Hestia Ember

## Bio

Hestia was born into a silent world just like her mother’s, her father’s, and later her brother’s. She spent her early childhood like most children in Twelve, running in the dirt streets and playing games with what little they could scrape together from odds and ends around their homes. Within the community, though, there was also a small collection of Deaf citizens like them- born with it like her, developed, the result of a myriad of mining accidents, anything. A family. With them she took her first steps, signed her first words, learned to read lips and emotion and people. They shared food, they shared gifts on holiday,  and on long nights they’d gather at someone’s home around a fire to share stories.

In it there was community, common ground, and it kept her and Aiden alive when her parents fell victim to a cave in at one of the deepest, oldest mines the day after she turned fourteen. They were taken in by Twelve’s small but close-knit Deaf community, cycling between homes as they could be supported. Despite their seeming unlimited kindness, Hestia was determined to stay as little of a burden even in her and Aiden’s grief, to ensure they would always have something when all else fell through.

She worked tirelessly in the local butcher shop in the afternoons when school was let out. When the butchers looked the other way, she’d bring some of the less-choice catches to the underground markets, ones that would have been tossed anyways, and sold it for spare change. Every year she took out as many tesserae as she was permitted, determined to feed herself and her brother as much as she could manage. What kind of a person could she possibly think herself to be if she did not?

Hestia despised the Games and everything they stood for, but had deeper concerns. It was a horrible annual occurrence, a nightmare, but in it there was a grim reassurance that they probably wouldn’t have to watch their own struggle for long. Twelve never lasted. While the worry was always in the back of her mind, the two years before her Games she had no choice but pay attention to more immediate needs. Did they have a home that was willing to take them in this week? Was Aiden getting enough to eat? What if one of them fell ill- how could they afford medicine? How little could she ask of her community to ensure they did not become a burden, take food off the tables of those who had helped them most? And what happened when their charity ran out?

The Games were always a distinctive threat, but a future one. Perpetually a future one.

At seventeen, the odds caught up to her.

She would not leave Aiden alone to discover where the kindness of strangers met its limit. She only had one option- win.

Hestia was able to lay low for the majority of her Games. They were launched into sprawling, open prairie, an unfamiliar territory from District 12’s forested surroundings. Though she had taken off in a direction at random at the cue of the other tributes leaving their podiums, she’d gotten lucky and ended up in the rocky badlands, tucking herself into the corners of the canyons and stay out of sight.

She had received one gift two days in, not long after dodging a mile-wide tornado tearing through the Arena. A small survival knife, but it was enough. She was able to kill small game for food, understood what was edible and what was not from her time at the butchers. She could stoke a small fire, nothing too obvious, she had practice in Twelve’s harsh winters.

She grew familiar with the tremor in her gut that she came to recognize as the cannons. It was a small Bloodbath, meaning she spent her days in there feeling them over and over and over, each one more certainly marching her to her death than the last. Sometimes, she wondered if ending it herself might be kinder. She never did. Aiden would have no family left.

As it had turned out, the other tributes underestimated her almost as much as she underestimated her own capability to fight. Her own capacity for violence. She was small, underfed, unable to hear. But she had not anticipated their arrogance to go so far as for them to think she still would not notice their approach in sight, feel, smell. The girl from Two had provoked the attack in broad daylight, a sick grin on her lips and shiny sword in hand, so sure of her own superiority. Hestia’s mind went blank as she faced her first human threat. She acted in primal defense, a dodge, a knife in the girl’s back, and run. She felt the cannon rattle her bones an agonizing forty-five minutes later.

In the end, it had been her and the girl from Seven, shoved hastily together by wildfire choking life out of the Arena only marginally slower than it was bleeding the life from the remaining two. There was a struggle, but both were weak from black smoke strangling them, the heat of the fire sapping their little remaining strength. It was narrow. It was chance. It had been a wild flash of her knife in the right place, the right time. Hestia won with hot ash in her lungs and wet blood soaking through her skin. The last thing she recalled of her Arena was succumbing to the earth, closing her eyes, welcoming the fire to take her too, reclaim her for ash.

Hestia returned home empty. The final desperate look in the other girl’s eyes haunted her every time she closed her own, and at night she woke from dreams of fire closing in with screams tearing her throat raw into a house too big for her. Sometimes, she almost wished it was real- that the fire could do what it should have and let her move on in peace.

Aiden did not look at her the same. She carried guilt in her belly for knowing he’d have been okay without her instead, that he’d only gotten the skin and bones of his sister back. What was it all for if they were fed, but he was blood with a killer? She couldn’t blame him, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to stomach it if he were to do the same. Still, she loved him. Despite the money, food, home, and newfound stability he was all she had, and she poured herself into making sure he was raised as her parents would have wanted. Going to school. Making friends. Coming home to a soft bed and warm meal and someone who loved him.

Five years later, Aiden was reaped at fifteen. There had been no tesserae taken out, only odds that Hestia knew must be rigged when she saw the lips of their escort form his name. It was a grand deal at the Capitol: A Twelve Victor’s sibling! Could he survive? Continue Twelve’s unprecedented streak of Victors? The days spent together in the Tower were some of the worst of her life, a cruel joke.

He made it three minutes and twenty-nine seconds. Slaughtered by the boy from Two as he was running away.

She came home to an empty house in Victor’s Village for the first time in five years. The house seemed to threaten to drown her in its appalling vastness, a sickening imitation of the lavishness the Capitol craved. Did they think it was consolation? Or was it an intentional punishment, making her live so isolated from her community in a house she could never possibly dream to fill? Did they know they were forcing her to stare at the empty spaces Aiden left behind?

One year later, there was another mine collapse. Another set of children left behind, just like herself and Aiden. Hestia had the space. She had the means. And she reassured them that her compassion would not run out, that it was not earned, that it was never something they could lose.

She then took in an infant, abandoned at the markets. More children whose parents were claimed by the mines, illness, the Capitol. A teenage boy, left to fend for himself in the streets and hauled to her home by a Peacekeeper as a last chance.

Hestia filled her house with children that were not her own, but may as well be. For the first time since Aiden died, the house was a home.

As a mentor, Hestia is just as much of a mother to her tributes as her own back in Twelve. She’s dedicated to giving them as much of a chance as she can, even if she feels she fails far too often. The death of each of her tributes feels like losing one of her own, because in a way, they are. Children failed by the people meant to protect them. Children like her.

She approaches some in the Tower similarly, with gentle care and understanding, like she does her children. However, she has less patience for narrow-minded or Games worshiping members of the Tower, like most outer-District mentors. If anyone dares cross her children or her tributes, her rare anger is invoked. Hestia is compassionate, generous, and hard-working, but can be insecure, overprotective, and neglectful of her own needs in favor of meeting those of others.

## Family & Relationships

Parents: Unknown

Siblings: Aiden Ember (d. 92 [108th Games])

Children: Reyna Ember, Slate Skylar, Ansel Ember, River Ember, Winter Ember, Granite Ember, Ivy Ember, Luna Acero-Ember

Relationships: Luca Acero (101-102)