Cinder House

by Freya Marske

And for a while that was enough. No. Not enough. But something.

What is it that you’re seeing in the dance? she would ask. Does it hurt you the same way it hurts me? And does that hurt feel so sublime that it keeps drawing you back, like the opposite of a warding?

Any long-standing human custom could become a law that bent human magic around itself. So house-magic, ghostly or otherwise, had a tendency to end or reset itself at these transitional hours: noon, or midnight, depending on where one found oneself.

The inevitability of the second act was clear in the curl of her wrist and the arch of her back. And yet she raised her face to his, as he took her hands and they swayed into the steps of the dance, with a smile that made Ella long to believe otherwise.

He had a comfort with silence that Ella wanted to relax into. If he were a house, he too might be a haunted one.

For a moment she missed being a house; this anger craved a larger skeleton.