The Fourth Annual Writer Games: Canon

The Tributes | The Entrance

District One Female – Dioria Rose

Dioria Rose prefers magenta to bubblegum, china to cotton candy. Her favourite pinks are dark and deep; contrary to popular belief, prettiness comes in deadly shades too. Some of the loveliest colours can be found on the most poisonous of berries. A rushing waterfall fills those who see it with admiration, but anyone who falls into it will die immediately. Hope calls to us, time after time, and more often than not it is misplaced and brings us to our demise. Pretty things are not always soft, nor do they have to be docile; Dioria hopes to exemplify this.

Today, she is dressed as a princess. She may be disappointed, but she's not surprised. As a girl from One, she knows her role: Dioria must tease, must tantalize, but must never give the audience what they want. Her allure is her unattainability. She's beautiful and untouchable, and through dying she will become tragically so. When a girl from One wins, she becomes forgotten. Nobody wants to watch a gem crack and crumble under the weight of time. It's better – much better – to cut a beautiful flower and see it die than to see it wither.

But Dioria doesn't plan on dying. Nor does she plan on withering. Beauty is magnetism, and so magnetism must be beautiful. She can continue to charm and impress long past her expiration date (which is coming quite fast, now that she thinks of it), so long as she continues to charm. She must captivate them with her wit, have them dripping off her every word, so that they won't even see when her skin looses its smoothness and when her hair goes from silvery to gray. That way, she will not be forgotten.

She has made her peace with the possibility of death – but Dioria Rose refuses to be forgotten.

The wind is cold against her bare skin. Her dress is longer than most, a soft pink with a massive bell skirt that begins right at her hips and looks as though her legs are trapped in a dome. She's not fond of the style – too much artifice has never appealed to her – but today she's thankful for the dress's sheer size. The Capitol air is still brisk in early spring, and she has never liked to feel the chill. This is one of the more conservative dresses worn by One's female tributes, and she wonders, for a second, how the others dealt with the cold when they had little more than a sheet of fabric to cover their beautiful bodies.

But Dioria doesn't like to think of One's past tributes. Fifty young women have come before her, each radiant and beloved, most of them mourned. The odds show that when a tribute from One wins, it is usually the male; most say the girls they send are too ditzy, too vain, for their talent to hold them up once the Career pack turns on itself. Girls from Two are what a real Career woman should be: focused and determined and practically unbreakable. Give them a few knives, and they'll bring the world to their knees.

Dioria toys with the tiara atop her head. It's little more than a fragile, brittle thing that clings to her hair and occasionally digs into her scalp. Perhaps, she thinks, we would be taken more seriously if you let us be. The Capitol dresses her like a princess, makes her up like a doll, and then wonders why she serves as ornament in the Games. Her predecessors have simply given the Capitol what they want. Dioria, on the other hand, will show them what they really long for. She'll show them the diamond's sharp edges, prove that an ornate sword cuts just as deep. The Capitol doesn't want a princess. Not really, anyway. They want a queen.

Around her, tributes are being herded to their chariots. She's already standing at hers, unimpressed by the white horses and golden carriage – there is much more to luxury than fairy tales, but it's all the Capitol wants to see. Dioria would love to show them the beauty of modernity, with its sharpness and its angles, or maybe the allure of darkness, with deep crimsons and burgundies and purples and magentas. Perhaps, when she wins, she will become a stylist. Finally, she could put an end to years upon years of bubblegum pink and glittering gold.