Melantha Leventis
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
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"Ask a child if he remembers when he was born. The correct answer to that question is 'no'. If the child says anything other than that, he is lying. Having someone tell you isn't the same thing as remembering first hand. Telling yourself something until you believe it isn't the same either. Just the same, a child who says anything other than 'no' is nothing short of a deceptive little brat."
Melantha did not remember her birth. She did, however, remember her father and his wife, Puakai. It was the family that had raised a young girl under the pretense that she was their daughter. She believed solely and whole heartedly that Puakai was the mother who had gone through the eleven hours of labour to not-so-suddenly bring forward a young girl into the world. In spite of any physical differences, Melantha grew with the notion that she simply either looked more like her father, or she had been graced with what they called recessive genes rather than dominant. With a mother and a father, she was happy.
Her father, Ikaika, was a musician. He played the ukelele and had once told Melantha that he'd been playing since far before she was ever born and before he even decided he wanted a daughter, or a wife, or a girlfriend, or much of anything other than his mother's home cooking on a nightly basis. Puakai did décor arrangements, usually out of flowers and assorted seashells. She'd said that she was honouring her parents for giving her the name she'd been born with. The two had met in young age, were fond of one another, but due to different directions in life, they believed they would soon part. Their initial meeting had led them both to the same conclusion: that they could not be together.
Through schooling and other hardships, fortune smiled upon them and the two reunited. Determined not to let her walk out of his life again, Ikaika very gladly persuaded Puakai to complete the other half of his heart by becoming his wife. Their families were overjoyed. They were overjoyed. And not so long after those days began, they looked onto the far off horizon and dreamed of their future: children, a home, stability, and everything else that comes after the book of marriage has been opened.
Ikaika was a good man, never the sort to intentionally spite or harm another person. There was no disguising his surprise when he was caught by a creature so devastatingly beautiful who claimed him to be the father of her child. For certainly he would have remembered each person he had slept with, or so he would have wanted to believe. But the woman who stopped him, in all of her glorious flesh and dark hair, was not one he could recall so readily. In her anger, she ranted and raved, and proudly boasted that it was her doing that had brought him to the point he had warmly settled into. And when he asked, she told him that she was Fortune.
She gave her name as Eris and claimed proudly that it was because of her that Puakai had returned to him. And as if that simply wasn't enough, she stated brazenly that as easily as she had given him happiness, she could strip it away, destroy his career, his home, his new family, and everything else he held dear. He knew when he looked into her eyes that she was more than capable of it. His heart, moved by fear, compelled him to grant her every wish that she might have had, if only for the sake of keeping an ounce of tranquility in his life.
"I give you a simple task, Ikaika Leventis. This child of mine, my darling daughter, you shall raise her. You and Puakai. And you will tell her that she is yours. You will give her all that she asks for. You will tell her nothing of the truth. My daughter shall live a glorious life on this surface and she will bless all of those that she should touch."
His hesitance did make him wonder if it could be so appropriate to lie to a child who could not speak, but rather held her eyes tightly shut, as though the world frightened her. A man never bent so much on lying was torn between what he believed was right and what Puakai would say if she should have caught wind of the situation. In either predicament, he was guilty of falsehoods and deception, and truly believed the guilt would feast upon his insides, the way maggots eventually tore through the flesh of dead animals who'd beached themselves upon the shores.
But Puakai had heard, had eavesdropped, and when she heard her husband begin to sacrifice his happiness, she was quick to join Eris's coaxing.
"She's a child, Ikaika. There are many children in the world without families. How ungrateful we'd be if we were to deny this one our home, our hearts, and our love." She looked to Eris, in all of the woman's eerie behaviour, the odd way she moved about in a manner that indicated she might have been disjointed to some degree. "We thank you, o' Fortune, for bringing us a child from the stars. We will do all you ask and more. She is my daughter from this day forward."
And Eris's anger was sated with their verbal contract. She left her daughter in Puakai's arms, offering a very fond farewell, tickling the nose of her baby. Then as she faded into utter nothingness before the eyes of Ikaika and Puakai, she left only a single word, which both assumed to be the name that was to be given to their new spawn.
Melantha.
