He wore the shape of a man because it frightened people less. The gods had learned that long ago; shave the horns, bend the spine, gray the beard, and mortals would offer food instead of salt and fire. They’d point you towards water. They’d call you ‘sir’ instead of ‘monster’. He wore the face of an old man because mortals no longer believed in gods who walked among them untouched by age. Now, the...

She hated him the moment they met. He was too sharp, too smug, too good at making her fists clench for all the wrong reasons.

“You’ll never win,” he said once, grinning like a god who liked the sound of hail and thunder.

She demonstrated otherwise by sweeping his legs out from under him and walking away before he could catch his breath.

But hatred hat a heat to it, a tension they couldn’...

(Emotion I choose: Loneliness)

The fire had long since gone out, leaving behind only the scent of char and damp wood. Morning hadn’t arrived, not fully anyway. The light that leaked through the cracks in the boarded window was pale and tired, like a candle that had burned away all night and was ready to give up under the press of liquid wax pooled under it.

Eris sat alone at the rickety table ...

Eris Kane came to consciousness the way most people did on Monday morning after a weekend of drinking: slow, confused, and vaguely pissed off. Something was wrong. Her mouth was dry, her wrists were bound, and judging by the tension in her shoulders and the weight against her spine, she was sitting in a rickety wooden chair.

She blinked once. Then twice.

Dark room. No windows. A single overhea...

The audience cheered as Caesar Flickerman gave his usual dazzling smile and gestured to the stage wings. “And now, from District 7-please welcome the ever-enigmatic Eris Kane! Let’s see what secrets she’s hiding as we head into the 73rd Hunger Games!”

She stepped onto the stage like she owned it. Not with grace, but with command.

Dressed in dark forest green, her hair woven through with razor...

I carry them all

The broken days folded like paper

In the hollow of my chest

Creased with names I no longer

Speak out loud.

Each breath is a ghost

Threaded through the silence of things

I can’t bear to forget

There is a weight to remembrance.

It doesn’t not scream

It sits- patient, patient-

In the marrow of my spine,

Curling like smoke in the rib cage

Where joy once made a home.

I remember the...

In our family, we name only eight kids. There are photos on the wall of my older siblings- birthdays, graduations, awkward smiles- but mine stops at age three, hidden in the attic behind moth-eaten curtains. I am the ninth child and I was supposed to die before I turned ten. Instead, I woke up speaking the name of a god buried beneath the orchard and now the crows have begun to bow when I pass.

...

The quiet of the estate had long since shifted from peace to pressure.

Yvonne arrived without ceremony, escorted in by Arlo and met at the door by a subdued Damian who didn’t need to say a word. He just looked at her the way a man looks when something fragile is slipping through his fingers, and Yvonne- no stranger to the weight of grief or the walls this group of people that had come together c...

Dawn had not yet broken over the mountains. The world clung to deep, velvet shadows, a silken hush draped between the arms of the mountains. The lake, vast and ancient, sat cradled between the silver peaks, quiet in the lingering night.

From the darkness, the fog rose. Not in sharp bursts, nor in a creeping slither; but slow like an exhale, unfurling in delicate ribbons, spinning and tangling an...

Her Highness, Lilah Sinclair, had not smiled a true smile in ten long years.

Not since she was a twelve-year-old girl clinging to the petticoats of her mother- the revered Queen Rienne of L’Vera- hiding her face shyly against the back of her mother’s bodice while the Queen handled the affairs of Court.

Her mother had always been her shield; a woman who thrived in a world built by men, ruled by m...