MELITA
Perhaps Oliver didn’t find her joke amusing, or the alacrity immersed into truth and veracity a hard pill to swallow. “I have no idea. Each monster is different.” Each with its own parameters and scruples, abilities, a twist and turn; some lingering in seas, aiming to devour long lost souls, some harbored in desolate shadows, aching for a bite, some that resurrected vital, honored beings and churned them into something they weren’t, and some that acted like gods, that could assume memories, control and contort into phantoms of the past. The last stung in particular; her mother’s once-gentle warble gargled and haughty, her once-lovely hands, smelling of herbs, clinging to the honeybee girl’s throat, asking for her to die. The youth would assume their tactics no longer; the experiences all uncanny and altering, haunting and horrible; and why she’d sworn to chase them down, erase them from the earth, send them to oblivion, tired, so damn tired, of the world suffering.Gods were different stories and indications. Oliver had prayed, but no lasting results. A friend who’d met Safrin. “What have you heard?” She was always eager and curious to know more; her fingers flicking over the edge of rags and continuing with the outline of floating things, little lanterns at the image’s side. “I’ve met Ludo.” A full, expressive smile fell over her mouth, a little mischief tucked into the sanction. “I can channel them too.” Call for them, though it’d only ever been Ludo, deep distinctions of safety in rags, escaping from blighted vampire gourds, screaming at Loren – brief glimmers of triumph in a sanctity that didn’t always grant them.
She's so hard to please
But she's a forest fire
But she's a forest fire
