MELITA
As the blight eased, no longer a pulsing void down the back of her neck, or streamlined into her blood – the youth grew more despondent, miserable, a certain anguish scorching and touching the remnants of pestilence. She’d once longed to be a monster, and given the chance, given the opportunity, given the ease in which she’d sunk – It turned out she’d just been awful.
Her memories were flickering barbs and sparks, none of which were good or transcribed in great detail, just enough to make out the situation; her gnarled fingers crushing flowers, her staff wielded against precious, gilded petals, her weapons a means to an end, yearning to tackle, to destroy, to menace – when her heart had been compassionate, her body had orchestrated and composed none of these things. She’d been a goner, incapable of swaying or bending into the light, into the pathways of life and all its grand gestures. The youth had divested and coiled knots and nooses in herself, and they were so hard to unravel.
So she tucked herself away, in the niche of trees, while she recovered, her staff flourishing across the void of sky and winter’s abyss, channeling the trepidation, the consternation, the sorrows, the affliction, into some raw entanglement of being better; because the past month had assured everyone and anyone that she wasn’t. Fangorn nestled himself into the snow, watching, quiet, likely afraid of her after devilish antics, after wayfaring moments, after her hands still trembled and her heart wanted to break. What a joke, she chastised herself in the gloomy eaves, as she swung against boughs, against leaning branches, trying to salvage some means of accuracy and precision in the vicious haze, in the unrelenting force of upheaval.
See I've come to burn your kingdom down
