The Fifth Annual Writer Games: The Fall

The Fall of Lucifer - Blair Setaria

Sometime between watching Elowen's face in the sky become consumed by the evening's darkness and tossing her memory into the wrecks of other dimming shadows in his mind, Blair had figured it out.

He had never meant to, wasn't even supposed to have been thinking about it. Thoughts of his home life were supposed to be off-limits. They were the reason that Elowen was dead; he'd thought about his friends and his family, and he'd acted irrationally during moments when losing focus was unforgivable.

There was an argument to be made that Elowen was the reason that she was dead, since she'd been so adamant to get Blair to open up to her, but at that point in the Games, Blair figured that the only person who Elowen's death hurt was him. Elowen was free from the Hell that gripped Blair so tightly in cold, stony fists, and her family was free of the agony of having to watch her exist among such nightmarish horrors through a television screen. Blair envied these freedoms, wanted them for himself. The psychological injury that Blair was nursing now was a testament to the fact that he was the one who had made a misstep.

And there he'd been, all the same, in the sparse light of morning on who knows which day, making that same misstep once again when he'd finally figured it out. It had been entirely accidental, the way he'd come back on himself during one of his endless, aimless meanders around the arena and stumbled across the green apple from the feast (Blair could not allow himself to be still, not when he was so vulnerable, both physically and mentally. It was also more likely for him to run into a more immediate—though, more unsavory—death if he was searching for it rather than if he was slumped by a tree somewhere, stewing in his misery and waiting for the starvation to get him). It had been covered in a thin layer of fresh snowfall, and, having not been touched since whenever it had fallen out of Blair's pocket, it had protruded beneath the blanket of white like one of those painful red spots Blair used to get on his cheeks back home. He'd prodded at it with the toe of his boot, exposed more of the green of its surface, and grimaced down at it as if it had hurt it. And to be fair to him, in some ways, it had.

Though, in an effort to distract himself from the horrible taste in his mouth—the one of guilt, of grief, and of giving up, at last—Blair had hunkered down beside the fruit and thought about Josiah, instead. Josiah was not dead because of him. Thinking about Josiah could not hurt him, not any more than it already had.

He was back on the old tower mill all over again, giving in to one of the memories he'd sworn he'd never revisit. Not after what had happened to his ally.

"I'm so damn tired of it. The crops, they get planted, they get raised, they get reaped, over and over again." Puffy gray clouds floated across pale blue skies unhurriedly, giving way reluctantly to nightfall. "It's like people. We're born, we're raised, and then we die. What's the point?"

Then, the statement that raised all the questions: "I mean, the story doesn't usually just end once they're reaped."

And no, his friend was right; it didn't. Because once the crops are harvested, they are taken to the factory where they're refined. And it's when they're in this state that they become dangerous. They become part of the large, lingering flour dust cloud suspended in the air that is only ever one spark away from causing an explosion of catastrophic proportions. They devastate entire factories; they kill innocent men, like Josiah's father. They bring unprecedented destruction wherever they go if not handled with calculated expertise.

Or, they become what they were always meant to become. Consumable. The give energy to those who are hungry, those who suffer by the hands of those stronger than them. They give hope to the little ones who can't wait until they have the capacity to help out their families by signing up to receive tesserae, like Wren and Cael. They continue the cycle upon which life depends so drastically; they are replanted so that they can support people across Panem for all of time. The crops are not just raised to be destroyed sometime later as part of some large, purposeless scheme, like Blair had always thought. They are raised and reaped so that they can become more than what they ever were, so that they can fit into the system that seems so untouchable to them as just one among the many.