MELITA
Staying soft was never a true option; she would’ve been dead, just as much as the rest of them, a cold carcass, or laden in dust, broken, shattered, beyond the point of return. Would she have wanted that for herself? Would her mother have saved someone vulnerable and weak? Someone meant to cave in, to break, to snap, to splinter away? She’d had too much spirit, too much will, too much defiance riddled and scored into her bones, etched into her essence, to ever truly give in. One day it would surely do her in, one day she would surely perish, become another mound of ashes and soot. But not this moment. Not this hour. Not in these collected fragments.Yes – it was who they were. Fighters. Rebels. Defying worlds, because the alternative was too grave.
His words beckoned, caused her to turn her head away from the wall, from the fringes of memorials, from the depths of snapped sprigs. “I won’t.” Her eyes were determined, stalwart bastions of justice and vengeance, narrowed together into gilded, golden pinnacles, too seditious to be anything else. It was one more pledge – something she wouldn’t forgo, no matter the cost – Helovia, the Dragon’s Throat, her mother, her sister, her friends, her makeshift family, pieces quartered and drawn, but never, never, never forgotten. “You can’t forget either,” she grinned, small mercies in their haunting pasts – it’d carved and sculpted and sheared, but they’d come out stronger, they’d come out bolder, they’d come out unrelenting.
The ocean was a better subject, less fault-lined and fissured, less heartbreaking and tragic – something they didn’t have, but could, and she’d yearn to throw herself into the waves once more. “Absolutely!” More vows, less sinister or nefarious in their shape – for shells, sea shores, sand, dunes, the cry of gulls, and the potency of the surf.
help tonight to split its seams
Give the bruises out like gifts
Give the bruises out like gifts
