here is the repeated image of a lover destroyed; glassheart

[Cordis]

They’d met at death’s door, once, perched on the threshold of it like some sick marriage. Spyndle, eviscerated and dying, children torn from her, His doing. She’d come in time, then, in time to kneel in the viscera, in time to plead, to strike lightning and life back into her. She’d lost the memories, after, and the woman Cordis so loved regarded her as a stranger. But it hadn’t mattered, because she was alive, and Cordis would be forgotten a hundred times if it meant pushing one more breath into her lungs, one more beat into her heart. The memories were restored, in time, the part of a deal Cordis never learned about, but she never forgot the way Spyndle had looked at her, polite but blank, a clock reset, and she’d wondered then – as she wonders now – how things might have played out if the circumstances were different. If it was another universe. Would they have found each other, fallen in love? Would they have been happier, less wrought by tragedy? She likes to think they will always find each other, across every timeline, every universe. She likes to believe in the idea of fates and fated, that there in an inevitability to them, but she would never know for sure. She shivers under the girl’s touch, and whether because it’s been years since she was touched or because there’s something else – an ember, a memory – in the contact, she doesn’t know. Against her neck, the girl murmurs - I think she’s here, I think she might be me. Cordis hisses through her teeth, as if the words burn (embers, again, a metaphor of fire to balance those rivers she loves so much). “Don’t….” she says – begs – but she doesn’t withdraw because there is such painful comfort in the girl’s touch, “you didn’t even know her name. You don’t know her. Us.” She says this as if it’s proof. As if the world isn’t full of wild, ridiculous things. c o r d i s I’ll touch you all and make damn sure that no one touches me