arcadia lumiere-fray ☾ district one || fin

You were born screaming, and too early. Smaller than your sister and brother, come before you, and you’d spend the rest of your life playing catch up with them. The youngest, the meekest, the most fragile. Sentencings forever engraved into your skin. But oh, how you made up for them. You used your title of youth to be spoiled – treated to everything your heart desired. You used your gentleness, and the way it made you unassuming and lithe, to fool anyone naïve enough to think you were nothing more than a doe-eyed damsel.

You are your own saviour.

And like any warrior, you knew how to use those little lungs of yours to demand attention, adoration and acclaim. To this day, you still do. Only you’ve grown out of your shrill voice and wails echoing down the halls. Instead, you’ve settled on soft-spoken words and honeycomb warmth.

The impact? The same.

In years to come, your parents will joke about how you’ve always been one step ahead of everyone else – that even as an infant, you couldn’t wait to make the world your own. You don’t correct them and tell them you just weren’t meant for solitude – that seven months was simply too long.

You were never meant to be alone.

You’re spinning around a room that’s not your own, and it feels so familiar. The lights are dancing and you’re laughing; with glitter in your hair, you feel so alive. You’ve always belonged to the throng, arriving at the centre, caught up in a gravitational pull happening against your will. You’re a willing passenger riding the waves of extroversion as you’re enveloped by faces and names you can’t keep up with.

People want to hate you and all that you are. When you sign your name in sparkling gold letters, it activates something in their psyche. A fight or flight response – a warning and preconceptions rolled into one. It’s easy to try and bring someone down when they feel so far above you, but it’s a much harder feat to achieve when there’s a real person on the other end of your name.

If Axinite is the brains, and Alexandra is the brawn, then you are the beauty. Your training took you down a path similar to your siblings – tough love in the time of careers, battles won and lost and emerging stronger through all of the bruises and broken bones the three of you shared. You excelled in the training arena, like any Fray would, and people watched. How could they not take notice of a golden phoenix with size and strength preserved?

While they were watching, they were talking; softly, at first, and you held your head high through every battle, letting their whispers grow to reach a symphony so loud, so clear, that you couldn’t help yourself – you followed the pretty words and became a face to talk to, not just one to talk about.

And this is where you found your strength. In the patterns of speech and facial cues – from dimples on cheeks to frown-creased foreheads. In the way people would stand taller around you, desperate for any advantage over you.

You pieced together the non-verbals and matched them with the words, uncovering all the hidden meanings and ulterior motives. The study of human behavior – a delicate art, with lessons times a thousand that you were born to master.

You perfected your laugh, sugary sweet and fragile. You trained your voice to sit on a note of F sharp, something soft and playful and unsuspecting. You spent hours in front of your mirror smiling at your own reflection, watching the corners of your mouth turn up just so – inviting, charming, captivating. And with it all came the conversations that would flow so easily. When you spoke, people listened, hanging on your words as closely as you would on theirs. A mutual respect, yet so much more – you’ve learnt it’s what people don’t say that speaks the loudest.

You can’t fake these feelings; you’re no actor. You’re just a girl with a silver tongue and the power to wield it like a blade.

It was only a matter of time until you found yourself at the centre of every inner circle. Invitations to parties and dinner events flooding your calendar, cropped-out “save the date” reminders stuck all over your bedroom walls; you rarely turn down a good time. It’s how you climbed the ranks of the brutal social hierarchy of District One, but it’s not for the faint of heart. Anyone might find it exhausting – the upholding of expectation, the eyes that stick to you like glue, the noise of it all. But you’ve only ever found it exhilarating.

If Axinite is the brains, and Alexandra is the brawn, then you are the beauty. A social butterfly – where you fly, people flock to follow.

Together, you’re everything your parents wanted you to be.

People come and go, but family stays. You’re stronger in solidarity; there’s strength in numbers. There’s nothing weak about knowing your limitations. There’s nothing weak about a three-headed dragon.

It’s because you know yourself that you know you belong to something bigger than your last name and shared blood. Sometimes the company of healthy sibling rivalry isn’t enough. Sometimes you find what you need in a crowded room with people you’ve just met – distant, yet right on the edge of being too close.

That’s where you made your name – Arcadia, not Lumiere, or Fray – wedged between your peers who want to be you; or be with you; or all of the above.

This is who you are: a shining diamond, silver and gold, waiting in the wings of success to be cemented in the Lumiere legacy. Failure has never been an option. There’s never been a doubt about it: you are destined for greatness and do anything to achieve it.

God help anyone who tries to stop you.