[SE] battered shore

Melita

Eating fire is your ambition
to swallow the flame down

There was no warning, no sound, no snap of twigs, before the soft voice echoed in her ear. Between all her other senses, all her other notions, any apprehensive notions fled the youth immediately. It was all trigger fingers and hot-blooded recollections of her childhood, of running, of racing, of defending, of muscle memory honed tight for these occasions. Emboldened and fiery, audacious and seditious, she dropped to a crouch instantly, dropping Fangorn down in the bed of vines and moss, drawing one of her many daggers hidden under her dress. Rapidly, fluidly, like water, like embers, like a dangerous, molten animal (and maybe that was what she’d become; without thought, without mercy), she shifted, turned towards the stranger. “I know how to gut a man,” she hissed. Feral and wild, untamed and unbeholden, no gods here in the warren of her mind.

The stiletto was raised, poised from her grasp, pinpointed towards him – a being she wouldn’t recognize, even if it hadn’t been dark. There were a myriad of ways she could approach this, and not a single one of them entered her mind, save for the savage intervals grazing over her flesh, locked in accord along her hilt. “Who are you, and why are you sneaking up on me?”

to be lit up from within, vein by vein
to be the sun