Twenty years passed. Or thirty? I stopped counting winters. For us immortals, time had frozen. Zariil still sculpted ice figures, and my face in the reflection of the frozen lake remained young.

  But humans…

  I watched those I had known as children grow old. I watched my favorite storyteller from the tribe—the boy I once saved from a wolf—turn into a frail old man. I held his hand as he died.

  “Why don’t you grow old, my lady?” he whispered with his last breath.

  “Because I am cursed,” I answered.

  His death hurt me more than losing my wings.

  And then Mortis came. The Fourth Brother.

  He did not come with fire or a sword. He came with wind.

  Within a week, humans began coughing blood. Elves were covered in black sores. Dwarves choked in their caves. I fell ill too. My body burned, my bones ached, my skin blackened.

  But Father’s curse—“Eternal Life”—would not let me die. I rotted alive, regenerated, and rotted again. It was endless torture.

  “We can’t do anything!” Zariil shouted, trying to freeze the disease, but it lived even in ice. “There are too few creatures left! In a month there will be no one!”

  But then the Impossible happened.

  A human. A weak creature with a sixty-year life. A herbalist named Aro, with no magic and no divine blood. He mixed roots, snake venom, and mold. He did not pray. He thought.

  And he created an antidote.

  The medicine was bitter, but it worked. Humans began to rise. Elves adopted the recipe. Mortis, the Archangel of Death, was defeated not by a God, but by the human mind.

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  And then the sky split.

  A meteor fell not far from us. Zariil and I rushed there. Mortis lay at the bottom of the crater. He was not frightening. He was pale and translucent, like melting mist. He only stared at the sky with empty eyes.

  “No! Mortis!” Zariil cried, dropping beside him. “Why?! You’re an Archangel!”

  Mortis turned his head. His voice rustled like dry leaves:

  “I am bound to them, brother. My power is their death. But they defeated my power… By killing them, I was killing myself. And now that they survived… I am no longer needed.”

  The air heated. Ignis appeared. He wasn’t laughing. He wasn’t mocking. He stood and watched our brother die.

  I saw a single tear roll down Ignis’s soot-streaked cheek. It hissed as it fell onto the heated stone.

  “Farewell, brother,” Ignis said quietly. “You were too kind for this work.”

  He vanished in a flare of flame, unable to watch the end.

  Mortis drew his last breath. His body began to darken and twist. Before our eyes, the beautiful (though pale) youth became a horrific, pulsing black cocoon.

  “What is that?” I whispered, stepping back.

  CRACK.

  The cocoon split. A soul did not fly out.

  A flood of creatures poured out.

  Thousands of black spiders, snakes with venomous fangs, scorpions, centipedes. All the filth of the world—all poisons and diseases—took on flesh. They scattered in every direction, hissing and clicking.

  Mortis did not vanish. He broke apart into millions of little deaths.

  Zariil covered his face with his hands and wept.

  Suddenly the wind died. Dust hung motionless in the air. A vortex began to form—black, but not evil. Calm.

  And from the vortex stepped him.

  Darkness.

  Uncle looked tired. Shadows lay under his eyes; his mantle was frayed, as if he had passed through thousands of battles.

  He came over and laid a hand on the sobbing Zariil’s shoulder.

  “Don’t cry, Iceborn,” Darkness’s voice was deep as the ocean. “He found peace. Unlike us.”

  “Uncle Darkness?” I breathed.

  “Yes, little rebel.”

  “Where have you been? Father exiled you…”

  Darkness let out a heavy sigh.

  “My fate is hard, Lucida. After Krav’s fall and ten years of hunger, hundreds of thousands of souls poured into Hell. All of them… are dark. They are angry at Father, filled with pain. I have to hold this chaos back so it doesn’t spill out again.”

  He looked at the spiders scattering.

  “Now there will be more work. The souls of those bitten by these creatures will be full of poison.”

  He began to dissolve into the air.

  “Take care of yourselves. Ignis is frightened by Mortis’s death. And a frightened beast bites harder than anyone.”

  And he was gone.

  Zariil and I were left alone among the shards of the cocoon. We returned north in silence. The world had changed forever.