burn the house down

MELITA

Something was off; but she couldn’t explain it, couldn’t fathom it, couldn’t say anything about trembling hands and clammy skin, uncertain if she was under the weather or if there were other notions scrambling through her senses – or if it was nothing, nothing at all but the hindrance of affectations bristling against her mind. On a distraction, the need for discerning and deterrents, she meandered along the distance, sticking her head into the chilling autumn wind and savoring its essence for the briefest of seconds, before the shuddering began again, and she had to tuck herself back into the foundations of fur along her neck.

What was going on? Things she cherished, the whip and will of the breeze, the infernal exaltation of autumn, the sudden bliss after a lingering storm, felt empty along her flesh, hollowed out instead of hallowed.

She swallowed down the embittered notions, listened to Fangorn, felt him nudging at her ankles, waiting for her to spring into action, into melees, into torrential flames and spitfire ambitions. Instead, she simply felt withdrawn, tired, fatigued; ever since the vampire gourd, ever since the king –

Her eyes traced over the foundations of earth she’d somehow not crossed over before: beatific shoreline and whispering rivers, and she remembered the Naiads, the collection of beads brushing against her foot, the trace of days where all she did was follow and embark into the unknown. Then, her gaze shifted down the embankment, and an unknown, unfamiliar figure was nearby, a man, shoes gone, pants rolled up, likely to enjoy the rush of the brook’s flares and currents.

She flowed by, staff in hand, pushing it into the dirt and loam, and would’ve offered a brandished, exuberant hello to the stranger, had she not been wholly distracted by the set of words flowing from his mouth. Quickly, her head snapped in his direction, because the majority of them were completely unfamiliar, nothing she would’ve caught, snagged, or even remotely understood, save for one. Geen.

Days beneath the summer sun, of grass beneath her feet, of the wilderness stretched before her haunted her visions – a man, strange too, appearing before their mother, uttering nothing but Geen; it’d been what she’d called him, a name for a face that was striking and harsh. “Excuse me,” she uttered, not quite quiet, but not her usual, boisterous incantations, somewhere in between ricocheting savagery and the inaudible. “I only recognized one of those words – do you know someone named Geen?” Because how remarkable would it be? How amazing – more and more connections from a broken, shadowed world?

help tonight to split its seams
Give the bruises out like gifts