who is the knife

Melita

I never had a chance to be soft
I was always bloody knuckles

Melita had only been painted a few brushstrokes of Sunjata’s father and the monstrous ilk – enough to know, to understand, that he was balancing on a knife’s edge, and didn’t need her daggers, her stilettos, her blades, caught on the fringes too. Hand still tightened around her staff, uncertain what to do, what to say, when presented with the possibilities of ghosts and myths becoming real, her voice softened, lowered, and her gaze too, flickering down to the floor as everything seemed to dim. “Oh. Sorry.” An odd thing to apologize about, when she had no control over it, and hadn’t expressed regrets for all the other damnable moments they’d had recently. “I’ve been seeing and hearing Clem a lot lately. Maybe it’s just the season.” Maybe it was something else entirely. Maybe they didn’t know what the hell was going on.

And she teetered, volleyed, rallied right back to vivid flames within the next statements, the mercurial, capricious entity of her existence sparking, sizzling, searing at the implications. “Fuck.” She shook her head, trying to entangle the cobwebs, the spinning wheels, what had been going on here while she spent her days at sea, while she’d been nestled behind cannons, arrows, and swords, while she’d been grasping for adventure. “I thought the war was coming between the Fae and Ascended? Wasn’t that what everyone was up in arms about before?”

and shards of glass
I wanted people to be afraid of hurting me