So much has changed.
When everything she ever feared had come to pass – her lover gone, her daughter in His lair, living the same fate she’d once known – they had taken her heart with them, left only dark and bitter parts of her. The cancer inside of her was permitted to metastasize, to grow and spread into thoughts.
(“Do you want to know a secret?” she’d asked the boy, who had been too young, and then she had burned him, torched him, because it felt good and because he was helpless.)
She dresses in lightning, now, holds sway over it. She knows how to make it sit on her skin and not burn her. She knows other things, too, promises of a power within her, depths unplumbed – she can strike birds from the sky, can turn living things to ice and snow.
She makes herself untouchable, decrees it in lightning and fire, in silver skin set flame.
Yet.
Yet she looks upon her with so much hurt and wonder that she forgets she is a cancer, forgets she is a thing untouchable.
She looks at her and every defense she has is breeched, just as it’s always been, just as it always will be.
She looks at her and sees memories, sees atoms, sees all the things that made them – every sunset and goodbye and a name so sweet on her lips it hurts to say it.
Will you come back for me, she’d asked once, when the lightning was still something strange and new, when the blood was wet on her knees.
‘No,’ says the woman, and Cordis recalls how she once made a woman look like Spyndle, had lied to herself. She wonders if it’s the magic, changing a stranger to gold, drawing ghosts from thin air.
Ah, but there is no magic so powerful that it makes her heart quake in this way, there is no magic so powerful as to recreate the precise scent of her skin.
Memory has never done her justice.
“You’re lying,” she says, but she says it idly – it’s nothing new, they are often liars.
They say goodbye, and they are lying.
They say I can’t, and they are lying.
“I did sometimes wonder if I made you up,” she confesses, “but I always knew my imagination wasn’t vast enough.”
She couldn’t have created this, couldn’t have made her – she cannot speak life into poetry, into sunsets.
“I’ve missed you,” she says, finally, and she has – but the spaces carved out in her absence have been filled with lightning and cancers, and she doesn’t know how the two will coexist.
she said it was a mistake to let them burn her at the stake
Cordis
(and she learned a lesson back there in the flames)