it comes with a price

MELITA

Fangorn growled at her feet, uncertain, maybe a little afraid, and her fingers trembled in the cool air, in the way she pressed them into fists to muffle whatever fear and apprehension kept crawling and creeping over her too. She stared out over the sea instead, at monuments and monoliths of power, at rippling tides that never conformed to anyone, that never begged or pleaded to be released from a fabricated hell. The wild girl swallowed down bouts of feral accord, the scream begging to be released, the sorrows pent up and building, brewing, brimming over the surface. Ludo had said the memory would go away – it would be gone and she’d never have to live it, have to see it, have to be immersed in it ever again.

But it beckoned and crawled, like knives over her skin, and felt feral, felt tainted, felt demonic, as if she could split apart at the seams. On impulse, she grabbed a shell nearby and heaved it as far as she could, muffling the sob springing across her tongue, the fire in her nape a turbulent, defiant roar, uncertain about her loyalties, about her devotions, about everything nestled within.

She hadn’t even noticed Nate approaching until his voice called to her softly, along the breeze and shoal, and she flinched for a second, half-expecting something else to come unwinding from the layers between dusk and dawn. His hand reached out towards her, and she thought her flesh might be like thorns, nettles, and daggers, sharp pinpricks of devastation and ruin, a youth left to fester, to decay, to rot – shying away, something mixed between savage cretin and tempestuous urchin. His palm represented some form of comfort, and she wasn’t sure if she deserved it. So she shook her head, the rest of her body like a leaf on the wind, trying to be rigid, unyielding, and failing drastically. “Just bad dreams.” She kept her digits tucked, clenching her jaw, imagining, and struggling so hard not to, the suffocating reel of her phantom-mother’s reach. “Why are you out here?” Deflection, not a skill she was so artful at – gilded eyes an intermingling of ferocity and damage, sliding to his only for a moment before heading back towards the ocean.

You're all gonna watch me
Disappear into the sun