she learned a lesson back there in the flames; any

[Cordis]

Once, she had thought Him friendly. (All these years later and she doesn’t say His name. Naming things gives them power.) In her defense, she had been very young and very stupid – and very alone. A child wandering, parents dead or gone (the distinction never mattered), and He had been there. Asking are you alone. Yes, she’d said. (She’d wonder, years later, if the affirmation had been the final nail in the coffin. Not that He couldn’t have taken her anyway – she was just a child, and there was no lightning, then – but maybe the yes had invited Him in, somehow. As if He were a vampire.) And then, well – well. She is so different, now. Lighting and hard stares and hollowed out, she invites no friendliness into her life. And it doesn’t matter. She smiles politely at his advice. “I’ve never been good at separating the friendly from the not-so-friendly,” she says, “I missed that lesson, growing up.” She grew up in a lair, under His awful eye. She missed a lot of lessons. But learned things, too. How to die and come back. Again and again and again. Still – she stays. She lets him talk. And when he moves his head, motioning to more open spaces, she follows, albeit with healthy distance between them. “You’re strange, Leiland,” she says, but the words are kind, a compliment, “but I’ll follow.” c o r d i s I’ll touch you all and make damn sure that no one touches me

sorry for taking so long -_-