down // [gryphon]

[sbeeg]

Sarita Wolfe

coming towards her,
stuck
still no turning back

She doesn't wear a head scarf anymore. Wen she had first arrived, Sarita wore one everyday. So paranoid of being recognized as a Wolfe, as a sister to the dead tributes. But time had blurred their memory and she was confident enough to leave the darkness of alleyways with her bright red hair in the open. With her sister's nose and her brother's dark eyes. Her mother's grimace and her father's heart.

She misses them sometimes. Rob and Jeyne, mother, Jon, and little Rickon. They don't feel like people anymore. In her mind they're portraits hanging in a hallway. Ancestors left in oil and canvas.

The girl spends most of her days walking. Mother never allowed her to go on walks in District Eight. She had to be soft, ladylike, and ready to be married away to a rich gentleman and locked within his house. Whereas she used to spend her days knitting and embroidering, now she spends them on the beach. Bare feet sink into the warm sand, grease from a street vendor's fried fish reddens her lips. Her hands have fresh callouses on them. She loves them. She loves anything that separates her from the Cold House and home.

It's dusk, and a cold front has wrapped around the district. The fishermen have tied their boats to the docks, the fishwives have walked home after selling their wares. Peacekeepers halfheartedly parole the streets and Sarita Wolfe sits in the cool sand watching the tides roll in and back out. She's dressed in rags, her headscarf hanging around her neck just in case. She looks at her hands, tanned from the District Four sun and so foreign from the ones that had delicately woven a needle through muslin back in Eight.

Brown eyes look over the black water. The girl had managed to run from District Eight, and for a while she enjoyed the freedom the new district gave her. Open seas, fresh air, and plenty of back roads and shacks to hide away in. However, the longer she stayed the more choked she began to feel.

How far could someone swim out into the open ocean? Would she make it far, or would she die before morning? Sarita knew she shouldn't ponder such things but the thoughts came uninvited in her mind.

She laid back on the sand, spreading her limbs out like when she made snow angels with Aria and Rickon so many years ago. They had all carried Bran out of his chair and moved his legs for him so he too could be an angel preserved in snow. They all melted away too quickly.

Sarita closed her eyes and listened to the ocean.

She probably had an hour or two before a Keeper made her leave. So, for now, she would rest.

[Gryphon]

🌊   s e b a s t i a n     m a r l o n - h y d e   ⚓

We all start out on one path from birth, and from then on the trails we walk split into two, four, eight, sixteen; they branch out to more forks as time passes, as we get older. Some walkways will have much more people upon them than others, and some will barely have anybody strolling through.

Everybody's different, so their journeys in life will vary too.

But one thing they all do share in common in them, with each other, is that eventually they don't want anything to do with me.

They will walk with each other by their sides, frequently even holding hands as they keep moving forward--but it is as if I'm destined to keep staring ahead alone with only the fresh air and the cool seabreeze around me for company. I don't understand why, I don't know what I'm doing wrong and I probably never will.

Am I boring? Is that what makes me not worth that much to people to keep me as their friend? To keep in touch with me at the very least? Am I really meant to feel like this for the rest of my life, detached from the rest of the world as they carry on without me and pretend that I'm not even here?

Don't I matter too?

I suppose not.

So lately I've been starting to forget how to use my voice, lips kept in a straight line and tongue held for hours on end as I go about my day and keep it all to myself, not sharing it with another soul--not even Mom and my stepdad, who thankfully make the endeavor easy anyway by being quiet and minding their own business just like I do.

People I know used to know see around at school in the mornings sometimes ask to no avail about this sudden, progressive change, but I only so much as brush past their shoulder as I continue my solo course through my existence like everybody else does without it in their presence.

And question marks replace the features that sit upon their faces as I treat them the same, them off in their own world together and me in mine with nobody to explore it. It is just the company of myself and if they're making me adapt to that then I guess I will.

Everybody needs their alone time every once in awhile, so it must be such a privilege for me to be able to have it from the moment the sun rises to when it falls back down--and when comes that time that the sky becomes a glowing red-yellow gradient, darkening the sea as the sun goes to conceal itself behind it, I spend the last couple hours on the beach with chills prickling my skin because it's just so beautiful to look at, so relaxing to breathe in the atmosphere that surrounds it, to lay in the sand and feel the water meet my toes as it undulates in and out of the shoreline.

And I'm not letting another person take away this feeling because as I approach the shallow waves I see her, a girl laying in the sand with her eyes closed. She's clearly enjoying the scenery as much as I do, so not wanting to disturb her

or for her to talk to me, notice me, so much as even look at me and to just leave me to myself like everybody else does and like I'm finding myself wanting them to now because what is the point anymore in trying

I sit down some ways away from her body as I bring my knees up and rest my arms on them, sighing softly. Seagull calls in the distance and the waves rumbling when they approach me, I close my eyes too.

This is all that matters.

If only the ocean could wash away mental impurities too and leave me with the peace it provides me now.