burn the house down

MELITA

It was avian, the way he tilted his head, and she could imagine him with feathers, with plumes, soaring into the sky – like so many others from so long ago; ancient, primordial, things with talons, teeth, and claws. When he followed, she caressed over the veneer and visage again, a slow, methodical, fluid transition, like a nymph, like the Naiad who had prospered beyond these falls and rivulets. However, she was not born from the water, from cool, chilling depths, but from the ash, from the stones, from the sand, from the heat and the scorching sun, the draconic interludes pressed into her skin, into her blood, into her bones. Perhaps, in that regard, the revelations couldn’t, wouldn’t matter. Would they change her, who she was, who she’d become, if she’d known it, somewhere in heart, all along? Would the earth shatter around her? Would she fall like a pebble, weary and frantic, foolish and desperate? Would she break apart any more than she already had? Would the admissions, the confessions, spill across her and morph her into something else? Would it have altered her path? Would the great hulking beast of a man have saved her mother, pushing her into the portal with them? Would he have been proud? Did she care, did she care, did she care?

She still didn’t like the way his eyes narrowed, the way he skulked, even with the softer edges, as if he understood, comprehended, how he presided, how a simplistic word was leading her down primrose paths and edges she’d forgotten to face. The fringe, the blurred lines, the pedestals, the cracks in foundations, contorted over her, as he described, as he pointed at his nose, as he described a man once towering before her small, lithe figure – looking down, down, down, hommelby grumbled from his throat. Had he been glancing at her then, trying to figure her out, trying to weigh out his options, trying to see if she was even worth the effort? If she was deserving of his bloodline?

Or had he thought about snuffing her out, leading her to ruin and damnation, consigning her to oblivion?

Because she could remember the way he’d glared at the two of them, no; geen on his breath, before leaving, like they were nothing and held no significance in his world. Crooked nose, as if it’d been broken, mauled, or maimed, pointed, like a bill, imposing and intimidating, eyes flecked in gilded refrain, the red along the borders all the more enigmatic, curious, like blood, like crimson, like her damned hair that fell in waves, in curls, in locks, swept away into the wind.

“Yes,” was the inevitable answer. She hung her head, one hand balled in a fist at her side, the other clutching the top of her staff, Fangorn hissing amidst the shoal. Melita sighed and breathed, sharper inhales that her lungs threatened not to take -

And she knew, she knew, he’d never wanted them. Refused, denied, and abandoned; forsaken from the moment of her birth by a man she’d never understand.

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