When in Rome - HG Competition Entry

Task 8: The Fates

Jaiden had wandered the wastes, leaving the three dead tributes behind with a heavy heart. He hadn't wept for them. He felt unable to show emotions.

Somewhere in a book on the psychology of war he had read that the memory of your first kill would stick with you forever. It related how soldiers could, after many years, still describe exactly what their first victim had looked like, how it had all played out.

Fuse came to mind; his first kill. He could certainly recall the moment he had dealt the final blow but it was nowhere near as sharp as they said it would be. His state of mind at the time had been fairly cold; he needed to survive with people being hacked to pieces all around him.

He had felt no remorse.

The memory of his second kill, Valerie, was much sharper. Once again he was still in survival mode but that hadn't protected him from her intense gaze. It had been the look in her eyes rather than the act of ending her life that had stuck by him, haunting his dreams.

The third of his victims was the first one where he actually did have an emotional reaction at the moment itself. Aissalyne had been dazed and confused, sprawled across the arena floor with Jaiden hovering over her. Even though it was Antonio who had sealed her fate he had been the one to plunge the sword through her heart.

Making him just as much of a murderer.

The last three tributes to have been taken out he could hardly count as kills he had made. Surely he had run each one through with his blade but it was as if neither they nor him were actually present at the time.

They had not seen him and he had partially zoned out, finding it hard to deal with the situation. If he made it out alive and if people tried to get him to talk about taking out both District 1 tributes he would deny any heroism or skill in that regard.

Now he wandered the wasteland alone, thirsty, filthy and numb. All around him was grief and desolation and somewhere, he knew, more tributes.

Finally having left the fields of sorrow behind he was now on a large stretch of barren, cracked land with jagged rocks and cliffs jutting out of the ground at random intervals. It reminded Jaiden of pictures he had seen of the salt flats; dry and broken.

As he walked alone, hearing only the dusty sound of his footsteps, he felt something brushing against his arm. This new sensation brought his mind back in to action as he still needed to be on the look-out for other tributes.

Turning quickly to see what it was he noticed a few thin threads hanging off a pile of rocks, suspended in the air by the foul breeze.

They puzzled him.

They didn't look like scraps of clothing, rather like red strands of spun wool. Looking around himself he now started noticing many more of them on the ground and hanging off of cliff edges and the occasional dead tree.

He picked up and felt a single thread, trying to work out if maybe it was some kind of spider web. If so he would need to steer clear of its creator.

It wasn't sticky and felt fairly coarse.

Intrigued, he searched for and found the direction the threads had been coming from, heading there next. Nothing down here was accidental, he recalled, and the fact that this red thread had drawn his attention probably warranted investigation.

As he got closer to the source the ground was literally covered by the textile in thick, rope-like bundles. They seemed to be originating from a small alcove in a cliff side and Jaiden approached it cautiously.