LOWBORN, cordelia snow

cordelia snow

my skeleton danced on your gravestone

She is not a lady.

She could never be.

Instead, she is a wretched sort of elegance and grace, brows arched and head (too) high.

Late at night, her mother whispers into her hair as she brushes it, tugging the thin, copper strands between her nails. “We are warriors, you and I. We don’t need anyone else.”

Her mother planted poison into her kisses, slipped the sharpest blades into her smile. She raised Cordelia in a land too cold and harsh to nurture. She was a skinny, shivering child in her mother’s spindle-thin arms, and her chest was hollow where her heart should have been.

“You will only ever get what you take, my little Cora,” her mother would say, and she would listen attentively to every word. The lesson? Only the strong survive, and the best kind of strength is resourcefulness.

She will always remember her mother as she was back then, fighting against the cold, refusing to shiver. Square shoulders. Sharp jaw. Untamed hair, whipping across her cheeks.

But there are times when she sees her mother glancing at the noblemen during their travels, as if searching for a face, and she notices the ice in her mother’s eyes flicker with something lost.

She knows the story. Her mother told it to her once, told Cordelia of the love she shared with a Dormund of House Stark, a man who dropped her as soon as she was stated to bear his child. Cordelia doesn’t ask more than that.

He was never her father, and she never loved him.

(She met him as a child, though she doesn’t remember — he acknowledged her as his bastard daughter, and offered to send her mother money to help raise her; her mother declined out of pride.)

She knows she never wants to have the same weakness her mother does, and so she shuts herself off from those around her and stretches her spine.

She will not fall.

It was always just her and her mother from the beginning, strong figures carved from glaciers — but her mother leaves, one day. She disappears in the night and she doesn’t come back.

Cordelia gives up on waiting in a fortnight. She doesn’t know what became of her mother (she still doesn’t), but she knows what she was taught.

Survive, not surrender.

And there were only so many things she could do to survive.

She follows in her mother’s footsteps, travelling through the kingdoms as a tradeswoman — no longer just a trader’s daughter. She drops her bastard’s surname in most introductions, knowing it does little for her situation.

She swindles and swipes for extra cash, using her strengths to con others into giving her more than she deserves. A delicate smile here, a subtle lift of her skirt there: she knows the role she must play, and by the gods, can she perform.

Cordelia has outgrown the nuances of being a girl long ago, shedding her innocence for the skin of a woman. She holds herself like one, with her voice like satin and a smile like wine.

But she is not a lady. She could never be.


N/A

[b]DRAGON AGE, leliana[/b] as [i]cordelia snow[/i]