don't leave me here alone; cordis

[Cordis]

She doesn’t feel the moment when it happens, when something slips from Glassheart into her, a diseased intimacy. The virus slips into her blood cells, and begins to multiply. She, of course, is only looking at her. Breathing her in. Trying not to backslide. She has all but forgotten how wanting feels when it is not so wrapped up in grief. She is used to that particular kind of wanting – the desire to rewind the clock, to set them back to the river or forest or hazel or anywhere, really, any of the places where they’d been together. (Except for that one time, at the river’s side, Spyndle split open and Cordis kneeling at her side, screaming and wordless, without knowing what the lighting would, or could, do. That time, she never wants to relive.) She is not so used to looking at someone, their body alive, healthy, eyes bright, voice clear – and feeling her stomach twist in another kind of way, like a bird’s wing, extended and fluttering. “I feel I am beyond help,” she says, despite whatever she feels in her stomach, because it’s just a fluke, a reflex (she looks so much like her, in this light). That sentence should end it. She is beyond help. Done. A smarter woman would walk away. Would not engage this - whatever it is. (It’s not a bird’s wing stirring, no. It’s smaller. A butterfly’s wing. Delicate. It can be crushed.) For as much as she thinks of Spyndle, she does not talk of her much. That’s not to lesson her memory, it’s more that Cordis, who has never been a poet, hates that she cannot do her justice. She tries and comes up short every time, to capture her, to capture how bewitched she was, the words that make their way out sound cheap and clichéd. But the girl asks, and she tries. “Spyndle…” she says, and just the name hurts, thorns in the mouth, “she had a way of seeing things. Deeper truths than she was shown.” The first time, when Cordis was wild-eyed with a racing heart, pursued by hellhounds, and Spyndle shouldn’t have bothered. But she did. Persisted with her, persisted her into a river, sunlight on the water, and that was all that she wrote. “She endured so much. More than was fair. But she never let it ruin her. She was kind, mostly, but there was a cruel streak to her. Her tongue could leave you bleeding, if she so desired.” She’d left Cordis crippled by it, after Perse was taken from them. “And she was beautiful, of course.” There’s more to say, but her throat grows tight, and so she goes quiet, trying to swallow down the memories her own words bring. c o r d i s I’ll touch you all and make damn sure that no one touches me