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Her first memory is, like everything, a golden one.
A warm hand. A cold eye. Skin on skin, a kiss on her forehead, metal in her palm.
She is taught to sing before she is taught to talk. She is taught to fight before she is taught to walk. She is taught to obey before she is taught to love. It is all a game to her, until the sunset paints the sea the colour of blood and she watches a girl’s head meet the marble floor.
War, her mother says, is a door. Break through it and you will be caught in its splinters, bleeding. Wait for it to open, child.
But will it open? she asks, will it open?
It will, her mother says, it always does.
Piltover is a cold place. The sun bears no semblance of the star it is in Noxus, heat and sweat and love, if the battleground can be called that. It barely warms her skin. She dresses in warm and pure tones to enrapture the flames, bring them closer; but, as everything, all she knows is far away.
Her mother has always called her weak – much too diplomatic for a princess. Mel disagrees. There is nothing diplomatic about not cutting off the enemy’s tongue before he can speak and then sentence him for his silence. There is only humanity – something she hopes to find in Piltover, and something that she realises is a myth.
She builds her own battlefield, there in those high, empty towers, looming far above its own people. Her voice is her sword. Her body is her armour. There is no man not easily fooled by a lilt to the tone or a cushion to his ego, and it disgusts her. They eat from golden plates, metal melted from the family heirlooms found in poverty’s graves. She swallows their forbidden fruit and feels it rot through her bloodstream.
She does not talk of her mother. She does not talk much of anything that is not calculated. Even her paintings hold political meaning, these days.
Jayce is a boyish man, kind and naïve, and as she lies with him, his hands are friendly. That’s all they ever will be. He shows her the stars only to pick them up for someone else, leaving her alone in the blank darkness of the universe. There is no heat between them. Only cool, political tact, even deep in the throes of passion.
Mel learns to despise the cold. It is all she knows, now.
Unlike other women of her line, her mother is very keen on raising her right beneath her guiding palm. Her warmth is a burning flame at times, more freezing than the deepest winter in its severity. Whenever something goes wrong, she is met with its raging heat. Her mother calls it love like religion calls the apocalypse salvation.
A child knows not the difference between a mother and a god – only the tender hand turned violent. What is a child to believe in, if it does not have the words to pray to either?
She asks about her brother, just once. Her mother goes quiet. Mel is brought to watch an execution for the first time that day, and she learns to not ask again. Two years later, she will command those executions herself.
At night, she dreams of it being herself beneath the blade. She wakes up tracing her throat, feeling her heart beat frantically beneath her fingertips. Mostly, she finds terror in it. Sometimes, hope.
Her mother steps foot into Piltover. As she is embraced, Mel wants to slice every lying vein from her body. She relaxes into it, instead.
I am glad to have you back, her mother says.
You never had me in the first place, Mel wants to say, not a single time after you ripped me from your womb and called the world my garden, my Eden.
Her mother drinks the juice of pomegranates like it is a heart, running down her chin like blood. It stains Mel’s dress. Her mother laughs and tells her it is not fit for her anyway – none of this is, this cold, wretched place.
What is fit for me, then? Mel asks.
Her mother does not answer. They both already know – home, too, would never be fit for her, she would never be fit for it. She is much too blurred at the edges, much too soft in her word and colourful in her maze of a mind. An artist wielding the word and the brush, the song.
Her mother calls killing an art. Mel calls killing killing. Her mother calls herself an artist and Mel weak – Mel calls herself an artist and her mother nothing at all.
Silence has its meaning, too.
Her mother finds a new daughter in Caitlyn. Mel tries not to feel envious – there are much greater sins in the world than rejection – but suddenly she finds herself a hypocrite. Did she grow you, feed you, sacrifice her flesh for you?, she wants to sneer, did she grant you the world only to tear it away again? Do you know the feeling of her womb, of her warmth? Do you? Do you?
Does she?
Mel never cared much for such things, but suddenly she finds she despises Caitlyn and her foolish little dreams and her heavy, burdened grief. They both lost a mother in that attack – and when hers came running for her, and Caitlyn’s lay crumbled in the rubble, did she ever mean to wipe the blood from Mel’s brow and soil her own fingers? Did she ever do anything else?
In that hatred, she looks into a mirror and sees a reflection of her mother. It terrifies her. It comforts her. Always a piece within her – whether it threads her wounds or stabs her back.
It does not matter. Mel closes her eyes at night and all she finds is a grave without a body, rubble, rubble, a golden flash, Viktor, dead, and herself, dying, and something she has always known but never called for deep within herself sings and sings and sings.
She learns the truth – about herself, about her brother, about the sky. She learns that all she’s ever known is a lie, and this itself might be one, too. She returns with scales beneath her skin and the sun in her eyes and fury boiling, boiling in her throat.
Her mother goes to embrace her. She does look relieved to see her, for just a split moment, and Mel almost wants to become a girl again, true and unblemished, small in her mother’s arms – but she steps away. It sends daggers through her chest, cutting away the net she is trapped in and slicing her open all the same.
Does it matter that she is free, when she bleeds out in the sea regardless?
Her mother leads an army against the city and calls it peace. Her mother gives the order to shoot Caitlyn, another betrayal, and calls it mercy. Her mother stares her in the eye, relentless and soft and hurting, steel on time, stone on erosion, and calls it love.
Her mother bleeds out in her lap, proud of her daughter for the first and last time of her life, dawn bleeding out in the sky, too, and calls for nothing more.
They never really did find the words, did they?
She is a girl by the sea side. The salt washes up to her ankles. The sky is clear. Her mother shows her how to kill a man and tells her to dance.
War, her mother says, is a door. Do not break it open. Wait for it.
War, her mother says, is a door. It can show you a path to paradise. There is no paradise.
War, her mother says, is a door. The womb is a door. It is the first war you’ll ever know, and the only one you are damned to never win.
She sits in an empty hearing room. The stone is cold. The sun has lost its grip on Noxus. The sea lies calm and steady.
Art, all of it. A child, a woman, leans her head against the throne and pretends it is her mother’s lap.