the cinders are falling like snow; raelynx

[Cordis]

She realizes her mistake too late, and her throat tightens – all of her tightens, a bowstring drawn tight. Yes, he says, stupidly normal, just as the mousy brown foal had once been. (“Are you alone?” He asks and she shakes from cold and says yes and it is a question she will replay in her mind a hundred times, a thousand, because she wonders, in the way we all wonder on our worst decisions, if things would have been different if she had lied, had said yes. She wonders if He, like a vampire, needed to be invited in.) (“Are you alone?” Spyndle asks, years and years ago when they were both wild things, hearts undomesticated by the beautiful chains and shackles of each other. Cordis stops running from her. Spyndle stops offering herself to the wolves for her, although there are entirely different wolves waiting for her, for both of them. “Are you alone?” Spyndle asks and Cordis shakes from fear and says yes and it is a question she will replay in her mind a hundred times, a thousand, because she wonders, in the way we all wonder on our best decisions, if things would have been different if she’d lied and said yes.) A thing she learned, in time: it was a pleasure to burn, to make them pay for their sins, real or imagined. It was a pleasure to burn, and perhaps she caught a sickness there, a cancer – His radiation. She touches him, softly. Like a mother might. She can feel the electricity under her skin. She touches him. She tries to ground herself. She tries. (It was a pleasure to burn.) “I could stay with you,” she says. She doesn’t know what it is about the boy, the way something about him begs to be broken (burnt) but she remains there, touching him like a mother might, thinking of how she was once alone, thinking of the lightning in her skin, of what it might sound like hitting flesh. She tries to shake the thought. He has done nothing to her. He is alone and adrift and she is not a monster. Isn’t she? He is alone and she can hear his heart beating and a part of her knows she could tear it out of his chest before he even knew what happened. He is alone and so is she, but she has been alone ever so much longer. c o r d i s she said it was a mistake to let them burn her at the stake and she learned a lesson back there in the flames