played it so nonchalant

Before they’d fallen into the Rift’s jagged catacombs and consuming void, Melita had been brave, stalwart, and intrepid. Her smile burst like the sun, kissed by fire and temptation, her motion, her movements, abrupt, haphazard, and silly – exuberant and filled with heartwarming endeavors. Her essence had been whittled from adventure and audacity, plunging herself into sea swirls or monstrous caves, dancing in puddles, remarking in wonder, in delight, at the mystical properties and illusions Helovia had always offered; but here, here where snakes crawled and demons loomed, she was out of her element. She’d been cherished and protected by her mother, by her sister, by the intoxicating hums of the Throat and its draconic declarations – apprehension had only built in her veins when the unknown had been too vast or grand. Amidst this untamed, savage wilderness, however, she couldn’t remember a time where she wasn’t on edge, where her eyes didn’t follow the lines of shadows, where she didn’t turn at the snap of a twig, at the haunting promise of barbaric beings (just around the corner, always watching, always waiting). It’d reduced her to the child she was – Helovia had given her a sense of everything all at once, and the Rift sought to snap it away from her puffed chest and her emboldened throngs, chipping until she was naught more than a babe lost in the woods. She’d seen phantoms and wraiths, she’d heard infidels and cretins, she’d watched friends flicker, falter, and splinter apart, and she didn’t want to be the same. The little honeybee girl strived for persistence, for fortitude, to be able to instigate that might, that valor, that strength she’d embodied since her birth, but it’d been spun into chaos, rebellion, and fear.
 
It was all she felt as she maneuvered around the riptide pools and the colossal waves, struggling not to whimper, not to lower her head, not to cower at the ways of this ridiculous earth. She’d yet to see her dam (the demonic form didn’t count; still trailed her in murmurs of despair), she tried to protect her sister and Iskra to little or no avail, attempted to reach out past the rubble, the ruins, the lines of constant, unwinding bombardments, and everything continued to escalate. It drew against her shoulders, her senses, her mind, so even as Sila reached out with her fledgling beak and wings, the girl shuddered, moved away, tried to find a sanctuary amidst bedlam. “I’m sorry,” she said softly to the little bird, trembling like a leaf in the wind – weak, so weak, and the notion made her skin crawl, because she’d never been like that – a being made of action and fortitude, not of terror and trepidation. Her mind raced and her motions were a frenetic, uneasy dance, skirting along the darkness, presuming there were eyes in the wood, in the sea, in the great beyond, hungering, breathing down her neck until there’d be naught, she’d be nothing (just bones, just ash, just dust careening across the shoal). She begged for release from the tethers, from the blight, from the damned, forsaken chains splitting and nailing her to the sepulchers; nearly screamed, shouted, and cried for help (but there’d be none – there was hardly anything, anyone, to trust, and the rest of the world were preoccupied with their own dilemmas and strifes; she wouldn’t dare ask Iskra, Clementine, Otem, or the scores of strangers).
 
In an instant, she ran across the sandy shore at a maddening tear, limbs flailing, wings outstretched, ready to leap, ready to jump, into anything that would rid her of this plague. Her eyes fell to a shrub nearby, and in some fanciful moment of clarity, she remembered her mother’s abilities as a healer, how she sometimes tended to inhabitants of the Throat with more than magic. Her motions ceased abruptly, lowering her maw towards the bush, pondering if this would be enough to sate her wishes, or drive her to the brink. Sila screeched out several warnings, alarms, shaking her head, but the girl was beyond listening, staying true to form, diving headfirst into either calamity or sanctum. Melita’s maw sank over the blooms, chewing methodically, hoping for some salvation in the coming burst of flavor (somewhat sweet), but when the paranoia wouldn’t cease, when the eyes continued to watch her, when the buzzing, the droning, didn’t stop, she went further. In desperation, in destruction, she uprooted the entire hedge, sinking her ivories into the roots, yearning to cry out for her mother.
 
{For Melita’s trial!}

Melita

the fires found a home in me

art | codes
@Savera