Emotion sunk into Gerlinde like an eclipse.  A brief corona of thought flashed around it:  Can I possibly think of anything other than this moment?<br/><br/>And no.  The answer was 'no'.  Just like she could imagine no other moment quite like the feeling of this one - nothing so intense.  That kind of intensity demolished names.  It broke any parallel.  It was raw feeling.<br/><br/>And yes.  Yes, she loved it.<br/><br/>Outwardly, she seemed porcelain.  Magazine perfect.  Still an icon.  Still just snow.  Inside, her heart had become a black hole - its brilliance and substance so dense it inverted and blazed with gravity.<br/><br/>Gerlinde fastened herself firm around Lisle; not confining her so much as defining her.  She drank in the emotion flooding out of the girl, and there was so much to that flood:  The agony that raked its nails across the inside of her throat and belly and balls.  The shock that kept kicking the base of her brain.  The fear she felt like frost around the roots of her teeth, coating the inside of her ribs, running icicles down into her sex.  The helplessness, like a black drug running through every vein, staining them, weighing them down.  The thrill that singed the tips of her breasts, the tip of her cock, the ends of her toes and fingers.<br/><br/>Gerlinde took in all of that flood and nearly quaked with it.  She cried without her mouth moving.  If it could have moved, it would have smiled.  Because at the core of all of it - at the source of that inferno that eradicated all distinction and turned her flesh and soul into a pyre - there was a feeling like no other.<br/><br/>A feeling.  A fact.  A force that made Gerlinde feel so exquisitely calm that she imagined it was just what heaven felt like - just what made her hold Lisle so firm and so peaceful - just like being on God's lap.<br/><br/>It was a feeling she could have put into a sentence.  Gerlinde repeated that sentence over and over:<br/><br/><em>I did this.  I did this.  <strong>I </strong>did this.</em><br/><br/>She wept and held Lisle and looked at what she had done.  She felt everything.  She felt peace.<br/><br/>"It's alright."  Gerlinde said.  She said it like it could not be otherwise.  "It will be alright."<br/><br/>She believed it.  Absolutely.