throwing rocks at a glass house

MELITA

Normally Wessex’s presence would’ve sobered, toughened up the youth. She would’ve yearned to appear her best, to impress, to try and apply all her methods, all her techniques, all her trainings, so that she looked mightier, stronger, in the Queen’s eyes. The Ascended had taken her under her wing and showed her tactics, invested her time, thought her worthy of something –

But that was gone now, absent from her mind. Instead her skull was filled with convictions and biting, gnawing things, so much so that as she turned towards their royal majesty, there was not much left of Melita to go off of – the golden entanglements of her eyes bright, but with hysteria and madness, a sense of something wrong, otherworldly, not controlled by the body it inhabited. She tilted her head, the blackened blood still dripping from her nose, never brushed off, settling there on skin, staining remnants until it was Stygian against pale, white flesh. The honeybee’s gaze darted towards the outstretched hand, the call to another world, staring at it as if she couldn’t account for its measures or purpose. Her frame shivered involuntarily on a gust of wind, then she plunged forward, raw, red feet sinking deeper into the snow, towards the Spire’s gaping mouth, its open depths, its plunging declarations. “I’m fulfilling a promise.” Her voice was singsong, but almost faraway; as if she were elsewhere, anywhere but in the winter’s threshold. The wind snapped at her nightgown and she continued on, maneuvering towards the basement entrance.

Fangorn pleaded by Wessex’s ankles, uncertain, apprehensive, growling and hissing because he couldn’t explain, couldn’t fathom, couldn’t understand the reaches of what was occurring. The youth’s head snapped back, over her shoulder, ghostly, phantom-like, a wraith in soulless form, barely even tying herself to the air around her. “Did you do this?” She rang, haunting and poignant, not explaining what this could’ve been: the Spire itself, the spread of the blight, the haze of distortion and ruin – Phoebe’s blanket statement about Ascended laying somewhere in the pockets and corners of her brain.

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