There is a part of her that looks at death like it could be a lover.
How else could she look upon it? For grief wells in her like blood, filling every vein and organ. Grief has even drowned the fear inside her, so she walks now, instead of runs. Her magic is gone, stripped, but so is everything else so why should this be any different?
She should be used to losing her. She knows the pattern, the cycle they crafted for themselves over the years. Leaving, returning, leaving, returning. Always coming back. Always hollering her home.
And of course some stubborn part of her wants to believe it still, even as that other heart beats inside her, joined.
Her existence is impossible unimaginable.
(Don’t say the word.)
She’s dried off, since wandering in the river, though she still feels liquefied. Like her limbs are loose and strange, ghost-things attached to her and moving on their own accord. She feels like a ghost, herself, disassociated and not-there. Her throat aches, like she’s spent days screaming. And maybe she has. She doesn’t know how much time may have passed, for time does not exist in such a dark place.
The meadow looks unchanged, and it seems impossible ridiculous, that the meadow should not have been rocked, that the world should not have been rocked.
But it’s the same. The same grass, the same sun, the same shifting throngs of horses.
The same rivers.
She moves, mechanical, staring out with a glazed expression. She is rocked, she is made stupid in grief.
She is alone.
I’ll touch you all and make damn sure
Cordis
that no one touches me