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

[Cordis]

The woman carries with her a soft hint of smoke. Cordis inhales and shudders, she does not want to be reminded of burning, of the pleasure that lay inside it like a vein. She mustn’t think of it, must turn her eye and mind away from the smiling face of sin. It is a pleasure to burn, yes, but she mustn’t. She had been the one to instigate, to ask the question, but now, with the mare’s answers spoken and hanging heavy in the air, she is the one who is silent. Silent, and thinking of smoke. Silent, and wondering why the mare’s skin seems to shimmer gold, make the air around her quiver. She is alone. They are both alone. The mare is black and white. Then she is gold. Somewhere, something is burning. There is a story here but it is one she is scared to tell. Are you alone, replies the woman, mirroring the question. “Yes,” she says. The answer is always the same when they ask it. The answer is already written in her ghost-filled eyes. “It is my own fault, too,” she says. Another mirror. She is at fault. She did this, set every ball in motion that led to her lover gone, her son gone, her daughter – well, her daughter worse than gone, imprisoned. (‘I think this will consume us,’ said Spyndle as their love went to twilight, and she was right – here she is, consumed, electricity stretched across her skin like a barb and her heart left poisoned.) Once upon a time, when things were different – when there were still pieces of her heart, pieces not rotted, not cancerous – she called herself an Atlas with shaking knees, holding worlds on her back. Now she calls herself no such thing, the worlds have long tumbled off her shoulders, shattered at her heels. She knows the taste of destruction as well as she does the smell of her lover’s skin, and there’s a fine line between the two. “Cordis,” she says. The mare looks gold again. She blinks and she is black and white. The air shimmers. The air smells like smoke. Another blink, another wash of gold, like Midus’s breath coasting over the stranger. (Is she a stranger?) She almost looks familiar. She almost looks golden. 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