it comes with a price

MELITA

“Who had you choose?” He might’ve tried to peel away and hide, but now her rashness, her brazen, hot-headed compassion unfurled, corrupted, and contorted, incapable of swallowing or smothering it away. It was fire and brimstone, cinders and embers, brimming to the surface and climbing up the inside of her throat, to become molten, to become infernal, to become rebuttal and resurgence. For all her faults and flaws, the youth craved vehemence for those she considered family, and Nate had slid his way in there, in between rock, crag, and blistering wakes. She’d surround herself in flames and take down the world if they asked it of her – and a serpent sway settled into her gut, a clenching of teeth over the vicious howl threatening to overwhelm and consume. Was that what Nate sought, after all this? Revenge? Justice? Or to slink away and simply meander in this essence, in this shell, in this threshold he may not have been able to escape or evade?

She made no note of what would happen to her uncle either, in the interim, when immortality scorched over Nate’s skin but didn’t touch Sunjata’s. When the potential threat of other things came to light, when the world sneered and roared around them. When choices would have to be made.

Her gilded eyes burned with ferocity, even when he looked away, even as the subject altered and changed, biting, biting, biting on the cataclysm waged inside her. “Two years ago,” even younger and dimmer then; but this would be her third LongNight coming, how she marked and chiseled the time away. While his voice was soft, hers was a crackling maelstrom, no longer so dulcet and composed, one more stoking away from an incensed bellow. Even at his tease, she merely shrugged, a smile touching the corner of her mouth and no further. Maybe even that was unnerving, before the cracklings of her abhorrence and rage.

The arm winding around her shoulders, closing in over her, might’ve been the only thing to anchor and give her pause, before any violent, turbulent, mercurial, tempestuous contortion. She breathed, and stared down at the sand, kicking a stone nearby. “Right.” Family, friends, loved ones. Things she had now.

Things she’d defend until her heart ceased beating.

You're all gonna watch me
Disappear into the sun