here is the repeated image of a lover destroyed
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It is both strange and dangerous, to be so empty.
She is empty because the years have carved out parts of her – He took her childhood, perhaps even her humanity. Spyndle took her heart, her love, broke every rib in her ribcage on the way to pulling it out (metaphorically, though she wishes she spoke literally, she would have given her everything in her body). Perse took her heart too, in a different way, a different love, the way mothers love their children.
All that is left of her now are the poisoned parts, the dark and rotting cancers within her that no one wanted to reclaim. All that’s left of her emptied shell is a virulent darkness that scars even her.
She was wicked to the boy, a monster, and she knows that. She knows there was pleasure in the way she burnt him.
She knows it was wrong.
She knows she enjoyed it.
She is a rare and dangerous thing in Beqanna – a magician in her nascence. She does not know what brews beneath her, she knows only of the lightning, knows she is a silver color like molten steel.
(She gleams and hurts the eye, but when she was with her gold girl, it had been electrum, had been alchemy.)
The lightning once came in bursts, like a temper. Now it remains, a steady undercurrent. She electrifies herself like a fence, guards herself against being touched. She likes the low buzzing noise, like static. It drowns thoughts. Sometimes. Not always. Thoughts slip in, they always do. Their faces, their names.
The boy’s screams.
She doesn’t focus on this. She focuses on the lightning. The buzzing. The heat, the kind that should burn her but instead feels warm, like an embrace.
She is so focused on not thinking that she doesn’t see the girl until she’s almost upon her. The girl is a bit odd looking, black with a shock of white mane and tail. For a moment she reminds her, achingly, of her first daughter, the dark girl with silver hair.
“Hello,” she says, and she must be a terrible sight, silver and buzzing electric, a woman made empty save for the darkest parts of her.
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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