She could be a legend, if the story came from the right mouth, was told the right way. Her story has torture in it, has a great and terrible love, has kidnapped daughters and other such things. But what her story also has is her own darkness – yes, she once wept over her lover’s body, once begged her to come back, begged while the lightning crashed all around them and then her lover did come back, reanimated. Yes, she did all this, but she also once burnt a seer alive because it was somehow the seer’s fault, something that had happened.
Yes, she once stood by helpless as He walked off with her daughter, wailed and gnashed her teeth at the loss of her. Yes, she did all this, but she also once burned a boy alive, left him hairless and scarred, because he made the fool’s mistake of trusting her, of letting her hold him close.
She is not a myth that deserves telling.
She lets him spill his logic, doesn’t tell him she is dangerous, that she is more storm than company. She lets him speak and tries to listen and tries not to track his heartbeat.
(She doesn’t know he’s a friend of Caw, the selfsame girl Cordis herself brought back, the one whose head she fills with tales of the monster and his terrible deeds, the monster she hopes the girl will someday destroy. Had she known this, would she have had different thoughts, had lightened hopes?)
He is close, too close, but she is confident in the lightning, confident in her ability over it. So she stands her grand while he peers at the way her skin acts as womb to the lightning storm.
“This? No. It feels good. It reminds me I’m strong,” she says, strangely honest to this boy without knowing exactly why.
The lightning doesn’t hurt – it’s just everything else that does.
I’ll touch you all and make damn sure
Cordis
that no one touches me