Hey ya'll :D I'm sosososo sorry omg, it's been so long! I've missed you! I mean, I've been keeping up with everything (updates and reviews and favourites/alerts and all), but I haven't been able to, you know, post anything. I'm trying to get some money so I can buy a new computer, but it might be a while, so pleeeease don't give up on me!

Um, it's been a while since I wrote this, and honestly, I have nooo idea what was going thru my mind ._. wuteven. If you wanna, idontknooow, suggest a story or something, go right ahead! Like, you know, if you want something about a certain character. The main stuff I'll take for The Hunger Games, The Mortal Instruments, and Warriors. But there are also a bunch of other books I like, so if you just add it in your review or in a PM, I'll check into it. (:

I think that's all! It might be a while before I update again, though, just to let you know :/ sosososo sorry again!

NOOO, WAIT! DON'T READ YETTT. Keep an eye out for quotes that sort of stick out in your mind. Some of them have deeper meanings.

She glowers at her sister.

"What, is little Foxy too scared to steal some food?" she taunts as if 'Foxy,' or Froxen, is a defenseless baby. Oh, how they despise each other, the tormentor and the victim (each plays both parts). How she longs to smack her, cut her, rip her open…

She is thinking like a savage Career again.

"Please, Feren, leave me alone." Fury seeps bitingly into her voice, a raw, frore rasp, so weary and fatigued, and / it's all because of her… /

Smiling sweetly, Froxen's older sister extends her left palm and uncurls her sallow yet delicate fingers to reveal three bright red berries, oh-so inviting. Froxen is tempted to snatch them away from her and take refuge in their matte cellar with the cold and infrangible iron bars, but then it dawns on her: This is a hoax.

"I do not want," she abrasively spits, pronouncing each syllable distinctly, "your. Stupid. Berries."

Her sister's head, a dull mop of red-brown curls, snaps up in surprise. "Where…" Oh, darling, she is not as naïve and stupid as you cut her out to be. "Alright. Fine. Don't take them. I'll eat them myself and let you starve." At the age of only seven, Froxen does not catch the glint in Feren's luminous amber eyes, or the edge to her frosty and raddled voice. "You're on your own now, Foxy," she says apologetically as she pops the blood-red berries into her mouth. Her last words.

And then she crumples to the floor, twitching erratically for a moment before she becomes eerily dormant. Her eyelids droop over those wide brown eyes that no one will ever see again.

She buries her by the river.

.;.

Only weak people commit suicide, she tells herself, protectively cradling a small, transparent bag of cerise berries to her tiny chest.

Tossing the bag onto her wooden bed, she hops to her feet and closes the bathroom door behind her after she enters. She is greeted by a familiar flaming-haired girl in the oval mirror. When she smiles, it is a forced and wary movement of pensive, blood-stained lips. Though her lips are not to be the only blood-stained body part of that day (or exactly ten years later, either).

Fist and mirror collide, and this thing, this monstrous flame, is lying on the floor in a pile of broken glass. Shards of her shattered enemy dig into her caseous skin. Words, trapped inside her bone-dry mouth, throw themselves at her ears and her cuts. Slice! End! Forget! Burn!

And burn she does. Anguish spreads over her body like a wildfire as her fiery hair brushes against the bloody cuts promiscuously concealing her mangled yellow flesh. But the pain is satisfying and distracting.

"Burn…"

.;.

She remembers a time when she and her mother would gather berries in the woods. Those were the days of joy and felicitous tranquility, though she now likes to think of them as inauspicious and foreshadowing. In all grave honesty, she will ask herself, how did I never see it coming?

With a snap of a finger, her life crumbled to pieces. Mommy committed suicide and Daddy was poisoned.

"Let's pick some new berries, Foxy," Mommy had gently suggested one day as they trekked through the forest (back then 'Foxy' was only a harmless nickname). They ducked under a low branch and sat down, legs crossed, drinking in ever aspect of the forest. It was simply beautiful, she recalls. Dulcet and innocent. You'd never have suspected a thing. (Is that not the point?)

The little girl with the cherry-coloured hair helped her mother pick new, ruddy berries that she had never laid eyes on before. "They're special," the woman had told her. "They are to be saved for a time when you need them most. Don't let them go to waste." Of course, the small child, all dimples and curls and cherubic cheeks, had riveted her mother's cloying words oh-so somberly, with panoramic chocolate eyes that stretched to the size of saucers.

That was the first time she didn't quite catch the flicker in someone's eyes. Being so young, she cast it aside and labeled it as confusion or excitement. But later she learns.

She and he mother danced gracefully back to the house, bright red berries in hand. They were eaten carelessly by a young man and woman, desperate to cease the horrors of the ever-changing world.

But it was demolished the wrong way. Cowards.

.;.

Two weeks after her sister's death, she is thrown into an abnormally large cellar, along with ten other teenagers. Frozen white paint keeps its sheer spot on the leaden walls, stock-still in its jagged position, surrounded by a heavy world of grey. Metal bars lock the eleven rejected orphans inside the "cage."

Vinc, a mentally off elfin girl, has taken to wrapping her scraggy hands around the bars and screeching in a trembling, high-pitched voice, "Let me out! Let me out!"

No one listens.

One girl, transparent and brittle, violently rocks back and forth, head between her quivering knees. "Shut up," she moans. "Vinc, just shut up. You're giving me a headache."

A boy about the same age as Froxen snaps, "Jaic, you always have a freaking headache. Why don't you shut up, jerk."

Jaic wails even harder. Vinc bangs her head against the wall in an already-dented spot. Toredu laughs hysterically in a corner.

"Does anybody have glass?" Froxen asks, voice rough from neglect. Glass has become her constant companion, an ally she can always count on. Especially the shards of her rippling, broken reflection.

(All that she was is dead and gone.)

"No. Why? Is it too safe?"

She assumes that is the boy, Effor. But she does not know that for sure, because her own little world chooses that moment to recede into scarlet.

She weeps.

.;.

"Run," hisses Jaic pleadingly. "Before they catch you."

She tears her eyes away from the young girl's desperate gaze and takes off. Her bare feet fly down the stairs, thudding dully against the rock-solid concrete. Blisters form on her heels. The world around her spins and spins and spins until all that is left is a blur of bright lights and colours. Shouts reach her ears and spill from her mouth. She is running running running, as far away as possible.

(But where is that? And will it be enough?)

"It will never be enough." And so she falls. Frantic golden eyes wildly search their surroundings until they land upon another pair just like them. Screeches erupt from the corner of the room, along with clawing hands and scrambling feet. "Feren! Feren! Vinc!"

Three shadowy figures approach the struggling teenager. As they lift her up with their bulky arms, a burnished silver needle plunges into her leg and comes out crimson.

.;.

People mull around her, chattering away and shoving through the crowd. A low hum soothes her, keeps her from fighting back. It's just a dream, she tells herself. A horrible dream.

She reaches the back of the store and stumbles over to a small wooden box. Standing on her tiptoes, she peers over] the edge and eyes a juicy scarlet apple. No one is around to see the filthy, muddy, flame-haired girl snatch the apple and flee.

That's what she tells herself, anyway.

(But everyone is a liar.)

She tells herself a lot of things. Many of them play through her mind ever single day, soft yet fierce and they go on and on and on. She still hear Effor assuring her that / it's not her fault / Feren would have swallowed those berries no matter what. Toredu's neurotic laugh rings in her ears, haunting and devoid. Feren whispers in her ear, tells her that she is next and oh, how beautiful her death will be. Maybe she will follow the family tradition. But some thoughts are her own, such as the ones that remind her how cruel the world is, how easily her life could be snatched away and be dangling at the fingertips of a warped child designed to destroy her.

No, that will not happen. If necessary, she will take her own life, die just like her sister and parents. Her death will not be a sanguinary gift to a hollow, savage psychopath. It will be a gift to herself, rather than another haunted soul. She will satisfy herself. Because Feren was wrong; Froxen is neither weak nor afraid.

(But what is there to be proud of? Froxen is a hollow, savage psychopath just like everyone else.)

The apple slips from her bloody hands and crashes into a sea of glass.

.;.

Smiling deviously, her golden eyes scan the cheering crowd and once again, they land upon a pair identical to them. This time, however, she does not will not cannot cry out, for she is the center of attention, the sly, extant target of brutal serial killers and heartless animals.

Her red hair glints in the golden sunlight.

.;.

She laughs luxuriously, tilting her head back in dark amusement. Ashes billow up in smoke around her, but she pays them no attention, just continues to laugh as hysterically as Toredu. For now she understands.

She understands why Feren and their parents wanted needed those berries, why Cato was so mad, and that Toredu was scaring away the demons and regaining control of his life. The point was not to get away unscarred, but to be warily observed day and night. It's all about power.

Poor Girl on Fire. Maybe she will burn just as Froxen has.

.;.

For the last time, she seizes the bright red berries and runs runs runs until she is under the safe cover of a lone willow tree. She rolls the tiny things around in her skeletal palms before greedily shoving them into her mouth.

These silent killers, dangerously powerful, take over her cadaverous body and send her into a world of bright lights and red.

(Oh, Death, don't be so greedy!)

As Feren takes her hand and pulls her away from this world of anger and ruthlessness, she is thankful that it is finally her turn. Yes, she thinks, it is all about power, all about control.

(That is why her soul's death belongs to only her.)

The brush of her fiery hair against her cold, pale skin burns the life out of her.

"Thank you."