"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
She is unremarkable in every way, but they are drawn to her anyways - as though in the fractures of her soul, as though in the trenches carved through her entire being, a gravitational pull exists against all logic or reason; her skin is golden, but she is no sun.
He comes; he orbits.
He wonders what they are, and where they have been. He wonders about the things that they have seen, and the things that they have said. He wonders about the shapes that they made with their mouths the nights they poured their insides out, but only she knows. Only they know. He wonders, but the answers are, perhaps, the only thing the world will never take away from them.
“She was never nothing,” she says, because he should know, because the world should know – because Spyndle is made of water, and she waivers, and she gives, and she would do or say anything in the world if it meant that she could curve around the contours of her body and destroy the space between their skin. “She will never be nothing.”
Not when she is everything.
‘I know her name,’ he says, but Spyndle knows her soul. She knows the sounds of her frantic heart thrumming against her chest, and how the sweat against her skin smells musky and sweet all at once. She knows what it feels like when they are one being, and the magic it can stir. She knows.
i'll pick up these broken pieces 'til i'm bleeding
if that'll make it right
He comes, he orbits - but she allows it. Perhaps, in her unremarkableness, she is not in fact the sun he orbits, but the empty space which they all exist within. Perhaps she is the void, and he's simply realized her existence. Despite her golden skin, her insides much surely be black; not only like the nothingness around the stars, but rivers at midnight. Surely she is more than less, an eternity so long it simply doesn't exist. For if a river runs forever, surely it has never run at all. If she is infinite, then all that is, truly is not.
"Cordis doesn't think so." He says blankly, staring into her eyes, staring into her."You need to remind Cordis." He's careful to use her name at every opportunity, to drown the nameless woman memories. "Cordis wouldn't listen to me - to anyone..." He takes a small step towards her, a small step closer to eternal nothingness. "...But you aren't just anyone, if your name belongs to her." His name belongs only to himself - to fathom any different brings a crease to his youthful brow. But age isn't shown on skin, but in eyes. And this woman, she seems both ancient and ageless. An infinity of emptiness.
"Why then does Cordis's name not belong to you?" He breathes, shivering in the cool of the night, in the closeness of her skin. "How - what did you do to lost the Lightning?" Curiosity burns inside of him - ironic, considering that she drenches him with her liquid sadness. "If Cordis had been mine, I would never have let go." A small, cruel smile twists his dark lips. He is not infinite, and he wants answers, no matter the means he must use to get them. "But I suppose that it wasn't you who chose to release Cordis. Exterior influence, perhaps?"
‘Cordis doesn’t think so,’ he says, as though he knows – as though he had been the one that compared her to mermaids when she bathed in the river under moonlight, as though he had stood against the hazel brush himself, as though he’d given her the only children she could ever bring herself to love. Over and over, he says her name, tastes it on his tongue like wine; sweet and warm.
It isn’t his to drink.
She isn’t his to taste.
‘If Cordis had been mine,’ he says, and here the skin will twinge and prickle across her spine; her ears fall flat against her skull, but she’s still listening. Even as the blood in her veins begins to bubble, she’s still listening. She knows the words before he says them. The words of men. The words that could only belong to men, who took what they wanted and gave nothing back.
Mine.
‘I would never have let go,’ he says, and he smiles a smile that is supposed to make her knees weak and her heart hurt – but it doesn’t. Once she was a wild thing. Once she was a mouse. Once she hid a jitterbug heart behind her ribs, but she does not now. She is none of those things anymore. She is not a coward when she says: “Because you think like that is precisely the reason that you will never have her.”
Cordis may be sweet wine and Spyndle sour, but Nihlus will always be the taste tester, never deciding on just one to call his own. He will roam the world in search of the one taste he desires but will never know, for for all his tasting, he has overlooked the simpler drinks. His hand has been too mighty for the the waters and the juices, for the liquors and the poisons. The boy will always lift the wine before the water, and perhaps this is where his biggest downfall lies.
"I do not think the way you think I do."
His voice is harder now, less eloquently cruel. Clouds of agony blind her, and for this he will not blame her. Yet he refuses to be minimized, generalized. She does not have the capability to understand right now, but she will. In her anger and her emptiness, the empathy has dissolved. But it is there. He knows it is. He simply does not have to time to draw it out of her, nor the means.
"I say these things in an attempt to reunite the two of you. To spark jealousy beneath your skin, and lightning beneath hers."
The rain has come, the dark clouds rolling overhead like dead bodies towards the fire. It falls in thin drops which fall quickly, pelting them until he realizes that his anger has transformed his rain into hail. Through spiteful blue eyes, he watches the nameless woman for her reaction, watches for the flinch of her skin and the reawakening of her soul. He may be cruel, but he wants nothing more than to see them together again, even if he does not completely understand why.
"I conquer nothing but myself. You would do well to do the same."
"You will go to her now, and you won't see me again, perhaps ever. I do not know your name, but I won't forget you, or what it feels like to be caught between two forces of love so strong, they could also be called hurricanes." And thus, he leaves. His work here... Is done.
