M E L I T A
Failure wasn’t a foreign counsel, but a frequent direction Melita found herself drifting down. She was occasionally too hardheaded, too stubborn, too damn willful to ever step fully in its containments, never truly permitted herself to be swallowed whole, consumed, by its efforts. The world would screech its warnings, its ultimatums, its creeds at her, and she’d either listen or rampage forward, held back only by her friends, by her family, by loving hands hoping to shield her from the incoming anguish. This wasn’t any of those things – another reminder that bullish tenacity wasn’t always going to be the proper method or mode, that sometimes the world was cruel just to be so, and that’d she still rise from it, the phoenix from the ashes, dusting away her cinders, her embers, her coals. She would learn. She would prosper. So the girl didn’t balk, didn’t cry, didn’t fall into acrimonious rage; she’d lived all this before, an eternal pattern of deficiency and hope, downfalls and triumphs. This wasn’t her lands falling apart. This wasn’t her comrades disappearing into the midst. This wasn’t anything other than a lost game, a dismissal in the wind.
Maybe she didn’t deserve it, but she’d accepted the terms wholeheartedly. She’d adhere to them, not bend, not break, not shatter, but smile, a polished, enduring fortitude sketched, mapped, outlined right across her features. It was written in her grin, in her eyes, in her steady, stalwart glances, in the lightness of her voice, in the essence of her pride; strength, bordering near calculation, the first of machinations. “Thank you, Wessex,” she prospered, gaze flicking towards Rory for a moment, at the offering of names, at the way he tried to salve and assuage the defeat. “I don’t mind. Rules are rules,” she winked, no hard feelings exchanged as she hastened to grab her makeshift staff back from the grass, where she’d dropped it in her haste to join in on the butchering and merriment. I’ve seen bigger monsters than her, she yearned to say, but kept it behind her teeth and tongue, not wishing to look a gift horse in the mouth – not when tutoring and guidance were tossed into the air. “Where should I find you?” Because she starved for knowledge, craved it, required it, before she ran into reckless abandon over and over again.
Then, before she turned away, her gilded stare managed to surmise the gourd cooking. She smothered down a laugh, a chuckle, tilted her head, and proffered some assistance, accommodating and benevolent in the face of so many unspoken things. “If you take the seeds out, you can roast those too.”
