"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
If she were made of moments and not atoms, this one might feel cancerous.
Once she lead her by the hand through white fog and into the lighthouse on the edge of the sea. Once she was a beacon, once she was the only light on a horizon of endless ocean. Once, Cordis asked her to come back, and she had been brave and looked death in the eyes and said, ‘no’. Once, lightning struck her flesh, and her bones. Once, lightning fed electricity into her heart, and it was enough. Would it be enough now? If she asked, could she tell everything else ‘no’? If she asked, would she come back?
‘I’ve changed,’ Cordis says.
They both have.
Because somewhere a wind is blowing, and it rattles the leaves of an old hazel bush that has not seen water in a long, long time. Somewhere, there are hazel leaves that pull away from the dried branches of a tree that was everything they ever needed until it wasn’t; they drift on the breeze to the depths of their graves, and they remember the things that they have seen, and then turn them to mulch. And somewhere, there is a river running dry, and rock shores that are so thirsty for the erosion that used to lap kindly at their hardest edges. Her edges are thirsty, too. She cannot remember the feel of rounded corners, of kindness, because everything about her is hard now.
‘You can’t see it,’ she says, and maybe she’s right – but maybe she isn’t, maybe the simple fact that they are not still skin-to-skin in these moments is enough to prove otherwise, that they resist, that they are not the same. Maybe they both see it. Maybe the gravity is not the same anymore. Maybe they have split atoms and worlds and skin, and both come out differently than they ever had thought possible. They’ve been broken and remade so many times that maybe the pieces don’t align anymore. Maybe this isn’t addiction. Maybe it isn’t withdrawal.
Maybe endings are just endings.
‘I love you,’ she says, but maybe it’s too late for consolations.
“I loved you once,” she says, because she is a volcano spewing ash and lava and resentment; she’ll rain clouds of it until they both suffocate under the weight of her choices and the bitterness all at once leaves her tongue.
And then she is alone.
This is still the kindest thing she has ever known.
i wanted pomegranates—
i wanted darkness—
i wanted him.
She is so much more than them.
They are made of moments, quivering and circling each other with damnation hot on their lips and in their souls. Their love is an anchor, dragging them down from the river they so cherished into the brackish weeds below, impossibly tangled. Their love is a lightning strike that does not bring them back, but sets things aflame, consuming indiscriminatingly.
She is the result of that love, of a consummation years in the making and a magic that made bodies do things they should not, but she is so much more.
She does not carry her mothers on her back like a weight; she has shed them, rolled them from her skin like a bead of water on an oilskin. They are a memory, a blur of gold and silver, a hazy embrace, a soft word.
She is so much more of them because she was chosen, she was picked by Him to live as His queen.
(Sometimes her crown is fire, sometimes ice. Sometimes thorns.)
And she loves Him (she must love Him), in a different way than they do – there is no coyness about it, her love is less love and more worship, for gods do not love as mortals do.
(And she is despairingly mortal.)
But He had turned her loose from the lair, set her unto the land with a promise to return that goes unfulfilled. And she is devout and she does not question Him.
(Not often, at least, though there is a mare made of fractures who asks questions Perse cannot quite answer.)
She bears a mark, as her mother does. His mark, though hers is not on her hip, but rather, hidden under a swathe of silver mane that pools on her crest like quicksilver. She wishes every day that it was more obvious, that she was never doubted for a moment to be His.
She has not found either of her mothers, or her brother. Has not felt particularly compelled to, not when they are a faint memory, like a dream she can only barely recall.
But she hears their voices, in the distance, and watches a streak of silver leave.
Like water, she flows in to take Cordis’s place.
Unlike Cordis, she does not tremble in the mare’s presence, does not look upon her like she might shatter at any moment. Instead, her gaze is cool, almost bored.
“Hello, mother,” she says.
She is so much more than them.
p e r s e
------------------------------cordis x spyndle
12-16-2015, 01:37 AM (This post was last modified: 12-16-2015, 02:03 AM by Spyndle.)
The skin that she touched is still burning; it’s alive with the memory of the feel of her lips, as though she had traced lines across her flesh in black felt pens to map out all of the ways they knew each other once. And this piece of her wonders if she ever dared to connect the dots, to draw out the lines of her burning skin, if she would look like constellations – if she would become a perfect mirror for the things that they have seen, and the things that they have said. Would it bring her to tears?
Because she is close to them now.
Because she is not as wicked as her words pretend to be.
She wants to be, or a part of her does. She wants to be a volcano. She wants to be an earthquake, and tear the world at its seams into halves. She wants to be as strong as she sounds when she says ‘I loved you, once,’ but all of her resolve so quickly turns to poison in her gut. It splits her in a bigger way than the vivisection did. It splits her in a bigger way than anything ever has.
Would the constellations spell out her regret?
Because she wants to turn her cheek. She wants to look across her shoulders, and see her dark eyes looking after her. But she left first. She said, ‘I loved you, once’. She said goodbye.
And then something happens to pull her out of constellations and ‘what ifs'. She almost laughs. She almost laughs, and then there is this sudden flash of teeth and her neck coils back like a snake before it lunges. She can’t believe the audacity – that when she is a volcano spewing fire and ash and hate, Cordis crawls back. Even if she wants her to. Even if she slows her steps on purpose, just in case she might. Because this is what they are. Because they are made of half-truths. Because they cannot be together and they cannot be apart.
Because they don’t know how to end even if it’s the only thing left that they need.
Because she wants to curl up in her anatomy. Because. Because there are a thousand reasons that she can fathom in the fractions of seconds. Because. Because if your heart is willing then there are a thousand reasons that you can create to make things appear the way that you want.
But it isn’t Cordis.
And the lines of Spyndle’s face soften. And then her eyes grow bigger, because the disbelief in them feels too huge to contain. “Perse,” she says, because there aren’t words that exist inside of her to say what she needs to say, because there aren’t words existing like that at all.
“Are you real?”
She asks, because she is not as wicked as her words pretend to be.
i wanted pomegranates—
i wanted darkness—
i wanted him.
Real.
Real is His lair, a labyrinth of stone and fire. Real is the chuffing breaths of the hellhounds as they circle around their master’s hooves. Real is Him, the gray of stormclouds woven across His back.
Real is all the ways she was made to burn.
(Real is the way she always asked for more.)
This reality – where she is alone, where there is no lair, no fire scorched hot across her skin – feels pale in comparison, like a photograph long left in the sun.
She knows there was a family before Him, she knows their names. She knows they are fools, but she feels a mild fondness for them nonetheless, her progenitors.
(More, she misses her brother, her twin – together, they knew stars and centuries.)
But ultimately they are so weak, mewling and crawling back to one another with poison still glistening on their lips, ready to kiss again, to infect each other again. It’s bewildering and foolish and Perse cannot grasp such a thing.
She wants for a moment to toy with her – her mother seems such an easy target, the weakness like a halo about her.
But in the end, she must still love her.
In the end, she answers only, “yes, of course I’m real.”
p e r s e
------------------------------cordis x spyndle
Once upon a time ago she’d said those words, and she can still hear the sizzle of the syllables as the words found salvation between her parted lips and hit the earth like acid. It was an easy choice then, and she can’t remember seconds existing between His proposal and her answer. What He wanted then had felt impossible. What He wanted then had felt like something the laws of physics could not allow. She should have known better. She had every reason to know better – to know that she existed in a world where loving something badly enough could kill her, and lightning could bring her back.
But He made it an easy choice then, to sneer and to spit, to tell Him to take what she did not have; what did not exist, what should never have existed.
It was an easy choice then, until magic made them a boy and a girl, and that same magic made the girl look just like Cordis. And then, when He came for her, it felt like losing both of them.
And in her mind she thought up schemes to save her.
She kept them safe, like heirlooms; seen and never touched – because in her head she was so much cleverer than reality had ever proven her to be. In her head they forged new identities. They wore disguises, wrought with magic, extravagant enough to change the way their bodies glittered with metal, and in her head even He, with all of his omnipotence, could not see through the charade. In her head they survived. In her head they were both safe before the wicked could creep in.
Reality is different, and uglier.
‘Yes, of course I’m real.’ Perse says, like she was a fool to spend a thousand nights wondering if her heart still beat. Of course. Of course.
They are only moments, but they feel like shards of glaciers falling into a sea. They feel like waves, monumental, obliterating, like the blue of water explodes in every direction revealing Atlantis after so many hungry years without. They feel so much bigger than they are, but they are only minutes, only seconds, only moments until she answers.
“I’ve missed you,” because even though there are a thousand other things that she could say, that she should say, these are the words that play again and again on repeat.
And even if her words are brave, she still won’t meet her daughters eyes. If they are the windows to her soul, then she will not look in – then she cannot press her cheek against the glass and fog it’s edges with her exhales while watching all the things that her daughter knows that she should have kept her from, all the things that were her fault, all the things she made reality when she said:
i wanted pomegranates—
i wanted darkness—
i wanted him.
She doesn’t know she is a promise writ, that once, there was a mare who was left without memory and a god who would give them back to her – at a price, of course.
(In these stories, there is always a price.)
She doesn’t know she was currency, spent before she was earned.
And would she have minded, had she known?
I think not, for Perse – Perse as she is now, not as she was, for the short time they had her – loves her life. In some cruel twist of fate, she loves the life her mother ran from, and aches to go back at some fundamental level, the way birds ache to migrate.
I’ve missed you, says the mare – says her mother – but can Perse say the same? In truth, she recalls so little about them. She remembers Elektrum more clearly, but her mothers are something indistinct – hazy breaths of silver and gold.
And rivers. For some reason, when she tries to remember them, she often thinks of rivers, light glinting off the surface.
So she doesn’t respond in kind. Because it would be a lie. Spyndle is a stranger.
(And Perse, a price.)
“How is Elektrum?”she asks instead, because he is what she remembers most from her past, remembers time held in his palms, stars flying past.
“I miss him.”
That much is true, at least.
p e r s e
------------------------------cordis x spyndle
