here is the repeated image of a lover destroyed
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All things end.
This is a lesson that has been taught to her again and again. Sometimes for the better: her time in His lair ended, didn’t it? Never mind that He still haunts her in ways she hates to define.
And they ended. They ended where they began, in a river, in pieces.
(Never mind there’s another heart in her chest, never mind she thinks of her every day, an entirely different sort of haunting.)
They end.
She fights to accept this, to not lose herself in her grief. Time heals all wounds, but they heal jagged and infected, the proud flesh of memories necrotizing her from the inside out.
But she moves on, or she pretends to. She wanders the meadow and river and forest and belongs nowhere. Sometimes she talks to others, fleeting, empty conversations that she is unwilling or unable to carry. She dresses herself in lightning, and she is untouchable, and this, she tells herself, is all she needs.
Today, her chest hurts. The pain is pinpointed to the second heart inside her, the one swallowed up by her body in the river, the last piece of Spyndle she’d ever know. It throbs like an infected tooth. She does her best to ignore it – she is no stranger to pain – but as she walks it worsens. Sighing, she changes directions, moves instead to the river, thinking perhaps the cool water will soothe the fever-heat that spirals in her veins.
The pain worsens as she walks into the water, the lightning temporarily gone from her, nothing but slick and silver now, and it escalates until she can hardly breathe, all fire inside of her, untouched by the water surrounding her on all sides.
The water rises – it shouldn’t be rising, there’s no rain, no reason for it – and then it envelopes her, and she barely notices for the pain, and she sinks down, her hooves hit the river bottom, and she should stop there, but they keep going, like she’s landed on quicksand. The silt of the river floor swallows her knees, then her belly, and finally her head, stretched wildly towards the hazy surface.
At another river, in a land that’s here and not-here, she breaks through the surface. Into the valley, in the shadow of death.
She’s been here once before, when she drew a girl back, sent her to fulfill a vendetta. But that had been purposeful – she’d followed the ravens, then.
So why the river?
She staggers to the surface, dripping wet, and realizes the aching pain in her chest has ceased. The world around her is muted, ghastly, land of the –
oh.
There’s a voice in the mist, like music, like miracles, like home.
The mist is everywhere, and she can’t see her, but she knows that voice better than she knows her own.
“No,” she cries out, and the mist swallows her defiance, “no, you’re not, you’re not-”
She’s almost babbling now, stumbling wet through the fog, towards where the voice had come from, wondering distantly if she’s going mad, but calling out for her nonetheless. There is so little light here, but she creates what she can. She brightens herself, tries to make herself easily spotted, a glare of silver in the mist.
Like a lighthouse, beckoning her home.
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
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NEV IM CRYING I LOVE YOU
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