Heartlights

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

She wasn’t innocent though – for everyone who believed that she hadn’t seen, hadn’t experienced every ounce of suffering – what else did they wish she’d experienced? What more should she have seen and done, committed to? She knew the scent of death, she knew the taste of blood, she knew the curse of power, and she knew what monsters were capable of – how they struck, how they blinded, how they blistered, how they wounded. In some portions of virtue and purity - maybe - but otherwise she’d been just one amongst the many that suffered and plagued their way through the Rift. They drifted through survival modes and methods, aching to persist, striving to condemn, bludgeoned, battered, and barbaric, hands clawing over cave walls and limbs rampaging over unknown land, desperation a familiar emotion. The youth ground her teeth together, a snap of her jaws, at the first statement the bard made, and she couldn’t fathom why the series of vexations and irritations hastened over her, nestled into her brow, into her fingers as they clutched together in their fumbling, quivering, shaking movements. More animalistic, carnivorous, predacious in the moments that followed, her gilded gaze snapped to his, the compassion gone, replaced by something like rage, like exasperation, anguished and distressed, a conflagration, an inferno, a begging set of talons in their golden glow. “That’s all I’ve been trying to do.” It came out like a hiss, like a growl, like a feral embrace, melancholy on the ends and strands. “Stronger, stronger, stronger,” the youth whispered, and it came out like some mumbled chant, her stare fixating back on lantern lights and sprigs, mind reeling, hands quavering again, limbs threatening to unleash or drag something into the abyss that wasn’t worth having – no salvation here in their wicked airs, in their malignant blood, in the blackened vitriol surging through her form. 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