“It wasn’t a reward.”
She says this flatly. If pain came with rewards she would have been rewarded long ago, in His lair, within the first day. Each of her deaths, her screams, would have brought gold and jewels dripping all colors. No, something else had happened, some catalyst that was somehow different than pain that had sparked the nascent magic inside her.
(This is what happened: when she was free from Him, He no longer tamped down the magic that had always been within her. The rotting wayfarer who violated her was merely the first threat to awaken it.)
He asks for her tale, and she isn’t sure what to say – how to shorten the story to a few words? Cordis has never been particularly articulate; she’s not one to ramble tales, though her own story is a novel within itself.
Not that it’s a story she wants to share. So few of her tales are.
(She’d share stories of Spyndle of course. For her, she would write poems, write epics of their strange and beautiful story. She could spend hours on the way her skin looked in the river. But that is not what he asks. He does not know Spyndle.)
“He quit hurting me because I killed him for it,” she says. A different he, of course. The other one – the dark god – still walks, still haunts her.
You can’t kill them all.
“What about you?” she asks. A vague question, open – there to take his story, or not.
I’ll touch you all and make damn sure
Cordis
that no one touches me