there's something beautiful and tragic in the fallout; any

[Cordis]

It had been her security, the lightning. She dressed herself in it, turned her molten silver coat into a thing alive, a thing crackling and bright, her own electric fence, a silent, screaming warning: danger.
For she has never liked others in her proximity, she recalls too vividly the things He had done, the way He had flayed skin and cracked bone, had drank her own marrow in front of her. How He had pressed against her, whispered stories in her ear, stories of the cities He burned and the earth He’d sown with salt.
(One exception glares bright – the mare, the one like gold, who had broken down every defense, who had shone like an angel there in the river, the mare she would move heaven and earth for, the mare she would – did – kill for. The mare who is gone, again.)

So when he approaches she tenses, but his body is distracted, and though he speaks to her, he barely seems to actually see her -- and she finds this a great relief, for she does not like to be noticed, she likes to run, she likes to be alone and clothed in lightning, a woman untouchable.
(A woman touched too many times to ever be touched again.)
She does not run from him, though the thought crosses her mind. Instead, she listens.
I’ve lost someone, he says, and she knows the feeling. Oh, she knows it so well.
“Who?” she asks. As if she would know them – she knows so few, here, despite the years she has dwelled.
But she stays. She stays, because she, too, has lost someone.

I’ll touch you all and make damn sure

Cordis

that no one touches me