11-24-2015, 12:02 PM
 i wanted darkness— i wanted him. The broken mare shouldn’t have mattered. None of them should matter, save for Him. Her thoughts should not wander, because she is devoted, she is branded. And if her dreams are sometimes scattered with memories of broken skin and cracked fissures, what of it? They are only dreams, after all. I pray you find it, she’d said, their parting words, and the mare had gone. And it shouldn’t matter. (She still doesn’t know if she meant it. She doesn’t know what she meant.) But time passes. Perse wanders the meadow. No one else interests her, though she does see some who bear His mark (different on everyone, yet somehow universally recognizable to the educated eye). None of them so broken as Joscelin, though. None of them so intriguing, either. Still. She does not expect to hear her name breathed out. She is a stranger in a strange land, and she likes it like that, likes her name a secret. But Joscelin knows. She knows other secrets, too. She sees her and the feeling in her stomach is strange – a kind of relief, an exhale to a breath she didn’t know she was holding. “Joscelin,” she says, and the name feels familiar, a queer rightness to it she does not want to examine too closely. The mare calls her beautiful, and she wonders if the words fit – she is not beautiful as she was for Him, but maybe she can be beautiful in others ways. Perish the thought. Instead, she says “so do you.” Instead, she touches the cracks on her body like it is a map to somewhere she is scared to go. ------------------------------cordis x spyndle |