[SE] Can't Do It Alone

Melita

Eating fire is your ambition
to swallow the flame down

Maybe Ludo did suit her. Because there was something tempestuous and mercurial, vengeful and loathing, in her actions, in her movements, in the way she held onto grudges for a little too long. Maybe she was a heathen, a monster, a bludgeoning, disastrous thing, biding her time until reality clasped and clutched and broke. As much as she would’ve soared beneath the sun, hastened and bristled with fire, emerging with glory in her heels and the heat upon her back, it wasn’t an option here and now. Instead, she had ghosts and figments and mischief, parallels of another world where death had been so rampant that for months it was all she’d known and understood. Graves of friends, of family, of her body shielding her sibling and it not mattering in the slightest – had Aurelia even asked, Melita wasn’t certain she’d have the right answer for anything. So some days she still turned her features, her face, to the sun, and dreamed that he was there, in the midst, not destroyed, not ruined, not marred, not sacrificed, and she could recall days stretched beneath the Dragon’s Throat pillars, along the sands, immersed in the oasis.

But there they were at the entrance of Rae’s Fingers instead, pondering over the rightes and rites of deities and heralds. Fingers clutching at her staff, drumming them along its wooden surface, prospered nothing but the restless coil of her energy. Her gaze glinted, flinted, back to Aurelia, narrowing her eyes briefly, mostly in speculation, in memory, in sparks of days long gone. “It doesn’t like Ascended. The Old Gods hate them.”

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