She was made, once, in the simple way that biological creatures come into being. Sperm and egg meet, fertilize, and a child comes into the world (that her creation was helped along by magic – that she sprung from a temporary, magic womb, her father acting as her mother – is irrelevant). The creature made there was a small girl named Mahala, a mousy brown.
She was made, again, in a lair full of sulfur and shadow. She had been made and unmade, in His lair, the skin stripped from her bones and grown back, her body set aflame, body frozen, torn apart by hellhounds. All this, and more, some things she doesn’t think of because she buries memories so far down she might crumble if they ever saw the light of day. The creature made there was a fearful girl, with a jitterbug heartbeat, the kind of girl who says you can’t, you can’t, which told them that someone once could.
She was made again by a woman. In a river, in hazel, in a thousand moments made of held breaths and love growing like a virus in her bones, unable to stop it. The creature made there was a strange one, who loved and lost on repeat, in cycles, but never stopped loving her.
But the things we make are impermanent, and crumble.
Now she is made of all that and more. Now she is a magician, dressed in lightning. She is a sword honed on a whetstone, sparks flying to reveal a sharpened edge.
(She is all sharp edges.)
Now she makes herself untouchable even as she touches them.
She doesn’t want to, but she remembers the boy.
She remembers how he had felt, close to her. The aching purity in his voice.
(The way lightning had sounded as it ate into flesh.)
She was sorry. Wasn’t she? Surely.
Just because a sword is sharpened does not mean it aches to cut.
She wonders if he survived. She isn’t sure how badly she had burned him.
Do you want to know a secret? she’d asked him, like it was a game, just as He had once asked her.
She almost doesn’t recognize him.
What she remembers is a boy, weak, frail and impossibly stupid as he pressed against her and believed sugar-spun lies. What stands before her is more thing than horse, burnt and scarred like it had crawled from a nightmare.
Ah, but the eyes are the same.
He says her name, and she wants to cringe. He’d thought her kind, once.
“Raelynx,” she says, unsure if she should stay or flee, unsure what of him is her doing and what is not.
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)