we were burnt down like catholics; caw

[Cordis]

Cordis does not sleep.
She’d slept, in His lair, because then the magic had lain dormant in her veins; then, she would fall asleep and pray to die, to stay dead. The dreams there were fitful things, nightmares mostly, for there were so few sweet memories to make dreams of – before His lair there was only an autumn night spent curled against the fever-warmth of her dead or dying father, a blink of blue sky, and then it was Him, asking are you alone, are you alone.

Now she does not sleep because sleep makes her vulnerable, and she does not sleep because now her dreams are haunted by other things entirely, by a mare like spun gold and the way they dance around each other even as love falls at their feet like a natural disaster. She dreams of her skin and her smell and the way she’d looked in the river.
She dreams of her dying, too, but she tries not to think about that.

The girl rises, strange, and Cordis can now see the resemblance – the girl looks like the monster, her features an echo. She does not consciously know how to use her magic to read these things, but it happens sometimes, like a sense.
“Caw,” she says the name again, to affirm, “I’m Cordis.”
The name will mean nothing to her, but she offers it anyway.
“Do you remember your father?”
Your monster, she wants to say, because he does not deserve children – but ah, the wicked are the most prolific of them all.

I’ll touch you all and make damn sure

Cordis

that no one touches me