Brinly
The dark had felt safe, but she is sure she is one of the few that felt that way.
In the shadows, with the creatures and the beasts, she did not have to worry about anyone finding her because no fool would dare to venture that far into the wood. Not in an endless, moonless, starless night, with no light to leak through the canopy of the trees. Not without a promise of a light in the dark, with no hope of a dawn waiting at the other end of a terrible night. She heard the creatures maim and kill, and though the sounds made her grind her jaw and left a heavy feeling in her gut, she told herself it was for the best.
The creatures kept the rest of the world away from her self-made prison, the one that existed mostly inside her own ribcage.
She could be alone, as she had grown accustomed to being—because she liked it that way, she told herself, and if she tells herself it enough, she believes it.
But even in the pit of the forest she knew when the sun returned, and something inside of her seemed to wither and crawl away from the idea of it. She ventured closer, of course, just to see if it was true; to press against the bruise, to see if it still hurts. When the dappled half-light fell across her skin, when the faintest whispers of voices on the breeze first reached her ears, ever buried emotion flared to the surface.
She remembers how badly she had only wanted to be touched, and how the only one that could withstand the heat of her skin was someone she would have never wanted to touch her at all.
She remembers the daughter, phoenix-born and fire-made, and how she had tried to raise her without showing the revulsion she felt each time she looked at her; her constant reminder that touch was not how she had thought it would be.
Some are beautiful in their breaking, but she is not one of them.
The light that filters through the cracks of all her broken pieces is not the soft glow of sunlight—it is fire, hot and relentless, and the pendulum between wanting to protect everyone from the pain she could cause, and the spiteful part of her that wants to watch them burn, swings recklessly.
From the edge of the treeline, she watches them, with eyes that seem to smolder from the heat that is just barely contained by her skin, praying that she will not get caught—she just wants to watch, just wants to remind herself she is not missing anything—and almost hoping that she does.
— if i’m on fire, you’ll be made of ashes too —