To Go {Further} (unnamed day 1)

[marguerite harvard d2a (zori)]

m a g i

A voice called out to you
Strange how you can't turn away
You've got someone who is true when the darkness becomes too great

Were those voices in the trees?

What was a boy with no weapons, no allies, and no sense of a way forward to do.

He could, as so many before him had done, lay down on his knees and simply give up. That option had weightlessness – a finality that could save him from all the pain and suffering he was likely to endure. And, he wouldn’t have to raise a fist or a knife to anyone that stood in his way if he bowed to them first.

But for all that Magi did not know, from the physics of why objects fell at the same rate to the expansive history of panem, he had been certain that death scared him.

Though not for the typical reasons.

Sure, he hated thinking of the emptiness of what remained after one’s last breathes. That there could be no more of this world and all the good (fireworks on Founder’s Day, the first swim of the summer, or his mother’s sugar cookies).

But what if, as he imagined late one evening when he was a few years younger, death was worse than he imagined?

For far worse than all the visions of nothingness were that this was just the beginning of his suffering. Perhaps this world was his last chance to feel any sort of pleasure at all. And perhaps when he closed his eyes for the last time, no matter how good or bad he had been, damnation always awaited. All the suffering of this life could not compare to the torture that might await in the next – or the next, if there was more than one.

For all he knew, there were those who controlled his every move here and now, his memory, his movements – just to determine that when he no longer amused them, he’d perish.

He sat at the edges of the forest and the cornucopia, stuck.

As footsteps came behind him, he turned with a sneer and raised his fists.

“Don’t come any closer.” He found his voice, all deep and raw.

ELEGANT

[Red]

She was heading to the cornucopia, maybe there was something there that she could collect? She was trying to be quiet; didn’t want to alert anyone nearby of her presence. The beating she had taken in the bloodbath was still hurting her, and blood was still trickling from her nose, though slowly. One step at a time, careful, careful. Out of nowhere there was someone standing in front of her. Masculine, by his build. Lara squeaked in surprise, back peddled to avoid him. He spoke to her in a sore-sounding voice, which made her realise how dry her own throat was. She stood on the balls of her feet, ready to run if need be, but he didn’t seem to be advancing. “Please, I am just trying to get to the cornucopia,” she tried.