I miss seeing you apart from everything else, Spyndle says, and Cordis cringes. There is no unmaking the everything else.
“Someday,” she says, “I’ll learn how to build worlds. And then we can leave everything else.”
There is no undoing, but there is renewal, there is creation.
It would be easier, to exist in a vacuum, without the weight of all their experiences. And if she thought it would save them she would do it in a heartbeat, create a world for them somewhere, somehow.
(Ah, but she is not a god. Not yet. Maybe not ever. Even if Spyndle makes her feel like one.)
Instead they are both stained, dripping with all these experiences, history a thick and leaden tapestry on their backs.
Death and family and betrayal and leaving, always leaving.
(But always looking back. Always loving.)
(always always always)
She’d say the words enough that they become nonsensical, as language ultimately is. What’s left is a purer language – their bodies, near but not touching, two metals, lit by fire. What’s left is a queer dryness in her throat because she imagines this, every time she imagines this and every time she comes up short, she is unable to keep this, keep her.
(As if she was something that could be kept.)
Worse now, because her wickedness has floated to the surface like a corpse on a river, because she finds it a pleasure to burn, to strike with her lightning, and she’s told her as much, spit the words like venom because sometimes venom tastes like honey in the right moment.
(Love your own destruction, indeed.)
But it’s always (that word, again) been destructive, built on metaphors of shipwrecks and more natural disasters, and it’s perfect, in its own terrible way.
Love her like radiation, poison in your bones making you sick.
Love her like an apocalypse, burning every city down just so they might find a home.
Here’s another disaster: the way she speaks to the other man. A familiarly that excludes her and thus paints lighting on her skin because she is jealous, she is terribly jealous even though she has no right to be, Spyndle is no more hers than the water is.
I’ll touch you all and make damn sure
Cordis
that no one touches me