[se] I will be tempests

Melita

Eating fire is your ambition
to swallow the flame down

Melita started, as always, without preamble or a hint of a thought. “How are you feeling?” Impulse, impulse, impulse: she bounded and leapt and the question was there, never quite caught beside the branches, brambles, nettles, and thorns. Nymph and fey and spirit of ethereal boundaries, amidst and alive in the forest – undeterred by its rankling vines and its dancing, haunting waves. Her head turned towards her uncle, presuming he’d managed some sort of recovery before they launched out towards the humid void – exploration in her bare feet and dominion on her breath, scalding the fringes without hesitation. Completely unaware, ignorant, of all the other manifestations brought into his life thereafter.

There’d been Hotaru, suddenly back in the house, with some manner of explanation. As if everything had picked up from where it’d been left off; peculiar to her too, in a way she couldn’t quite explain.

There was more she wanted to say. About Nate. About everything. But they were all tied to her tongue and hidden behind her teeth. Instead, she listened to the slap of her quiver against her back, to the lilt of birds and the dashing of insects’ wings, taking in the air, the world, the succession of tree after tree, canopy after canopy, bough after bough. “Have you been out this far before?” Distractions, words that might’ve been useless as she avoided all the other ones.

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