She knows, abstractly, that some of them love such horrors.
She knows this because she is older now, but also because sometimes He would bring them into the lair where He kept him trapped, and make her watch as he did things, committed sins upon them as they begged for more.
(What she doesn’t know is her own daughter is one of them, that her daughter sat splendid and silver in His lair and took everything He gave her with a smile on her face.)
It is strange and surreal, to stand before him again. She looks no different than she had all those years ago, except for now she wears as lightning as a constant thing, the way he wears his fire.
(Fitting, she supposes.)
She wears it to remind them – to remind herself – that she is untouchable.
She wears it because the crackle and hum of the lightning helps drown out the terrible cacophony of her thoughts.
You remember me, he says, and almost sounds surprised.
“Yes,” she says, “but I thought you might be dead.”
Maybe he is. The thing before her is so unlike the colt she once knew.
And then, the oddest thing – he thanks her. For what? She is a wicked woman, a woman who drew him close and burned him up, who had known in some secret part of her that she wanted it.
Her eyes widen and for a moment the lightning shudders on her skin as her concentration wanes.
“For what?” she asks, because she must know.
She meets his eyes then, because she feels she must. She meets his eyes, unsure of what she’ll see there – but then none of it matters, because she sees the brand on his forehead, and her heart quakes like earth on a faultline.
“You met Him.”
It is not a question.
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)