I was ten years old when I found out about the mass grave in the Meadow.
I used to think that if I crossed the meadow, where the primroses bloomed and the grass wavered gently, that the hands of the dead would erupt from the soil and grasp at my ankle and drag me down to rot with them. So I skirted the edge of it, watching my little brother play with the Donners and the Hawthornes and the Cartwrights, and I folded inwards on myself as though I could already tell what was to come.
I was eighteen years old when my mother died on the Meadow with her bow in hand.
She just slipped, I remember that, it just seemed as though she had lost her balance and slipped to the ground, and then suddenly my father was running to her and my brother was screaming and I was staring at the blood that stained the edges of the grass the colour of red roses and soaked into the soil and I wondered if we would bury her there too.
I was eighteen years old when the rebellion began anew - set alight by the gasoline of my mother's murder and the indignity of a hero martyred on her front door, without even the honour of facing her killer as she might have in the Games
I was eighteen years old when the rebellion failed again, because I was not my mother, and I could not be. There was only one Mockingjay, one girl on fire, one Katniss Everdeen.
I was eighteen years old when I died, executed on the Meadow, facing the woods where my mother had spent her days, standing on the soil where she had died.
When I was eighteen, this story began.
After the rebellions, things don't go back to normal. They never do. What is normal in a new world?
This is a SYOC set eighteen years after the end of Mockingjay, immediately after a brief period of rioting that followed Katniss Everdeen's assassination.
The new Capitol is uneasy in power, trying to strike a balance between fear and respect and, terrified of losing control, they have authorised a new kind of Games to be carried out, ostensibly to ensure that everyone is kept in a state of readiness should any sympathisers of the old regime attempt a coup.
It works like this: the first generation of the new Panem, those born after the rebellion ended, are also the first to never experience the Games, as that portion of history is still painful and raw for those involved. Some of the teenagers are the first District 13ers in a hundred years not to be raised as soldiers, and there are no Careers.
There will be thirteen reaped from the districts, one from each district, but it will not be a public reaping, nor will the Games be announced beforehand - the tributes will be taken from their homes, just disappear in the night and be taken to the Capitol. There will be several differences in these Games - no sponsors, no training, nothing. It's a game of survival, and the odds are in no-one's favour.
Please submit your tributes through PM with the name of your OC and their district as the subject line - the form can be found on my profile! No Mary Sues, no Gary Stus, no Careers, and realistic characters only. As only thirteen will be accepted, everyone will get a much bigger focus than is typical in these stories, and there are plenty of surprises in store!
.