M E L I T A
No one seemed aware that Melita had already been ripped apart.
It hadn’t been in slow gestures, or leisurely strokes. It’d been a cold, merciless fury, stoked and fueled and incensed upon hundreds of beings all at once, and the chaos embroiled far down into their sanctions, made them flee, made them sob, made the yearn for an escape they couldn’t find. She’d lost a multitude of things in a matter of moments – had watched one push them into freedom, had attempted to salvage the other every damned day – and then was brutally reminded of their effect for years afterward. Her mother’s ghost had wrapped its gnarled hands around her throat. Her sister’s songs had haunted her dreams.
She remolded, resculpted, reshaped herself; carved her motives and ambitions into mercenary tendencies, into seditious splendor, into becoming a monster the other fiends feared. She protected her friends and family, what was left of them, as best she could. She strove to shield anyone brutalized. She attempted to become something other than the shrieking, pleading, begging child left in the dust, ash, and soot. She simply didn’t allow herself to become a ruin. The girl had too much fire, too much vehemence, too much potency to ever let something take her down for long. Otherwise, she would still be sunk, down at the bottom of a lake, pushed and shoved and drowned by the weight of memories, wraiths, and phantoms.
Alarm shot through her heart, a jackrabbit rhythm suddenly pulsing through her chest, as the flick of an arrow launched itself into a tree feet away. It was a warning – the honeybee child knew that much. The problem was that she was a stubborn, incensed youth; her time in the Rift had taught her to fight back at any cost (otherwise one was dead, the story over, forgotten about moments later). She managed to stifle a laugh, a chuckle, and danced further into treachery and danger, because it was how she’d lived for years and years. The pair had the nerve to skirt closer to the marked timber, and wrench the arrow out of the wood. Her eyes followed the make and mold of the feathers, but she didn’t recognize it, didn’t ascertain it belonging to any particular being. She put it amongst the other arrows she had nestled on her back; could put it to use in the future if the stranger intended to be wasteful.
Then, she volleyed one of her own – straight back at the location where she thought the arrow had come from. It was an emboldened show of savagery, a keen raising of the hackles, a noted intention that she wasn’t going to back off. Thereafter, Melita grabbed hold of Fangorn and sidled back into the darkness, forgoing the current location in case another one yearned to sail closer. This was probably what the other predator had intended – to ensure no one else hunted on their turf, to make sure they were undisturbed; but Melita frankly didn’t care. She did the exact opposite of running away, and instead, attempted to follow the line of sight, the flick of the arrow, she’d envisioned through the darkness. They could follow the direction, and hopefully come upon the other hunter. It was ridiculous that they would get to occupy the entire oasis, with so much game and supplies to be had.
So she finally embodied the footfalls of silence, Fangorn following, intending to find the fellow hunter, treading into blankets of needles and long, pine boughs, bow and arrow ready to strike, one already notched on the string. She’d never taken threats lightly.
