Melita had always been a piece of movement, a leaf on the wind, a cry of the gulls, a beam of the sun. She was motion and conveyance, striving to reach, to scale, to cherish, rolling amidst the hills of sand and stone on acts of curiosity and impulse; the kind of creature driven by capabilities and the vast unknown. She hadn’t crossed into particular paths and avenues where the notion of her joviality, where the sense of her adventure, had ever caused harm to herself or another, and continued to persist in the same roles because there’d been no consequence. She served her follies, her flaws, her insistence on reckless abandon due to its amusement, due to its diversions, and the more she experienced, the more notions and thoughts and sentiments began to grow. So the little honeybee was pleased, brightened, and charmed, a tender streak of rebellion pervading her veins, when Otem pierced cleverness into Vulkan’s prior statement, when the outcry of roars and bellows curled into the foundation, when an eerie sense of sedition boiled down between all of their layers. Her gaze ran from the other filly to Vastra, the picture of subversion as they raced down into the terrors and horrors of another day – but didn’t immediately go to them. The call, the insistence, blazed and lanced through her heart, yet, her resistance was made of embers and coils too, and she strayed, stayed, beside the colt for a little longer as he tried to slide together all the conveyed logic, all the brandished ideals, the forces of nature colliding to form them – their choices, their decisions, their motivations.

The youth wanted to help. She didn’t know what the others craved.

Maybe that was enough – but she didn’t want to abandon the boy to his muttering either (with a strangled pitch of wrong, with pandering to Gods and how they weren’t one of them). So her head tilted a fraction, her brow arched, and her smile remained, mouth and mind trying to form an exact response that wouldn’t leave them all blundering into the day’s end. “Sometimes we have to do more than let the world just pass us by. What would we be if everyone just let nature preside?” Would the realm crumble to ash and dust, because all the animals had been robbed of their lives, bones picked, carcasses discarded, all players and stages falling apart, one by one? Or would everything remain the same, and they were mere ruffles of wind, champions of the moment, the second, before it slid away from them again, and the empire just kept churning, spinning, revolving, regardless of their efforts? She aimed to do more than stand amidst the soil and allow it to beat against her; she was too proud, too bold, too audacious. Her grin, never faltering, beamed and illuminated as she whispered back into the fold, winking at the younger lad. “I hope you won’t always be a bystander.” One day he’d see something that sizzled and emboldened, she was certain of it.

Thereafter, she turned, she twisted, an edge of poetic frenzy, a zealous charge, a chaotic blend of cacophony and ardent endeavors, placing her heart into the fold – wings stretched out to her sides, dust billowing beneath her feet, and a war cry in her lungs, stampeding straight for the bounty of snakes.

Melita

let me live that fantasy