[SE] Can't Do It Alone

Melita

Eating fire is your ambition
to swallow the flame down

“Could be worse,” she muttered, hands floating back over her weapons again as she turned back, as the bountiful giggles and chuckles, the beatific rhapsody started in her ears once more. A soft sigh floated and flickered form her lungs, coating the ash, the fire, the vitriol in her chest into something else entirely. Thereafter too, another voice blended within it, and every part of her ached and begged to turn around, to follow it as Aurelia had done with her spirits; to burst from the seams as her mother’s beautiful song reverberated along her heart. She knew it by rote and by refrain, every note precious and lovely, compelled to the back of her throat. The honeybee nearly hummed, and if she’d been by herself, perhaps she might have regaled and sung beside them, in the nestling of wildflowers, as they picked herbs, as they memorized the hues of butterflies and the measures of the wind. As they remembered and recalled bliss, before everything was gone, gone, gone.

But she moved forward, and Fangorn grumbled. Perhaps for comfort, she grabbed hold, lifted, and tucked him tight against her chest, listening to the hisses intertwine with the melody in her head. Aurelia was somewhere behind her, and the youth couldn’t look back, not right now, when thorns were sticking out of her heart. “I’m an Outlander.” And her jaw jutted outwards, as if her sedition towards the world might instill, might allow, her to not crack and break and fray. “But I lost them all before I came here.” And then not another word about it, seized by the knife in her ribs, by the taste of rancor on her tongue.

Around another pillar, another wall, as they circled back towards the entrance, as she strived to leave the spirits behind for now. But Aurelia continued, and Melita couldn’t, her gaze pinpointed to the floor, and then on the walls. She didn’t know anyone that hadn’t lost someone or something to this world or the last. “Sorry I yelled. That’s understandable.” She’d want to run after her sibling too, if she saw her, if she knew she could be here. She’d want to yield into her mother’s arms and cry the day away.

Another question, another inquiry, one she could handle in the murk. “This is Rae’s Fingers. We use it for smuggling, but there’s a lot of paths to purposefully confuse. I don’t know all of them.” Just the ones they’d used for destroying monsters; for demolition, for mayhem. Maybe that was all she was good for anyway. “We had to get rid of a lava octopus down here.”

to be lit up from within, vein by vein
to be the sun