I think I thought I saw you try

I am my mother's child, I'll love you till my breathing stops
I'll love you till you call the cops on me

Melita had faced many monsters: she’d coined it as her duty amidst friends and family to be the defender, the sword, the shield, the rampart, the bulwark in the scattered remnants of oblivion. So she didn’t quake or shudder as the wolf’s gaze slid over to hers; but lord, she felt an impact, the eerie, enigmatic rise of apprehension, the hair looming on the back of her neck, the smoldering sway of power beneath menace and malice. Perhaps it hadn’t meant to be so desperate, perhaps the world had been just as cruel, and in return it relied on its instinct, on slinking, on roaming, on becoming this - she could understand it, the way the world twisted someone back upon themselves, nowhere else to go but down, down, down. She didn’t hate it, couldn’t scorn it, couldn’t shame it into death and desecration. They might’ve been the same, pushed and pushed until it naught else left. She only wished her arrow had been more precise, more true, wafting and waning until it hit the chest instead of the head. What might’ve been a shot with less suffering, less agony, didn’t matter; a snarl, a scramble in the dirt, a knotted, gnarled feeling pushing into her heart. Her hackles didn’t raise. Her expression didn’t change; disheartened, saddened, enigmatic in a way, just as all the other established deaths in the Rift had tied her into nettles and thorns. This one was no different. Jigano shifted again – no more fox, but equine, and when his hoof descended upon its skull she didn’t shy or look away, gaze fixated on the end, on the finale, the misery shaken and gone, hers still attached and haunting. She put her bow along her back again, silent, then still, her stare shifting back to the bard with her solemn brow. “Sorry. I should’ve been better.” An anthem, a theme, a tune to everything she’d ever done. M e l i t a But in our darkest hours, I stumbled on a secret power I'll find a way to be without you, babe