Something is happening.
There aren’t enough words to describe it, but it’s small and fragile; it’s like candlelight, maybe, casting shadows that break and pulse at the faintest hint of disruption. A feeling, and it could be smothered, lost to smoke and wax if even just one of them moves too abruptly. They recognize it in themselves but not in the stranger standing before them, the one drawing them in with the gravity in their skin.
“I feel I am beyond help.”
Glassheart almost answers her, almost tells her that ‘no one is beyond help’, but she’s never felt so helpless as she does in these moments; like she is a single petal in a river, going where the water wants and dreaming of nothing else. Luckily, she doesn’t have to speak. Cordis answers anyways; beyond help, perhaps, but not beyond trying.
“Spyndle… She had a way of seeing things. Deeper truths than she was shown. She endured so much. More than was fair. But she never let it ruin her. She was kind, mostly, but there was a cruel streak to her. Her tongue could leave you bleeding, if she so desired. And she was beautiful, of course.”
And what an answer it is.
Maybe she isn’t a poet, but if her answers are not poetry then poems must not be beautiful or meaningful — because her words drip with both. To be loved like that would be everything, she thinks. The description alone, however, is enough to put into perspective the impossibility of the two of them because there is nothing extraordinary about Glassheart. No one will write poems about the way she comes together like constellations aligning, because she doesn’t.
Everything that she is made of has belonged to someone else first.
And it shouldn’t matter, because Cordis is not hers, because she’s never wanted anyone or anything before (and so why should she start here, now?). Somehow it does, though — matter. Somehow this gravity is pulling her, beckoning her forwards and into a false sense of recognition when in all reality Cordis is just a stranger, should be, anyways. So, she stands there, comparing herself to all of the pieces that Cordis loves about someone else, wondering if the fact that she is withering is visible, if Cordis can see her folding in on herself realizing that she will never amount to enough because she is so certain right down to the marrow of her bones that there is nothing new or cruel or passionate concealed inside her skin.
Oh, but how wrong she is.
It is rising, out of ashes and sickness alike, scaled and treacherous. There, rippling just below the surface. She closes her eyes as a second drop of blood streaks across her lips.
( Of course she has endured so much. She has been stupid, again and again and again. And this wreckage, this ruin, it is of her own making with perhaps some aid from each of the monsters she has loved at one moment or the next. She has always been a reckless, wild thing. How many times now has she been led to slaughter? How many times has she acted the gentle lamb as they trod her through the blood of those before her? Their faces flicker alive in her mind now; Belgarath, Isami, Carnage, Weed.)
With her eyes still closed, she says:
“If you tried, do you think that you could see what she shows me?”
Glassheart
i'll always love you the most
@[Cordis]