let the monster rise
A breath atop the mountain.
When he puts it like that, it doesn't sound nearly as glorious. Melusina frowns, pointed, angry.
Hm, he begins, his pointed gaze combating the ferocity within her own, But what then?
Melusina was so certain the climb alone would kill her that she did not think about what would come after. She's never had designs on crowns or dominion. She had never wanted to be a player in the Game—such was the ambitions of Cassius and Icefang and countless other ambitious fools. She wants to be queen no more than she wants to be another nameless, faceless soldier in one's army. She does not want to be another hunter, or spy, or assassin. She is a healer by trade alone because she's good at it, and she's never known anything else.
Once, she wanted to be a knight. Gallant, good, adored by men and women and children. Told about in stories children pass onto their children, and their children thereafter. Immortalized as someone infallible, someone unwilling to give up when staring down the throat of uncertainty.
But those are the dreams of a girl long dead.
Now, nothing comes after the mountain, and that first full breath.
L-Leave me alone, old man—
The air will turn stale. The fear in their eyes will fade. He continues, and Melusina is forced into inquisitive, angry silence. —what will you be left with?
Nothing but the end. The end she's been waiting for so long.
Pity and amusement dance in his eyes, causing Melusina to bristle.
She is vaguely aware that he is inching ever-closer, and what once would have spurned a streak of rebellion in her instead stayed her hand. She neither moved backward nor rose to meet his challenge, instead choosing the one thing she never has before: Remaining completely still, chin held high, eyes still holding her fury.
You want to be remembered. He smiles, sly and wicked. And that, my dear, is far more dangerous.
Get out of my head,
she snarls.
But he doesn't. He is inching closer, until she can feel the heat of his breath and the intense scrutiny of his gaze, until he swallows the sky and surrounding trees and there is nothing left of her to see but him. She is too breathless to offer rebuttal, too tired to spurn her paws into action. She has long since resigned herself to this stasis of being only half alive—of keeping her tongue and her wit but knowing she can do little to contain the fires she stoked.
His words are ones she's sworn she's told herself a thousand times. When Nikandr had first convinced her to leave his homelands, to return to the very place that had broken and blighted her. When she first avowed to become stronger, when she spent countless mornings waking before dawn, training and fighting and pushing herself to the very limit. And when she had reached its culmination, the very pinnacle of what she thought was power, it was wrest from her in one fell swoop.
All it had taken was one sister killing another to crumble the very ground from her feet.
And suddenly the mountain became insurmountable.
So, he finally asks, what will you really do?
She snaps, a torrid of emotion unchecked. A girl trapped in a broken body, a bird breaking her wings against the cage.
There's a noticeable stagger as she rises to her feet, but it takes little time before she reaches her full height. Her mouth is curved into a pointed frown, far more her than she's felt in too long, and the narrowing of her eyes and furrowing of her brow barely holds back the desire to leap at him, to see if his teeth are as talkative.
But she knows it's a battle she won't win.
Not like that.
Maybe that's what he's trying to say.
A pity Melusina is still too young, too angry, too unrefined.
I want everything,
she seethes in reply, desperate to keep her voice steady, desperate to claw her words and wants to freedom. I—I want everything I am owed.
Suddenly, she is pressing forward, closing that distance; not with wildness and wanton as she might have before, but with controlled, icy rage.
I want the climb and the mountain.
She's panting, faltering. Physically, she knows she's at the brink. But there's a spark in her eyes he's put there and nothing can snuff it out.
And I want my fucking breath.
@Lachesis
