the faltering prayer {mila dp}

It is the empty eyes of a hollow child that stare back at me as the spears drive into my body.

No soul but wires, no heart but steel, there is no use in hating tall husks as empty as yesterday's demon-child illusion. No use in anger that is swallowed up by a bottomless void - I may as well hate the clouds for blocking out the stars.

Blood pours from me, and my fury pours out into the dirt with it as I lose the strength to stand, sinking to my knees, weapon slipping from my grasp to land next to Clementa's body.

Futility; inevitability. The faces may change - Quillon, Tobias, Clementa - but the structure remains the same; already they are closing the hole in their ranks left by her fall. They are inexhaustible, implacable, unyielding.

One day as a child I'd looked out the shop window to see an older Seam boy charging at a patrolling Peacekeeper and stabbing them in the stomach with a sharpened stick. The snow ran red with their blood, within minutes joined by deep crimson from bullet holes all over the boy's chest.

My mother had tutted about how stupid Seam children were. The next day, the bloody snow had been shoveled, and a different Peacekeeper patrolled the area. Life went on. The cogs of society were not so easily shifted.


Ansel's spear comes for the final blow, and tears spring from pain blurring my view of the clouded starless sky. Ragged gasps leave me wanting for air, hands scrabbling uselessly against the gore dribbling from my stomach and the sting of rough ivy as it digs into the wound on my back.

I turn my head to the side, feeling the urge to retch, but there is nothing left to spill from my body, nothing else to offer the cold unnatural earth of the arena. Agony paralyzes me and leaves only leaden muscles and a fog that hardens my insides like concrete. Death is not merely the quiet cessation of a heartbeat, the single boom of a cannon; it takes away limbs and breath and churning stomach one by one before finally allowing the eyes to close and the mind to slip into blissful comfortable darkness.

I'm exhausted. I'm tired of fighting, of struggling against an unfeeling realm where the only joy allowed to continue is the satisfaction from crushing others underfoot. I have neither the strength to bear suffering nor the power to impose it upon others; there has never been room for me to survive in this world.


They say that beyond the veil is an eternal peaceful meadow with no fear, no greed, no hunger. But in this mortal world, innocence is an illusion. Innocence is only vulnerability.

On a screen thousands of miles away, my children are surely watching these last dying heaves, watching for the first time a bloodshed they do not yet understand. I cannot save them. I cannot shield them and wish that they grow up with warm hearts, that they become something better than what the world wants of them.

"No one ever said the Games would be fair."

Warm hearts grow cold and dead beneath the point of a spear or the swing of a sword. Only the harsh orange moon and a landscape of dead branches endure.

Cruelty lies in an empty-eyed boy drinking bitter crimson wine, intoxicated by melancholy and growing ever more powerful with each new splash of red across his form. Justice and ideals refuted with steel and wood, sharp blades whispering you are nothing, you are worthless, you are a lump of coal to use up and disappear. What Ansel deserved, what the world seemed ought to be - none of it mattered. None of it made a difference when the few and powerful stole the movement from our limbs and choices from our mouths.

I am only wrong, and weak, and insubstantial; my twins do not need me in their lives. Better they forget and grow up sharp than hold on to hope just waiting to be shattered into bleeding shards of despair.


Please stop, please end, just let me move on from this torture tears through my mind in fragmented flashes, but my body still stubbornly, desperately clings to consciousness. Frozen and mute, I can only lay there as Ansel lifts the bat from my hands and jerks the shawl from my neck and -

To my immense relief, he does not undress me any further.

There's a glint in his eyes reminiscent of the cold Career from three games ago, not quite a grin as he rummages through my bag and takes what has become his.

When the pale servant of death has stolen his fill, his shrinking silhouette disappears into the trees in the distance.

I am alone.

The trees creak, their branches rattling like a thousand ghosts are sweeping through the chilly air. Each sound brings on the instinctive fear of another tribute, even as a new wave of agony rippling through my stomach begs for eternal relief; a tribute coming by to finish me off would have been mercy compared to this, the ticking of seconds measured in gushes of blood and pulses of pain.

But there is no one. Whether friend or foe, I only want to see someone care, yet all around is only a dead and empty void.


A final shooting bolt throbs from my wounds before all feeling disappears; in the distance, a cannon dimly sounds. I step forward into the darkness, and a figure beckons, her features completely shrouded in shadow. The meager light is far thinner than even the darkest nights in the arena, but the ground is smooth and I feel naught but calm and safety as I follow the mysterious woman.

The road is long. I begin to have the uncanny feeling that I am retracing my steps since the first day, and as she leads me through the emptiness I spot glittering orange in the distance. It is the only speck of light in this landscape; as I draw closer I see light from beyond a door carved into a giant pumpkin.

Through the door is a vast hall, even larger than the dining hall of the training center; under its high ceilings and glittering chandeliers were hundreds, perhaps thousands of people seated at the long tables or milling about near racks of food and glasses of unknown beverages. I pluck an apple (a normal apple...) from the towering pyramid of fruit, as well as a couple slices of bread and a spoonful of the green sauce next to it.

Hardly had I slid my tray onto the rough, empty stone table when Alice strides over, plopping herself down on the long wooden bench directly across from me.

"Is that really all you're eating? We're already dead anyway, might as well eat something good."

I think back to our first meeting, and smile.