"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
“Are you alone?”
She whispers this to herself. They are simple words, to outsiders, but to her, they are heralds, harbingers.
Are you alone, He asked as the stupid filly she once was nodded dumbly, followed Him down, down, down into the lair where He would spend years taking her apart.
Are you alone, asked a golden woman, wolf-bit, as the skittish, frightened mare she once was flickered with lightning and begged her not to come closer, not knowing in the years to come she would give anything just to touch her again.
Are you alone, Cordis asked the small boy, before she played the destroyer, before she let the lightning sing on his skin.
Are you alone, she whispers to herself, and the answer is as it has always been: yes.
She is alone and the ache inside her persists, the caved out emptiness of her. Spyndle had absconded with a part of her, intentional or not, and what’s left is a dangerous and empty woman, a woman rife with magic who does not know her own powers.
All she really knows is the lightning, and that she loves – her one constant, electricity and heat whispering across her silver skin.
She doesn’t know what else she can do, what else is possible from the magic bred into her. She doesn’t know, and perhaps this is fortunate.
The days and weeks and months pass and blur, time running at the edges like poetry on wet paper. She remembers the boy, the one she hurt.
(She hadn’t meant to. She is not a monster.)
(It was a pleasure to burn, but she won’t say it, not aloud.)
She thinks about them but doesn’t say their names. Naming things gives them power, she said once, long ago when romance was a promise in the smoke and they breathed the possibilities, when their story was still unwritten.
Now the story is written, ended, burnt – words gathered and thrown into brushfire, a golden back turned to her, and she is the one left alone with a heart that is dark and cannot always be trusted.
She sees a mare. She should walk past her, as she does so many of them. But something slows her. For a moment, she swore there was a sheen of gold about her, a curve of the neck that seemed familiar. But she comes closer and it all goes away, what’s left is a stranger. But still, she cannot shake the feeling, so she stops.
“Hello,” she says, and then, because fate demands the words, “are you alone?”
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
In the recent weeks, Ilka had taken to spending time away from the Gates, perhaps too much time. Her family had a penchant for drifting though, there was wanderlust in their blood. Makai was as nomadic as the birds, and it seemed like the only way to keep him in one place would be to break the wings on which he flew. As it were, in her short life, Ilka had known first the thick green jungle of the Amazon, and then the dark, gutted forests of the Chamber. Those places had been chosen for her, and when she was old enough to make her own choice, she had picked the Gates.
She had picked the kingdom that would later burn.
It was why she left so often lately. The stink of ash and soot choked her, the sight of that immense tree struggling to fight off the poison that had been knit so carefully into the roots below. Even she smelled of smoke now, of charred regret and unfulfilled desires. And it was worse that every time she saw Ledger, there was only hollow regret aching for her in those dark eyes. His shame made her feel dirty.
She paused and looked down at her chest, at the claw mark slashes placed sloppily across her heart. They had been deep, of course they had though. She and Ledger were only a stride apart when the change claimed him and confusion buried those enormous claws into the closest living creature. Her blood had stained the snow at their feet like tears, and when Ledger had finally been able to shift back he had hardly been able to look at her.
So when a voice pulls her from her quiet musings, it is relief she feels to find the sharp gaze of a stranger holding hers. She pauses a beat, and then, “I am alone.” She confirms with a quiet sigh and a slight nod of that dark, delicate head. “But it is my own fault.” It isn’t, not really, but guilt is a fickle beast. Her pale brown eyes drift to the silver, an impossible color, and the most beautiful one she has ever seen, and then back to a face that seems to wait for something. Uncertainly, she fills the silence with the soft of her quiet voice. “Are you alone?”
The woman carries with her a soft hint of smoke. Cordis inhales and shudders, she does not want to be reminded of burning, of the pleasure that lay inside it like a vein. She mustn’t think of it, must turn her eye and mind away from the smiling face of sin.
It is a pleasure to burn, yes, but she mustn’t.
She had been the one to instigate, to ask the question, but now, with the mare’s answers spoken and hanging heavy in the air, she is the one who is silent.
Silent, and thinking of smoke.
Silent, and wondering why the mare’s skin seems to shimmer gold, make the air around her quiver.
She is alone. They are both alone. The mare is black and white. Then she is gold. Somewhere, something is burning. There is a story here but it is one she is scared to tell.
Are you alone, replies the woman, mirroring the question.
“Yes,” she says. The answer is always the same when they ask it. The answer is already written in her ghost-filled eyes.
“It is my own fault, too,” she says. Another mirror. She is at fault. She did this, set every ball in motion that led to her lover gone, her son gone, her daughter – well, her daughter worse than gone, imprisoned.
(‘I think this will consume us,’ said Spyndle as their love went to twilight, and she was right – here she is, consumed, electricity stretched across her skin like a barb and her heart left poisoned.)
Once upon a time, when things were different – when there were still pieces of her heart, pieces not rotted, not cancerous – she called herself an Atlas with shaking knees, holding worlds on her back. Now she calls herself no such thing, the worlds have long tumbled off her shoulders, shattered at her heels. She knows the taste of destruction as well as she does the smell of her lover’s skin, and there’s a fine line between the two.
“Cordis,” she says. The mare looks gold again. She blinks and she is black and white. The air shimmers. The air smells like smoke.
Another blink, another wash of gold, like Midus’s breath coasting over the stranger.
(Is she a stranger?)
She almost looks familiar. She almost looks golden.
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
There is something nostalgic about this mare, something dangerous that sends her thoughts drifting back to ruinous homesickness and her thus far inability to find a place in this strange world. Maybe it’s the way silence seems to bleed from the silver on her skin, but it sets Ilka adrift, this quiet that swells to a crescendo between them. She thinks of Malis and her indigo secrets, of the way she and her sister were forced apart by the ghosts in those haunted green eyes. She thinks of the fire, of the Queen being taken, of Ledger’s claws buried in the flesh above her heart.
And when Cordis speaks and Ilka’s sad eyes flash back up to settle with some uncertainty in that aching silver, she can only offer one thing in response. “Maybe alone is good, though.” But even as the words form in her mouth and tip from her lips, she knows it to be a lie. Loneliness ate pitted holes out of Ilka’s heart. Alone was as bad as the ghosts in Malis’ eyes, the ghosts she thought she recognized in Cordis. “But I don’t like to be alone.” She says quieter now, her face as soft as the whisper of her tremulous voice.
Her ears flick forward at the sound of Cordis’ name – though it takes a heartbeat too long for her realize it for what it was. “Ilka,” she says quickly, quietly, “I’m Ilka.” She pauses again as her attention drifts back to that impossible silver. Malis had been brown before the indigo blossomed on her skin like a bloodstain, she wondered if Cordis had always been this way, the color of a cold star and just as distant. And then, with those pale brown eyes returning to hold her gaze, “What was?” She is silent for a beat before adding in a quiet whisper, “What was your fault?”
She’d told herself much the same thing – that solitude was best.
Alone means you cannot hurt the things you love, cannot lead them into the lion’s den (oh, she hadn’t meant to, had tried to stop it, tried). Alone means there are no children once pressed close then gone. Alone means there were no rivers, no hazel, no moments passed by a hundred times until finally the line was crossed and history laughed.
Yet she is alone and still things around her fall hurt. She was alone and there was a boy set afire because something wicked in her heart demanded it be so.
And for all the stories she tells herself sometimes she aches so deeply, so acutely, for things and times gone by that she feels she might cave in, a church collapsed, the prayers that once were scattered to the winds.
“I’ve tried to be alone,” she says. A rock, an island, but somehow there are always shipwrecks upon her shore and she cannot help but pick through the wreckage.
The mare says her name - Ilka - but over it echoes another name, one far more familiar: Spyndle.
The mare is gold, then black again, a trick of the light.
“I tried to be alone,” she says, repeating herself, “but there was someone. And we weren’t alone.”
She summaries the story, speaks a bullet point - there was someone. And we weren’t alone - because nowhere in her does she have the words to articulate the story that unfolded, the missed moments and the feeling of being an unstoppable force and immovable object both, of wrecking herself for this woman and loving every moment.
It is too much to tell a stranger. (Is she?)
“But she’s gone,” the last bullet point, the conclusion she never hoped to write but had been inevitable from the first moment that the sun hit the riverbank between them.
“She looked like you,” she says, almost pensively. She sees it now. The mare seems to shift before her eyes, seems to be increasingly gold. Her name sounds nothing like Spyndle’s but somehow it echoes in a way Cordis doesn’t understand.
Her bones tingle as magic crawls out like a parasite and gloms to the mare, but she doesn’t notice, she is too curious about why the mare is sometimes gold, why her name seems familiar when it shouldn’t.
Why suddenly, there is a river nearby where there once was not.
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)
Ilka considers this for a moment and her face changes, it darkens and drops and disappears within itself. Alone. And she can feel her heart stretch thin, so thin, until the skin rips and tears and crumbles to dust within the bone cage of her aching chest. “I don’t have to try.” She says, she confesses, and this truth will undo her. She thinks of Ledger and Shah and the purple stallion, she thinks of her children – how can it be that they are any part of her? But they are, and they are gone and she has only the memories, those twinges of heartache tangling in her chest, and the dark of her shadow nestled at her heels. Nothing else has been so permanent. She is not enough, will never be enough; she is the kind of broken that won’t and can’t and shouldn’t be fixed.
She inhales and the sound is ragged in her chest, like the wind rattling branches and loosing leaves from their moorings. Her eyes flash to Cordis and they are bright and sad and lonely and the brightest gold they have ever been, and she can feel that color spreading like poison. It bleeds into the black of her face until there is only gold, only bright, down her neck and across her sides until the only black left is that of the shadow perched unwavering beneath her. “Gold.” She says suddenly, quietly, a tremulous whisper torn from unwilling lips. “Gold?” She says again, more uncertain this time.
She blinks and the gold is gone, like her shadow has crept back over her skin because nothing should ever be so beautiful. “What’s wrong with me, Cordis?” She asks and it is the kind of question she doesn’t really want answered, the kind of answer she supposes does not exist. But the lonely in her asks anyway.
Her eyes close once more, long enough for seconds to bleed into years and eons, long enough for worlds to be born and die again, and only then do they open, that gold blooming like starlight in Cordis’ direction. And then those eyes slip beyond the silver mare, to a place that had moments before been a smooth slope of grass and wilted flower but was now, impossibly, a slash of cold water between two dirt banks. “Was that always there?” She breathes, just a whisper of fragile sound as she inches past Cordis to find her reflection.
ILKA
makai x oksana
this is so random and awkward i kind of just decided to time-leap around with the things that have been happening to her so i'm super sorry if it's terribly confusing D:
