She is no longer sure how many iterations of this world she has seen. How many iterations she herself has been.
(She was born a mousy brown, with another name. She had been a different girl, when she was first taken by the dark god – and she’d emerged something else, and then she’d changed, and changed again, and again, and again --)
Some of the shifts she had been almost entirely absent for, as she often left Beqanna – telling herself she would find somewhere else. But it called her back, and she returned, and sometimes she stayed for a long time and sometimes for only a day. Time has begun to shift for her in the way it does for the immortal, the days bleeding into one stretch, years passing in what seems like a blink. She is grateful for this sensation, to be honest, because the easier the time passed the more callused she becomes, the more her pain – the pain that had once felt as immortal as she was – ebbed.
She likes the way he talks, the way he seems to know this sensation – the pointlessness of time for the old.
(And oh, though she is old, she is nowhere near the oldest here – by some standards, she is almost young. Almost.)
“It seems like every time I come back, something’s changed,” she says by way of agreement, nodding her own head.
“I’m Cordis,” she says, and she’s smiling now, grateful for this moment of kinship amongst the old.
I’ll touch you all and make damn sure
Cordis
that no one touches me