"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
There is a part of her that looks at death like it could be a lover.
How else could she look upon it? For grief wells in her like blood, filling every vein and organ. Grief has even drowned the fear inside her, so she walks now, instead of runs. Her magic is gone, stripped, but so is everything else so why should this be any different?
She should be used to losing her. She knows the pattern, the cycle they crafted for themselves over the years. Leaving, returning, leaving, returning. Always coming back. Always hollering her home.
And of course some stubborn part of her wants to believe it still, even as that other heart beats inside her, joined.
Her existence is impossible unimaginable.
(Don’t say the word.)
She’s dried off, since wandering in the river, though she still feels liquefied. Like her limbs are loose and strange, ghost-things attached to her and moving on their own accord. She feels like a ghost, herself, disassociated and not-there. Her throat aches, like she’s spent days screaming. And maybe she has. She doesn’t know how much time may have passed, for time does not exist in such a dark place.
The meadow looks unchanged, and it seems impossible ridiculous, that the meadow should not have been rocked, that the world should not have been rocked.
But it’s the same. The same grass, the same sun, the same shifting throngs of horses.
The same rivers.
She moves, mechanical, staring out with a glazed expression. She is rocked, she is made stupid in grief.
She is alone.
He wasn’t sure what was happening lately. His world was turned upside down. Paths that used to be achingly familiar were now foreign and sometimes fraught with danger. Families had been ripped apart, both of blood, and of loyalty. It seemed not a single life had escaped unscathed, even he, who’d been absent is not unaffected. His home has turned on him, the veil protects her, even from him. Rejection burns hot inside his stomach, churning the contents, making him feel ill. He wants nothing but to go home, to return to the places he’d played as a colt, to see the faces he’d grown up around, taken for granted, and hadn’t appreciated. Instead he is here, alone, homeless, with no one to soften the brunt of this realization. He is so very alone.
So he comes to the Meadow, in search of…something, anything to mute the loneliness. It isn’t often he is brave enough to intrude on another, but when he sees her as she wanders, blind to the world around her, functioning only on a basic level as her gaze is lost on the world around her, he cannot help himself. He calls out, a soft nicker winding through the treeline, and steps from beyond the brush to fall in step a few paces off with her. He thinks that perhaps for a moment, he can find distraction and solace in her company, and from the energy she gives off perhaps she can find solace in him for a brief moment or two, or perhaps not. If nothing else they offer each other a short distraction.
”Are you looking for someone, or something?” he inquires gently, ”I’ve nothing to do, I can help if you like.” he offers. This is truth, he has nothing, no one in this strange world. It would cost him nothing. ”My name’s Uconn.”
At least she’s used to loneliness. Used to the grievance of it, the way it felt settled on her. Because loving her had been lonely, in its way, with the tidal nature of their love – coming together only to leave again; a series of moments that they stitched together to make a quilt resembling some kind of romance, and it was paltry and strange but goddamnit, it had been theirs.
Now she should not be so lonely because a dead girl’s heart beats alongside her own.
Now, she can’t leave – except she already has. To the one place Cordis can’t follow.
She almost doesn’t notice him. Once, she would have been on a hair-trigger – especially now, lacking her magic, lacking the lightning she’d so clothed herself in, a warning sign in silver.
Now, she almost doesn’t care.
But instinct is instinct, and her baser nature recognizes some rustling of movement a moment before he speaks – are you looking for someone? and oh, her heart breaks afresh – and she looks to him.
“Not anymore,” she says, which is the terrible, heart-wrenching truth – she is not looking because for once, she knows where to find her: in a pile of bones on the beach.
He gives him name. She half-hears it.
“Cordis,” she replies. The words sound distant, like echoes.
