the cinders are falling like snow; raelynx

[Cordis]

It is a pleasure to burn, she thinks. She remembers Him saying these words, murmuring them into her ears with His rough-hewn voice. It is a pleasure to burn, and it is a thing she knows – has known, now, for longer than she cares to admit. He infected her, a virus, and He lives still in her blood, her bones, in the phrase: it is a pleasure to burn. She recalls the wayfarer, the black stallion whose name she never knew. She’d encountered him on the outskirts of Beqanna, years and years ago, before Spyndle, before any of it. She had burned him and she had not meant to, had not even known such things were inside her, but hadn’t it been a pleasure, even as such a new, unknown thing? He meets her gaze, and it should stop her. The innocence, the blinding stupidity, isn’t it a mirror of how her own eyes must have looked, to Him? But this is not what runs through her mind. Hurt people hurt people, the saying goes, and oh, she is so incredibly hurt. Her skin flickers, the lightning racing across her. She is glowing, alight with it, and the rightness of it – of touching the power, the electricity that’s always there but so rarely tapped – is glorious and calming and right. Her skin flickers and lighting shoots out, a bolt of it, goes into the boy. And another. Another. She does not kill him. At least, she thinks she doesn’t. If she does, one bolt kills and one bolt brings back. She feels his bones through the lightning, it acts as a strange hand, strange fingers tracing scapulae and skull. It’s intimate, in a strange way. Something is burning. She wonders if it’s him, or if it’s the foliage around them. She is alive in a way she has not been in years, not since she laid in the meadow with Spyndle and their children and the hope that, somehow, things would work out. (They didn’t. They never do.) The lightning storm stops, gives out, and he is alive though she cannot ascertain his condition because the horror of what she has done – how like Him she just might be – washes over her, a tsunamic epiphany, so she turns, and, without a word, she does what she’s done for years: she runs. 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