beneath the sun {kia, stella, blitz

She’d been terrified ever since her arrival in the Capitol.

The harsh familiarity of home had been replaced by skyscraper streets and the glitz of countless Capitolites desperate to buy their way into a higher social ranking through their limitless extravagancies. The landscape change was surreal, and the rays of sunlight that seeped through her bedroom window each morning had little calming effect, despite being the only Capitol resonance with the desolate lands of District 11.

She was a strong girl – she knew that. Her entire life had been built on the principle of strength – not love, not hard work, not forgiveness. Strength.

She’d never been troubled by the reality of loneliness; it was all she had endured. Yet something about the glittering wonderland she had been sentenced to death within made the feelings all the more poignant, and the accompanying discomfort did not help either.

In the dining room, she sits alone, a single pastry laid on her plate. The constant stream of conversation from chattering tributes comes in short buzzes of incoherence, as if the words flying around the room and ricocheting off of the walls had been stolen greetings of warmth and fake declarations of friendship. Stella had not had any appetite at all, yet despite the stones in her stomach, entering into starvation days before entering the arena would be of no benefit to her. That much she knew.

The intricate swirls carved into the bread reminded her of clockwork in the ways the patterns had been artificially manufactured, and as she sat staring into the empty spaces of the glazed delicacy, she counted the seconds, the minutes, and the hours that still remained of her ungodly life – counting the time as simply as she counted the abundance of simulated stars over her head each night, until sleep finally consumed her with the promise of serendipity.