Of course, the legend she knows most about is Him – the dark god, thundering in his lair while she, small and mousey-brown (He had been before the silver, before the magic made itself known on her skin). He had told her tales, His own terrible deeds, tales of murder and mayhem and slated earth, forests burned down for the sake of seeing a flame.
(The ideas that seemed so wretched at the time almost have an appeal, now. Not that she would burn down a city, but maybe a house. Not a forest, but maybe a lone oak.)
She still does not speak his name for fear it will turn to ash in her mouth.
It will hurt me, he says.
“Yes,” she agrees. It would. If he touched her, she would hurt him, because it is her nature – her skin is sacrament and anyone who touches it is cursed by her lightning.
(Except, of course, for her. For Spyndle, Cordis would flay her own skin so she could kiss her very bones.)
She doesn’t invite him, but she doesn’t dissuade him, either. Don’t say he wasn’t warned.
But he is on to other questions, other desires – to become like her. Because he is a fool, he cannot see that under her hard eyes lies a hundred deaths and the cold flatness of heartbreak, he only sees the glamor of her walking thunderstorm. To him, she is something to desired, envied.
“I don’t know, exactly,” she said, “I escaped from…a place, and ran away. Someone else tried to hurt me and then…well, then this happened. And he didn’t hurt me again.”
She remembers that wayfarer with a dusty bitterness. It hadn’t been Him, had been a simple, stupid boy filled with fury and lust, who had taken her before she burned him alive, left her in the family way with a silver-maned daughter she hasn’t heard from in years.
Pain is a pathway, though, and that pain – the pain that blossomed outside of His lair (what happened there was beyond pain, beyond anything she had words for) – had paved a road for her, a road of rivers and gold mares, a road of lightning.
I’ll touch you all and make damn sure
Cordis
that no one touches me