we were made out of lightning; any

[Cordis]

She is strong. She is strong because she came out of the pits with hellhounds nipping at her heels. She is strong because she learned inside of her there was lightning, a magic electric enough to leave charring and smoking corpses in her wake. She is strong because she found it in herself to love (though that part never really felt like a choice, or a conscious decision – it felt like gravity, like a natural law of things, that somewhere the rules of the universe wrote a sentence for them). She is weak. She is weak because she wept and blubbered for death, for mercy, as He towered above her, impossibly tall, refusing all her pleas. She is weak because she could not love her own child, her silver-maned daughter. She is weak because she could not stop Him from taking the daughter she did love. (She is weak because she did not kill her herself – she knows she should have now, that it would have been a mercy, that death was infinitely better than the pits.) She is weak because she let Spyndle leave. Because a part of her was glad when she did. The stranger is kind and the kindness hurts, in a way, because she does not want him to be kind. She wants him to be rude, cruel, so she has an excuse to let the lightning lick over her skin like eager jungle cats, tensed and ready. But instead there is only kindness, a desire to help her when she is beyond help, and she doesn’t know what to say. “He took my daughter,” she says. It is not an answer. She is speaking to him but also she is speaking for the sake of speaking, the masochistic desire to relieve the memory. “He took my daughter and I let him because he threatened to kill her if I didn’t,” she laughs. It is a morbid laugh and sounds ugly on her lips. “As if she isn’t wishing for death now.” (Oh, but she hopes Perse is dead already. She hopes.) “I’m sorry,” she realizes she is babbling, a history he has no stake in, “my name is Cordis.” 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