M E L I T A
The youth munched on her bread, content to spread the word, faith, and creed of the Dragon’s Throat, savoring the sweetened depths of the pastry on her tongue, and then choking, sputtering, coughing when Rexanna admitted knowing of the land. Her head swung back immediately, and once her eyes had stopped watering, she blinked and studied Rexanna a little more, listening intently. “Oh!” She exclaimed: Helovia, Helovia, Helovia, a saccharine bell in her eyes before disaster struck and butchered them all. The honeybee child had never made it to the Aurora Basin; but it had slipped along her mother’s tongue in stories and fables, myths of lands at constant siege and war (a favorite, like an old book with crumpled, warped, yellowed pages, dabs of tears and favored sonnets underlined). So it was with a grand reverence that the girl stared, imagining Rexanna belonging to that time and fold, ears sharp and eyes wide. Were there alternate timelines…portals shifting and reshaping? Explanations were murky and unclear at best, nothing quite distinct, how they’d all traversed and gathered here from so many separate lands, but then, not at all. “Portals skew a lot of things,” she wrinkled her nose, as if that conveyed a theory, a fact. “My mother told us stories about the Basin – mostly just hearsay though. I think she missed out on the wars.” Here she grinned, a little malicious, as if she’d love nothing better than to embark straight into the acrimony, wickedness, outcries, and crusades. But her gentle, loving, soothing, assuaging parent would have never. “Deimos…,” the name reverberated on her tongue, a dubbing, a title, of one of its Kings, she nodded, but couldn’t put a face to the name. “Maybe. I’d have to see him. But he was in the tales. So was Mauja, D’art, Ophelia…” the legends came like rain, like fire, sizzling on her tongue, on her skin. “I’ll always consider Helovia my home. Even if it’s gone. It’s where I was born and raised and blessed.” Her eyes lifted to the sky, then drifted back to Rexanna, bolder and bolder still, glad to have found another one to unite with.
It was where her sister had drifted on flowers and petals. It was where Sila had cawed and been born within a storm. It had been peace and curiosity and a thousand other beneficent things she wanted to have all over again. The gilded set of her gaze glided downward then, recalling Kiada, another of Helovia’s residents, and how deeply she’d tarnished and burned against the girl, because of mistakes, because of lives lost. “Kiada is from Helovia too. You’ve probably seen her around.”
