King Beast - Vicious Flames

Chapter 3

Warning: Mature content head.

A few centuries later

Odette POV

People walk to move from point A to B.

I don't.

I run.

And that was what I had been doing since my brain began to store memories.

I run whenever I can. To climb stairs, to go to the market, to go to school. 

I never take the carriage. I "run" my dog to the park, not "walk".

Every day after school, I train. I'm the fastest, faster than the boys.

The funny thing?

I was never a fan of the activity. 

I was only sixteen when my sister was forced to participate and never returned. I was four months old last time my mother kissed me. Or at least I was hoping she did it, before she left for the Games ... and so, I grew up without remembering the feel of her caresses or the memory of her bright smiles.

"Odette, can you go to the market to pick up some milk and eggs?" Dad's head popped from the door of his office.

"Sure, anything else?"

"No, darling. Unless you need more bananas or beans for your proteins." He knew me and my habits well.

There was a certain eerie aura at the market. It looked more like a funeral. People crowded into small groups, quiet chats instead of the typical ferment and cheerful shouts.

It was that time indeed... The Games.

An interesting way to put it. A sarcastic, bad joke.

Because I would have called it: nightmare, a sentence to death, a ticket without return. A jump into a black hole.

All I was left with was a father and a younger brother.

And I intended to come back to them. Alive.

"Have you heard? Some of them were spotted this morning on the outskirts of Saint Winifred," Old Fred, whose wife was taken away many moons ago, when I was just energy in the universe, commented from his shrimp stall.

"What do they want? Mate with our cattle too?"

"Won't be a surprise!"

"Yeah, they are disgusting beasts!"

"I told you to keep the guns loaded and buy more garlic."

"Isn't it enough that they already destroy our families every six years?" Uncle Craig grunted from his own stand, selling terracotta. At least his wife had managed to escape and not got caught.

But she had died sometime after her return. Heartache, they said. After The Games, she was no longer the same, for some inexplicable cosmic reasons.

She kept muttering and moaning a strange name.

A strange symbol was found on her forehead.

Signs of sexual assault too, though she never confirmed it...

Our village was located on a small valley on the edge of the Cantata Silvam, which consisted of acres and acres of untouched forest. The forest thinned more and more until it became a land where nothing grew, where not even the earth itself wanted to be, and then, as you continued further west, you found the gates of Molten Land. Nobody ever went there; it would have been weeks of walking from here.