the battle begins [the darlings vs sk] day 2 / 7am

my dreams are always nightmares. this is why i do not trust it, even as it begins.

usually, they are crystal clear. invariably, they feature my mother; she holds me down and paints rouge on my cheeks, or drags me through the district square by the hair, or hangs me from the chandelier in the hall of our old house, and no matter what, i scream and scream and scream. 

the dream is comprised of snatches of conversation. a king and a knight, the low grave tones of people who have been defeated. my mind has created the previous inhabitant of the throne i sat atop last night, with august below me -- a man, of course, but he does not revel in his power, does not seem to preside over something glorious. there is a sick feeling in my throat that tells me i should run, but find myself a part of the furniture itself, just a watcher. i have no mouth to open in protest, no fingers with which to touch the figures in front of me. 

if i could shout, i would tell them to go now, although i do not know quite what it is we should be fleeing from; probably my mother, i assume, who has not yet shown herself but must surely be hidden around a corner, or pressed up against the underside of the table, waiting her time to strike. 

i am looking for her when i open my eyes to see the dawn light filtering through the trees. i am left with an anchor in the pit of my stomach that threatens to sink and drown me. 

wake up, i insist, laying a hand on the nearest limbs: andromache's wrist, eulalie's elbow. a soft touch conceals more urgency. i am certain we must go. we need to leave this place, and they agree, because the sense of unease seems to extend beyond the bounds of my dream and into the physical world; it shows itself as a thick fog, a warning, and it is all i can do to keep my legs moving steadily, restrain them from breaking into a run. this morning, i am glad of the company, although the conversation is lacking.

we are amongst the trees when i hear it; a terrible crunching that sounds like bone scraping against bone, and i squint up into the canopy and find something there that cannot be. certainly, i have not really woken up from my brief and restless sleep; here i find another iteration of my night terror, cloaked behind the deception of a sequence in which i open my eyes and believe myself, for a moment, to be awake. but things like this are not the sort that you face when you are awake. it is the oldest trick in the nightmare book.

perhaps now we are up to the part where i face my mother, i think, but as the form it comes together, i see that still she has not joined us. it is a great creature built of stone, something animated that should instead be still. it moves toward us - me, eulalie and andromache - and speaks in an awful, gravelly voice: protect the kingdom, it says, although it has no right to be vocalising, no right to be stepping outside of its lane as a statue of a knight and meddling with us real human girls in such a way. 

this time, when i open my mouth to scream, it is not like other dreams; the sound that comes out of my mouth is shrill and urgent and very real, so real that i begin to question the foundations of this volatile state of consciousness, eulalie, i shout, andromache, look out, but what i really mean is florentine, please wake up, this has gone on long enough.

somebody told me once that if you die in your dreams, you die in real life; but i know that this is not true, because if it was i would die every night, strangled by the carefully-manicured fingers of a woman i used to know. 

i do not think the dream-girls need my warning, because the knight is taking protecting his kingdom extremely seriously, and brings his weapons down upon our vulnerable flesh-and-blood. it hurts as if it is real. 

gifted the freedom of my faculties, i use them, grateful that my dream-arms, groggy from the sleep within sleep, seem to remember their training, and grip the knife with assurance. 

_[DARS]

I sleep as easy on the mossy ground as I did in my bed in the Capitol. I get back from my nighttime adventure just in time to sit down at the watch and catch my breath, just in time to get the amount of sleep I'll need for the day ahead. No dreams that I can remember. Funny, since at home every sleep was marred with all manners of conjurations from my mind. There were the good ones, where I won, and stood in front of District One, a returning Victor. But there were also the bad ones, where I die without even seeing who killed me. In those dreams, I collapse, looking at the Cornucopia, full of possibility, when some asshole takes an axe to my knees, and when I meet the ground, they swing it again, plant it in the back of my skull. This morning, as I wake up, I reminisce more on those older dreams than anything from the arena so far. After building this experience up for myself for a lifetime, reconciling my expectations with the reality of the Games is something I have to do again and again. 

I still think I might be in a dream, some early morning fancy, when I first hear the leaves crumpling underfoot. Then Florentine touches my arm, whispers for me to wake up, and I am awake. Even as I walk, I'm still half the world away, up until the last moment.

The ground nearly shakes beneath the weight of the stone warrior approaching us. Or maybe that's just me, light headed in his face. This is something different to the statues we've seen so far, with the smiles and grimaces on their faces, frozen in their play of the everyday. They were so unreal, so uncanny. This thing moves. This thing is armed. 

"Florentine! Eulalie!" I yell right back, following Florentine's lead. It means yes, and it means I've got your back, and it means no fucking way am I going to die to a damn hunk of rock. I back up and it's to my benefit. The stone knight swings at Florentine and Eulalie, and clips them both. It looks like it's early for him too. It's hard enough to be us, stiff from a night on the earth's floor, now imagine being him.

Protect the kingdom, he says. If I had a heart, it would be breaking. Poor thing. They've programmed him to believe all of this. All of us in here, killing each other, and he's the single thing doing it for something more than just himself. 

I line up my shot.

_{[ DARS ]}

i am beginning to think that this is not a dream, after all. 

the sky is too impossibly high and blue, the bark on the trees too detailed, the leaves preserved and pressed with their tiny, spider-leg veins, and i am beginning to think that these things are too irrelevant for my imagination to conjure, currently, considering the events of the morning. the ground beneath my feet crunches beneath my step; the soil and leaves give way, shift below my weight, and i am struck by the unnecessary value it adds. i wouldn't bother, i think, wouldn't notice, if it wasn't real. 

and if it's true, then, that the sky and the trees and the ground are not figments of my overactive, sleeping mind, then the logic follows that everything else - eulalie's indignant cry of your kingdom is in ruins,  and andromache's flying arrows, and the assailant that seems made of something more than flesh and blood, something more solid and certainly more merciless -- these things, too, must be true, and this is a very terrible thing. 

the stone man turns to andromache, and seems to be looking at her with his hard stone eyes. i find hard to believe that such a thing can see and perceive and consider, but it goes through the motions of these humans traits as though deciding that andromache is not worth the wrath of its sword or spear, and turns back to eulalie and myself, blessing the golden child with yet another gift of fate - the world, a wonder that just keeps on giving to the blessed.

is that it? i shout at the knight, although i do not trust that his stone ears can really hear at all. now that i know that he is real and not my own creation, i take my role in his destruction significantly more seriously. is that the best you can do, for your precious kingdom? no wonder it fell. 

and here we are within its shattered remains, among the wreckage of what used to be beautiful. we are close to joining the bones no doubt buried here; just one wrong footfall away from being swallowed by the rest of what was left behind. 

_[DARS]

Birthday filler!!! andromache probably tells eulalie to be quiet but is actually... sort of mesmerised by the stone knight..... which is why she misses smh 

_{[ DARS ]}

there is a tipping point, somewhere, between manifestation and delusion. 

the line of it lies across the dirt between eulalie and myself. when i destroy you, she tells the knight, her mouth stuffed full of what remained of her credibility, i'll take your head and throw it before the empty throne. i imagine the scene she describes; the stone face, inanimate, making a slow and steady roll toward the feet of that chair, coming to rest where august sat. i can hear the groan of it as it scrapes across the floor, stone on stone, a heaving sigh before perpetual stillness. it is a nice thought, i won't deny her that. she tells an enchanting story. 

the reality looks me right in the eyes and challenges me to a dual. the knight himself is unbothered by eulalie's crowing; does not falter in his unflinching pursuit of kingdom protection - some sort of well-meaning and frankly genocidal crusade in which we have been marked and labelled for extermination. although the shape of a man, he shares little else with any man i have ever met. there is nothing supple about him, nothing is weak, there is no blood running through his veins into a persuadable crotch. he is flawless, in his way, and we are at his mercy. 

i am about to tell her she is wrong, that she cannot do what she claims, when she raises her axe and drives it clean into the stone of the knight's throat, where his pharynx would be if he had ever been a real boy. the blow sends cracks and shards rushing out like tiny baby spiders, and i swallow my accusations as the head topples from the shoulders.

it seems that i am the one on the wrong side of the line; the one who's understanding of things has come unattached. 
 
i am wise enough not to celebrate; it is not long before the knight is moving again. blindly, he swings at me again, with an apparent personal vendetta against florentine-kind. 

i glance at eulalie, who has danced away from his blows, avoided the worst of every strike, managed to taste his lips and then fell them. even here, even when the enemy we face is nothing more than a wall of rock, even here she is the golden girl, crown balancing prettily on her head, singing ridiculous songs of victory. a stab of jealousy joins the real knife in my stomach. 

you coward, i shout, channelling her brilliance with everything i have, because it is the only thing i can hold onto right now, you're afraid of her! i did not foresee my time in the arena including the heckling of a headless pebble, but here we are. people change. 

well, you should be, i scream, you should be fucking afraid of her. 

because her delusions of grandeur aren't even delusions, they're just her. 

_[DARS]

The knight’s head falls and crashes beneath its feet, and yet it still advances on us — Eulalie and Florentine are twin winds, useless against him but effective against my arrows.

I notch the next one from my quiver once I’ve spied my last ones in the grass for later. His head doesn’t land on any, and that’s as much as I can ask for right now. He seems to come to his senses at last; he’s realised that I am not to be trusted. All it took was losing his head. Oh well. Seems like this relationship was never meant to last. Sorry, Eulalie, but I wasn’t going to make you maid of honour anyways. I don’t care that you set us up.

And yet I can’t stop the hesitation that creeps through my veins, holds my arms stiff even once I get into position. All the things that I’ll never have — suddenly I would love to have a fight with Eulalie over the cut and colour of her bridesmaid dress. We’d buy Florentine a train ticket to Disgrict One so she could attend too. The Stone Knight is there too, I guess, but his head is still attached, because really, what good would he be without it? And my mother would hate him. And everything would be normal and right.

I can still have all of that, minus Eulalie and Florentine. All I have to do is win. Sorry, girls. I’ll have a couple of drinks in your honour.

Now, back to my boyfriend. If he likes it rough, then I’ll give it to him.

_{[ DARS ]}

there seems to be nothing that can stop the knight. 

not our blades, not eulalie's ferocious words, not his head tumbling to the ground. he cares for nothing but his kingdom, and somewhere in his calcified mind we stand in his way. 

he is not the only one with a mission, though, not the only god-forsaken fool in this place with a crown to protect. i, too, have come here with a cross to bare and ruins at my feet, and i do not intend to relinquish my rights on the second day. if a sword in my stomach was going to stop me, then i never was the right girl for the job. 

at home, the street kids will be watching, and they will be wondering what my plan is; what will my series of mistakes culminate it? will i avenge us? is there a point to prove, among the dust? i will die, but i refuse to die before it is done. 

the stone knight cannot take their deaths away from me, should not dare to pry the lives of andromache and eulalie out of my stiff fingers. they are for me, not for him. 

"you need to leave, now," i tell him. "before somebody gets hurt."

_[DARS]