preventative measures / andromache & the cure, day 5

I swing like a pendulum from one extreme to another in here — this curse, I believe it in one second and call bullshit on it the next. As I stumble out of the throne room, my bucket laden with new goods, I believe in it. I feel light headed and top heavy all at once.

Some foul thing is working its magic on all of us, and although if you asked me last night, I’d have told you it’s all tricks of the mind, illusions beamed in by the Gamemakers to mess with us, today, as the morning wanes and the afternoon sun begins to heat up my face, I can’t help but fully buy into it.

Who cares if it isn’t real? Who cares if if the Gamemakers can make the curse stop spreading or spread super fast or kill us instantly at the push of a button? It’ll come for us if we don’t do something about it, and it does not matter at all whether we know it’s all the Gamemakers’ doing. In here, what they say is real is real. It’s long since past time that I accepted that. There’s no ignoring the sinking stone in my chest, or explaining away the patch on my hip I’d labelled a rash anymore. You can’t simply just willpower your way through the Games and the people in charge’s plans.

Florentine is off with D’arcy — it’s weird to be alone like this without knowing approximately when she’ll be back. I’ve gotten so used to having at least one person by my side that stopping where I do, sitting atop my bucket and using a craggy old rock as a table to mix my drink on, feels markedly unsafe. Even when we’ve gone off by ourselves throughout the days so far, it has been a comfort to have a rough location to meet at.

I pour over the little scrap of paper. It’s so old that it feels like something from a different world altogether. I hadn’t even known I’d grabbed it. I must have picked it up alongside one of the other things. Maybe it was inside the stone chalice. But it’s a good thing I got it; I don’t know a damn thing about plants. Anything requiring nurture wasn’t exactly my mother’s area of expertise, and so she never saw fit to educate me in those ways either. I probably would have managed to eat the one part of the sky flower that was actually toxic.

I mix the petals into the shrine water gently with one pointed finger. I keep mixing it, in case it needs help diffusing until I stop, suddenly overcome with the fear that I’d overdone it. Isn’t that something to do with bread? Or pottery dough? Can’t you do too much?

Before I lose my nerve I knock back the entire chalice’s content in one go. If it does nothing, who cares? If I was never cursed in the first place, we’ll call it a preventative measure. And if it works its magic? Great. Wonderful. Hopefully my mood swings will balance out. Immediately, the shrine water is beyond refreshing, a freshness which alone maybe makes all the stress worth it. How much I took for granted before.

_{[ DARS ]}