Over Reilang, the moon bled.

The gods were mocking the city. Perhaps it was revenge on the farmers who cursed them for the dry season, or retribution on a population that only prayed in the case of death and taxes. Nevertheless, it was cruel even for gods to hang a reminder of what they’d done among the stars.

Lore dictated that when the sun fell from sight and the moon emerged red, it was a sign that the gods were especially pleased with a recent sacrifice. Tonight’s sacrifice, however, had not been given, but stolen.

Rakeno intended to steal her back.

His calves burned with the strength it took to hike through the vines littering the base of the hill before him as he squinted to make sure each was truly a vine and not a viper expertly disguised in the dark. His heart thudded against his bones, more adrenaline than nerves—there was no time for doubts or deliberation. He had gods to outrun.

The air tightened as he ascended, and Rakeno couldn’t tell if the squeezing in his lungs was the product of altitude or fear. Paranoia must have been his punishment for defying direct orders from his new sovereign. 

As soon as the princess Sakiya had been pronounced dead, her stepmother had assumed the title of empress and issued the conditions of her sacrifice. She would be removed from the city in order to make sure that the divine wrath visited on her would be no one else’s to bear, and absolutely no one was to go see her until the morning, when she would already have been carried away to the underworld.

But Rakeno needed to see it. Everyone else in Reilang bowed their heads and accepted fear of the gods as if it was natural to quake beneath beings who did not even show their faces. Even when centuries had passed without a single tale of a sacrifice being taken during the blood moon, they held onto that fear with bated breaths until the sun rose on every eclipse.

No one had ever witnessed what happened when the gods collected a sacrifice. No one had ever been curious enough to try.

If it had been anyone else, Rakeno might have joined the rest of the servants in the imperial household tonight, but he was oddly unsettled by Princess Sakiya’s death. To Rakeno, death had always been unforgiving, ends met in agony and breath choked out in suffering. He had first confronted it the day the Blue Death came to his village to wipe out the entire population with no greater weapon than two puncture marks embedded in the throat, leaving no greater wound than blued veins and lips. Then, since coming to the city, he had witnessed every possible mode of human demise. Execution. Assault. Suicide. Axes. Fists. Poison. It was all the same, with the same stench of rot; a familiar damnation.

But something about this death was different. Maybe it was that he knew her too well; not in the way that intimate friends knew each other, but in the way that age knew death and clocks knew time: always bending, always serving. Or maybe he was the same curious boy he’d always been, reckless for knowledge and desperate for thrill.

The land beneath him began to flatten, and the vines gave way to dense foliage that gripped his legs with iron branches. Rakeno cursed as he struggled to rip his foot from an especially stubborn bush. It was a cruel taste of the new empress’s piety — she had chosen to leave Sakiya on this jungle of a hill to discourage someone like him from getting in the way of the gods. Devout fool. 

Trees began to overtake the landscape, so tall that not a sliver of moonlight fell through the canopy, and so closely arranged that maneuvering through them demanded agility more than sight. Rakeno stumbled between thick trunks and gnarled roots for a number of minutes until he finally detected a ray of light in front of him. He pushed himself forward, ready to seize whatever—

He froze. 

Everything about the scene before him was unusual. For one, he was standing at the edge of a grove so perfectly round that it could not have been the work of nature. All the grass and shrubbery within the circle had been eviscerated, and singes of smoke rose from small lumps of dirt. The emptiness was interrupted only by an ornate coffin jarringly out of place in the center of the clearing, its base gold and engraved, the lid glass and glowing.

Glowing with the outline of a girl.

Rakeno’s breath caught. She was just seven or eight yards away. He had planned to wait until the powers above came for their slaughter, but she was so close now, so taunting …

He didn’t even realize he’d been slowly inching closer until the glass was near enough to touch, and for the first time, Rakeno looked on the face of death and felt no repulsion. 

If anything, he was entranced. 

He traced a finger along the coffin’s surface to follow the softened shape of the face sealed beneath. The princess had never been abnormally striking in life, but in death she was otherworldly. Her night-black hair fanned out from her colorless face while her pale hands sat clasped at the fold of a flowing white dress embroidered with small flowers at the wrists and hem. With each faint flicker of the fireflies that dotted the night, he could have sworn her eyelids fluttered.

A twig snapped in the distance, and Rakeno was snapped back to his senses. Any second now, an angry god could descend in a blazing storm of thunder, and he would be within clear sight. He ripped his finger from the coffin as if it were a burning coal and turned to retreat back into the camouflage of the forest.

Just then, a series of taps reverberated through the air like rain on a metal roof—except the land was in the middle of its dry season, and precipitation was inconceivable. He glanced up to the sky, but it was still as ever, that cursed blood moon taunting him again.

Then the sound struck again, and Rakeno was convinced it was no figment of his imagination. The taps steadily became louder as he approached the coffin again, as if something in the air was threatening to shatter the glass.

No, not in the air—in the coffin.

Rakeno recoiled, every one of the hairs standing to attention on his body begging him to flee. Something was terribly wrong.

It wasn’t rain at all. It was the tapping of a fingernail. 

The princess’s eyes were open.

Tinged red, they darted frantically side to side while her body lay paralyzed. Rakeno could hear nothing over the beating of his own astounded heart. Was he hallucinating? Or had the dead princess come back to life?

Excitement seized him. Whatever he had discovered here—a botched assassination attempt, mishandling of an autopsy, perhaps even a premeditated interference in the line of succession—made him someone in a very unique position. The only other witnesses here were the gods and their crimson moon, and Rakeno was the only one of the three who would talk.

He was significant now, and he needed the girl if he wanted to be able to prove it.

He lifted the glass from its base and the princess shot up immediately, wrapping her arms around her ribs. She coughed violently, specks that seemed to resemble apple seeds flying from her throat. She clawed at her neck, chest heaving against shallow gasps, as if breathing took all the effort in the world.

Rakeno, who had jumped back when she rose, slowly inched towards her again. If she realized he was there, she didn’t care. Sakiya stayed where she was, eyes crazed and throat grasped. Her raven hair fell like a waterfall over the shoulders of her white dress, which now matched the shade of her own face. She looked strangely like the moon, as if she glowed from the inside; as if her veins ran empty and left her flesh to do nothing but reflect light.

Anticipation drummed in Rakeno’s chest. He could already taste the feast the empress would prepare in his honor, offering a toast to the brave servant who had once washed her nightclothes but was now the man who’d saved her beloved stepdaughter from a hellish fate. Maybe if he told her he’d brought the girl back to life himself, she’d even give him an honorary lordship.

He cleared his throat. “Your Highness? Can you hear—”

Slowly, Princess Sakiya turned to meet his gaze. Rakeno realized something when he met those eyes, suddenly more feral than ethereal.

She was not the moon. She was an animal.

It was instinct to run. Rakeno had never imagined what a boar felt when confronted with a hunter, though this might be the closest he would ever come to understanding it. There was no inherent malice in Sakiya’s person, but he knew to his bones that she didn’t need to possess ill intent to harm him.

It was not ill intent for predators to obey nature.

He turned to flee, realizing with a plummet of his heart that she was standing in front of him. He whipped his head back to the coffin, now deserted. How was that possible?

The only sound Sakiya made was the gentle tapping of bare feet against soft dirt as she edged closer to a paralyzed Rakeno with almost childlike curiosity. Her wide eyes were completely bloodshot now, the tongue she ran across dried cracks of her lips speaking to an overwhelming hunger.

He was hallucinating. He was sure of it. Dead girls didn’t wake up. Dead girls didn’t manifest before him. Dead girls didn’t take his arm, throw their heads back to reveal fangs three inches deep, and bite down on his wrist.

Rakeno must have screamed, though he didn’t hear it. All his senses had shut down, and all he could register was the pain in his veins, as if they were all being pulled to this one point in his wrist. He was glued in place by a power greater than his own will, unable to do anything but watch as Sakiya’s face slowly became fuller, as if absorbing life. His life.

Slowly, she lifted her head from his bluing wrist, wet lips crimson and gleaming. Her dark hair had become a halo, whipped around the crown of her head. The glow of her face was even brighter now, and when his vision became a tunnel of black, it was that glow that illuminated the path to the end.

The Blue Death had finally come, as Rakeno had always known it would. But he had never realized just how beautiful it would be.