Cordis doesn’t quite know what to do with herself.
That old adage - time heals all wounds - is disgustingly true, she supposes. As many times as she’s picked her wounds, made them bleed over and over and over again, they scab and heal and when she picks again, there’s a little less raw flesh than the time before. The pain of it just a little less sharp.
That, of course, is terrifying in its own way. The pain trickles away in agonizing slowness, but so too do the memories. She remembers Spyndle – god, of course she does – but everything is softer, blurring, and small things escape her. She is less and less sure what is memory and what is the memory of a memory, a thing replayed so much that she cannot be sure it happened at all or if it’s since become purely part of her imagination.
She is past mourning. Past the sharpest part of it, at least. She isn’t sure when it happened, which is terrifying in its own way. She did not wake up one day healed, she was simply moving and she realized that somewhere along the way grief had stopped stabbing her every motion.
It’s a strange feeling. She is lighter and heavier at once. She doesn’t know what to do with the time that’s opened before her, what to do without wounds to claw open.
She experiments with her magic in a way she has never done before. She changed landscapes and never mind if they shift back in a day or so. She shifts into monsters. She freezes a bolt of lightning and walks up to its endpoint and looks at the storm-ridden world below.
She still doesn’t quite know who she is, in this new, emergent form. But she knows that whatever or whoever she is, she is powerful.
And so she returns. Back to her homeland, to the familiar yet not-familiar land. Things have changed – so has she.
Besides, the meadow is there, and it is familiar enough. So to the meadow she goes, a silver woman with lightning crackling across her skin and something almost like a smile on her lips.
I’ll touch you all and make damn sure
Cordis
that no one touches me