She is so full of emptiness it’s a wonder she exists at all. For she is more emptiness than not, a creature built on missing – on missing her, on missing the lightning, on missing a life that never quite came into being she way she’d distantly thought it might.
These absences are like holes inside her – black holes, opening and swallowing everything up until she is dark and soundless and impossible.
(oh, that word, that word)
There was fear, at first, when the earth shook beneath their feet and all the powers were taken, reabsorbed/ Fear that He would find her defenseless, would choose to return her to His lair. But those fears never saw fruition, and before long they were replaced with something else, with a grief too huge and terrible to comprehend, a grief that muted all else had come home to roost within her.
A love story turned shipwreck.
She sees the girl afire, the flames tapering into wings. It’s a strange sight, and one that stirs a kind of homesickness in her. She had not liked fire, herself (fire was one of His favorite tools, she’d been burned alive more times than she cared to count), but she had liked lightning, had encircled herself in it like barbed wire, a visual warning: do not come close.
She does not like closeness, and the exception – her exception – is dead and gone.
The girl is close enough that Cordis imagines she can feel heat on her cheeks and her stomach roils at the sensation. She considers leaving, turning away, giving the girl a wide berth but something stops her, holds her like an anchor to this spot.
“Are you all right?” she asks, dumbly, unsure of what else to say – unsure if the girl controls the fire or it her.
(She’d felt the same way about the lightning, once.)
I’ll touch you all and make damn sure
Cordis
that no one touches me