here is the repeated image of a lover destroyed
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She is not a monster.
She had not meant to hurt the boy.
Surely, she had not. Yes, it had been – it was – a pleasure to burn, but she is not so base as He is. She is no monster, no sadist – things as broken as she cannot be sadists, surely?
(Things as broken as she cannot take pleasure in the way the boy’s skin charred, in the way his nerves lit up like matchsticks.)
It had been a mistake, a slip. It was not a pattern. Patterns mean repetition. She won’t do it again. She doesn’t want to do it again.
(Oh, doesn’t she?)
She is not a monster.
She is not bloodstained (the boy had not bled, after all, only burnt) but she feels that way, like she is marked in a way for them all to see, a scarlet letter drawn across her chest, a proclamation that there is something wild and dark inside her. That the girl who once lay quivering in His lair has since grown fangs.
She feels overly self-conscious, overly aware of how her skin is hot with electricity, how her body aches to run, to burn.
She is a magician in her nascence, realizing there is so much more to her than just the lightning, things both great and terrible.
She is not a monster.
No, but the things that kept her mortal – her lover, her children – are things gone, lost or stolen from her, and she is alone. She is alone with her terrible thoughts and terrible powers, both growing inside her, cancerous, and she wonders if they will overwhelm her, if she will wake up one day and find the loneliness and the powers overflowing, and what will happen then.
She is not a monster.
Ah, but gaze too long into the abyss and the abyss the also gazes back into you.
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
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