Strangers still cause her heart to stutter and leap in her chest. She is no longer the frightened, cringing girl who had first come to Beqanna, the girl who saw hellhounds baying at every corner, saw Him in every shadow, but some things are engrained, carved like symbols on her bones.
Because He was a stranger, once, too, a smiling gray god asking are you alone, and she, a stupidly naïve girl, a child wandering, had said yes and thus damned herself.
(Not that she would have been given a choice, had she said no, He would have taken what she instead gave. But she’s remembered that word, that yes, ever since and felt the way it tasted sour, like damnation, now.)
But this stranger is not a smiling gray god, it is a boy, half-grown with a scruff where mane will be and a thick accent to his voice. She does not smile, though lightning sparks on her skin, as if she is the sky itself, walking in thunderstorms.
(Her magic is a strange and unpredictable thing, but the lightning is a constant, it was the first piece of magic she created and she is certain it will be the last.)
“Hello,” she replies, then, “what are you doing out here alone?”
It’s not are you alone, but it’s close. She finds herself mimicking Him, sometimes, and it’s terrifying, this queer defiance, the way it changes. That maybe she’s not so far removed from Him as she likes to think, that inside her there is a dark and shadowy heart beating and waiting to spill blood, whether it’s hers or theirs.
I’ll touch you all and make damn sure
Cordis
that no one touches me