Chapter 1 — It Starts With Death

Where has all the time gone? Alissa asked herself as the first rays of sunshine began to disappear behind the northern side of the stone walls.

She shook her head slightly, and a few twigs that had been tangled in her hair fell to the ground. When she glanced down, she noticed that the ants, which had been frantic when she first disrupted their trail, had begun to move around her instead. The bush leaves where she lay started to sting, but she still pulled the bowstring between her fingers with the same diligence she had done her entire life.

How long had she been there? How was it that time seemed to pass so subtly when she found herself in such an uncomfortable position?

The woosh of the arrow slicing through the air was followed by a sudden breeze, almost as ephemeral as life itself.

Alissa did not miss.

She never did.

A high-pitched squeak came next, the low thump of a small body falling over dead leaves right after. Why did those sounds still make her recoil?

Alissa whispered a prayer, retrieving the small animal to carry it deeper into the forest.

She wished not to hear the sounds of death any longer; she would listen only to the echoes of silence and the hushing of the oak tree leaves. Closing her eyes, her focus was solely on the chilly air and the chirping of birds.

Only for a little while.

That was as much time as she could afford herself, only gifted with the briefest of moments to calm her mind from the worries of the real world, from the impact that killing every single day had on her.

She didn’t know why there was a single oak tree in the middle of a pine tree forest, but it was the place she usually sought calm when life was too chaotic to bear—more often than she cared to admit. There was something about this place that had the power to ease her spirit.

She took a deep breath, gathering the courage to move again and start the part of her job that churned her stomach—stripping the skin from the animal. When Alissa finished, she headed downtown Bryniard, and regret instantly hit her.

Wooden stands lined the narrow cobblestone streets, crowding the already limited space. The vendors at each stand shouted over one another, hoping to sell their goods. It was all a reminder that the few moments of peace she had allowed herself were now over. Their voices rose higher and higher, each trying to outdo the rest as if they had any chances of attracting new customers in Bryniard.

Alissa cringed at the chaos around her. She had almost forgotten about the dead animal dangling from her left hand. The scene was far from unusual for the vendors; none spared her a second glance, except for a child who ran toward her and latched onto her legs like a stubborn leech—her daughter.

Alissa stopped by one of the stands and waved the animal corpse under Mr. Namir’s nose, ignoring the smell of blood that exhaled from it. “Here,” she said, offering it to the man.

He stared at her like she spoke a different language. His forehead was creased, and he scrunched his nose at the scene. “What is this, Miss. Kriegen?” he asked, waving his fingers at the body hanging from Alissa’s hands.

“Mommy?” the child interrupted, only to be successfully ignored.

“You said you would double my regular fee if I killed the rabbit that was ruining your little crops,” Alissa demanded.

“And how will I know you’ve gotten the right animal if you skinned the poor thing!” Mr. Namir raised his eyebrows in defiance.

“Mommy!” Another interrupting murmur followed Alissa’s heavy breath.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Did you intend to eat it with the fur?” she answered in her naturally sarcastic tone.

The consistent pull on her leg grew stronger as the girl begged relentlessly for attention. Alissa sighed, her eyes darting down in a reprimanding glance at the child who had been calling for her.

“What?” she demanded impatiently. “I can’t talk right now, Dhalia. Can’t you see I’m doing business here?”

All the joy in the child’s eyes disappeared when Alissa snapped. Unfortunately, Dhalia’s disappointment escaped her mother’s eyes as she went back to discussing the fee for killing yet another creature for the unpleasant man across from her.

“You owe me two silver coins.” Alissa stretched her hand forward to collect the payment she was promised.

“I ain’t paying you shit, kiddo. You try and sell this on another stand, they might pay you something for it.”

Alissa grunted. It did cross her mind to throw the dead animal in the man’s face, but in respect to the animal, not to the man, she didn’t.

“From now on, you’d better find someone else to sell you meat. And to save your crops.” Alissa left, stomping her feet with the little girl in hand. “Asshole,” she muttered to herself.

She caught sight of Dhalia sticking her tongue out at the man, and it brought a smirk to Alissa’s lips.

The rare sense of amusement was replaced by a flinch of horror when she bumped into Mrs. Monlard on the way home. Alissa had hoped to end the day without another unfortunate interaction; the day had already been hard enough. Hiding behind a mask of indifference was the only way she could afford to face the woman now.

“Alissa, how are you two girls doing?” Mrs. Monlard asked.

“We’re good, Mrs. Monlard. How about you?”

“Great. Concerned as expected this time of the year…”

Alissa only nodded in response, her chest getting tighter as the words left the woman’s lips.

“I hope we’re safe tomorrow and that when the siren rings again, it’s not for any of us or those we love.”

Alissa felt an instant knot in her chest, feeling bad for the woman.

If she only knew…

Alissa rested her hand on Mrs. Monlard’s shoulder. “Stay well, Mrs. Monlard. Enjoy the night with your family.” A sad smile graced her lips.

Alissa wished she could tell her everything, but she couldn’t. Instead, she pretended once again to live in the bliss of ignorance like everyone else in Bryniard.

When they parted, she watched from a distance as the woman reunited with her husband, sharing a tender kiss. Both were completely unaware of what the future held for them.

Alissa arrived home more melancholic than when she had left that morning. The door creaked, and a startled Freyah jumped from the couch, rubbing the back of her hands on her chin. In an attempt to get rid of the drool and any remaining evidence she had been sleeping on Alissa’s couch.

“What are you doing here?” Alissa asked in greeting.

“Wow, that’s how you welcome your dearest friend into your house?”

“You’re already in my house, if you haven’t noticed, my dearest friend,” Alissa replied, annoyed.

She didn’t mean to be rude, but exhaustion was getting the best of her. When her mind was so worn out, it was hard to keep her temper restrained.

“I came here to bring Dhalia something.” The child had already run to Freyah’s lap, hugging her aunt for dear life. “You see? She missed me. I think I’ll promote Dhalia to be my best friend,” Freyah teased and ended up receiving a smile from Alissa’s grumpy face in return. It was a small victory indeed.

“Unfortunately, it is now time for little children to go to bed, Aunty Freyah.” Alissa raised her eyebrows to Dhalia, who willingly kissed her aunt on the cheeks and went to the bedroom holding her mother’s hand.

The nighttime routine with Dhalia was always peaceful. Within minutes, she was tucked into bed, her wool blanket pulled snugly up to her shoulders. Her brown eyes, bright and full of wonder, sparkled in the dim light as she gazed at her mother.

Alissa kissed the girl on the cheeks. “Good night, baby.”

She headed to the door but was stopped by small hands on her callused ones. “Can you tell me a bedtime story tonight, Mommy?”

“Maybe another time, sweetheart.”

“You said that last time,” Dhalia answered, her lips twitching in sadness.

“Tomorrow. I promise.” With a wink, Alissa shut the door. Behind the closed door, the little girl’s eyes filled with tears.

Freyah awaited Alissa, leaning against the wooden table, her arms crossed in her chest. “You know, sometimes I think you are too harsh on her, Alissa. She is just a little girl.”

She rolled her eyes. “What have I done now, Freyah?”

Freyah tapped her fingers on the table in an anxious pattern. Speaking her mind so openly was still hard for her. Even in Alissa’s presence, her nature to comply would often hold her back. Not this time.

“It’s not something you did or said now, but the way you treat her sometimes. I think you forget she is a child.” Freyah let out a sigh. “She spent the whole day by herself in this cabin before she met you downtown, Alissa. I came by whenever I could to see if she was okay, but she shouldn’t be alone for this long at such a young age.”

Alissa sat down. She leaned her elbow against the cold wood, her fingers digging into her own hair. “I know, Freyah. Do you think I enjoy leaving her here for hours alone?” she asked. “If I don’t go out hunting every day, we will starve! I don’t know if it’s because of the wall, but hunting becomes more difficult every year. The only thing I got today was a stupid rabbit Mr. Namir refused to pay me for.” Alissa’s breath hitched. The struggle to feed her child was a weight too heavy for her shoulders to bear on her own.

“I am all she has, Freyah, and if I don’t do this, she won’t have food on her plate the next day. I don’t know what else you expect from me.”

Freyah reached out to hold her friend’s hand. “You have my parents and me. You know we are here for both of you. All I’m saying is that someday, you will regret not having spent this time with her, Lissa. Children grow up fast, and before you know it, she won’t be the same little girl anymore.”

Alissa released her friend’s grip from her hands. “I think I know how to raise my own child, Freyah. I don’t need your advice.”

“I only want for you two to be happy, Alissa. And I know you haven’t been for such a long time, you don’t even remember what it feels like. I know your life is tough, my friend, but sometimes I think you unconsciously make it harder. You can’t keep living a life where all you do is wake up, kill, sleep, and repeat.”

Alissa didn’t say anything; instead, she opened the door of the cabin, an invitation for Freyah to leave.

Her friend chuckled and shook her head. Freyah left the cookies for Dhalia on the counter and walked to the door.

“Someday, all this stubbornness will be the death of us, Alissa.”

 

***

 

Alissa awoke to the sound of the siren, one as familiar to her as the singing of the nightingale that visited her windowsill every dawn without fail. She opened her eyes, still adjusting to the light of her room, startled by the little shadow standing by her bedside. Dhalia’s big brown eyes, wide and bright with fear, were the only part of her face illuminated by the daylight invading the cabin through the small window of her room.

“It happened again,” Dhalia whispered with a heavy breath.

Alissa could sense the unease in her voice.

“I know, sweetheart. Are you okay?” Alissa pulled her daughter onto her lap to comfort her. She kissed her cheeks and swiped the sweat off her small forehead.

Dhalia’s hand trembled in anxiety.

The days when the siren rang were never easy. Although Alissa had heard the siren countless times since she could remember, she still mourned it the same every time. However, since Dhalia was born, the siren days felt terribly worse. Dealing with the constant reminder of death would be hard for any adult; imagine how it felt for a child.

Dhalia, however, didn’t answer Alissa’s question. “Who do you think it was this time?” she asked her mom.

And although Alissa had known for six months that the kind gentleman who owned a shop two streets down from her cabin was the victim, she replied, “I don’t know, honey. We’d better get ready and head downtown for the service.”

Alissa wore an all-black outfit, a simple tunic paired with dark trousers and polished boots. Her cloak hung quietly at her shoulders. Her light-brown hair was braided, and her boots were muddy from her walk back home on the previous rainy evening. Dhalia also wore black, as was tradition every siren day. Her plain, long-sleeved dress was twice her size, and the corner of Alissa’s lips twitched up almost unnoticeably to see how it draped off her.

It was the only one Alissa could afford to give her daughter. It would be the one she would wear for as long as it fit her. The luxury of owning more than seven different pieces of clothing each was one Alissa had learned to accept she would never have.

Alissa and Dhalia walked to the service hand in hand, their heads nodding in greeting to the neighbors who did the same mournful walk to the cemetery.

She would never get used to the heavy atmosphere that took over the town on those days, to seeing her neighbors’ swollen red eyes and desperate sobs. She would never bear the silence that took over the town on those dreadful marches, how the only thing that broke the quiet were the screams when people learned who had been afflicted by Senectus this time. The city seemed drained of color, its streets dotted with mourners dressed in black. And still, when the day was over, they would all go back to living their lives as if nothing had ever happened.

Alissa always wondered if the community acted with such detachment, with the belief that if they simply kept going, the evil would forget to curse the next of them, or if it was a desperate craving for the slightest sense of normalcy before they had to take the same walk down the cemetery six months from then.

She glanced into the open coffin, at the sweet man who sold her spices and grains lying inside. His eyes closed for eternity.

Mr. Monlard was only forty-five years old. He was the brightest man she had ever met. He still had many years left to live before old age could frail his bones and his mind, but while she stared at the coffin, she noticed his hair had gone completely white since she saw him thirty-six hours before. The deep wrinkles around his eyes, which anyone would think had been formed by decades of smiling, and the pronounced lines on his forehead weren’t there only two days before.

His skin, once firm and unblemished, had sagged and was covered with little dark spots. Alissa watched Mrs. Monlard bent over the coffin, sobbing over the death of her husband, not even the ghost of the smile she had seen the day before on those same lips remained. Their son, who was only two years older than Alissa, held his mother by the waist. His support was the only thing keeping her standing. The young man’s semblance was vacant, but the way his body shuddered demonstrated he needed all his strength not to collapse with her.

Senectus Subita—that was what they called it, the evil that had plagued the people of Bryniard for generations. The name, meaning sudden aging, was no coincidence. For everyone in Bryniard, the symptoms arrived with a twenty-four-hour warning. But for Alissa, it was different. She could still see the faint glow, flowing with black and white threads, surrounding Mr. Monlard’s body, even as he lay in the coffin, lifeless.

The glow that warned her—and only her—of upcoming death was still there.

Alissa could still remember how, as a child, she would ask her mother why people were suddenly glowing. Mrs. Kriegen never understood it, nor had anyone Alissa ever asked. Eventually, she stopped asking. Feeling misunderstood and judged by those she had ever dared ask made her realize that people simply couldn’t see it the way she did.

As she grew up and those that glowed died one after the other, she finally understood it to be a warning, a sign. As if their souls knew life was fading away, drifting from their fingers before their bodies could ever comprehend.

That was how she knew Mr. Monlard would be the one the siren rang about that morning. She had seen him glow every day for the past six months. She had seen the threads encircle him since the last service happened half a year ago.

Pretending she didn’t know of his imminent end killed her inside. Interacting with him and his family for that long, knowing his death was close and not being able to help him, broke her soul. She lost a little of herself every time she had to pretend again with someone new. Alissa sometimes believed this was the doing of some twisted force that found it amusing to warn her of the next victim as soon as the last one was buried, not even allowing her a single moment without the premonition of death.

Now, as she peered around to see all the faces of people she knew and cared about, those who had been her community when she was young and alone with a baby in her arms, people who were like family to her, she feared for the next one to be proclaimed a victim. It was extremely hard to accept the fact that they were all destined to die one after the other, and there was nothing she could do about it.

Alissa closed her eyes as they covered the last of Mr. Monlard’s coffin with dirt. This was always the moment she dreaded the most, the suspense, the tension before finding out who would be the next of them to die.

She was afraid to open them again and see someone else glow. She wished she could never open her eyes, never have a glimpse of the black and white sparkling threads. A sight so beautiful that had she never known its meaning, she would have considered it good fortune.

She took a deep breath, gathering the courage she needed to open her eyes again.

For a moment, when her gaze drifted through the crowd frantically, all she saw was black attire and sorrowful faces. Believing the glow had faltered to curse them at least this one time, Alissa breathed in relief.

When Alissa glanced down to her right, her smile faded, replaced by terror.

She saw Dhalia, her brown eyes and golden hair fixed in tiny pigtails, her cheeks rosy and lips pursed, her oversized black dress, and the rag doll she carried in her arms.

She saw her loving, five-year-old daughter, embraced by black and white sparkling threads.

They resembled wires battling each other, the black for the death that was coming and the white for the life that was vanishing. These were the same threads that had haunted her entire life and, a moment ago, surrounded Mr. Monlard and took him to his grave. They flew around her small figure as if it claimed her every breath, her every heartbeat from that moment forward. They claimed Dhalia’s life as their own, and there was nothing Alissa could do but feel like by claiming her daughter’s life, the evil would be killing her, too.

Dhalia is going to die.

The realization of her daughter’s imminent death made Alissa’s knees falter. She fell to the ground, kneeling in front of her child in utter shock.

She grasped both of Dhalia’s shoulders with urgency, her wide eyes anxiously tracing her small body, her mouth agape with despair. Her hands moved frantically toward the sparkling threads that embraced her daughter’s body, trying to remove them by force, to take them for herself, to give her life in Dhalia’s place, to save the person she loved the most in the world. The one she would give her life and soul to keep safe.

But she failed to do that, again and again, while the threads danced around her hand, not surrendering to her grasp, mocking her endeavor, the agonizing hope of saving her child’s life.

Alissa only realized she was crying when she saw tears stream down, forming little puddles of mud. It was impossible to tell if Dhalia had been glowing in front of her for minutes or seconds as time and space seemed to freeze. In her mind, it had been an eternity since she had learned her daughter’s days in this world were numbered.

A knot formed in her stomach so tight that she brought her hand to her lips to prevent the precarious meal she’d had from having an encounter with the mud. Breathing became too difficult, as if the walls of Bryniard were suddenly closing on her, trapping Alissa in madness. She wrapped her arms around her girl in an attempt to ease her agony.

Blinking away her tears, she released Dhalia, holding her at arm’s length. Looking at her daughter for the first time since the world began to fall apart, Alissa saw fear in her eyes.

How is she also afraid? Does she know she is next?

When she looked around, the same look of fear and bewilderment sparked in her neighbors’ eyes. She realized then that all eyes assessed her as she knelt on the cemetery’s dirty ground, frantically shaking her daughter’s shoulders.

None of them could understand.

None of them could ever really fathom what Alissa felt when she gazed at Dhalia, and all she could see was the damn glow reminding her that her beautiful girl had only half a year left to live.

Dhalia’s broken whisper brought Alissa out of her frenzied state. “You’re scaring me, Mommy.”

Alissa’s eyes were filled with too many tears for her sight to be anything other than a mess of blurred images. Wiping them off her face, she kissed her daughter on the forehead and stood up to gather her composure. Making it look like she wasn’t falling apart on the inside and her heart hadn’t been broken into a thousand little pieces was the hardest part she’d ever had to play.

As her gaze darted around, she saw a widow, whose eyes were bloodshot, and a young man who struggled to remain standing after the loss of his father. She saw her neighbors’ wary glances give way to disapproving scowls.

At that moment, Alissa grasped how pathetic this scene must have looked to the rest of the people. They didn’t see a mother grieving when she cried in desperation. No, in their skeptical eyes, she was a hysterical woman wailing on the cemetery ground, while someone else had just buried their loving husband. Her cheeks tinged red, and she rubbed the palms of her hands on her trousers to get rid of the dampness that had settled there. Immersed in her own little whirlwind, she had forgotten about her surroundings and been inconsiderate of others’ grief.

But how could Alissa blame herself for reacting that way?

Taking a deep breath, she mouthed an apology to the widow.

Later. Later, you can crumble to your ending world.

Later. When you’re by yourself, and Dhalia won’t see you hurt.

Holding hands that were half the size of her own, she buried the pain and squeezed soft, small fingers tight to ease the devastating pain in her chest. She centered her focus on the fact that Dhalia was still there by her side, and all she could do was enjoy every second of her daughter’s presence while she still could.