love on the water, love underwater, love, love and so on; spyndle

[Cordis]

Back in His lair, she’d never thought it would be like this. She’d thought of escape, abstractly, the way grounded creatures think of flying. She’d never thought beyond the possibility of sun on her skin. (She hadn’t even known the way the sun would come to reflect off of her like she is a scimitar, for back in the pits she was a mousy brown.) She’d never thought of love. The idea itself never even crossed her mind. Love, to her, had been the one night spent curled against her father-mother, the way he’d called her Mahala (a name she would come to reject, after hearing it poured from His lips), their breaths turning to smoke. A body burning fever-hot and then not being warm at all. And then this, all this, pain and beauty and a love so sweet she would (she did) kill for it. I think this will consume us, says her love, says the woman who was a thousand times better than sunlight on the skin. The girl, the silver girl, the reckless promise made in exchange for memory, in exchange for this. The girl who was damned, because He would have always come and Cordis would have always fought Him and she would have always lost. We should have run like wild things, continues Spyndle. “Yes,” she says. Yes, this will consume us. Yes, we should have run. (“I creep, Cordis.”) “She’s his prize,” she says, the words like cyanide in her mouth. Their girl is not a girl to Him. She is a symbol. A slap in their face. A show of His prowess. “He doesn’t let go of prizes easily.” It would take so much. c o r d i s she said it was a mistake to let them burn her at the stake and she learned a lesson back there in the flames