The children were the first to succumb, and Khloye the first of them all. Thalea looked on, arms thrust towards her young daughter as she thrashed, trying with all her small might to break free of the stone.

“Mama, Mama, Mama!” Khloye cried, not understanding why her legs would not budge, and why her mother had not comerushing to help. She longed for Thalea in the way all babes long for their mothers—instinctually, desperately, utterly.

Thalea’s soul splintered, if souls could do such a thing, when she realised there would be no saving her child. Not this time. Not when her own feet were fused to the ground.

“Khloye…” Thalea rasped, as the rising tide smothered her daughter’s mouth, no longer screaming, but open, silenced by the kind of fear that makes statues of us all.

The red mass of it crept over her freckled nose, her tear-streaked eyes, until nearly every part of her turned to stone. The last Thalea saw of her daughter were the tips of her chubby fingers, outstretched towards the sky in an unanswered plea to be carried and held.

Her boundless grief had nowhere to go—a cry stuck in her throat, unable to erupt from the pit of her chest. All she knew was that ithurt: the plague; burning, burning, burning up her legs. The hurt of Khloye, now cold, hard rock. The hurt of knowing what came next…inevitability.

The first blood plague arrived in the spring, but it was not the last.