M E L I T A
Iskra was a constant: strength, generosity, benevolence, and liberation.
Iskra was family, friendship forged on fiery plains and those vivid strokes of a wide-open canvas, before plagues and barbarity, before demolition and massacres. There’d been hope and futility, adoration and joviality, the youthful, wild exuberances and ebullience inspired by curiosity and endeavors, not a single soul held back as they dove into chasms and caverns, as they wove their way through labyrinths and warrens. Thereafter, when there was only smoke and fire, blood and ash, tyranny and death, they all found one another midst the ruins, sunken into the embers, driven back into the shadows. Perhaps that was their endless, unwinding theme – despite every mishap, every trial, every tribulation, every damned, treacherous moment, they still found their way back to one another. Each time, she blended her strength into his, so they would match, parallel bonds of persistence and fire, and she’d swear to catch and snag the stars for him. He brought her back from ghosts, and she screamed at his mother’s wraith form, challenged dragons and demons for the sake of her companions. He’d show them glimpses of other worlds – paradises below the fathoms, glass fixtures unbreakable, unattainable, and she’d smile and laugh, she’d be advised, but never ridiculed, never lectured, allowed to breathe, to be herself in the waves of uncertainty. It was one of the many vows and assurances the honeybee child had made in the glimpses of sunlight and dunes, frozen in time, in space, in memory, collected in her rogue ambience, delightful and radiant, a glowing promise, an opulent sacrifice she was always willing to make. She’d stand as a shield, as a sword, even though he’d never asked, she’d blister and scald and break apart anything that threatened him, even though he’d never dream of it, and she’d bleed, bleed, and bleed, sacrifice anything and everything, ferocity embodied, if he ever said the word. It was loyalty, it was friendship, it was harmony and devotion, and too many others things she’d never pondered, never put to notion; simple, just, and binding.
She breathed in serenity for its finest of seconds, splitting along the sacred, finite shards; she’d never dared to ask
why they only had those brief intervals of peace and repose, when they could merely relax instead of fight, instead of pummel and bludgeon. Perhaps those days were gone now, and they only existed in the framework of demise and destruction, a pattern of chaos and bedlam, ricocheting and bouncing off the shrapnel.
This one, however, was entirely self-inflicted.
The ground came rushing to meet them, the branch cracking under the weight and pressure of their forms, and on impulse, she thought about shifting in his arms, about taking the brunt, about leaning into the ground first instead. He must have known, must’ve felt her maneuvering, because he only tightened his hold, and
she was defended.
That’s not how this works she thought about hissing, but all she could emote was a gasp as Iskra crashed against the forest floor, and she was flung beside him, only loosened and thrown when the impact gnarled into
him.
“Dammit,” she uttered, gilded eyes focusing on the skyline for a second, side throbbing from where she’d landed, and instinctively reached out for him, pushing off the brush, the moss, the sticks and stones bruising her form. His wheezing wasn’t lost on her, caused her to scurry over faster, to kneel near him, arching her brow at the distinctive smile still traipsing over his mouth.
“Are you all right?” Her tone was concerned, laced with a thousand other conflicting things, like mayhem and vehemence (towards a damned
tree, as if it could’ve helped two idiots stuck in its boughs). The youth sighed, rose from her knees, brushed the leaves and dirt from her dress, fingers plucking a few twigs nestled in his hair.
“We’re so stupid,” she laughed then, the laughter escaping her like a rush of air, a means of escaping the bounty of emotions seething their way through her throat, offering her hand to help him stand.
