there's a song in your lung
and a dream in your eye
It is with a sudden clarity that she realizes her wounds had not healed. They had festered. They had been deposited beneath a slip of fragile skin, suppurating until they had been ready to burst. And she had ignored them, much like a blister on her heal that she would like to pretend were not there. Those wounds had stung, biting at her tender flesh while she had willfully ignored them, pushed them aside. The shimmering mare had broken them open, exposing the rawness, releasing the poison she had held within her. The moment she realizes this, she knows what she must do.
Perse gives her the perfect opportunity, asking her with banal callousness what had happened. Her hesitation gives way to a pregnant pause. But then she steels her resolve, and, with a grimace, she slices open those festering boils.
He called, and I answered.
She halts then, unsure of how to continue. He had called and she had answered. She should not have answered, but she had. She had been a fool. A terrible, arrogant, naïve fool. Her words echo her thoughts.
I was a fool.
She is not kind to herself. In this moment, she cannot be.
He sent me to retrieve his lover. The one he trapped at the end of the universe.
Her story comes in fits and starts. It is difficult, forcing those words from her throat. She had not spoken them in full to anyone. This mare is the first, and the realization surprises her. But still, she continues.
I fell into the cosmos. I froze, shattered. I think I died. He remade me.
Her golden eyes bore into Perse’s, an unwitting lifeline as she relives the horror of that day. But then she is done, the story is finished. Her relief is exhaled on a sharp breath, a breath unintentionally bursting against a glimmering cheek.
joscelin