hello from the other side; any

[Cordis]

Gaze too long into the abyss and the abyss also gazes back into you, and perhaps that’s what had happened.
She had not always been a monster – had she? – but she’s long stared into the abyss, looking—
Looking for a way out of His lair, a crack in the wall, a lapse in attention.
Looking for the hounds, hot at her heels, chuffing breaths hot and filthy.
Looking back, for one more glimpse of the impossible gold woman who comes and goes but is always a constant in her mind, in her heart.
Gaze too long into the abyss and the abyss also gazes back into you, and Cordis had long stared into the abyss because sometimes the nothingness took the shape of Spyndle’s face, so she stared forth like there were answers there.

I can’t, Spyndle had told her when she left (again), and she had been right to. Can’t was an incantation of theirs, the first and last words, and in between them were some of worst and sweetest memories Cordis has ever known.
I can’t, she had said, but they were often liars, even if they had no intention of being so.
(I won’t hurt the boy, Cordis had told herself, drawing him close, lightning in her heart.)

She is a shell, built of virulent parts and pestilence, but she is harder, too.
The woman who once ran scared, whose heart danced a jitterbug in her chest, she is gone. She is gone because every terrible thing that woman feared has transpired.
She’s lost her daughter. She’s lost her.
And in the spaces they left grows lightning, grows a pleasure for burning.
In the spaces they left grows a dark heart, a creature perhaps forged in His lair – a nascent magician who wraps herself in lightning, wears it like a barbed wire fence around her.
She is, for the first time, untouchable.

Terrible then, that fate creeps in, the abyss gazes back.
Terrible, then, that a woman so untouchable sees the one thing she longs to touch.

“You,” she breathes – she can’t say her name because naming things gives them power, makes them real, “are you real?”

she said it was a mistake to let them burn her at the stake

Cordis

(and she learned a lesson back there in the flames)