Prologue
The epidemic started small, a tiny little disease. Everyone thought it was just another incidence of the common cold, but no. Everyone was wrong. There was no cure. No one knew what to do. If you walked out onto the streets, at any time of the day, you could see people kneeling on the cement sidewalks, holding their hands in prayer and their faces wretched. Or you might hear a shrill cry from one of the small mud-brick houses. And you would know this: another person, no, citizen, of Shiiandan has taken a brutal walk and arrived at the Hades’, lord of the dead, doorstep.

The curious thing is, however, you didn’t die in agony. There was no pain, well, at least not at the moment of death. There seemed to be some sort of hormone in the body that the disease activated that had the power to close a person’s eyes and have them die during their sleep. Or nap. And that was also the worst part. They died while they were sleeping. People in the girl’s town all thought this was a blessing from the all-powerful Zeus that the victims passed so peacefully. They thought it was a good thing that their loved ones passed in silence, in wicked quiet, as if their death was nothing more than the common everyday whispers of the wind as they brush up against a free-falling leaf, nothing more than one stitch done wrong in a flowing tapestry. And the girl thought that was the most horrific attribute of this… thing. The thing is, the disease had the power to mock death. It was pretend peace, and it was a lie. She hated it.

But the disease wasn’t too prominent in her immediate circle. Her family and friends were all safe. Of course, Shiiandan wasn’t a large city. Everybody within knew one another, like how all the birds in a migrating flock can interpret the calls of their kin amongst all the other white noise in the sky. Maybe the girl felt some degree of sadness when her neighbor’s friend’s grandpa died of the disease or when her best friend’s classmate did, but it never affected her person, not really. At the moment there were only about 50 cases of this happening to the town, but what really scared people was the fact that this never appeared on the news, and there was no known cure discovered, at least none by the town’s physicians, consisting of the almighty amount of… one.

So she had nothing to do with it. And she was grateful. Grateful to Hygieia, goddess of health and cleanliness. Grateful to Apollo, god of healing and medicine. Grateful to Hestia, goddess of the hearth and family, for keeping hers intact.
And she was loyal to her gods. She worshipped them. She did everything right. But the gods are fickle and it seemed that, one way or another, they simply wanted her to atone for some misdeed in her young life. And the gods always get what they want. Zeus commanded THE NOSOI (a Grecian spirit of illness, plague, or disease) to take on the form of a snake and set it loose in the girl’s house when everyone was asleep. THE NOSOI’S fangs were poisoned with the deadly unknown disease, and it proceeded to bite everyone in their beds. Strangely enough, the girl in question was nowhere to be seen. But the snake didn’t know this. Its commands were simply to go down to Earth and bite everyone who was sleeping in that household. It didn’t know that there was supposed to be another child. And when it completed its job, it left and flew back up to Mount Olympus.

And Zeus was proud of it. The creature purred and basked in the temporary love of Zeus, its master. Then fox-like Hermes, messenger god and secretly against Zeus’ idea to punish the girl, flew down to Earth and back in less than a minute. He returned with the news, that the girl was still alive. Zeus was irate, as furiously angry as the storm clouds which he ruled. He flung the snake down Mount Olympus, throwing its body far far away. The snake body formed the basis of the ever-famous Snake Mountain in present-day Vermont, but the spirit of THE NOSOI lived on and went back to the village in order to plague their souls even further.

The girl was horrified. She came back in the morning from a friend’s house, and what did she find? Her parents, her siblings, even her old grandmother ice-cold and stone dead, unmoving and lifeless as another simple insect carcass, no different from all the others that litter the ground like dewy raindrops on the grass after a rainstorm, numbered in the thousands. But afterward she arose from her dark black retreat deep inside her mind, plagued with gray guilt and deep blue depression. The process HAD taken several weeks for her to move on, past the sadness that reiterated in her bones with such resonance, the constant reminder akin to faint echoes in a cave in response to a child-like squeal, to the undulating ripples of water that arise after a heavy stone is dropped into the center of a pond- slow, steady, and endless. But she did it. She conquered the ugly feelings churning within, and when that happened, a new emotion emerged from the rubble. Determination. Not for revenge, as one might think, because the girl had no idea who, or what, “committed” the crime, and therefore revenge would be somewhat pointless and meaningless, but so that this disease that brought so much heartache, pain, and loss to the people of the city-town might never occur again.

She set out on a journey to ensure that the disease that had already claimed so many precious lives would never have the power to affect anyone ever again. With winged-footed Hermes as her guide, swift-footed Nike, hard-working Ponos, and bright-eyed Athena supporting her silently from the heavens, the girl trudged through the terrain of the land, alone, desolate, privy to nature’s disasters, but with a heart of steel, a backbone of iron, and the determination of a thousand men.

Chapter 1
Cry, Goddess, scream the determination of a single girl,
Unwavering, stolid, that would not break no matter the circumstances,
Crushing those against her furiously, relentlessly,
Loved by most of the gods, by strong Ponos, god of hard work; swift-footed Nike, goddess of victory; and bright-eyed Athena, goddess of wisdom and craft.
Begin, Muse, of what spurred this young one to set out on her journey
Disheartened, sad, and most dreadful of all, alone.

And so she plodded along the land, one foot in front of the other, never wavering, never failing, and always keeping in mind the goal, the destination. The girl moved on, thinking about her family while walking steadfast on the road. Her poor mother and father; her older sister and brother, who both had their lives planned so far out ahead; and her frail grandmother, who must have gotten everything she ever wanted in life: a stable job, a place to stay, steady income, healthy kids and healthy grandkids. But she still didn’t deserve to die just because she was finally happy. The disease, if ever personified, had a twisted sense of logic.

With a heavy heart, the girl stopped at a nearby inn to ask to stay for the night.

“Would you be so kind as to let me stay-“ she cast her eyes downward as she spoke and tried to look less threatening in her outfit so thoroughly smeared with dark mud.

“Get outta my sight, ya filthy girl! We can’t take no more stragglers ‘ere,” Loud, rude, and clothed in an enormous white apron, a lady walked out from behind the counter and smacked the girl on the head with a rolled-up newspaper, then walked out the door, the chime swinging gently behind her.

The girl made a face akin to wrinkling your nose at someone and turned to the second lady. Repeating her initial question, she asked, “I have money. May I stay the night?”

“Oh, of course, sweetie. You look so tired, how are you? Do you have any room preferences?” Dressed in an ankle-length dress, which was an inviting shade of yellow, the woman spoke so fast she was barely audible.

“Um… Yes, thank you. No, I’m fine. I don’t think so.” The girl mumbled then handed the nice counter-lady a few bills.

“Ok, so here’s your key, you’ll need it for the door. And bathrooms are around the main hall. We’ve got quite a recreation center too, if you want to try your luck there.” Overly enthusiastic, the lady dropped the key chain into the girl’s cupped hands. “Sleep tight!”

With a forced nod back, the girl dragged her pack over the carpeting until she reached her door. Digging in her pocket for the key, she inserted it, threw the door open, tossed her pack inside, and shut the door quickly. The automatic light flipped on, but with a flick of her wrist, the light dimmed. A thin stream of brightness came in from where the door didn’t quite touch the floor, but that was it. The room had been plunged into darkness, just like her heart.

It was the beginning. The beginning of the end.