MELITA
Consumed and devoured by two things simultaneously, her mind scraped and scavenged, barely capable of forming anything other than incoherent, solemn punctures and mumbles, croons below her breath. She curled further into herself, trying not to sink into the siren’s wail – either by blight machinations or her own self-awareness striving to peek through, a desperation grating along every sense as the sable tears kept streaking from her eyes, down her cheeks, balance precarious on the limbs, losing her sense of place, her sense of purpose. What was she doing here? Why was she within the canopies? Why was her quiver on her back? Why was her bow out? Stop her brain echoed and unraveled. Please make it stop.She hadn’t even realized the stranger approached again, below her, beneath her chosen branch. She didn’t know he’s summoned the singing creature. She was lost and clueless, ignorant and helpless, controlled and contorted by too many means and measures at the same time – bowing until her head nearly touched the timber, shaking, quivering, trembling in the strain of her body’s breaking conjectures. Please kept pulsing, kept pervading, kept residing in her skull, rattling around in the Stygian webs and corresponding vitriol; as if she were breathing down the ghosts and wraiths of old, the feral interwoven laces of the Rift, where she’d tried so hard to do something, and here she fettered and unwound.
Then there was a prick against her skin, along the outstretch of her hand, and for some strange reason, an odd sense of relief as more blackened blood pooled, dripping from where the newest wound opened – the pain almost not there, numbed and bound. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she cried and murmured, barreling between the strands of the siren’s melodies.
She's so hard to please
But she's a forest fire
But she's a forest fire
