Author Games: Written in the Stars

Task Two - Elementary, My Dear... - Males

When the third wave comes, it's clear that Alice and I are going to be caught at its end and dragged off the clouds. Another girl appears behind us, running from the waves, just steps behind Alice. When I hear the noise of it getting closer, however, I get an idea.

"Alice," I whisper. "Hold on."

"What?"

"Hold on to my leg."

Thankfully she doesn't ask any more questions and does it. Once she does, I fall to the ground, digging my dagger into the cloud, which is much more solid than I'd have thought were it not for the fact that it can stand gigantic waves hitting it. As the third wave comes, it crashes over our heads, but I manage to pull mine out from under it and grab from air. One look behind me shows that Alice has done the same.

And so has the girl with caramel skin, who is now holding onto Alice's ankle.

"I can't handle her weight," I say. The wave begins to pull back now and I can feel my arms tiring at the feat of keeping the three of us from being pulled under. I start to panic, wondering how long exactly I can last. My hands start to sweat and soon the dagger feels much more slippery.

"I'll handle it."

Before I can ask what she means by that, Alice sends a swift kick into the girl's face, causing her to yelp in surprise and briefly let go. I look behind me in horror and watch as the waves take her over and carry her off the platforms and crashing down towards the ground.

I don't think I like water anymore.

ARIES - Brendan Kingsley

I saw Willa's face in my dreams last night - her face before I had killed her, with her fake greenish blue eyes, her perfectly plucked eyebrows, her trademark sneer.

Over and over again, she spoke her last words. "Killing me won't make you any more Aries than you were before. You'll still be an awful misfit, and the entire District will hate you." Every time she repeated it, a new version of her face popped up, until they surrounded me on all sides. My world became a dome made of Willa's face, her words echoing endlessly through my mind.

Then my hammer would finally make contact with her, and her once-beautiful features became terribly distorted. Whatever pleasure I might have had at first was mirrored with pain as I heard her skull crack all around me, felt her blood fall on me like a monsoon, saw her features cave into an unrecognizable mass of blood and bone and gore. Still there was no escape.

Her faces, whatever was left of them anyway, turned to me, inched towards me slowly. No matter which way I turned, there was a face drawing closer to me, and there was no escape. There was no escape for what I had done, and these faces, all that were left of Willa, would have their revenge. They crept forward, inch by inch, until I was suffocated by them.

They were so close to me they latched onto my skin, her bone and blood rubbing all over my body. I couldn't move, since they weighed down my body so much, it was all I could do to stay upright, even trying to shake one or two of them off took too much strength. I felt them all open their mouths, and begin to speak in tandem.

"Are you happy now?"

I wish I could say I was.

*

The loud booming of a cannon woke me from my nightmare. Sweat drenched my body, and I was breathing even harder than I had been after the Bloodbath. I'd never been the kind of person to have nightmares, but I'd also never been the kind of person to murder someone just because I felt like it.