MELITA
Melita was used to trouble. More frequently than not, she walked right into it – as easy, as natural as breathing air, hoisting trials and tribulations straight into her lungs, comfortable, familiar, a touch of the old amidst the new. Perhaps this made her a glutton for punishment, perhaps it heightened her sense of victory and triumph, perhaps it was corded and wrapped around her veins, an itch she couldn’t scratch, until disaster and melee plunged into her heart and soul, and she was alive again. She’d been so accustomed to danger, strife, and treachery, that sometimes she craved it, a piece of her bone, enamel, and structure, rapacious and voracious, tied off in swords and shields, in rapid, savage ministrations, in the deliberate coaxing of fire and infernos. What she didn’t expect, however, amidst her skipping and leaping over brambles and branches, along the warm, sunny breeze, was to find Phoebe before the Labyrinth. The warren itself had been something Melita had longed to wander into for a while now, but she’d hadn’t thought herself strong enough, capable enough, and there’d be a thousand other distractions until this strangled, eerie moment. She likened it to a nest of hornets and wasps, the world waiting to devour them all whenever they crossed too far, whenever they touched the fringes of ruin and oblivion, and it made her heart race, her essence pounce, the staff in her hand shake and shudder – for the zeal, for the excitement, for the possibility of it all.
But Phoebe – what led
See I've come to burn your kingdom down
