Author Games Compilation [Cycle 1]

Final Note on Kassia Ejleaf

FINAL NOTE ON KASSIA EJLEAF
AN ENDING BEFOREHAND
"THE SONG OF AENEAS"

 The gods once called the first fabled Aeneas "terrible grief."   

Now, Kassia had never minded the thought of loss before - it was a natural cycle of life, she'd been told, something unavoidable in the old and the youthful. The latter left people more broken than the former, but she'd never experienced anything beyond the natural deaths of her grandparents and the stillborn child of an aunt she'd never met before. It was hard to understand the concept if she'd never been subject to it.

But that year...that year had been a rude awakening in terms of sprinkling wisdom over her head. It rained down, scalding pellets that made skin raw with heat and the slam! slam! slam! of a frozen summer. Unrelentless, the storm came, vibrating with the strength of an intercom's thunder and cracking with the sound of a whip beside a horse's platinum mane. They didn't give her a break, not once, to simply let herself give in to the sequence of mourning that her father had, that her aunt cradled.

She was forced to stand stock straight as a man with devil's eyes placed a crown, for the second time, upon her head. She was forced to keep her chin up as they reversed her down the tribute's parade - a parade of one - and clutched so tightly to the handles of the chariot that her knuckles stretched stark white. She was forced to smile and smooth over the golden silk of her dress as she strutted and sat, ignoring the cramps at the base of her self, with a noticeable stiffness, beside an interviewer with calm eyes and a remote that presented everything causing that stiffness.

She was forced to live with a terrible, terrible grief and no outlet for it. Instead, it rolled through silently, tightening and suffocating all that she had left. Corsets under dresses left her choking for air, and the weight of false armor threatened to crush everything from the shoulders down. Her abdomen, especially, was subject to this crippling tightness, and often she'd find herself bent over, gasping for air and clutching to quell all the pain with a press of her hand. And nobody helped. They had to turn a blind eye in order to keep on convincing themselves this victor knew no weakness. It was a horrible and pointless feeling.

And it did not feel glorious. It did not feel glorious at all.

When they finally let her go home, she wasn't too sure she had any capacity to grieve at all anymore. Everything'd already been packed up from the old house and sent to her place in the Victor's Village; her parents settled everything around the way they ought to have been, placing small picture frames on tables they wouldn't possibly have been able to afford before, lighting fires in a fireplace they'd always wanted, and arranging Kassia's new room with everything new. Her new bed had new sheets, her new walls were a new hue of white lathered in tiny bulbs of pure light, and the only three objects recognizable from before were a thin white dress hanging in the closet, a ratty wooden bow leaning up against the wall, and a blue blanket heaped up in a stark mess at the very end of the bed.

For a moment, she swayed there, taking it all in, breathing the unfamiliar scents of this lavish place. And still, she thought perhaps grieving had skipped over her and plagued the next person in line.

But when she stepped over to the bed, she didn't fall upon it. She collapsed. Cheeks dug into the simple fabric of something familiar, and with a single swift inhale, everything fell apart. It began as a wet flood, a drenching of skin and the color blue. It continued into a quivering ache at the base of her throat, ready to lunge right out and give the world all she had. Sometimes it leaked - weak groans and tired squeaks of strain as breathing got harder and sniffling frequented itself.

The worst of it all was the screaming. Violent noises coming up from the recesses of her chest where only throb-throb-throb, it beats but it hurts existed. It was sad and it was angry and it was a voice to all the unfairness she'd been thinking but never spoke aloud. And no matter how long or how loud she proceeded, it was never enough to truly release everything.