lysander riddle, district seven | fin

Lysander always thought the world was haunted. He noticed the things nobody else did - the chills in the summer air, the slight shimmers in the mist. He can hear them in the forests, in the rundown apothecary shops, and in his rickety wooden house. Their footsteps smelled of decay and every time he turned his back to a wall, he could feel their eyes sinking into the back of his tousled blonde hair.

Helena Riddle used to whisper in his ears that his father was here with them. And as a child, he devoured her words like hymns and after a while a hunger bloomed within him.

This hunger was feral—a wolf bounding after its prey. He chased after a father he never knew, grasping at the fringes for anything he could find. Palm readings, ouija boards, and frayed tarot cards; he begged the spirits for guidance. But their guidance never came.

For years he sought anything that would give him a sign of his father, but nothing ever came. A boy of thirteen, burying his toys in the backyard. The ouija boards and tarot cards soon became one with the undergrowth and Lysander swore that he was moving on.

The district knew him as the ghost boy. A boy haunted beyond relief, chasing after ghosts and ghouls roaming the midnight forests. He would lay upon the branches of the trees - air stagnant and unassuming - listening to the gentle breezes of the wind and crackling of leaves underfoot. Lysander could feel the specters hiding in the murky depths of shadows, obscured from vision.

He would speak to them in gentle whispers, coaxing them to reveal themselves. There was always a sign: cracks of branches and wind howling like a storm being brewing in the cloudless skies.

They called him a mad, a fraud like his father. They spin tales of witches and cryptics hiding deep within the forests of district seven.

But Lysander pays them no mind—because after all, all Riddle's are born outcasts.