"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
Time is cruel to her.
Not in the way it is cruel to so many things, the years piling on until they crumble. Cordis is untouched in that way, ageless in the way of magic things. Time’s cruelty here is more subtle, as the years clamber on and she forgets. Not big things, but the little ones, the minutiae.
She knows she loves – loved – the curve of her smile, but can no longer recall the exact angle of it.
She knows she loves – loved – how sunlight had looked in her hair, but she cannot recall it’s exact shade, only a general color.
And for all her magic this is one thing she cannot stop, it feels sometimes as if memories are water in her cupped hands, spilling out.
And what is there to replace it? What has she done, since? So little. Drifted as aimless as a dandelion seed in the wind. There’d been conversations, short and stuttered, but she is not someone who easily invites conversation, with her steeled gaze and the low crackle of electricity on her skin. She is a warning sign writ large, Cordis, and it is exhausting.
She’s back at the river. It seems she always returns here, as if it might spark more memory back into her. Not that this is the same river, but still, there is a ragged sort of peace in the way the water moves, how it’s cool to the touch. She watches as the sun plays on its shifting surface, looks for the darting fish in its depths. It is quiet here, save for the faint crackle of her lightning-skin and the rush of the river, and to anyone who did not know her, she might even look peaceful.
Kindness has never found a place to call home within his heart. There is nothing to sustain love or warmth here. This is why it strikes him as odd when he feels compelled to approach her. It doesn’t feel pleasant the way he imagines those emotions should, but rather like obligation. Something buried in his blood reaches for her and he simply humors it. It hums comfortably when he draws near but he does not smile or seem equally glad to be standing here before her.
Instead, he tilts his head as he examines her, his expression empty and sterile like a dormant hospital bed.
“Have we met?” he finally asks, his eyes narrowed while he picks apart his memories. Of course, there is nothing there when he reaches for it. He normally preys on weaker things and something about her unnerves him enough that he would keep his distance on any other given day. Yet, her face feels like something out of a fever dream he might’ve had several years ago.
“I don’t think so. I am Beelzebub.”
But he takes a step back. Something feels wrong about being here, staring into her face, and he would like to return to the depths of the forest.
Cordis sees the stallion and her teeth set on edge.
It is the curse of magic and love bound that she feels it, even a faint thread of the bloodline – of her. She’s met them before, the children or grandchildren, and each time had caused a certain ache, a twist of the heart (or hearts, later).
She barely sees it in him, but there’s something – the gold of him, maybe – and she knows. She feels a cry build in her throat, something wordless and agonized, but she swallows it down. She is sure this boy knows nothing of her, nothing of the gold woman who graces his lineage.
He speaks, and she is surprised, wonders if he can sense something to – if their blood calls to one another across generations. She almost smiles – a wrench of the lips – but it ends up as something pained.
He answers his own questions before she can, and she is glad, for what could she have said? I once loved a relative of yours in a way I will never comprehend, I would burn the world for her but she is gone and I am alone and I have not known kindness in a decade or more --
No. None of that.
“I’m Cordis,” she says, then, “you look a little like someone I once knew.”
What banality. Once knew. As if that were all it was – an acquaintance.
Maybe it would have been better, that way.
His golden eyes watch her as though any minute she might lunge for him. He watches the way her lips twitch into something equally uneasy. The urge to leave this place angers him and he defies it by remaining firmly in place. Beelzebub has never known fear and he does not permit the feeling to fester in his chest today. Instead, he sinks his teeth into the way his hairs stand on end near her, anchors himself to it.
“Cordis,” he parrots, and her name is static across his tongue. The only name his mother ever taught him was his father’s, and he cared little for even that lesson. He begins to circle her as he plunges headfirst into his discomfort. Either he will acclimate to this dreadful sensation or she will put an end to it, he decides.
“I don’t know anyone like you,” he thinks aloud, neither hostile or inviting. “Maybe you knew Ophanim or Glassheart.”
He shrugs, watches her face for some telltale shift. Beelzebub cannot recognize the exquisite ache of a broken heart and so her expression only further confounds him. He has only ever known obsession and greed, cruelties he can afford to withstand. To be loved seems too heavy a cross for him to bear, he thinks.
He comes to a stop beside her now. Slowly, at the rate caves birth their stalactites, he leans his shoulder to hers.
10-13-2020, 02:21 PM (This post was last modified: 10-13-2020, 02:22 PM by Cordis.)
She watches him move, the architecture of him. Familiar and not, blood several times removed, but if she glimpses it from the corner of her eye she can see her, and oh, how it twists her. He says her name and the word is flat in his mouth and it means nothing to him, and nor should it, because surely he knows nothing of the history that haunts his bloodline.
God, she hopes he doesn’t. It is not his burden to bear.
He muses on, and the first name means nothing to her, but then – Glassheart.
She remembers the mare. Glassheart had known. She had looked at her, inside of her, and for a moment Corids thought her Spyndle reborn and hope had clawed a hole in her chest and she had felt so many things and oh –
But Glassheart had left, too. And had not come back.
“Yes,” she says, and the word hurts a little, “I met Glassheart, once.”
The uncomplicated answer.
The complicated answer - I met her and she was herself and then she was someone else and then I was sick and she never came back and then I was well again.
It goes on. She doesn’t.
“Is that your mother?”
He’s closer, now. Leaning towards her. A conflict flares within her – part of her wants to burn him for it, because she is not a touchable thing, yet another part wants to allow it, because his skin is – must be – born from skins she once knew, and she is perhaps so desperate that she will take this crumb, this morsel of memory, and swallow it down.
She swallows, and his skin touches her, unburnt.
How awful, to see her love, her Venus only when she sees him in her peripheral. But when their eyes meet, there is only Beelzebub standing there. He is a monument to decaying prayers and discarded dreams. Nothing more could be expected of him, really. He was born of loneliness and little else. Two warm bodies that met in the chill of an autumn night.
Glassheart had loved her awful son, despite who he was or who he would later become. But, she left. And sometimes he wonders if she’ll ever come back for him.
He shows no sign of the thoughts swirling and brewing in his mind when she answers. His smile remains flatlined. His eyes study her a while longer when she repeats the name back to him. Then she offers up a question of her own and his expression is bruised for a fleeting second. His mother, his only friend. The only thing in the world he didn’t want to break in two.
“She is. I haven’t seen her in a long time,” he confesses without letting the hurt bleed into his voice. Beelzebub wonders if he tore Cordis apart, would his mother’s broken heart bring her circling back? Would it echo across time and space until someone answered back?
Doubtful. Then he would be more alone than before, so he rids himself of the thought.
“Did Glassheart call you beautiful too?”
Each time he inhales, his ribs press just a little closer to hers. Breath by breath, he finds himself dreading being here a little less. It isn’t comfortable by any stretch of the imagination, but it isn’t standing alone with his thoughts either.
