Not anymore.
Alissa wiped the tears off her face, deciding she would do anything—she would break the world into pieces if she could save her daughter. She would not let her child die, not until she was at least given a chance to live.
I only have six months.
Lying beside the girl, Alissa raised her right hand and brushed a strand of hair from her daughter’s face to tuck it behind her ear. The child spasmed a little under her touch, and she smiled.
Alissa whispered a promise right there: “Iwillsave you, my sweet girl. I will be strongfor you. No matter the cost.”
This love, it ached. It burned like fire in her heart. She could only hope the strength of this feeling would be enough to save her girl in the end.
Chapter 3
Mysteries are Better Left Unsolved
Although the light of a new day brought nothing but a desire to stay in bed, crying in self-pity, Alissa managed to find the motivation to get up. She had decided to fight to save her daughter, but that decision didn’t make it any easier to figure out where to start. How could she win this battle when she barely knew what she was facing?
With that thought, she deduced it would be crucial to her success to find out what she was really up against.
Alissa didn’t know much about Senectus Subita. In fact, she had the feeling nobody did. It was almost as if everyone considered it to be a forbidden subject. She had the idea that people believed not bringing it up would make it somehow less tangible. This entire city had always accepted it as an irrefutable reality. They assembled their lives around this one thing that had always been part of them, instead of questioning it.
There was a group of people in town who believed Senectus to be a blessing, a sign that one was chosen by the greater power to be sacrificed, and in return, they would keep the fields fertile, the hunts bountiful, and the weather pleasant.
Alissa grunted at the thought of that. She had always despised them, those who would celebrate the passing of othersas a graceful sign of divinity. Now that Dhalia was about to be damned by the same wicked fate, she despised them all the more. Dhalia was only a child, not a sacrifice.
But Alissa never believed in that. No, she didn’t believe in any of the myths she heard when she was little. How could she, when no theories ever mentioned the threads of life and death she could see glowing around the victims?
A sound from the kitchen threshold interrupted her wandering thoughts. She was taken aback for a moment when her eyes settled on her daughter’s figure. She had almost forgotten that Dhalia would be forever accompanied by that entangled mess of black and white.
“Good morning, honey.” She smiled, trying to hide her distress with a gentle kiss on the girl’s forehead.
“Hi, Mommy.”
“Did you sleep well?”
Dhalia nodded, joining her mother at the table. “Do princesses exist?” Her head twisted sideways in curiosity.
Alissa frowned. “There are no princesses in Bryniard…”
After seeing the instant look of disappointment on the girl’s face, indulging her child’s fantasies seemed to be Alissa’s only option when life was already so damn hard. She shrugged, rectifying the situation. “Perhaps there is a princess somewhere beyond these walls, honey.”
“What about the monsters?”
“Well…” She glanced at the ceiling for inspiration. “Maybe the princess has the power to control all the monsters, and they can’t hurt her.” Alissa was entirely out of her comfort zone, saying things she never believed in to avoid upsetting her daughter. “Why do you ask, honey?”
“I had a dream of a princess. She had silver hair and blue eyes. Her dress was so beautiful!” Dhalia sighed, grabbing a bite from a loaf of bread, the one that was meant for her mother.
Alissa kept her smile on her lips as her stomach rumbled. She would never deny her daughter food, even when that often meant she had to go days without a proper meal herself.
Alissa was one of the two hunters of Bryniard. It was her father who taught her to hunt on a particularly chilly night almost fifteen years ago. Before that day, Alissa had never ventured into the woods at the edge of town; it was too dangerous for children to be there unaccompanied. Her first memory of this moment defined who she was meant to be for the rest of her life. She held the bow and arrow in her small hands, her slight body almost giving way to the weight of the weapon, more than half her size.
She still remembered the sound of the arrow slicing through the wind right into the squirrel’s chest, the look in the animal’s eyes when the last breath came out of its lungs. The dark little eyes stared at her as if they had been betrayed. When its heart beat its last, Alissa cried desperately. She wished she could give its life back, but it was too late. There was no saving a life she had ripped apart herself.
Her father only gazed into her eyes, his large, rough hands squeezing her shoulders in sympathy. “You have to be strong, my child. We only do this to survive.”
Anyone would think that after the way Alissa sobbed at the killing, her father would dismiss her and do the other butcherous tasks himself, but that day, she had to do it all.
She had flinched at the sound of the little bones breaking and the warm blood, so much blood, dripping from her hands while she skinned it. She would never forget how slippery its body felt while she removed the organs, the way it looked like a completely different creature without all the fur. Alissa asked herself then whether she was any different from the terrible monsters who lived outside the walls in the tales she often heard.