The Story of Artemis Letcher

Excerpts from District 8: A Panem Childhood

Artemis Letcher was not born extraordinary, but she was born into an extraordinary world.

Mella Royfall and Dane Lescott grew up on opposite ends of the same street in District 8 in the nation of Panem. They attended the same public school and after graduation worked in adjacent wings of the same factory. They knew each other in passing but genuinely became acquainted when one of the largest machines in the factory broke down on during Dane's overtime maintenance shift. Neither family had much money (as was the norm in District 8), so when the two were married a year later, Mella wore her grandmother's faded silk dress and the ceremony was held in a field behind the public school. After scraping every penny of their savings together, the newlyweds moved into a tiny house across town and prepared to raise a family.

Two years after the wedding, Mella and Dane welcomed their first child into the world: a fair skinned, dark haired baby girl named Iza Rayne. A year later came a second daughter, Ingrid, followed three years later by yet another daughter, Aimee Jay. Two years after Aimee came Parrah, and five years after that, a fifth daughter, Ruby, was born. Five girls in twelve years forced Mella to mature and Dane to soften; raising the girls became a project of shapes, of factions. Each subsequent daughter learned to occupy a space unfilled by her predecessors, so that by the time Ruby was born there as little room for self-exploration as there was for a new crib in the two bedroom flat.

But each girl understood and adapted. Iza Rayne, the eldest, was most familiar with this practice, knowing self discovery was to be completed early on in life, before the years when the reapings would materialize into genuine threats. Iza knew exactly who she was and what she wanted by the time she was fourteen, and the two things that she loved most then - her family and a boy named Ryle Hudson - would be the things she would love most for the rest of her life. She was forced to mature early and quickly due to the births of her four younger sisters, but it was an evolution that spared her heart in years to come. On the outside, it was no secret that Iza Lescott was one of the most beautiful girls in District 8. Her fair skin was clear and supple, her red lips gracefully curved and her cheekbones regal yet soft. She had smooth, dark brown hair that fell in soft waves and shone even under the buzzing factory lights. Her eyes, hazel-brown hued, were playful under beautifully arched eyebrows, and over the years she grew into an ample chest and smooth, slender curves. Iza was much too beautiful for the bounds of District 8; her beauty was uncommon, imperial, and drove every boy at her school frantic. By the time she was sixteen, she had had three serious offers of marriage...but Iza Lescott was not a fool. She possessed a kind heart with a deep capacity for love and a natural ability to detect sincerity in others. Her younger sisters revered her for her undying loyalty and faithfulness in relationships.

Next after Iza was Ingrid, but despite their proximity in age were probably the most dissimilar of the Lescott sisters. Ingrid was certainly not the natural beauty that Iza was and had come to terms with that fact promptly, which allowed her to settle into her own separate niche in the Lescott household. Ingrid spent most of her teenage years being compared to Iza but could not have cared less about looks, for she knew well that none could rival her sister's. Ingrid herself was paler than Iza, lacking the warmth in her cheeks and the redness in her lips that the eldest Lescott sister possessed. Ingrid's jaw line was softer and her straight dark brown hair often tousled, failing to shine the way Iza's did in the light. Ingrid did bear similarity to Iza in her eyes, which was nearly the only way the two appeared related. But Ingrid never fretted over her average looks because her niche in the family was one of wisdom and solace. Ingrid found peace in detaching herself from the world, stowing away in a quiet room and surrounding herself with books...there was nothing that Ingrid would not read. She became a deep well of knowledge, moving quickly through the books provided for her at school and digging further into the Capitol approved books that lined the town library's walls. Some books she read were so full of propaganda and Capitol flourish that she had to laugh, but she read them nonetheless. But amidst her extensive wealth of knowledge, Ingrid's greatest fault lay in her inability to act. She calculated too much, added up risks and rewards in her head, and in the end always found a reason not to take action. Her sisters respected her quiet, detached personality, but often spoke amongst themselves about the great potential that grew cold behind Ingrid's introversion.

And if Ingrid was the epitome of reservation, Aimee Jay, the middle child, was the materialization of exploit. Even at a young age, Aimee acted without hesitation and was bold and true in her ways. She benefitted from the guidance of her older sisters and adopted Iza's charisma and Ingrid's intelligence. Though she was not as beautiful as Iza or as knowledgeable as Ingrid, she filled a space essential to the structure of the family: she became the son Dane never had. By the time Aimee was born, Dane had been aching for a son but had come to terms with the fact that neither Iza nor Ingrid would ever want to hunt or fish or fight the way a proper son would. In general, District 8 was not a fighting District, and every year Dane, whose ancestry originated in District 2, grew frustrated at the weakness of 8 in the Games. Dane saw Aimee as his opportunity to raise a fighter, to reassure himself that his family would not be weak in the face of oppression. As Aimee grew he began to take her to a special club that met on the outskirts of 8, an underground combat association founded by the ex-mayor of 8, Kaspar Subban, after Kaspar had been forcibly removed from office and burned nearly to death in the city square years ago. Though most members of the club were men in their early twenties, Aimee learned her fair share of hand to hand combat but thrived most after learning archery skills from Kaspar's daughter Valkyrie, the fine skill a supplement for the girls' physical disadvantages against the club's male members. In the basement of the club Aimee became quite the marksman, visiting on her own time when Dane stayed late at the factory. Through her highly illegal training Aimee adopted Dane's motto of "self preservation" in regards to the increasingly homicidal state of the Capitol and her internally developed drive to survive by any means necessary. On the inside Aimee was a bright fire, and her appearance captured some of the same allure. She was tanner than Iza and Ingrid due to the long hours spent with Dane outdoors but still light skinned, and with her athletic body would grow to be the tallest of all her sisters. Her face was sharper than Iza's or Ingrid's due to the accents of her small mouth and long nose, but she still carried an air of refined beauty, though nowhere near as remarkable as Iza's. Aimee's light brown hair shone golden in just the right light and fell in thick, subtle waves past her shoulders. The most notable part of her appearance, however, was her eyes. Aimee was born with golden brown eyes, but by the time she was three her eyes had become a remarkable orange hue, a color as startlingly unnatural and bold as a sunset or a flame. Her eyes sparkled with undeniable power and ferocity that was only heightened by their deviant coloration; they made her face one of daunting supremacy and irresistible command. Aimee was a born leader.

Following Aimee were the two youngest Lescott sisters, Parrah and Ruby. With the well defined personalities of their older sisters, Parrah and Ruby occupied less obvious, intangible spaces in the family. Parrah was the rule breaker, always in need of saving, and Ruby had the wildest imagination for a girl of her age and upbringing. Both Parrah and Ruby shared the same fair complexion as their sisters, but Parrah was uniquely blonde while Ruby had straight dark hair like Ingrid. Out of all the sisters, Parrah had facial features most similar to Aimee and Iza, despite her light hair and chocolate brown eyes. And people said Ruby looked most like Iza, though the two were twelve years apart. Parrah and Ruby looked up to their older sisters with the utmost respect and learned quickly from their accomplishments and mistakes.

And thus the Lescott sisters grew into their own skins over the years, each feeding off the others as they matured into young women. Poverty made their lives difficult but they were well used to it, knowing that the rest of District 8 was not much better off than they were. The year Iza turned twelve, the Lescott family experienced for the first time what it was like to have a child at stake in the Reaping. The Hunger Games had always been a looming threat, but with poverty as the primary struggle the Games were sometimes placed out of mind. Though she was the eldest child and the first of her sisters to experience the Reaping, Iza exhibited little anxiety towards the event, partially to calm her family but also because she was in love, and consequently death afflicted her very little.

A love so strong to make one indifferent towards death? If this was Iza's story, it would begin as such: Iza was well used to being pursued by those of the opposite gender. She was so beautiful and carried such a strong allure that she was always surrounded by suitors even at a young age. Through her preteen years she had been toying with the heart of the mayor's son, who was tall and reasonably muscular and one of the only people in District 8 who did not go hungry on a regular basis. He was beyond drunk in love with her, but she, indifferent and distant, really only maintained his company because of the protection he offered. And Iza needed all of the protection she could get, because the infamous District 8 human trafficking system had been eyeing her up for a very long time. The trafficking system had long been a threat but generally ran under the radar because it was really only prominent in District 8. This was a consequence of the nature of the district's industry, because the working at a textile factory did not harden the girl's bodies and weather their features like working in the fields or coal mines would. So at various times throughout the year, special ranking men from Districts 2 and 8 would appear at the doors of households with beautiful daughters, threaten the families, and take the chosen daughters away. These girls were then sold to wealthy individuals in the upper districts and the Capitol as property. The only restriction on the taken girls was that they had to be at least sixteen years of age, which in some cases made families more willing to comply because it removed the girl from the threat of the Hunger Games. Given the choice between certain death and a life estranged for their daughter, families often gave little resistance when the trafficking system came calling. A life in slavery, though crushing, would provide the girls with a good home and steady meals, whereas the district life of absolute poverty offered no chance for escape.

But Iza Lescott would have rather died twice in the Hunger Games than been forced into one moment of prostitution. Early on in her teenage years she had decided to one day marry the new mayor's son in order to maintain protection for the rest of her life, though she soon realized that a loveless marriage itself was a form of slavery. And it was not that she did not feel affection for the mayor's son, but the year she turned fourteen Iza met a boy whose love would transcend every breath of space, every fragment of time like water falling to earth from the sky only to raised up again into clouds. It was an exponential version of the love depicted in books or cried over in songs, a love that ran into marrow and swirled against blood and rushed red into lips and cheeks. And not even Mella and Dane had ever known anything like it.

The boy's name was Ryle Hudson.

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