M E L I T A
Risk had been a part of her since the moment she came onto the earth: pleasant, exuberant, and utterly wild. She hadn’t inherited it from her mother or her sister – both calm, serene beings, more apt to healing, soothing measures, to beatific lullabies luring others to repose and slumber. She’d been reckless and impetuous, drawn to layers of fire and brimstone without a second thought, tossing her heart and mind over cliffs and sails, pretending to be a monster well before she was required to become one. Her curiosity had been insatiable and untamed, her movements had been an echo of her desires, and her compassion had molded itself well into her savage ministrations; nefarious acts reserved for protection, for upheaval, for friends, families, and the occasional stranger. She was audacious and reckless for those who couldn’t be – a flame in the wind, a barb in the fields, a demon in skirts and furs. “I might,” she shrugged again and winked towards him, as if there were worse things in the world than suffering from a cold (and there were; she’d seen scores of them, had battled against them, had sobbed, begged, and pleaded for it all to cease, and when it didn’t, raised her arms in such a vicious, vehement cycle; damned to be repeated). But she didn’t tease or taunt him further; the interaction felt stilted, as if her boisterousness was too much, an overwhelming thing – her eyes flicked to the oasis and its babbling curls against rocks and grass.
“Pleased to meet you, Samuel,” Melita whispered, quieter, twinkling gaze flicking back to him once or twice, taking to following him towards the edge, kneeling and crouching over the water she’d played in moments before. She glanced deeper at it now, attempted to spy those aforementioned fish, the trace of a shining scale in the sun, the promised bounty of a well-cooked meal, roasting and pleasant over an open flame.
His last statement though caused her to widen her eyes by a minute fraction; then turn away, gaze floating towards Fangorn nearby, to the drifting alms and palms, to the distance between her innocence and barbarity. She’d lost the sensation of morality and virtue long ago; when it’d been amidst life or death, when ghosts and wraiths strangled her whole, when she became witness to friends’ terrors and horrors, when survival was the only thing she could ever hope to achieve. Presently, she had no after-thought to claiming another’s life, and it made the smile vanish from her lips, shift away, back into scattered hours before the Rift, when heaven was a certainty and no one had hurt, no one had ached, no one had split apart in anguish, in misery, when the world hadn’t been utter chaos and she hadn’t consigned anything to oblivion. Her stare lingered back on the pool, then the man who didn’t want to hurt anything, and she proffered to protect his decency, offered her already corrupted services, her iniquitous ambitions. “I can do it for you.” The utterance was hushed, meant to blend into his; watching the raised spear freeze in midair.
