back to basics

MELITA

The invitation was there again, glowing and glimmering, and she snagged it for all it was worth – back into those broken little miseries where she felt alive and terrible, nefarious and gilded, tethered and torn from a lifetime of aches and pains. The way she openly embraced it was ironic; eluding the demons for so long, then chasing them down again, but a promise was a promise (to become mightier, to become stronger), and she didn’t back away from a challenge, from things that went bump in the night. Be the bigger monster the world of the Rift had taught her, and she wasn’t going to shy into its forsaken reaches again – opting to hiss and growl, to roar and howl, to bellow and yell her vengeance, her rage, her contempt. “Yes please!” She grinned again, a shout, a bark, into the heavens, a quieter admonition following. “Thank you.” To even be considered was a novelty, and she wouldn’t forget his kindness.

He proceeded back down the ladder and she stepped back, measuring and calculating where to go from there with the borders – smothering a giggle as Fangorn received a croon from Ronin. The gourd glanced at her, then him, back and forth, uncertain about what to do, saved by Ronin’s scrutiny of Melita’s features, apparently cast in paint. She shrugged, because there had been far worse things on her person before (the stale breath of death, hastened and conducted by her own mother’s ghost, fanning and wrapping its limbs around her throat; the faded remnants of blood, stained and drenched, hers and others, speckled across shorn arms and bare feet). She did, however, make an effort to remove it from her face, wiping her sleeve across the bridge of her nose, but it only served to make it worse, spreading right along her cheeks. The girl shrugged again, not even remotely bothered, a laugh coiled from her lungs. “Exactly!” The youth agreed and winked at him, before gliding her paintbrush over a spot nearby.

This is a gift, it comes with a price
Who is the lamb and who is the knife?
Midas is king and he holds me so tight
And turns me to gold in the sunlight