i'll burn it down to build it up better

[Cordis]

She’s as beautiful and terrible as the day they first met, when some catalyst occurred somewhere in the river, somewhere in their words. She never quite knew what happened, after, only that something about her and her life had been deeply changed. She didn’t know quite what, but she could feel the shifting taking place inside her. This is what the earth felt, perhaps, as pangea fractured into continents. A fundamental reformation. There’s still the thought – this isn’t real, you’re dreaming her again - but the cold truth of the matter is Cordis could never dream her like this, the Spyndle she makes in her dreams is a pale imitation of the thing before her. Her Spyndle. Darling, dearest, dead. (you found me) “Of course,” she whispers, and there are tears raking down her cheek, like claws, and she’s happy and terrified all at once, on his dying shore, before this ghost of a woman who’s too solid and too there to be anything but real. “I have your heart,” she says. She means it in both the literal and figurative sense. The whole metaphor is overwrought and heavy, and she thinks again of the poem, one of the only ones she knows – I carry your heart, I carry it in my heart. Yes, and yes. She’s almost blind for the amount of tears stinging her eyes. She wonders if Spyndle can cry. How there she really is. Wonders if she can touch her, or if her muzzle would simply pass through. She’s close enough to touch her, now, and the light she had emitted slowly sinks back into her skin until there is only a soft glow that illuminates them on this distant, wretched shore. But she doesn’t touch. She doesn’t need to. (Want, yes. But not need. She doesn’t break the spell.) “I missed you,” she says. The three words aren’t enough, they don’t do justice to how she feels in her absence, but this is not something she has a poem for. c o r d i s I’ll touch you all and make damn sure that no one touches me