken. To have your one greatest love say ‘I can’t’ and walk away.)
Her muzzle is still pressed against him. She has touches so few who were not her family, it is odd to cross such boundaries without even knowing his name, or giving hers.
But she is a different woman than she once was: she is alone, and it makes her reckless.
He tells her ‘yes, stay’ and stay she does, pressed to him. She hears his name, sounding muffled and distant above the throb of his heartbeat, but she registers it: Raelynx.
“I’m Cordis,” she says, so that he can name her, later, name her and give her power.
“I have a secret, Raelynx,” she says, finally lifting her head. She sounds like He did, back in the lair, but she realizes she can’t stop herself, she is gathering momentum, an unstoppable force with no immovable object to stop her.
“Do you want to know what it is?”
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
i love the way that your heart breaks with every injustice and deadly fate
He is a blank slate for her to write upon. He has no history, his future still wholly undecided. She would fill the tablet of his mind with her teachings, and he would let her. He would let her because she is the most real, the most solid thing he has ever encountered. Because she has so much to teach him. Because she has so much he wishes to learn.
They work together, a symbiosis, he the plover bird to her crocodile. He would risk everything to stay near her, to feel her touch scrape against raw skin. He would learn from her and he would grow. He would become her star pupil, the child (though he had not sprung from her loins) that she had made truly hers. He wants this with a fervency that is entirely new to him.
He hears her name whispered against his skin. He would remember it always, like a brand burned into his flesh. It is a name to be uttered in reverence. Far more than he is capable of.
“Cordis.” Her name escapes his lips on a ragged breath, croaked past a throat parched from pain and wonder. And then she removes her touch. He hadn’t realized until that moment how much that simple, light pressure had been holding him upon his feet. He sags then, nearly falling to his knees as he should have before. A faint hint of relief echoes through him, followed even more strongly by a sense of loss. He almost doesn’t hear her speak then, as lost as he is in ragged emotions.
His dull gray eyes lift then, fastening upon her as though she is a raft and he a drowning man. A secret, she says. She wants to tell him a secret. And in that moment, he wants nothing so much as to hear it.
”Yes,” he says, his voice stronger now, though no less hoarse.
She was once the slate, and what had been written upon her was decades of pain: His scriptures, writ in fire and fear, writ in bones broken and recast, flesh torn off in tatters. It’s a story still written in the ghastly look to her dark eyes, a story told in the brand on her hip, His symbol, the one that burns when He is close.
(It grew warm as a meteor descended upon earth, as rumors spilled of Him, dressed in stars, spawning a legion of children, a constellation of them. But He has let her be.)
She was once the slate, the blank paper, the empty canvas. And drawn across her were horrors, some recalled and some buried too deep, skeletons locked in a closet.
Now she is not so empty, she has His story, and other stories, too.
(The river is a story. The gold woman, the baptism, everything that came after. The love and loss and children and her touch, the consummation of a thing months – years – in the making. It is a story, a foundation, and it is one that hurts to tell for entirely different reasons.)
Now, she wields the pen, the paintbrush.
Now, her skin is silver and electricity thrums in her veins and she hears his heartbeat.
She realizes he trusts her and she wonders how anyone could be so stupid.
“I’m magic,” she says. She still doesn’t truly understand the extend of her powers. Mostly, she just knows the lightning – the flicker of electricity she can summon, how she can draw bolts from the sky, from her very self.
(She does not question how she’s survived everything that happened, or how she escaped the lair, never thought it magic. Sometimes, she is a terribly stupid girl.)
“Do you want to see what I can do?”
The lightning buzzes inside of her and she feels alive in a strange way, a dark and terrible hunger that has rotted her heart like a cancer. It is a pleasure to burn, coos the darkest part of her, and the lightning agrees.
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
i love the way that your heart breaks with every injustice and deadly fate
He is a stupid boy. He does not run when he should, does not plead for mercy even as his body shivers in remembered agony (not agony, pleasure. A pleasure so deep and primal it is easily mistaken for agony). He should be running. Any child (any horse) with an iota of intelligence would be fleeing as fast as their legs could carry them. But he is so incredibly stupid. He would stay long after his body gave out, not just because he could no longer move, but because he wants to stay, would give anything to simply be near enough for her to touch.
His heartbeat is fast within his chest, a physiological response to the stress his body had so recently endured. He can feel the rapid thumping of the frantic organ as easily as she can hear it. He ignores it, for it has no bearing upon what might happen next. That it could give out so easily never occurs to him. Death to him is as unintimidating as life.
I’m magic. The words ring with such force and honesty that the only option he has is to believe her. And he believes those words as he has believed little else in his life. She is Magic.
He can nearly feel the thrum of energy bursting through her, causing his skin to tingle and quiver. His gray eyes are murkier than usual as he drags his gaze with agonizing slowness up to hers. As he stares at her, he can only think that she wishes to show him, wishes to teach him. He is thrilled, awed, by this prospect. He really is a stupid, stupid boy.
