... Go! [Ski Race/Feast, Day 4]

“Forests have secrets,' he said gently. 'It's practically what they're for. To hide things. To separate one world from another.”

Her father had told her that long ago. If something were to ever happen to him, he never said what, she was to run to the trees. To the cabin. To the safety of the woods. The branches hiding more than secrets. The sacredness of the silence. She knew hidden deep inside the forest, but well within the bounds of the district, was a cabin never visited. Her father’s collections of writings adorning the walls. The exploration of his mind. A secret place that she would never see. Was he watching her in the Games? Did he see his little girl transforming? Murdering friends turned monsters? Spilling blood? 

(You must run, Stella, run to the forest if anything ever happens to me. Do you understand?)

Perhaps he knew of what would befall her. How her fate was written in the cosmos. But this was not fate. The Hell that she had been dragged to was not written in the stars above District Twelve, nor any others. Her fate had been dictated by paper, ink, and blood.

---

Stella loved the dark, but not what lingered around in it. In the darkness you find shadows that like to play tricks, demons who take pieces of the past and lace it with the present, and memories that fill one’s hollow heart, but empties the organ once morning comes. The pain floods in when the moon goes up.

Her demons beckoned to the surface through Allie’s death. His second death. At her hands. Her hopes and dreams dangling on a string. Her demons and their grim existence, traipsing out in the moonlight. She is trapped with them. An internal struggle between light and dark that pushes her to the edges of her consciousness. Unable to reconcile the blood on her hands and adorning her body. The wounds inflicted by a dead boy she had one held in her heart.

An uncaged memory can be a savage creature.

(The silence you need
and me with a mouth,
a mouth full of words.

The absence, the stunning absence

you wrap yourself in

steals the shadow that follows me. 

I cannot be for you,

the ghost you require.)

She spoke fleetingly to Finley in the aftermath of their fight - escaping to the safety of the Cornucopia. The burned-out hollow of a building providing safety and security from the elements. From whatever beast or tributes lurking in the darkness. The wind masking footsteps and howling through trees. The fight had flown out of her like a candle extinguished. A wildfire that had run its course.

Finley breaks the silence as Stella is wrapping her right arm with a bandage, the blood freezing once it hit oxygen. "Was that Alejandro you were fighting?" She looks up from him, her hair in her face and her expression unreadable. She didn’t wish to speak about what happened earlier. The ear-splitting scream that echoed from her body - a moment of weakness - enough to make her regret uttering a sound in the first place.

"Yeah, it was like a dream, Fin. Like he was there but wasn’t there. They did something when they reanimated him. He wasn’t the same. Allie would never have attacked me.”

She pauses, licking her dry cracked lips with a shake of her head. “I don’t know if it was guilt manifesting or what, but killing him was easier than expected. Who was that you saw? I never really kept up with the Games before this.” She had never cared about the whims of the Capitol or the desires of others to sacrifice themselves as payment for past oppressions and uprisings. She had only ever wanted to dance. 

Finley is quick to answer and Stella sits with her back against a wall, her wounds tended to. 

"It felt real to me and it was one of the old tributes from my District. They must have chose who to bring back to kill us."

Sadists. Sadists and sinners. The Seventh Circle of Hell, from one of the long dead writers before the world had devolved into what it was today.


“This place is like Hell, Fin. Worse than Hell." She pauses again and tries to speak the words that have been floating around in her head since they lost Vesper. Words that could alienate her from Finley. 

"Should we find more allies? Is that wise?”

He is introspective, his calm flowing over Stella like the warmth of a fire. "I never thought someone like me would end up in hell." He pauses again, thinking about her question. Allies could be safety or betrayal.

"If we can find people we trust, yes."

She meets his eyes finally, her blue eyes icy in the pale light. ”Can we trust anyone here?”

He answers quickly enough and a smile barely cracks on her lips. "I trust you."

For now, you trust me for now, she thinks to herself, but cannot deny that they have suffered too much together to not have a tenuous bond between them. “I trust you too, Finley. But how can trust go in a game like this?”

He shrugs and replies, "It's how people survive, isn't it?"

“I suppose you’re right. It only works until it isn’t advantageous anymore, though. A stab in the back. A spear through the gut.” Her hand goes to her stomach once more and a shudder pushes through her body.

"I guess we will just sleep on it, please can you make the fire the tonight?"

He is done talking, which is more than enough for Stella. She gets up gingerly, her stomach bruised from the gash that found a weakness in her now-ruined armor. She places the wood from her satchel in a pile, standing like a triangle, and watches the flame materialize before her eyes. She looked at him through the fire.

”I’ll keep an eye out for anything....tributes or otherwise.”

(I cannot swallow the words

filling my mouth,

I cannot fade 

into the silence of absence.

You need a ghost 

I cannot become.)

The stars danced throughout her soul, twirling and gleaming with glittering lights as the night wore on. She falls asleep sitting up, her back against a cold stone wall, her arms wrapped around her knees.

(The ghost you require

and the quiet inside. 

The words never spoken

and the frozen sleep

of a night spent alone. )

---

Morning breaks cold, her breath escaping her chest despite the warmth of the fur coat. Finley was next to her, his head lolling to the side, hair unkempt. The cannon booms in the distance, loud enough to reverberate through Stella’s chest. Her mouth tastes like ash. Like the end of something. She prayed all last night for her heart to be taken - the deceiving nature of the organ too much to bear. The past day beating inside of her like a second heart and she wanted it taken out of her. Remove the weakness from her bones.

The voice of the Gamemaker (which one? thought Stella, trying to remember the silent trio appraising them like livestock) floods throughout the Arena and she knows they have been pulled from the safety of the Cornucopia for a race. The promise of the wealth and food calls to her as they ready their gear and make the trek to the Moguls, the other tributes ahead of them and off down the mountain.

She tingles with the evolution of something - with the changing nature of her atoms. She emerged from the fight yesterday carrying the heavy corpse of guilt on her shoulders. A broken promise to protect Allie on her lips as she struck him in the gut. Fate made her remove him from her path.

The explosion of emotion and the destruction of herself in the process. Something cracks and breaks within Stella and she steadies her hold on her spear - her heartbeat pounding in her ears as she makes her choice. The Gamemakers said nothing about violence. This twisted dance was not complete without a little bloodshed. After all, why were they even here if not to die? No one had yet made this move, tearing down the mountain (or trying to) in blurs of the colors of their Districts, clothes streaked with blood. She wanted, needed to strike first. To gain the upper hand.

She was changed from her experience with Allie. With his ghost and what remained of his corpse. She knew that in this moment, she needed to turn into something feral, instinctual, something that could survive the horrors of this place without another break. She needed to change.

With a step towards a tribute - a girl - a name she did not know, she lunged with her spear. She was becoming the wildfire. Becoming the storm. Changing and materializing from a girl in a nebulous cloud of uncertainty to a girl with a purpose. She needed to stay alive, and that meant some had to fall.

(I cannot be

For you,

the ghost you require.) 

”How well can you ski, Fin?" Stella asks, grabbing four ski poles, two for her hands and another two to loop through her satchel next to her spear.

♛