And just like that Cordis is breathing again — no longer collapsing in on herself as though Glassheart is some benevolent thing that could suck the warm air straight from her lungs and push down on her chest and her ribs with all the gravity of Jupiter. She isn’t used to wielding power like this, to making beings quake in their bones with just the feel of her skin against their own. It leaves her reeling, rattled because she is the one who caused the gentle furrow between this strangers brows, because she is the one who in these moments is making her heart ache.
She is the one unburying the dead.
“I still have your heart, but I’d give it back, if I could.”
“It hurts.”
Of course it does, she thinks.
Of course it does, because she’s read every page in their story, soaked the pages with her own salty tears more times than she can likely count. Of course her hearts are burning; Cordis breathed it — she lived it. Until this moment Glassheart has been so transfixed by the idea of what was happening to her, bound by a sense of duty and a hidden gravity, that she hadn’t stopped to wonder what it meant for anyone else. She’d wanted so desperately to know who she harboured inside her bones that she forgot herself.
And she forgot just how quickly the intruder could take her over.
So, she closes her eyes again for a moment, for distance between Cordis and Spyndle and all of it that wasn’t her. Only instead of space as her dark eyelashes fall against the tops of her cheeks she only feels a warm breath spill out across the plane of her right shoulder that raises the flesh and hair and leaves it standing. She doesn’t need to open her eyes to know who is beside her, but she does.
“Don’t leave me here alone,” Spyndle says, perfectly golden, her wings soft and white against her sides. Glassheart sees that her nose is stretched out to touch Cordis just across her cheek, like she has done so a thousand times before this morning. It feels like walking into bedrooms that aren’t her own. It feels like this is not meant for her, like it was never meant for her.
It isn’t.
“Cordis,” she says, a beautiful apparition; the name becomes honey on Spyndle’s lips. She turns her face towards Glassheart then, her eyes expectant, patiently awaiting her translator to bridge an impossible gap between worlds.
It’s too much.
It’s asking too much.
“I can’t.” Glassheart says, stumbling backwards with her eyes suddenly wild and white around their dark edges.
“I’m sorry. I can’t.”
...
And so the summer fell away, too.
The wildflowers withered, then died. The trees lost their leaves and looked as naked as Glassheart had felt in the moments she’d fled. She didn’t want to return to the meadow, or wade in the winding river. She didn’t want to see hazel trees, or think about mermaids, and when the sun fell into the mountains each evening bleeding out the colours of the day into the sky, Glassheart turned her head and looked elsewhere. She’d decided that she would make her own way, that against a nagging instinct she wouldn’t trigger the memories or offer them refuge any longer — at least for a while. She had to learn who she was apart from them, apart from Cordis and her gravity, too.
She didn’t want to be devoured.
The thoughts came creeping in regardless of what she wanted though.
Because one day she dreams a wild dream among the thistles and long grass, and when she awakes from it she is changed somehow in ways she cannot quite decipher.
The difference isn’t tangible, but it’s there beneath her flesh, brewing in the pit of her very existence. She feels it in her bones, and sewn through the very strands of her DNA; a promise that she is better, more capable, more enduring. For so long she’d been apprehensive about the memories and what they meant; if they made her important, or they were only a burden — if they would waste her. The truth is that they were both, and maybe she could be, too.
It feels like fire. It feels like a rebirth.
It feels like she is big enough now to house the both of them inside her skin.
So, she returns to the meadow to wade the long grass and look for the glint of silver in the autumn sun. There’s an ache along the ridge of her spine, and as she walks she’ll never see the wave of spiked scales that roll for a second along her back before they disappear.
Glassheart
i'll always love you the most
@[Cordis] I started a new thread because ~timelines~ I hope that's okay! <3