I threw myself to the wolves

MELITA

She hadn’t been so disgusted with herself in a while – not since allowing her sister and mother and her family to be departed from this world, not since becoming a failure, not since forgoing growth for impulsive, impetuous desires. The notion that she’d yearned to be savage, to be untamed, to be feral, and then granted it without her control, without her compliance, was a searing sentiment burning down the rapacity of her soul; it simmered her throat, it brewed against her ribs, it tore along the rest of her strength. Who was she anymore? To have believed in becoming a hideous, molten thing, and suddenly, when granted and given that opportunity, she hated the taste of it? The zeal, the fervor? The way she couldn’t distort her efforts, the way she couldn’t cease attacking those she cherished?

She and Fangorn wandered, the vampire gourd compliant (simply happy to have her returned to him), shoes finally on her feet, staff in her hand, collecting bits and pieces of pathways and trails not sodden and hidden by snow. In her palms she snagged a few stones and feathers, glanced upwards at the grace of luxere slinking along the same lanes, their glowing antlers and eyes twisting back towards her before bolting. Maybe they too recognized her inadequacies, her flaws, her defects. Where they’d once eaten fruit from her hand, they now scurried and ran. Something in her heart broke, and she found herself shifting down a familiar road – lantern lights showing her the way.

By the time she’d managed to find the shrine she felt like she was in pieces, foreign and unknown, completely altered from the person she thought she knew. Her limbs shook and she longed to shatter, right then and there, on the press of rime, glaciers, and darkness, the sun sinking below the tree-line, the canopies potentially treacherous. The youth didn’t care though, bending down to pray, to murmur, to whisper, as she took her ivory rocks, her feathers, and placed them along the altar. “Ludo,” she crooned, quiet, halfway between tears and rage, “Am I a monster?”

You're all gonna watch me
Disappear into the sun