throwing rocks at a glass house

MELITA

Good she thought as the Queen covered her face with her hands. Good, she thought as she ignored the insistence of the rose. Melita didn’t care, not anymore, about how much the world strived and tried: how many times had she done the same? How many moments had it simply not mattered? How many times had it been ineffectual, weak, and worthless? Better to play her part of a monster, of a beast, haunting this damned, stupid tower with all its rumors and iniquities, a little savage, a little feral, and every measure accorded and accounted for in her blinded, blighted haze.

The youth had absolutely no intention of going anywhere near the flower. It represented a multitude of things she couldn’t name – just an ongoing, agonizing pulse of wrong clutching over her seams, bounding into her veins. In her better days, without the range of sickness slinking its way into her bones and flesh, she would’ve heeded the animalistic growl, the blunt, keen warning echoing from the Wraith. She would’ve bowed her head and waited for some sort of lecture (that she likely wouldn’t listen to), would’ve asked for forgiveness or some other form of guidance. This Melita, punctured and brutalized by her own existence, did nothing of the sort – glancing casually at fangs and predatory means of dominance without batting an eye. Instead, she raised her jaw, her gilded gaze emblazoned with an aura, a gesture of defiance, narrowing her own stare, tilting her head, proclaiming sedition with insurrection, incapable of backing away when she should. A pattern, a cycle, a fortitude, a certainty, that at least the old Melita was still in there, enhanced viciousness and audacity aside.

“No,” she echoed, listening to it careen off the walls in her own feral growl. Fangorn hissed and implored; the bond, the connection, didn’t even reflect in her mind, just a shell, just a vessel, of rage and intolerance. She dipped down, eyes never leaving the fellow predator, as she gained more rocks in her palms, fervent, eager, for some other cataclysm. They were at a crossroads - catalysts extending their claws.

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