you take the things you love and you tear them apart; ilka

[Cordis]

“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