reign dalton ϟ district four ϟ 3rd games / fin.

[d8a lucia ✃ valentine ✁ tris]

they named her reign, because it was raining the night she was born. but her father called her reign, because 'it should mean something more than that.' something more than rain. more than just water.

[d8a lucia ✃ valentine ✁ tris]

it was her, and her brother, and her mother, and her father, and the sea. and that was enough. the waters were still before the storm.

[d8a lucia ✃ valentine ✁ tris]

but she couldn't hear the drums of war. not over the crashing of the waves. not over the sound of peace. but the earth moved without her, and everything collapsed. it took her years to see the smoke.

[d8a lucia ✃ valentine ✁ tris]

she was a girl before she was a soldier. a sister before a victim. a daughter before an orphan. but that is how a thing breaks. it must be whole.

[d8a lucia ✃ valentine ✁ tris]

the gulls stopped crying, and the gunfire began.

[d8a lucia ✃ valentine ✁ tris]

when her brother died, they gave him to the sea. and when her mother followed, they tied rocks to her legs. she watched them sink into the nothingness.

[d8a lucia ✃ valentine ✁ tris]

but when her father died, he was in her arms. and there was nothing but iron, and dirt. she watched him die in a cage. and she could not carry him to the sea.

[d8a lucia ✃ valentine ✁ tris]

"are you a rebel, girl?" she is a shark without teeth. "i am alone. what else is there?"

[d8a lucia ✃ valentine ✁ tris]

they come for her, and she goes with them. and one day, somewhere, the gulls start to cry again.

[d8a lucia ✃ valentine ✁ tris]

reign dalton. district four. eighteen. rebel.

[d8a lucia ✃ valentine ✁ tris]

reign dalton

Reign Dalton came from a long line of fishermen — men and women more comfortable at sea than with their feet against the earth. It was a simple truth. That a family could find a home on the water, that a man and a woman could raise a son and a daughter without help from anyone else, that the waves would rise and fall and make no judgment.

Life was gentle, and slow, and the whispers of war were defeaned by the tides. They kept to themselves, to their little ever-stretching puzzle piece of the world, until the sky was swallowed by black clouds and the war ships arrived. The Daltons were sailors, fishermen — until they had to become soldiers. Not rebels, not supporters.

Their army was few.

They fought to avoid capture for many months, when a young girl had to teach herself to hold a blade in calloused hands and pull it like a rope. Through something that would not yield, something that would scream and mark her with its pain. In shades of red, and the loss of innocence. She was not a cruel girl, but she was not soft. She was a Dalton.

Wild, and restless, and so strange. She didn't need anything more than her family, or the ocean, but it was hard to hold a thing with gunfire overhead. A child had no place out at sea — but she was there, and she loved it so dearly. A child had no place in a war — but here she was, and she was terrified. There were things that could not be changed.

Like a dead brother, and a dead mother — like bodies tied with ropes and rocks and given back to the waves. Like a daughter, and a sister, crying out into the smoke and the wind and hating the world for swallowing them whole. Because they were free, and they were alone, until the land grew closer and the clashing armies slammed them from either side.

It was not a thing that could be escaped. A girl couldn't dodge a boot to her cheek, couldn't pull her father away from the arms of older men — she could bite, and she could scream, but it would not take the ending away. A child and her guardian, locked in a cell, for many months. For many memories. For a shudder, and a breath, and a dead weight in her arms.

And all she could feel was the dirt beneath her, the concrete around her, the silence in her head. It ruined her, knowing his bones would stay there — forever, unmoving, giving back to nothing. But it shaped her, too, made her fall back into herself. She didn't drown in it, didn't become smaller. She was quiet, and she was frozen.

But so were beasts caught in a net.

When they came for her, years later, still tucked away in a cage made for orphans and nobodies — she bit them hard, and scratched at their eyes, and they pulled her to the town square bloody and swollen. Reign Dalton was tired of being moved; tossed and torn by anything other than the sea. This was a thing she could change. This was the war she enlisted in.

She would live, and she would fight.

Because she refused to die in the dirt.

[d8a lucia ✃ valentine ✁ tris]

L△LIA

[L△LIA]

Accepted!