Sometimes she feels like a spirit; like a ghost. She’s died enough to be one, all those deaths at His proverbial hands, every bone broken and reset, skin stripped and remade. Such is the terrible power of magic that she was allowed to die and come back, over and over again.
She is haunting and haunted both, her eyes are full of ghosts. A terrible thing.
She sometimes thinks of dying – more, now – but she fought too damn hard and long to escape, to live, that even now, wracked with misery as she is, she couldn’t stomach it. She lives, even if she does not know what she lives for, for she is alone here. Spyndle is gone and her children are scattered to winds, lost to her. Not that she blames them, she was never much of a mother.
(One child left of her own accord. One taken. One lost to space and time.)
Her throat is tight as she walks the river’s side and when she hears the noise of the other mare she startles, and her lightning crackles, for a moment she is encased completely in brilliance, a star fallen.
But then she breathes – she settles – and the lightning settles back into her skin, a low crackle of electricity.
The girl is striking in her own way, and she stares at Cordis with wide eyes, and she wonders, briefly, what she must look like to an outsider. A silver woman dressed in lightning, walking the river with muscles wound tight as springs.
Haunting and haunted.
She dips her head in a slight greeting, watching her.
“Hello,” she says.
I’ll touch you all and make damn sure
Cordis
that no one touches me