MELITA
Wars and upper hands; she smiled, but only because the only invasions and feuds she’d been permitted within had come from stories, tales, and legends – content and happy to hear about clamoring of steel and battle plans, strategies and tactics from brave, strong warriors and their slashing endeavors. What would it be like – she often wondered, in the back of her mind, in the pique of her aspirations, in midnight dreams and delusions – to participate in a full-scale battle, with armor, with fire, with vehemence coursing through their veins? Would it be like days in the Rift, succumbing to survival mode, where the only skill and strategy required was to stay alive? Or would it be something grander, something richer, something to sink and bite her teeth into, let the whole world see her for what she truly was - fire, fire, fire - or was that too miserable an assumption, that battlefields were places for glory and triumph, that there was more to be had and savored from those malicious tastes? “What did you fight about?” She pondered aloud, eternally engrossed in myths and histories, because the only ones she had were hearsay or rituals of persistence and endurance – craving the fortitude, the might, the sheer willpower of devastation not witnessed before her very eyes. He nodded and seemed to comprehend the measures of her hatred and abhorrence, looking away, and she tilted her head downward again, one finger gliding into the river, soaked like the rest of her, but not deluded, not deceived. Melita breathed in the fresh air, wondered about the crackle in her lungs, about the currents beneath her form, about the lives lost and whittled away, about the girl who would be set upon not only by her weapons, her munitions, or her contempt, but her words too, laced with foundational poison.
The chuckles continued, the rumble of phrases. Traitor seemed like a dirty thing, far more than any of the other slung insults, born of hostility and terror, of betrayal and annihilation. The honeybee had never thought of it in such a way, but perhaps Kiada had been a defector in some way, shape, or form, proffering her assistance to a false god, an indulgent paragon, swayed and moved by the undulations of power, instead of the press, the turn, the hands of her own homeland and kingdom. How far would she have gone? “Msaliti,” she emphasized, pinpointing on the middle sounds, as if it cursed Kiada here and now, granting the Harpy no justice. “Verraaier,” and it was enough without the other curses in front or behind it, nourished in the fault lines of her rancor and enmity. Her eyes lifted, gold on steel; narrowing down to slits while she made a poor mask of her hatred for another. “What about murderer? Or greedy?”
help tonight to split its seams
Give the bruises out like gifts
Give the bruises out like gifts
