"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
11-16-2016, 03:12 PM (This post was last modified: 11-16-2016, 06:17 PM by Alight.)
‘S-see. I’m like the sun.’
She remembers the vacuum of space squeezing her chest with a vice grip. She remembers endless darkness, being surprised how few and far between the stars really were – they seem so dense from earth, more than just fossilized light, strung out in lonesome corners of the galaxy.
She remembers floating past the moon and feeling disappointed with it – how pale and dead; a bloated corpse, pockmarked and desolate. Nothing romantic about it, at all.
She remembers getting too close to the sun, feeling it’s flares, like nine-tailed whips, against her face as she searched the roiling, molten surface for him.
But that had been a dream. Just a dream, and nothing more.
A dreamed-of universe with imagined constellations.
And yet, when she awoke, she was by the same shore where last – in that nightmarish dimension – she was skinned down to bare, white bone and condemned to a briny burial, attended by the reflections of a thousand far-away planets. It had not been black, however, but alive with a million shades of fire – imbued with dawn so violently, she had shot up, searching the island behind her for signs that the volcanic heart had herniated.
—it had been her.
She had been on fire.
At first, tiny flames licking each of her shoulder blades. And then, as if exposed to gasoline, they bursted outward, consuming, voraciously, oxygen and skin. Panic seized her lizard brain, and she ran, first to the ocean, whose wintered touch did nothing to extinguish the blaze but gentled the burn of her blistering skin for a moment. And then blindly, until she reached the bloodied plain and there she found a saviour. ‘Please.’ And mercy came, albeit slowly, before the fire devoured her whole.
‘...and you’re like the moon. W-we’re, perfect.’
He looked at her, with furrowed brow and concerned eye.
That had not been what she wanted. Not at all.
(‘Alight… where did this come from? Are you… okay?.’)
—the moon glows because the sun lets it.
---
She opens wide those bright, hungry wings, alight with orange and yellow. Hot, but no longer cooking the meat between her ribs – that flesh, mere hours ago raw and pink, white with bubbling fat, had mended itself. Smooth and golden. She watches them snap and growl as she twirls and dances, humming softly, shedding sparks into the cool, dusky air.
She is so full of emptiness it’s a wonder she exists at all. For she is more emptiness than not, a creature built on missing – on missing her, on missing the lightning, on missing a life that never quite came into being she way she’d distantly thought it might.
These absences are like holes inside her – black holes, opening and swallowing everything up until she is dark and soundless and impossible.
(oh, that word, that word)
There was fear, at first, when the earth shook beneath their feet and all the powers were taken, reabsorbed/ Fear that He would find her defenseless, would choose to return her to His lair. But those fears never saw fruition, and before long they were replaced with something else, with a grief too huge and terrible to comprehend, a grief that muted all else had come home to roost within her.
A love story turned shipwreck.
She sees the girl afire, the flames tapering into wings. It’s a strange sight, and one that stirs a kind of homesickness in her. She had not liked fire, herself (fire was one of His favorite tools, she’d been burned alive more times than she cared to count), but she had liked lightning, had encircled herself in it like barbed wire, a visual warning: do not come close.
She does not like closeness, and the exception – her exception – is dead and gone.
The girl is close enough that Cordis imagines she can feel heat on her cheeks and her stomach roils at the sensation. She considers leaving, turning away, giving the girl a wide berth but something stops her, holds her like an anchor to this spot.
“Are you all right?” she asks, dumbly, unsure of what else to say – unsure if the girl controls the fire or it her.
(She’d felt the same way about the lightning, once.)
She ceases humming, those childhood melodies she had filled thick, piney air with as a girl – those she had waltz to, under flushed skies, with her keeper. Her man. Her guardian. Her Giver. It had been only the two of them, then, tied together by the twine of their indelible blood-share. (In her dream, it had been chains.
Beautiful, shining, silvery links securing him down to the floor of their tower room.
Securing him so happily down to the floor of their tower room.)
Him and his stars, her and her melodies.
Perfect together. So perfect.
(He’ll see. He’ll have to see,
and then he’ll never leave.)
She waits for a moment, for the dizzy blur of her pirouetting to pass, the dim light of the sky and the brighter blaze of her wings setting the stranger’s odd skin agleam. “Why is everyone asking me that?” her voice is soft and singsongy, as it has always been, like the dawn chorus of birds, he would say.
“I’m just fine. I can never be harmed, again.” Her smile is a proud, almost gloating one. Because, she does not know and because, she is at her core, vain.
She had not even noticed. Not when she had run – tumbled! – down the steep ribs of that gluttonous mountain, scraping her knees raw. Not as she dashed, wild-eyed, through the thick, new underbrush, her legs and belly whipped mercilessly bloody. It had not been until she found her poor, dear father – stopped running, finally – that the pain off all that sloughed off skin revealed to her all that had been taken.
It should be smooth and golden, always, her skin. Free from harm.
The mountain had taken that from her.
(That, and for a time, him. That was the most unkind blow of all. ‘Who is she?’ just like in her dream, she had protected her hurt with mean incredulity. He had shaken his head and smiled, ‘Spark. Ah, you’ll like her.’
Seeding the ache that has blossomed into something slumbering and monstrous. That thing that thinks itself a product of love. It is possessiveness; vaguely, it recognizing its wounded cousin heartbreak in the silver stranger before it. Her narcissism stills her from asking just yet; besides, Giver has always been the perceptive one.
But she steps forward a touch, compelled.)
Alight tucks her fire against her sides, there is no searing or smoke, just snapping as they spit their sparks. “It hurt, a bit, at first. When they... well. Well, when they came to be,” still a mystery, “but someone saved me. With flowers all in her hair. She gave me my healing back.” She had, in fact, almost died as those flames ate away at the skin and the muscle, boiling her blood. It was quite harrowing.
“That, and more,” her tone is coy, like a child with a naughty secret they yearn to share. “I’m Alight, by the way.”
The girl is a contrast to her, a blithe smile, a voice like bells. Her eyes are bright, with a sort of righteousness and delight Cordis has never known. Once, she might have felt odd to stand near her, felt heavy and tarnished. But she was never much once to compare herself to others (she feels apart from all others, really, a chasm opened and yawning, and the one who had crossed has since crossed back, into places far more unfathomable), and she certainly doesn’t do so now, not when she walks tangled in her grief.
I can never be harmed, again, says the girl and that is enough to cause a kernel of jealousy in her. Cordis can’t imagine such a world – even before this (she doesn’t name it – naming things gives them power, they always said; so she does not articulate her grief) she knew much more pain than she did pleasure.
She doesn’t reply, makes a low ‘ah’ of acknowledgement and is ready to turn away again, to leave the girl with her fire and her bright eyes, but then she says something interesting. Someone saved me.
Ah, how Cordis needs to be saved, and how far-away the idea of salvation seems.
“You don’t say,” she says, and skepticism colors her tone, but still – the truth speaks itself somewhat in the girl’s wings, restored in a world that was stripped of its magic. Perhaps there’s something to her story.
“Where was this…being?”
She could find her. She could beg, throw herself prostate before the being and ask for the magic back, for the small and cold comfort of lightning once more wrapped around her silver skin, that one modicum of protection.
She is owed that much, surely.
She opens her bright, hot wings like a peacock does his tail. She flaps and swishes them in the cooling, dusk air. They snap and hiss ferociously, so at-odds with the secretive smile that brightens her pretty face. She giggles lightly – a girl’s giggle – and against the mauve-and-dark sky, by the flame lighting from left and right, it is almost unsettling
Maybe not for this stranger. This stranger who has been through so much.
This stranger…
—but an outsider looking in would see that the girl mutates, as quickly as day hurtles towards night, like a comet to earth. An evolution, fed on the power she suddenly feels she holds, as the silver stranger feeds at the bait she dangles; she jerks and bends out of shape, as the sadness and loss feeds that greedy, wounded animal.
(Those wing are a byproduct of a perverse subconscious; they are the reaping of a galaxy push off-kilter.)
Suddenly, she wants to know what troubles this stranger’s queer and lovely face. Where before her own twisted gut stayed any sense of genuine curiosity, now she draws closer, flitting like a lightening bug, those soft brown-and-fire eyes prying gently. “Indeed.”
She giggles again, “gone.” It is a sharp, smarting answer. Gone. Of course, Alight could not say where that flower-haired mare (if she was mare at all) had gone to, but when Alight had returned from where she had intended to nest with death, still partially raw and teary-eyed, to the center of that great, blood-fed coliseum…
Gone, with not a petal left to show of her own salvation.
“Why?” The golden-and-indigo girl settles (as much as she ever can now, those dreamed-up wings in constant, sparking animation), “do you need something? Because, you see, she gave me more than just my healing back,” her eyes are impossibly wide and glossy, for a moment she considers letting the stranger urge her for more, but even children understand when to play their cards. “I can do the same for others.
If I want to.” She wants to look cool. Collected. But night swoops low and she remembers darkness so utterly devoid of anything, instead she shifts ever closer to this stranger her breaths coming fast and excited. (She remembers that dead, grey-skinned moon. This is what she had hoped it would be in the flesh. Bright and silver... sad and romantic.)
Gone.
It shouldn’t surprise her, because so much is gone – gone is a word Cordis is intimately familiar with, a ghost haunting the peripheries of her vision. The lightning is gone, her magic is gone – and worst, worst, worst, she is gone, Spyndle is gone and there is nothing left of her but a heart.
So of course this being is gone, lit off for the territories. Another wave of despair crests and threatens to descend. But she fights it, because her breakdowns are meant to be private things. She does not share her tears with their gluttonous eyes.
She may not have the lightning, she may not be a warning sign writ large, but she does her best to still portray these things.
But the girl speaks on, and claims she can do what the being had – restore, make things whole. Cordis does not dare to hope (does she?) but those words keep her here, like shackles around her ankles.
Hope is a pathetic and determined thing.
“I had magic,” she says, pauses, “before.” Magic is a strange word on the tongue – she is a nascent magician, compared to most, and she does comparatively little – she wears lightning. She aligns herself with no kingdoms, protects no one (the one she wanted most to protect, the one she would have given everything to protect – well, she failed her, didn’t she?).
“I want dearly to have it back,” she says, “and would find myself indebted to you, if you can do what you say.”
For what does she have to lose? She has nothing left, her children are gone, her lover is gone. She is a boring, silver mare with a brand on her hip and two hearts beating in her chest, and she is desperate to feel the lightning surrounding her once more.
She smiles, and it is desire – plain as day – that crowds her pretty, brown eyes. It sounds like music to her. It sounds like something comforting like... like something from her childhood.
(He never said that, she thinks.
But he never had to. It was made so, in the way they formed around each other – not inspite of each other, though she always imagines that growing place must have been cramped with the two of them there, side-by-side.
Because of each other...)
“Magic?” she repeats, swallowing hard and blinking out at this moon, far too close to its sun. “You’re magic!” Were. Are. Quavering like a volcano – or like a song on lips, she is a dormant magician. Alight’s eyes flit to the right and left, then back to this… this… limitless creature. Her mind is a-race, across universes of fantasy – the ones weaved together with Giver, when he was pliable and devoted, before he found her and lost his imagination; the ones she wove herself, in quiet, when he had slinked off into the night…
(The chains were the first things to come. Smelling like what silver polish might smell like; glittering like so many smelted stars. In the strange, deceitful subconsciousness of sleep, they never felt as if they were made to keep him… but… secure him.)
“I can,” she whispers, her voice an admixture of defensiveness, wonder and distraction, “trust me. It’s like I said!” In the darkness (because night has fallen as completely as it will, now; somewhere, Giver still fails to shine… he only glows) her eyes dart side to side along with the feverish tempo of her thoughts and the movement of her lips, uttering only the tiniest of mutterings now and then.
The fairy had never said so, explicitly (at least, she does not remember – there had been only pain and then relief), but Alight knows, somehow, that she can temper this gift. Indebted is a sweet word, indeed. But a word, only. Her mind grasps at many things – like bows and ribbons to tie around the package; like chains, to secure it. It is like being in the eye of a storm, whose nature she is yet unsure of.
Whose threat is gentle and loving.
Whose name she knows, without a doubt. Plain as day.
Giver.
“I-I can give you back your magic, but I’ll need a favour from you,” she steps closer, her wings tucked to her sides, burning away. “I-I… need someone. You have to give him to me, okay? One way or another.” She tips her head down, shuttering her eyes. What flows between the two of them is not entirely Alight’s, for it is the fairy’s magic, but something from her clings to it as it were a liferaft in a tempestuous sea.
Hope? That seems too kind a thing.
No. It is the lack of it entirely, like hope flung off into the vacuum of deepest darkest space.
Desperation.
She opens her eyes back up, some dampness welling up in the corners. She wonders if the mare can feel it – that shared thing; that ribbon or chain. She is, after all, a magician. “You’ll know, I think, when he and I will need you.”
She doesn’t mind begging, what pride she once have fled with her magic, because like this – powerless, alone – there is no room for pride. She is willing to do whatever the mare bades, because it doesn’t matter to her, she is a creature of loss and grief with so little else, all she wants is her lightning, her power.
The girl names her terms – you have to give him to me - and Cordis nods. She doesn’t care who is it, she will fling his body at this girl’s feet, if need be; or leave him chained for her consumption.
(It should be unnerving, to realize she would kill so thoughtlessly, all for magic, for a cage of lighting, but she finds this doesn’t bother her the way she once thought it would.)
“Yes,” she says, in case her nod was not enough, “however you want him, I will give him to you.”
And then the girl’s head dips, and something flashes, brief as a lightning strike, and then Cordis is knocked backward as her magic returns.
She cries out, feeling alive for the first time in days, weeks.
Her skin prickles as the lightning returns, like chainmail on her silver skin, she is protected again, she is a weapon again and she breathes.
“Tell me when,” she says, voice rough, “and he’s yours.”
However you want him.
![[Image: RS84HN4.png]](http://i.imgur.com/RS84HN4.png)
