M E L I T A
She’d never been truly alone.
At her first breath, when the sun’s rays kissed her face, blessed her birth, her sister was right behind her – they were together, forged moments apart, consecrated in warm wiles and gentle spheres. When they played on the dunes, when they rushed into the ocean, when they screamed and laughed across the tides, there’d always been mother, with her tender, compassionate, soft-spoken croons, or the kingdom as a whole, encompassed and bordered by bridges, by heat, by swirls of dust and power. There’d been friends too, fire-forged or a constant, scorching existence – rushes of lightning, emboldened efforts, times spent in canals and beneath glassy screens. Even when they’d all plunged into hell, they’d been together, tying frayed knots, combining strands of strength, becoming something out of nothing, left to their own devices, fresh blossoms out in the sun. Spirals of loss had splintered, fractured their little, lithe souls, and willowy, mercurial, capricious convictions became molten regards, fiendish endeavors, rebellious motives, and still, they hadn’t been without one another, without a kind soul, without a merciful guardian. There’d been companions, there’d been bonds, there’d been everything and naught too, those endless days spent staring down ghosts, phantoms, wraiths, behemoths, and monsters, and Melita, with her honeybee raptures, with her persistence, had strived to protect what was hers. Her worries had been eternal, always catching the eye of her kin, of her beloveds, of her cherished, potent allies, but somewhere along the way she’d forgotten what it was like to have no one.
Now, in the stark plumes, in the ghastly wakes, in the shadowy, midnight oils, she understood its unwelcome embrace. It was hollow and uneasy, empty, cast off and aside, misplaced, laid out to waste in unknown realms, in mystifying glades. It was harsh and unrelenting – each call unanswered, each hushed whisper led astray, each silent sob forced to drift into meaningless strains. It was the void, gnawing, scratching, hissing, reflecting the irreverence she thought she’d escaped from – she thought they’d disappeared, they’d run, they’d fled – but the Rift always won.
It brandished and tarnished her hide in more than just a scattering of scars. The hard-earned diligence, the insistent boldness, the searing, blistering, scorching tear of daring cooled, pulsed away from her frame as she walked further and further into a world she knew naught about. She didn’t cry. She didn’t weep. Melita stared into the abyss and it stared back, as mutinous as she – she clenched her jaws together, flickered her golden gaze across the Stygian fringe, and deigned to repeat her steps. One more time she hinted, she told herself, striving to keep her mind occupied throughout the tangible lull (no Sila, no thunderous crackling, sparking, no Clementine rushing in with petals and blossoms, no mother, no father, no legion of comrades pledging allegiance to swords, to arms, to munitions, to revolution). Her steps, her motions, her rhythms were savage concoctions, an audacious splendor of sinister beats (try me she snarled at the wind, she growled at the veils, she hissed at the boughs), as she sculpted past the same cluster of trees, the same rustle of limbs and leaves, the same warren haze and formidable maze. Trapped, snared, caught – all part of another game, another ruse, another scheme. She had no doubts it was concocted by Kaos and his maelstrom devices, one more burning error and wound to send her on her way, down into the bulrushes, consumed by her own damned flaws and defects, elaborate and potent, venomous and deplorable. We have to go, she’d told her twin, smiling and grinning all the while, sinister anthems already distorting her sight – she’d seen nothing but freedom, liberation, and deliverance. The sweet girl had readily agreed, and then they’d all broken apart, fell elsewhere, scattered amidst the stars, the heavens, and the galaxies.
I’ll protect you, echoed past her skull, drummed into her heart; a brutal, barbaric reminder of her failures.
If this was where she’d make her last stand, then she’d make sure the fallen deity wouldn’t see her flicker into naught (you won’t have me - not in his line of gallows, in his catacombs, in his tombs, waiting to be brought back from the dead to screech and howl in her friends’ ears) – she was silent, she was stealthy, she was furtive and specious, eventually winding her way within a grove, blending into the darkness, into the cataclysm. She made no sound for other predators. She made no carnivorous movements. She simply eased into the shadows, a part of the backdrop, and waited along the heights of a tree, spread across a branch, legs folded, gaze narrowed, the hunted becoming the hunter.
Her body shuddered for its lack of contact with anyone and anything, and her heart yearned to melt, to fracture, to descend into its sorrows – but the rest of her simply wouldn’t allow it.
