"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
The things we do for love.
And ah, what hasn’t she done? Destroyed others, destroyed herself (she feels sometimes like ouroboros, like she is consuming herself, predator and prey at once). Through fire and shipwrecks and every disaster one could name, and still the name drips on her lips like something viscous.
Still, she is alone.
Alone because what she’d sown – what they’d sown – was an impossibility and they both knew it, they both knew it while the air was crushed out of their lungs because looking at the other was practically a death sentence.
Too much, all this, too much.
Cordis is transient, meadow-bound – she could destroy kingdoms, this silver magician with deadened eyes and a slack jaw, but she does not, instead she wanders and runs and tries not to allow her fury to too fully take shape.
(Fury would be something whole, something corporeal, if she let it. If she breathed life into it.)
She loses her path, again and again. She has no focus. And it is dangerous, this idleness, for it allows her time to think, allows names to spring fully-formed upon her lips, allows her to think of fire, and the way things have a way of burning.
Gun could not say that he had done anything for the sake of love.
He ate for the sake of eating.
He breathed for the sake of breathing.
But love? Not that; it was like asking Gun if he had a mother and a father.
Sure, he knew that a stallion and a mare had sex and he was the result of their copulation, one that he assumed was performed carelessly and only because of nature’s demands upon their bodies i.e. stallion sees mare, stallion mounts mare, mare has colt later on. Hence, Gun.
If asked where either of those two nameless ones were now, he had no answer nor had he cared to look for one.
Somehow, abandonment had crept in there and spun his existence down and out this road for him.
Gun is ribs and long legs; lean in muscle, sparse in mane and tail. He is a baby still; hunger scrabbles for purchase at his gut, reminds him that he needs to eat but his black eyes have landed on her - aimless in her run, tarnished silver from the sweat of her exertion, and he cannot look away from her. Sure, she is mesmerizing in a way he cannot put a name to (magician maybe, if he knew what one of those was) but he knows that is not why he stops and stares at her. “Hey you,” he drawls, mannerless and unperturbed by his lack of them; because of her, he forgets the clawing ache in his gut as it sticks to the underside of his spine, like a bat settling into rest, and his hunger hangs heavy in him - misplaced, by the sight of her.
The colt is not smitten, he doesn’t know what that even is!
Just curious, why she runs like a bat straight out of hell.
Maybe ghosts are chasing her, he thinks.
ooc: yeah, i did this and it sucks haha. love you!
Strangers still cause her heart to stutter and leap in her chest. She is no longer the frightened, cringing girl who had first come to Beqanna, the girl who saw hellhounds baying at every corner, saw Him in every shadow, but some things are engrained, carved like symbols on her bones.
Because He was a stranger, once, too, a smiling gray god asking are you alone, and she, a stupidly naïve girl, a child wandering, had said yes and thus damned herself.
(Not that she would have been given a choice, had she said no, He would have taken what she instead gave. But she’s remembered that word, that yes, ever since and felt the way it tasted sour, like damnation, now.)
But this stranger is not a smiling gray god, it is a boy, half-grown with a scruff where mane will be and a thick accent to his voice. She does not smile, though lightning sparks on her skin, as if she is the sky itself, walking in thunderstorms.
(Her magic is a strange and unpredictable thing, but the lightning is a constant, it was the first piece of magic she created and she is certain it will be the last.)
“Hello,” she replies, then, “what are you doing out here alone?”
It’s not are you alone, but it’s close. She finds herself mimicking Him, sometimes, and it’s terrifying, this queer defiance, the way it changes. That maybe she’s not so far removed from Him as she likes to think, that inside her there is a dark and shadowy heart beating and waiting to spill blood, whether it’s hers or theirs.
Gun only knows Caw.
She is a black and bossy thing, but he follows her anyway.
Follows her on her odd journey through the kingdoms and listens to her talk about legends.
The more he looks at her, the more he thinks she looks like a legend. She is a storm contained in the flesh, the way her skin sparks like lightning rolling along the underbellies of clouds. Gun half expects to hear thunder come snorting from her nostrils or from the stamp of her hoof against the dirt. Neither happens, though the colt has not squared himself in expectation of much - why should she harm him? Why should she want to, besides him being a tad more inquisitive than he ought to be…
She greets him and asks him a question that causes him to tilt his head to one side. Gun never really thought of himself as alone. Granted, he never thought of himself as kin to wind and sky like some of them do, or friend to bunny and bird. He was just a colt, and he only knew Caw and she instantly came to mind. He did not know the others by name or scent, that tagged along in her ragtag band of little ones and he supposed they mattered not because Caw led them. So naturally, he said the only thing that he could - “I’m not alone.” Except he is but Gun doesn’t know why or how that came to be. It never occurred to him that there should be a mother lurking nearby to keep an eye on him or an ear out for any trouble he might get into.
“I can’t really be alone if I’m right here with you,” he points out, taking a step closer to peer at the sparks on her skin. That intrigues him, probably because he has never encountered anything like it in his short life. Gun knows that he is staring and staring is rude, but Gun doesn’t care. “Does it hurt?” To touch, to be touched, he wonders; his nose hovers close then pulls away - he won’t touch, but the lightning that flickers across her silvery skin is a conundrum to him. It should not exist but it does - she does, and he is not overly awed. It would take something greater than that to truly shock him, maybe because Gun’s repressed whatever trauma he’s had to endure to become this thing she mentions, this alone.
She could be a legend, if the story came from the right mouth, was told the right way. Her story has torture in it, has a great and terrible love, has kidnapped daughters and other such things. But what her story also has is her own darkness – yes, she once wept over her lover’s body, once begged her to come back, begged while the lightning crashed all around them and then her lover did come back, reanimated. Yes, she did all this, but she also once burnt a seer alive because it was somehow the seer’s fault, something that had happened.
Yes, she once stood by helpless as He walked off with her daughter, wailed and gnashed her teeth at the loss of her. Yes, she did all this, but she also once burned a boy alive, left him hairless and scarred, because he made the fool’s mistake of trusting her, of letting her hold him close.
She is not a myth that deserves telling.
She lets him spill his logic, doesn’t tell him she is dangerous, that she is more storm than company. She lets him speak and tries to listen and tries not to track his heartbeat.
(She doesn’t know he’s a friend of Caw, the selfsame girl Cordis herself brought back, the one whose head she fills with tales of the monster and his terrible deeds, the monster she hopes the girl will someday destroy. Had she known this, would she have had different thoughts, had lightened hopes?)
He is close, too close, but she is confident in the lightning, confident in her ability over it. So she stands her grand while he peers at the way her skin acts as womb to the lightning storm.
“This? No. It feels good. It reminds me I’m strong,” she says, strangely honest to this boy without knowing exactly why.
The lightning doesn’t hurt – it’s just everything else that does.
To Gun, the best legends are never the easiest to tell nor are they the happiest.
He thinks legends are supposed to be dark and cautionary as much as they are sunny and inspiring.
Gun isn’t interested in myths any more; not after the way the lightning moves across her skin, as intimately as a lover.
He pulls his muzzle back, thinking it best not to touch her after all. Instinct, raw and old, tells him it will hurt to touch her despite the disturbing urge to do so. He wants to feel the lightning jump under his lips like her pulse might if he were to bridge their flesh with but a single sloppy childish kiss. “It will hurt me,” he states simply and confidently, as his eyes shift down and elsewhere as the mother of storms talks of strength. He understands that it is her shield and sword both, that is why they give her a wide berth, all of them except him.
Gun is almost envious now, something green and spiteful stirs in his coltish chest and the taste of it is ugly in his mouth.
A childish thought takes shape in his brain: how can he become like her?
Elemental and powerful; stripped of hurt because he doesn’t understand that she is still hurt, just on the inside.
Gun’s eyes become sly; “How does one become like you?”
Of course, the legend she knows most about is Him – the dark god, thundering in his lair while she, small and mousey-brown (He had been before the silver, before the magic made itself known on her skin). He had told her tales, His own terrible deeds, tales of murder and mayhem and slated earth, forests burned down for the sake of seeing a flame.
(The ideas that seemed so wretched at the time almost have an appeal, now. Not that she would burn down a city, but maybe a house. Not a forest, but maybe a lone oak.)
She still does not speak his name for fear it will turn to ash in her mouth.
It will hurt me, he says.
“Yes,” she agrees. It would. If he touched her, she would hurt him, because it is her nature – her skin is sacrament and anyone who touches it is cursed by her lightning.
(Except, of course, for her. For Spyndle, Cordis would flay her own skin so she could kiss her very bones.)
She doesn’t invite him, but she doesn’t dissuade him, either. Don’t say he wasn’t warned.
But he is on to other questions, other desires – to become like her. Because he is a fool, he cannot see that under her hard eyes lies a hundred deaths and the cold flatness of heartbreak, he only sees the glamor of her walking thunderstorm. To him, she is something to desired, envied.
“I don’t know, exactly,” she said, “I escaped from…a place, and ran away. Someone else tried to hurt me and then…well, then this happened. And he didn’t hurt me again.”
She remembers that wayfarer with a dusty bitterness. It hadn’t been Him, had been a simple, stupid boy filled with fury and lust, who had taken her before she burned him alive, left her in the family way with a silver-maned daughter she hasn’t heard from in years.
Pain is a pathway, though, and that pain – the pain that blossomed outside of His lair (what happened there was beyond pain, beyond anything she had words for) – had paved a road for her, a road of rivers and gold mares, a road of lightning.
Only Caw told him legends.
Everything else was instinct or decision - his, or the wind’s.
He was a rather wayward child, pushed here and driven there, and he never spared a thought to any of it.
She agrees that it will hurt him but there is no caution in her look or her tone that tells him he should not touch her. Just the stark murmur of instinct in him that says no, don’t do it and his temptation tapers off - Gun, in the end, really doesn’t care. He was never taught much of anything about feelings; learned some along away the way but mostly he’s learned this thing she called him - this alone, and his aloofness is born from that. “Hm,” he mutters, looking away from her now as if she is no longer all that glamorous to him.
Her prattle crowds his ears with an annoying buzz and his sorry eyes are pulled back to her; he cannot help but listen to her unfortunate plight. He could almost taste her bitterness on his tongue and he makes a bitter face in response to it before sliding his eyes away again and saying, “Your pain rewarded you.” Gun, make no mistake, is not sagacious even as this tender malformed thing that he is, but he is sometimes smart enough to puzzle the answers to his own questions like he does now. Pain was the catalyst and even though he’s sure he’s endured pain somehow, it is no match for hers and there must have been lightning in her all along - the pain just sort of, woke it up for her.
Gun will never be like her, like Caw, and maybe he should envy them for that.
He tries, but he cannot. He is horse, not legend, and it is as simple as that.
“Pain…” he mutters;
He thinks back to the hitch in her sentence about her escape.
There is a tale there, will she tell it? “Why did you escape and why did he hurt you and then not hurt you?” Brave Gun steps closer - close enough that their shoulders could brush. He knows the threat, it is vivid and sparking and dazzles his eyes, but he will foolishly take his chance with her.
“It wasn’t a reward.”
She says this flatly. If pain came with rewards she would have been rewarded long ago, in His lair, within the first day. Each of her deaths, her screams, would have brought gold and jewels dripping all colors. No, something else had happened, some catalyst that was somehow different than pain that had sparked the nascent magic inside her.
(This is what happened: when she was free from Him, He no longer tamped down the magic that had always been within her. The rotting wayfarer who violated her was merely the first threat to awaken it.)
He asks for her tale, and she isn’t sure what to say – how to shorten the story to a few words? Cordis has never been particularly articulate; she’s not one to ramble tales, though her own story is a novel within itself.
Not that it’s a story she wants to share. So few of her tales are.
(She’d share stories of Spyndle of course. For her, she would write poems, write epics of their strange and beautiful story. She could spend hours on the way her skin looked in the river. But that is not what he asks. He does not know Spyndle.)
“He quit hurting me because I killed him for it,” she says. A different he, of course. The other one – the dark god – still walks, still haunts her.
You can’t kill them all.
“What about you?” she asks. A vague question, open – there to take his story, or not.
Not a reward?
The very idea confounds him. If the lightning birthed out of blood and pain is not reward enough for her, what is? He cannot fathom it being seen as punishment to harness an element to one’s own flesh and spirit. Had not the pain made her stronger, too?
Gun is squinting up at her now; he cannot know that the magic had always lain within her, just dormant. That it took a horrible act to make it rise forth and snake through her until she knew that she never had to suffer like that again. Catalysts are beyond him, his life is too new and too lacking for him to have ever danced dangerously in time to a cataclysmic event. Even the event that finds him here, alone and in her company, is not considered to be a great life-altering thing for him - it is, but he fails to recognize it as such.
(How can he? He cannot even remember those that made him - just a stallion and just a mare. Where they are now is beyond his ken.)
Gun likes stories; it is why he trails after Caw, too bright to be a shadow but more like a speck of mud on her black hide. He listens to how she tells him quite simply that she killed him and the pain stopped, and he understands that. Almost like a cow chews its cud, he thinks on it and understands it on an instinctive level. But then she asks him for his story; a fair trade, to be sure. Except that Gun doesn’t have one. How can you tell what you do not have, or know?
The lanky appaloosa colt peers up at her, more solemn now than curious. Not overly sad though, just entirely too serious for one so small. Maybe it takes him too long to answer her, to formulate a response that is deemed acceptable by normal standards (what is normal when her skin sparks lightning at every breath, or so it seems?) to her - really, to him. His mouth opens, closes, then opens again - -
“No story, just a stallion and a mare, then me.”
Gun doesn’t even know how he came to be Gun in all honesty.
He picked up the name somewhere and it just stuck.
