Six Scorched Roses (Crowns of Nyaxia)

The first time I met death, it was in my first breaths—or rather, the first breaths I didn’t take. I was born too small, too sickly, too quiet. My father used to say that he’d never heard such a silence as when I was born—several terrible minutes in which no one said a word—and that when I finally started to wail, he’d never been so grateful to hear a scream.

Death never left, though. That became clear quickly, even before anyone wanted to acknowledge it.

The truth came the second time I met death, eight years later, when my sister was born. She, unlike me, screamed from the moment she came into the world. My mother, on the other hand, went forever silent.

My father had been right. There was nothing worse than that kind of silence.

And it was in that horrible soundlessness, as I stifled my coughs and my tears with the back of my hand, that the healer gave me a strange look. Later, after my mother’s funeral, he would pull me aside.

“How long has your breathing been that way?” he would ask.

Death always followed me, you see.

It quickly became clear that I wouldn’t have long to live. In the beginning, they tried to hide this from me. But I’d always liked knowing things. I was bad at reading people, but I was good at understanding science. I knew death even before I could name it.

But the third time I met death, it hadn’t come for me.

It was given to the town of Adcova like a silk blanket, settling slowly over our lives, placed there by one of the gods themselves.

Here’s the thing about the God of Abundance. Abundance wears many faces. The god of plenty is also the god of decay. There can be no life without death, no feast without famine.

Like all the other gods, Vitarus is a fickle and emotional being. The difference between excess and absence a mere whim of his moods. Entire lives—entire towns—made or unmade by a thoughtless wave of his hand.

For a long time, Vitarus smiled upon Adcova. We were a flourishing farm town, nestled in a fertile patch of land. We worshipped all the gods of the White Pantheon, but Vitarus was the god of the farmer, and so he was our favored deity. For a long time, he treated us well.

That changed slowly, in the beginning. One spoiled crop, then two. Weeks and then months of nothing. Then, one day, it changed all at once.

You can feel it in the air when a god is nearby. I felt it that day. I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling and could have sworn I smelled the smoke of funeral pyres.

I went outside. It was cold, my breath coming in little puffs of white. I was fifteen, but looked younger. My body shook. I was very thin, no matter how much I ate. Death stole every mouthful, you see, and it had been especially hungry lately.

To this day, I’m not sure why I went to the door. I was confused at first by what I was looking at. I thought my father was working in the fields, his form hunched and crouched in the dirt. But instead of the sea of greenery around him, there was only withered brown, coated with the wet, deadly sheen of frost.

I had never been good at seeing the things that people didn’t say. But even then, as a child, I knew that my father was broken. He clutched fistfuls of dead crops in his hands, sagging over them like lost hope.

“Fa?” I called out.

He looked over his shoulder at me. I pulled my shawl tighter around myself and shivered, despite the beads of sweat on my forehead. I couldn’t stop the shaking.

He looked at me the same way that he looked at those dead crops. Like I was the corpse of a dream, buried in everything he couldn’t save.

“Go back inside,” he said.

I almost didn’t.

For years, I would wish that I hadn’t.

But how was I supposed to know that my father was about to curse a god that would curse us back?

That’s when the plague came. My father was the first to go. The rest, slower. Years passed, and Adcova withered like the crops in the field that morning my father had damned us all.

It’s strange to watch the world wither around you. I had always put such stock in knowing things. Even the things that can’t be known—the power of a god, the actions of a cruel unfair fate—have a defined edge to them, a pattern that I could pull apart.

I learned everything about the illness. I learned how it stole breath from lungs and blood from veins, how it reduced skin to layers and layers of fine dust until there was nothing left but rotting muscle. Yet, there was always something more there, something I couldn’t ever really understand. Not truly.

So much lived in that gap—the gap between the things I knew and the things I didn’t. So much died there. No matter how many medicines I brewed or remedies I tested.

The gap had teeth like the vampires across the sea. Teeth sharp enough to eat us all alive.

Five years passed, ten, fifteen. More people grew sick.

The disease came for all of us in the end.