And here we are with chapter sixteen! By the way, I'm sorry that these chapters are all starting to ressemble each other quite a lot, my inspiration-o-meter must be low. But I'll be sure to recharge it this evening when I watch the last installement of the Mockingjay. (I'm gonna see Finnick die… He's my favorite character… *sobs*) Hmm, anyway, so as I was saying I'll try to make the next chapters better. But there are only, say, three or four chapters left.

Also, thanks to Dragonnetic, Ai Huiyuan, and Guest for their reviews. Really. I'm grateful. Thank you for reviewing. Please carry on reviewing. :D

I own nothing. Nobody. Now, let's carry on with the fic!

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Fire and Ice

The sun was setting over the arena, a burning yellow disk melting into the horizon. Eragon and Katniss were still trudging through the icy forest, their stomachs rumbling and their moods low. Katniss had shot a kind of rabbit-like animal earlier which they'd cooked quickly over a small fire and devoured hungrily, but it had been small and bony and so hadn't filled them up.

"When are we going to stop?" asked Eragon, rubbing his ribs. "Only, I hurt pretty much all over and I'm starving. Can't we make camp here and hunt some food?"

"Let's carry on a bit longer," Katniss replied, without turning around. "I want to put as much distance between us and the site of the attack as possible."

"What, you think the mutts are still around? That's not possible, Katniss. You shot every one of them. Unless you think they're going to come back to haunt us…"

She pointed up at the pink and gold star-streaked sky. "Haven't you forgotten something? The Gamemakers, Eragon. Think a little bit. What's stopping them from sending more in?"

"Oh…" said Eragon as he realized it and feeling a bit of an idiot. "Of course. But we might as well stop here, then. If the mutts can enter the arena anywhere…"

Katniss stopped. "You're right. Oh well, then I guess we'll make camp here. You start a fire and I'll go find us some dinner." She dropped Eragon's rucksack to the ground, nocked an arrow to her bowstring and headed off into the darkening woods.

Sighing, Eragon knelt painfully and started gathering twigs. Once he had a decent fistful, he built a pyramid of them and scattered some tinder beneath it, which he set alight with a few deft strokes of the flint against the steel. Soon, a small blaze was roaring. He added larger sticks until the fire was a decent size, a flickering mass of red and yellow flames against a shadow-filled background.

He sat down by it, crossing his legs beneath him, and held his hands over the rising warmth as he waited for Katniss to return. She'd been gone for a little longer than twenty minutes now.

Sure enough, she came back, holding two hares in her left hand and her bow in the other. Blood stained the animals' pale fur a rusty red. She tossed them onto his lap and Eragon gazed down at their two limp bodies.

"I suppose you want me to skin and gut them," he said in a resigned voice.

"I suppose I do," Katniss replied, squatting down and crossing her arms over her knees. "You're the one with the sword."

"A sword isn't a knife," Eragon said. "It'll be messy, but who cares anymore."

He set to work on the animals, cutting them open and emptying them of their insides, then skinning them and cutting off their heads and tails. Once that was done, he speared them both on sharp pieces of wood and handed one to Katniss. They held the hares over the fire, occasionnally turning them, as their skins grew brown and crackly. A mouth-watering smell drifted through the air.

Eragon still felt bad about eating animals, but not as much as he had in Alagaësia. He didn't know why, but assumed that it was because he could no longer sense animals' thoughts and feelings, and so he'd become detached mentally from them. For some reason, that bothered him; it was as if he'd become a heartless killer. But his rational side told him that meat was the main source of food in the arena, and the most filling. If he didn't eat animals, he would starve. He kept repeating that to himself as he withdrew the spit from the flames and blew on the lump of meat speared on the end, but it didn't stop him from feeling slightly nauseated when he bit into the flesh and felt skin crunch beneath his teeth. He despised himself even more for actually enjoying the savoury taste and the texture of the food.

"So," said Katniss as she gulped down a mouthful, "how are your ribs feeling?"

"Bad," Eragon replied. "But that was to be expected. I'm actually relieved that nothing worse happened to me. For example, a bone could have punctured my heart, or the mutt could have hit me in the chest and cut my heart open, or it could even have hit me on the head and broken my skull open, killing me on the spot…"

"Wow," remarked Katniss after a pause. "You're just bursting with the joys of life, aren't you?"

Eragon gave a weary smile. "I'm only thankful that I'm still able to move. That I still have a chance to win the Games."

There was a long silence.

"Sorry," Eragon said. "I think I just killed the conversation. Let's not talk about the Games, shall we?"

"That may be a good idea," Katniss said, taking another voracious bite out of her hare. "I'm starving. If there hadn't been a bow and arrow at the Cornucopia, I would have been pretty much done for. In this arena, everything relies on being able to find food. It's not like in, for example, a forest arena, where there are roots and berries and stuff like that. In here, everything's frozen over."

"But you know snares, right?" Eragon asked. "You could have hunted that way. Sure, it'd be more time-consuming, but it would work."

She shrugged. "I suppose so."

For several minutes, the crackling and popping of the campfire and the soft hooting of an owl nearby were the only sounds. Eragon peered up into the velvety shadows that shrouded the branches of the trees overhead and his elven eyes caught sight of a pair of gleaming yellow eyes, and around that, a ruffled mane of snowy white feathers. He smiled, somehow comforted by the presence of the night bird.

"What are you smiling at?" Katniss asked. He pointed upwards towards the owl and she craned her neck back. "There's nothing there."

"No, there's an ow…" Eragon began, then saw that the bird had disappeared. "Oh, I guess it's flown away." And then he heard it.

A low, rumbling growl.

"Actually, I think it got frightened off," he muttered as he leapt to his feet and drew Blödslytha. "Katniss, get up quickly. Get your bow. We're moving out of here."

She'd heard the growl to and jumped up, dropping her spit as she grabbed the rucksack and slung it on her back, then picked up her bow and fit an arrow to the string, turning wary circles as she tried to work out where the sound had come from.

"Do the Gamemakers hate you or something?" she hissed as she scanned the darkness draped between the trees.

"I don't know and I don't care," he murmured back as he held Blödslytha out in front of him. "If we run, it'll provoke them, and they'll be after us like cats after a mouse."

"Well, we can't fight them," Katniss snapped. "They're three times as big as me. And they're built like bloody battering rams. I –"

She got no further. An enormous wolf muttation burst out of the trees and landed on Katniss, projecting her to the ground and knocking her bow from her hands. It snapped its foaming jaws together over her face and snarled.

"KATNISS!" Eragon yelled, sprinting over, ignoring the screaming agony of his ribs, unaware of anything, everything, except that he had to save her. He jumped into the air, skimming over the shoulders of another mutt, and landing in a lithe crouch on the thickly-muscled back of Katniss's attacker. In a flash of steel, he placed his sword against the neck of the mutt and slashed out, cutting through veins and tendons. Blood splashed from the wound as the wolf muttation staggered, pink saliva bubbling up around its lips, and allowed Katniss to free herself from beneath its claws. She grabbed her bow, panting, and nocked an arrow faster than any human Eragon had ever seen. She release it with a twang and it lodged itself in the mutt's eye. The creature fell.

But more were coming, two, three, five, seven of them, a vicious snarling mass of grey fur and knotted muscles and slavering fangs and venomous tails, surging like a wave straight towards Katniss and Eragon. There were too many to fight. They ran.

Eragon's injuries were sending surge after surge of mind-numbing agony through his body, but he kept up his pace, tearing through the dark forest like fire was at his heels – which, in a way, it was –, vaulting over fallen trees and ducking beneath low-hanging branches. He couldn't stop to check if Katniss was behind him, he could only hope she was, because if he stopped now he'd be ripped to shreds. He would surely take out one or two mutts with him, but what was the point of killing them when, at any moment, the Gamemakers could send in a hundred more?

It was nightmarish. All he was aware of were the howls and roars of their pursuers, the snow sliding beneath his boots, the haze of darkness hanging ahead of him like an unnatural veil, and the icy coldness of the wind against his bare cheeks; he hadn't had time to pull up his muffler. Blödslytha was still in his gloved fist, snagging on bushes and branches. He shoved it back in its scabbard, and after a few clumsy attempts, it slid in, leaving his hands free.

"Katniss!" he shouted, hoping for a reply, fearing the lack of one. "Are you there?"

"I'm alright," she panted, drawing up alongside him. "We can't keep running forever, though."

They both leapt simultaneously over a log and carried on running.

"We can't fight the mutts, either," said Eragon grimly. "I'm hoping something will happen that will give us the advantage."

"Well, it had better –" Katniss began, then ducked as a thick branch whistled by where her head had been a second before "– hurry up!"

Then they stopped talking, and concentrated only on the repetitive cycle of oxygen in and out of their lungs, and the careful placing of their feet on the uneven, rock-studded ground. Eragon was starting to feel light-headed, and he could feel blood seeping from the injuries in his side. The last thing he wanted was to pass out, here, in this black, tangled forest, and be torn to pieces by the wolf muttations. In the sky, high above them, he was dimly aware of the anthem booming, and of an artificial light being shed down on the earth below – too weak to see by, but strong enough for him to know that the pictures of the dead tributes were being projected against the stars.

"Uh-oh," said Katniss, drawing him back from his thoughts.

"What is it?" Eragon asked wearily. What new monstrosity had arrived to try and steal their lives?

"Water," she said. "Dead ahead. You remember that kind of sea at the south of the arena?"

Oh, he did, and only too well. He also remembered thinking that only a foolhardy or a desperate person would venture there.

"What about it?" he gasped. "You don't mean –" There it was. A glint of icy water in the fake light of the Capitol symbol.

"Jump!" she yelled, springing into the air. Eragon followed her lead, propulsing himself over the wave-whipped sea lapping at the roots of the forest. Ahead of him, as far as he could see, was water, foaming, thrashing water, studded with lumps of ice tossed hither and thither upon the whitecaps. He only had time to think Oh no, before he landed hard on something cold and slippery, turned head over heels – the world was a whirl of sliding, falling, moonlight, ice – caught himself on a jagged outcrop and felt an intense coldness flash through one of his feet. He pulled it out of the freezing water, shuddering violently, and scrambled up to the tip of the piece of ice he was marooned on, searching for a sign of Katniss. His body was a mix of burning pain and biting cold. He hurt all over and he felt horribly ill.

But he wasn't dead yet.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

And there we go. The end. That was still 2000 words, by the way. I'm SORRY that this is a (kind) of cliffhanger, as I know how… hazardous they can be to Dragonnetic's health ;) but don't worry, I'll try to update soon. Even though I'm going back to school on Monday, aaarrgh!

See you soon!

Bye!

Remember to review on the way out please please please please please please! Just down there!

I

I

I

I

I

V