Writer Games | Death Wish & 51

Task Seven: The Last Midnight /SF - Aster Wheatleigh [5]

The castle was as quiet  as it had been the night before, and perhaps the only safe haven from  the swarm of tributes racing through the arena below, but it might as  well have been the emptiest it had ever been. Despite it possessing all  the materialistic superficiality that Aster craved in a home, he could  not bring himself to stay there a minute longer and look at the heap of  golden tapestries he had ripped from the walls hours before in a violent  fury.

Instead, Aster was  perched far, far above it all. He stood on the open rooftop looking  every bit a mess coming to the realisation that a place similar to what  he'd always wished to spend his life in was not the place he wanted to  die in. Feeling too trapped in the confines of the castle, he paced  about its roof and muttered a sort of dark rambling under his breath as  he went.

Occasionally, he'd throw  his head in his hands as he paced and climb up one of the nearby  turrets to reach the air he could not seem to find below him. Even at  the highest peak in the arena, he walked around it carelessly and  teetered dangerously close to the edge in his restlessness. More than  once, he threatened to lose his balance completely and he was so wrapped  up in his own tumultuous thoughts that he wasn't aware enough to  remember his immense fear of heights.

He couldn't avoid it  anymore, he mumbled to himself. Not with so few faces left in the arena  to light up its sky. He was not a fighter fit to do battle with any of  the remaining tributes - especially the Careers- and he never would be.  He would die if he tried to find the others or live just long enough to  die at the hands of his people with any other path to victory, if his  hallucination was anything to go by.

As his footsteps slid  along the ridge, he wondered how long he could continue before the  friction wore away the castle beneath him and crushed him underneath the  rubble of his own ruin. If he didn't make his choice soon, he'd wear  himself six feet underground and leave himself without a way to escape  his self-made grave; to put it simply, he'd die if he made his choice  and he would die if he didn't.

He'd known it for a  while; it's what drove him to place himself on that frightful edge to  begin with. He was going to die, whether that was then or a few weeks  later, so what was stopping him from slaying his monstrous self? He  hated the thought of giving anyone else the satisfaction of killing him  in some inhumane way, just like what his victory would deliver to the  people he loved most.

He remembered it, then.  The hallucination had tormented him and steeped his nights in a deep red  insomnia ever since he first bore witness to it. He remembered the  hatred in the girl's eyes when she held his own, beating heart out  before him. She was perfectly cold and unfeeling, and he could feel how  unapologetic she was to finally stop making excuses for him and his  cowardly behaviour. Perhaps it was time that Aster did the same.

Aster wasn't the reason  he got put into the Games - he could excuse himself for that - but he  was the one forcing himself into a grave perfectly carved with the words  of his wish. What kind of a person wishes death on thousands? He could  never forgive himself for that, not ever.

Still, he'd never  imagined it would actually come to this. He'd always thought he could  find the words to undo what he did, or come up with a plan to escape the  hateful wrath of the amount of lives cradled in his hands. There,  creeping dangerously close to the edge, Aster Wheatleigh was facing  death himself.

If he looked hard enough  into the abyss below him, he was sure he could make out a pair of  cruel, black eyes swathed in shadows staring back at him in a challenge.  Death was near; Aster could feel the chill of its presence in the air,  the kind that flowed like ice through his veins and the kind that would  soon take over the rest of his body when he finally threw himself over  the edge. After all, someone as despicable as him had to jump off the  ledge, didn't they?