"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
It is a pleasure to burn, she thinks. She remembers Him saying these words, murmuring them into her ears with His rough-hewn voice. It is a pleasure to burn, and it is a thing she knows – has known, now, for longer than she cares to admit.
He infected her, a virus, and He lives still in her blood, her bones, in the phrase: it is a pleasure to burn.
She recalls the wayfarer, the black stallion whose name she never knew. She’d encountered him on the outskirts of Beqanna, years and years ago, before Spyndle, before any of it. She had burned him and she had not meant to, had not even known such things were inside her, but hadn’t it been a pleasure, even as such a new, unknown thing?
He meets her gaze, and it should stop her. The innocence, the blinding stupidity, isn’t it a mirror of how her own eyes must have looked, to Him?
But this is not what runs through her mind.
Hurt people hurt people, the saying goes, and oh, she is so incredibly hurt.
Her skin flickers, the lightning racing across her. She is glowing, alight with it, and the rightness of it – of touching the power, the electricity that’s always there but so rarely tapped – is glorious and calming and right.
Her skin flickers and lighting shoots out, a bolt of it, goes into the boy. And another. Another.
She does not kill him. At least, she thinks she doesn’t. If she does, one bolt kills and one bolt brings back. She feels his bones through the lightning, it acts as a strange hand, strange fingers tracing scapulae and skull. It’s intimate, in a strange way.
Something is burning. She wonders if it’s him, or if it’s the foliage around them. She is alive in a way she has not been in years, not since she laid in the meadow with Spyndle and their children and the hope that, somehow, things would work out.
(They didn’t. They never do.)
The lightning storm stops, gives out, and he is alive though she cannot ascertain his condition because the horror of what she has done – how like Him she just might be – washes over her, a tsunamic epiphany, so she turns, and, without a word, she does what she’s done for years: she runs.
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
i love the way that your heart breaks with every injustice and deadly fate
He has never known true pain, true pleasure. Oh, certainly he has felt pain before. But this… this exceeds all expectations, all previous knowledge. Her touch is terrible and wonderful all at once, and he misses it. He doesn’t know of the horror she will experience at his unwitting acceptance, nor would he care. Horror is as much a part of life as pain is. It is all one and the same to him. It is life, and he wants nothing more than to live.
He is an echo of her, though he doesn’t know it. But it is a distorted echo. Where she had fought it, he embraces it. Where she finds disgust, he finds only joy. And when her lightning strikes, bolting straight through his small body, he transcends into a new plane of previously unknown, unfathomable existence.
His knees do give out then. The agony races through him, setting all of his nerve endings ablaze, causing his muscles to spasm, his skin to twitch. He can no longer hold himself erect. He falls, first to his knees, then to his side. With each bolt, his body arches, distorting, his eyes rolling back in his head, his lips pulling back into a grimace. It is a beautiful anguish, a sublime misery. Even as his heart seizes in his chest, he would be no other place but here. Even as his hair becomes scorched and his skin forever scarred, he would not trade it for the world.
And then she stops. His heart beats erratically in his chest. His breath, when it finally fills his lungs once again, is short and choppy. His gray eyes are glazed in pain and joy as his skin sizzles and his hair smokes. And he watches her run, unable to stop her. His heart hurts inside his chest as he watches her go. He wants her so badly to stay, even while knowing that she never will.
