petals for armor | mackenzie 96th

D A Y   T W O :

The mines were a brilliant choice on paper. The dark provided cover. There were limited attack points. There seemed to be an extensive-enough network shown on camera to imply that the tributes were meant to find it, and that was at least as much a good thing as it was a bad thing. If they were meant to find it, it could also have meant it was designed to kill them. In Mackenzie's Games, the tributes were meant to find the pirate ship, and what a coincidence it was when it happened to sink. The tributes were supposed to end up on that rock next to the lagoon, because that's where the giant shadow monster appeared. Things happening in the Games were rarely coincidence, and the amount of tributes who'd ended up there so quickly wasn't lost on Mackenzie as he watched over breakfast.

He glanced down at the plate of food on his plate: a slice of ham, a pile of fried potatoes, a grapefruit with brown sugar sprinkled over it, and a buttered piece of District Seven's signature bread. He'd been in the Capitol enough times now to have tried the bread all across Panem, and it remained true that Seven's was his favorite. It was the layers of different flavors and textures. There was the bread itself, dark and glazed to a shine, and covered in sliced almonds, which were coated in honey and covered in sesame seeds. Like he said: layers.

This time, though, Mackenzie had allowed the entire plate to go cold as he'd kept his gaze focused on the screen above him. He'd lost his appetite. He sighed, leaning back in his chair and patting his pockets for a lighter, before standing and making his way to the balcony.

D A Y   F O U R :

Mackenzie knew what it was to fight the darkness. To witness actual shadows pouring from the earth and becoming corporeal. Tangible. Real. He remembered fighting a beast who had many heads, each of them hungry. He remembered watching as an unstoppable force- a state of being- ripped through the remaining tributes and cemented itself as a staple figure in Mackenzie's dreamscape for the rest of his life. But even what he'd seen, what he'd lived through-

It wasn't like what the tributes in the 96th were experiencing. Here, the darkness took over everything. This was a world where the darkness of the 79th was never vanquished. The shadows stretched to every corner of the arena, and with it, brought beasts of unimaginable horror. Leathery wings and haunted cackles, ferocious snarls and confusing manipulation. Every swarm had its own terrible strengths. But the creatures who seemed to be the alphas of the darkness before its expansion, the ones the officials kept calling Volkra- their chosen audience included Vali and Hal, and their friend from Eight. How they'd all managed to survive, Mackenzie wasn't sure. And watching the fight unfold, the tributes desperately trying to end one another in hopes of so too ending the madness and the chaos swarming around them- it was unsettling. This wasn't a situation where the tributes could ever really win, was it? So many were dying. So many were still fighting.

But after Hal made quick work of the boy from Ten, Mackenzie made the mistakes of getting his hopes up that the fight would die down. He was wrong.

It wasn't too much longer after that when the boy from Nine cleaned Vali's head from her shoulders. With the sound of her cannon, the cameras cut from the fight for good and left Mackenzie feeling hollow, staring at his warped reflection in the bottom of the screen. Another year, another Forrester. He wondered what god would permit such a travesty, such a prolonged suffering for a family. Whatever god it was, he resented it for involving him in its twisted games of life and death.