MELITA
She’d crossed a line somewhere: wouldn’t be the first, wouldn’t be the last, designed and molded in her winsome, but willful interludes, where the persistence survived but the colder, calculating measures did not. The words marred and scalded, tipping over the edge of her pride, but she listened anyway, not immediately defiant, not immediately seditious, spreading her inhales with slow, methodical breaths, countering with calm, composure and patience even as the raw glimmer of sedition tipped and dipped along her wiles. She took it, the barrage, the siege, the battering ram – some of it true, some of it nuanced, some of it completely false; but with a smile, savage and untamed, beckoning its way across her mouth. “I’ve never been special,” she proclaimed – a matter of fact when the rest of the world had blended into magic, into enchantments, into shifts of animals and torrents of claws. She’d made hers – each talon, each dagger, each maneuver and motion of her staff, each swing of a broken, barbed blade, each pinnacle, each paragon. Just this once a god had talked to her, looked at her, the little fire, the little flame, and allowed it to build and grow, just a smidgen, so that she could absorb, or die trying to reach for the sky.“Maybe it'll work out. Maybe it won’t. But I’m willing to try, and sometimes that’s all that matters.” She’d dared. She’d strived. Perhaps that meant nothing to Delah, to someone who knew about the woods, who lived in amongst its particles and beauty, who could take from the elements, foster the intricacies, barrel and trap and seethe. “I doubt we’re all the same – otherwise this world would be a very boring place. I would never proclaim that all the Fae are so singular either.” The honeybee girl didn’t ask her to give them a chance. She didn’t ask for anything, really, her chin raised and her kindness still ringing from her mouth, even when the leaves, the moss, the brambles, and the thorns didn’t want to listen. “I’m sorry for coming where I don’t belong.” But it’s always been that way; I don’t know any different. The only place she’d ever been wanted was in the Dragon’s Throat, and it was gone, tarnished, extinguished. She’d landed here, to escape, to evade, to implore something other than chaos and bedlam in her life. Perhaps that had been a foolish thought too.
See I've come to burn your kingdom down
