She’d been a girl alone once, too.
A stupid girl (she’d been mousy brown then, plain) who was left alone – not by choice but by circumstance. She’d gone to sleep next to her father, the fever-heat fo him keeping her warm, but when she woke, his skin had been cool, almost cold.
So she had walked. The stupid girl had walked and when He came, and asked the fateful question,
(are you alone?)
the girl had said yes.
She’d been a girl alone once, in a filthy pit that stank of sweat and sulfur and something else, something less tangible – the precise nature of fear is acrid in the nostrils, but does not have many discernable notes.
He left her alone, often. Enough times for her to starve. Enough times for her to wish and pray for this death to be the last.
(She was denied, every time. In a dark god’s lair, prayers are made a laughingstock.)
She’d been a girl alone once, who ran and ran and ran until she thought her heart would burst from her chest then ran some more, because the chuffing of hellhounds never seemed to cease.
To that girl came a mare, gold like sunbeams made alive. With the mare came many things, came rivers and hazel and the commitment to a life of moments and pieces.
Now she is still alone, but the way the lightning crackles on her skin feels like an embrace and so she lets it be. She walks tall, and although there are ghosts in her eyes, there is something else, too – a spark that mirrors the lightning singing in her skin, the promise of something dark.
(Stare too long into the abyss and it stares back into you, and Cordis is a woman who spent years staring into one abyss after another.)
Above her flies a raven, a mangled thing that is half-ice and half-lightning. It is a remnant from her interaction with the raven queen, a dark and treacherous woman who turned from bird to queen and had not cried out when the birds fell at her feet.
It shouldn’t fly; but then, Cordis should not be alive.
She is crafted from a long line of impossibilities, and the raven is simply another checkmark.
She sees the girl, the red of her like a streak of blood in the forest. A little shimmer crosses over her, and for a moment Cordis thinks she blinked her out of existence, and then she is back again, solid.
Curious.
The lightning crackles on her skin like radio static as she walks forward. She isn’t sure what it is about the girl, only that something about her draws Cordis’s weakness.
(Perhaps the same way wolves smell sickness on a caribou.)
“Hello,” she says to the girl. Her voice is soft. She wonders if she has always sounded so wicked.
“Are you alone?”
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)