To Go {Further} (unnamed day 1)

m a g i

A voice called out to you
Strange how you can't turn away
You've got someone who is true when the darkness becomes too great

Were those voices in the trees?

What was a boy with no weapons, no allies, and no sense of a way forward to do.

He could, as so many before him had done, lay down on his knees and simply give up. That option had weightlessness – a finality that could save him from all the pain and suffering he was likely to endure. And, he wouldn’t have to raise a fist or a knife to anyone that stood in his way if he bowed to them first.

But for all that Magi did not know, from the physics of why objects fell at the same rate to the expansive history of panem, he had been certain that death scared him.

Though not for the typical reasons.

Sure, he hated thinking of the emptiness of what remained after one’s last breathes. That there could be no more of this world and all the good (fireworks on Founder’s Day, the first swim of the summer, or his mother’s sugar cookies).

But what if, as he imagined late one evening when he was a few years younger, death was worse than he imagined?

For far worse than all the visions of nothingness were that this was just the beginning of his suffering. Perhaps this world was his last chance to feel any sort of pleasure at all. And perhaps when he closed his eyes for the last time, no matter how good or bad he had been, damnation always awaited. All the suffering of this life could not compare to the torture that might await in the next – or the next, if there was more than one.

For all he knew, there were those who controlled his every move here and now, his memory, his movements – just to determine that when he no longer amused them, he’d perish.

He sat at the edges of the forest and the cornucopia, stuck.

As footsteps came behind him, he turned with a sneer and raised his fists.

“Don’t come any closer.” He found his voice, all deep and raw.