Prologue.
I bleed applause, I'm fading slow.
Alone, distraught, without control.
Believe there's freedom, took my soul.
I'll burn your shit alive and take the throne.
Elide Ozkann, 22
Student of the Arcadia Institute
It was a bitter, blustery day in October when the former team was put to the firing squad.
Elide was there through none of her own desire. Her path here had been carved through the streets by a sleek black car, leather trimmings, something far more expensive than anything her parents had ever owned. The car, really, was worth more than much of Elide's life.
They were strung out in a line like bobbing balloons up and down the road, all eight of them. She was in the lead.
That's much like it had felt similar to three days ago when she had been pulled out of one of her many research classes to sit down with none other than Vice President Sevaine himself. If he was younger, Elide may have fancied him.
But he wasn't.
His request was simple. To the point. Pick seven others in this program—your closest confidantes, your most trusted friends. Eight total, you understand that, Miss Ozkann? No more than eight. When she was done, she was sent to mail her list off to an address she increasingly believed was important, and now she was here. Here in the car on the way down the street or here in the square in front of the golden statue of Marcellus Tyvalt, first General of the Capitol. The one who won the war.
It was quite funny, really, to think that he was still overseeing such things today. Guns put to temples. Tears streaming from behind blindfolds.
To her, every place felt the same. The location mattered little when she was stuck in slow-motion, everything syrupy around her. It clung to her feet, caught at the points of her heels. The seven behind her all had curious eyes, wary eyes. Elide could feel them watching her as if she had an answer to a question they had not yet dared to ask aloud.
She knew nothing more than the rest of them.
They all knew what was coming. The rumors circulating had not been for naught—in the most respectful way possible, the Gamemaking team had royally fucked up. Killed half of their Careers. Let Evette Fernsby walk out of the arena without hardly a scratch, not a single kill to her name. It was a catastrophe of epic proportions, and Elide wasn't the only common-person wondering how they had survived over three months since her crowning.
It was something to do with the Quell twist, she assumed, one so grand they had no choice but to announce it towards the beginning of August. The team had been hard at work since then, forming a dozen arenas beneath the palms of their hands.
Whatever had been asked of them had clearly been accomplished. Elide knew an end when she saw one.
The crowd was simple. Small. Elide and her seven fit perfectly at the edge of it, all lined up in a neat little row. If she didn't know any better, they were set up to receive a bullet too, waiting so patiently.
"Why are we here?" Torryn asks from beside her, voice dark and low. She could only shake her head.
Why were they here, the eight of them? With the President and her Vice, a few high-ranking officials, and a squadron of Peacekeepers all at the ready, guns toted in hand. One by one the old team is escorted out along the cobblestone, sheep led to slaughter. In the lead, of course, was Head Gamemaker Ariston Lione, recognizable only by the cascade of blue hair at his shoulders, knotted loosely at the nape of his neck. It was rapidly falling to ruin.
He appears to be the only member of his team that isn't crying or pleading or wishing for something else. The woman to his left is inconsolable, her caterwauls only magnifying as the barrel of the pistol is pressed firmly to the back of her head, just over where her blindfold remain tied together.
Elide had dreamed of being this, a controller of a game. Dreams were all well and kind when they remained that—nothing more than a falsity. Only when it grew into something more tangible did it become truly dangerous. Dreams were inherently collapsible, like a building with poorly built supports or those fancy picnicking chairs her grandmother used to love so much.
She had not dreamt of anything beyond it, of dying because of one too many-fucks up. Perhaps that was a sort of blessing in its own right.
There was a countdown, somewhere further in the small crowd, but Elide didn't know where it came from, nor did she care to find out. Only the numbers stuck out as anything important, what she knew what would happen when they finally reached the end.
And reach it they did. Right on time, the triggers were pressed down. The guns went off. Eight bodies crumpled in unison to the cobblestone, their terror cutting off into an equally horrendous silence.
Elide forces herself to watch it all.
At her side, Torryn and Petrova and Andraste all watch on too, though their faces are drawn in varying shades of white. Mykari is looking at the ground, as is Leda to their left. Kosta has let his eyes slip shut, though he let his hand reach out towards Naevys, the only member of their party who had allowed their eyes to fill with tears.
Elide hears the footsteps approaching from some great distance, but recognized no presence outside of her companions until her view of the many bodies, still oozing red, was blocked by the tall silhouette suddenly parked in front of her. Even without allowing her vision to filter back into focus, Elide knew who it was.
She holds out her hand on instinct, electricity thrumming through her veins. "Madam President."
"Elide Ozkann," she replies evenly, the silk of her white glove cool against Elide's palm. "It's a pleasure to meet you."
"I'm sure it is," she agrees. "If I may ask why you invited us to this display, ma'am?"
They're all wondering, their brains doing that lovely spin of theirs like some sort of troupe dancer, unable to stop until the music did, too. It appeared that they were trapped in the middle of a symphony—the only way out was to wait for an interruption from the conductor herself.
"We've heard promising things, to say the least, about your time at the Institute. Ariston himself recommended you."
Ah, Ariston. Ariston, who was dead as a doornail twenty feet away from her. Blood matted the strands of his hair that escaped his carefully crafted knot. He had been a good mentor to her, but he had been a good mentor to everyone. Until his failure only a few months ago, he was one of the most prestigious Head Gamemakers that Panem had ever seen, easily raising his flock of students to one day take his place. Elide had been one of the best.
It meant nothing with him dead before her, her friends shivering in the wind.
"As of now, you may notice that Ariston's position has been… vacated. Starting tomorrow, you'll be the one to fill it. All of you."
"What?" Andraste burst out, her voice sharp and biting over the howling wind. Someone was quick to shush her, but the interruption was obvious enough. Elide felt herself shake, a full body quiver that ran all the way down to her toes.
She forces herself to stand tall regardless. "Ma'am, with all due respect, not one of us was even due to graduate from the Institute until next year—"
"As I'm well aware," Catriona Rey says, her eyes not unlike two twin embers. "Consider this." She jerks her head back to the macabre display beyond her silhouette, the bodies that have not made her so much as flinch. "Your official ceremony. All of you will be picked up tomorrow at eight in the morning, precisely. Be ready."
"Ma'am," she says once again, the epitome of a broken record struggling to sound off before she walks away. "The first Quell Games… it's less than three months away."
Catriona does not feel pity for her. Not for Ariston Lione's best student, the one left to carry his mantle. If anything, she almost looks smug. The cat that got the canary. "You'd best hurry then, Miss Ozkann," she says, voice falsely gentle. "And hope you picked the right team."
A security detail swoops her away, her coat flapping gently behind her. She struggles to breathe around the tremendous lump in her throat. It was like she said—dreams were only attractive to the eye until they became real. And then, this.
"Nice going, El," Kosta says. He looks very much awake now, though she knows his closed eyes hadn't suggested sleep in the first place. "Why did you have to pick me?"
If Elide had to walk through hell with any number of people, these would be the ones she reached for. They know it as well as she does. When it came down to it, Elide could have picked dozens of others, candidates with just as much possibility in their blood. Perhaps that was why so many teams had failed in the past—there was no connection, no shared loyalty. The only time they became the same was when their blood just so happened to intermingle on the pavement.
"This is what we studied, what we've been trained for," Leda says, her voice small but firm. "We can do this. Right, Elide?"
"Right." She nods. Trained. Practiced. Determined. They were made for this. "We better get moving quick."
"Quick enough to organize real plans, or quick enough to avoid a bullet to the head?" Mykari asks curiously, unabashed openness in their eyes.
"Both."
They were going to do this. Elide had picked the right people, left the wrong ones behind. She was leaving no room to doubt such a decision, less they crack and break in all the wrong places. Now they could afford to do nothing more than bend.
This was her job, now, her life and purpose.
Elide would love it even if it swallowed her whole.
Theora Mazaryn-Reinhart, 20
Former Student of the Arcadia Institute
Fourteen hours after the news breaks, and three more after the eight are taken away for good, Theora Mazaryn-Reinhart packs up her lavish dorm room and leaves the Institute for good.
Rash, perhaps. A yellable offense, most certainly. If her father knew that the schooling he had paid for to eventually get her in the control room was being abandoned, he would turn over in his grave. It was a good thing she didn't care enough to visit just to check on his positioning.
Or in general, really.
Theora could count on one hand the number of things she truly cared about and every single one of them was distant, now. The last had left her three hours and eighteen minutes ago.
In reality, the last had left her long ago.
It was possible to be both a lovely and terrible creature, existing in the same human skin. She had met such a thing in Elide Ozkann, a wild girl. A feral girl. They had broken up a mere seven days ago, promised to remain good friends. Theora had not been one of the people Elide had chosen to bring along with her.
Leaving the Institute felt like its own brand of simplicity. Less complicated than the two of them, at any rate.
She would never be a chosen Gamemaker, now, never amount to anything more. Not because she was leaving, no, but because Elide had not chosen her. Theora knew that the only way she made it into the real deal was along the back of someone else, and her ride had pulled away from the curb. If only they had broken up eight days later, in retrospect. Instead of leaving the Institute with only her bags to her name, Theora would have a real future.
She still had one, of course, but that only depended on what she did with it.
Elide and her were two storms out over the Atlantic, crawling over what parts of the land had collapsed into the sea. As was presently obvious, Theora was crumbling, set to remain inside the eye of Hurricane Elide as it crashed into land and ruined everything in its path. The worst part was, Theora had faith in her. If anyone could succeed in the midst of a near impossible job, it was her.
She had managed to crack Theora, after all.
It was quite easy to remember the last night they spent together, both of them wrapped in the lackluster cotton sheets the dorms provided, skin against skin. As a near perpetual insomniac, Theora was used to watching her lover sleep while she listened along to the sounds of the outside world, her fellow sleepless city wanderers.
Something was different about that night, Elide's wandering hand drifting across her back, awake as the day she was born. You think too much, she had said—it was her favorite thing to blame for Theora's lack of sleep. You think too much, and it's going to make you sick.
She did think too much. About why she was here, looking for an apartment on the east-side, something with cheap rent and food close-by. About why Elide hadn't picked her, all the broken promises left in her wake. About what she was expected to do now, with nothing, while Head Gamemaker Elide Ozkann paraded around with her true followers, off to kill some two-hundred odd children in the next year or so.
They were still children themselves, she couldn't help but think. Numbers aside, they were children.
Elide was strong—she was a storm, after all. The weight of those deaths, of each individual Games over every month, would not break her. She was not unlike the gilded, bronzed statue she had stood in front of in the square, watching bodies hit the deck. Elide was exactly the type of girl fit to be casted and installed in some important place in the Capitol.
If she did this job right, too, that would be her future. A member of history and its more well-known members.
Theora knew what her job was, now. To find a little place of her own and watch, and wait. That was what she was best at. A number of sleepless nights had given her ample practice. And what did she have to do now, except watch and wait for a game to revolve around each and every District, eventually set to throw its individual champions into one last set of bloodshed?
In a way, many of those kids were the lucky ones. At least they knew their future, bleak as it was. Theora's may as well have been a coin tossed into the air, no telling how many times it would flip upon itself, no knowledge of where it would land.
Even the worst gamblers knew how to turn things in their favor, though. Elide may have been the most promising, but she wasn't the most deserving.
All Theora could do now was keep her cards close, draw her chips in from the center of the table, and keep a cool head. When the table eventually crashed out from beneath them, right at the base, a fair amount of people were due to fall. Possibly Elide, even.
They would not want her, would not request her, but Theora would be there regardless.
Someone would have to remain standing to take her place, after all.
Hello. Me again.
(Unfortunately for everyone involved, and also myself).
Welcome to a new story, and a new verse. A happy seven year anniversary to the beginning of the first one and, in turn, me deciding to officially post SYOTs on this godforsaken account.
This is a SYOT, yes, but I have my tributes collected. This has been done almost exclusively through Discord, so if you're currently uninvolved but interested in conversation, let me know. My roster is decided, things have been written, and this is just the beginning. As was alluded many times throughout this chapter, this is in fact a quell (the fourth, to be precise); a District-specific Games is to be held every month throughout the year, crowning two victors to represent them, and all twenty-four respective victors will be competing in a 'Finale Games' a year later to find the ultimate victor. Convoluted? Possibly. But I've figured it out, and the layout will become obvious soon enough. If you're involved, just buckle in for the long haul. This isn't a short one by any means.
As an aside, you may notice that this story is related T (as are all of my other SYOTs). Well I tends towards the side of more graphic violence, this is the only thing in any graphic nature that I tend to get into. Other things such as, but not limited to, anything sexual in nature, suicide & self-harm, assault, mental illness, etc may be implied, referenced, or described, but in a way that is non-explicit. That being said, if you think I've done a poor job in any of this, please tell me so I can edit it. I'm not a perfect person, and my desire for everyone's mental well-being and stability does not mean I am immune to making mistakes in this. In most cases, though, I assure you worries are more than likely minimal. I'd rather die than read or write arena sex, among many other things, so no need to fret. If you still think you'd like me to summarize something you can avoid reading it, I can definitely do that as well. Just let me know.
Now that that's all said and done (if you made it this far, at least, which I hope you did), we'll be underway starting next weekend with regular updates. As for the tribute list and blog? Well that's for me to know and you to find out.
Thanks for all of your continued support. Love you guys.
Until next time.
