Let the shadows fall behind us [open]

[Cordis]

Something she never wonders – was the love greater (more terrible) because of Him? Because she knew such despair, all those deaths and torments at His hands, because her life was darkness for years and years and years, what did she make of light when she finally saw it? Would her love be so ferocious, so all-consuming, if she didn’t know darkness and misery so intimately? It’s the kind of question that haunts, and it’s not one she ponders –not one she dares to ponder. All she knows is – oh yes, she loved. Loves. Will love. Every tense of the word, and she feels it. All towards a woman who is gone. To a woman whose heart beats inside Cordis, now. (She’d wandered into the river that had taken Spyndle, and it had slipped inside.) (I carry your heart. I carry it.) How can you stay asks Tang. Cordis wonders this sometimes, too. She stays because there is nowhere else to go. She doesn’t know any other place. She stays because this is where everything occurred. Because the memories were made here, and she walks among them, a ghost in the museum of every heartbeat and heartbreak she felt. “I don’t think I had a choice,” is what she says, a poor summary of why she truly stays (it’s hope, or it’s fear, or it’s some amalgam of both). She asks her question, then. “How long?” she says, but that might not be enough, it might be misconstrued, “how long were you there?” c o r d i s I’ll touch you all and make damn sure that no one touches me