Princess Trianna wrung her hands with despair and indecision as she saw yet another cloud of black smoke rising over the gray city that had seen so many troubles lately. Her city, well, her family’s anyway. Until this year, it had been a beautiful place for all of her young life, but now it was a horror show.

Worse, if the rumors were to be believed, the rest of the kingdom was in dire straits. Spring was all but over, and there were reports from the south that fields were still choked with snow. It wasn’t her place to worry about such things, of course. She was sure her father had everything well in hand, but then she’d always thought that, and she’d never had to watch the city burn from her own window.

“It’s probably just another tenement fire, so I doubt anything of value was lost,” Zathenia said, not bothering to look up from her needlepoint. “My father says the refugees are cramped in there like sardines, and if anyone forgets to extinguish a lantern or a cooking fire, the whole place goes up like matches.”

“As if the people in those buildings have anything to eat,” Melania chimed in, smirking, “They’ve probably out of dogs and cats at this point, so if there’s anything left to be cooked, I’d say they’re down to cripples and orphans.”

“Melania!” Zethenia gasped, scandalized. “How can you say such awful things?”

“I’m only saying what everybody says,” the girl said with a shrug with a shrug and a smile.

The Princess could only shake her head at that. It used to be that Zethenia had been the more incorrigible of her two ladies in waiting. She’d always been so boy crazy, but something about the troubles that were facing the world and the beautiful city of Rakhin had mellowed her out while they made Melania ever morose by the week.

It was all too much, but Princess Trianna could hardly ignore the problems. After all, as of a few weeks ago, the hunger had finally reached even the high table in the form of smaller dinners and no lunches at all.

The criers said it was so that the King could stand with the people in their hour of need, but the truth was far simpler: the granaries were nearly empty. All it had taken was a single winter of hardship and refugees, and now famine was already stalking them.

She could see the hunger in her face when she looked in the mirror. The King had promised that the mages he’d hired would ensure a bountiful harvest; normally, such a promise would have been enough, but then these weren’t the stately grand maguses of Abenend. These were hedge wizards and worse.

In any normal year, her father would have burned men like this at the stake to curry favor with the church, but then, there was no church now. At least, there wasn't a functional one, she corrected herself. The buildings were still there, and many of the priests remained, but they had neither miracles to give nor insights to offer.

“Close the window, Princess,” Melania said finally, rousing her from her fugue state. She had no idea what she’d missed of their conversation in the interim. “It’s getting cold out, and you’ve only just gotten well again.”

The Princess did as she was instructed and returned to her embroidery, but no peace came from the gentle activity. She would have given anything for the laughter and gossip that Zethenia had overflowed with last year to make a return, but sadly, it was not to be. Instead, every topic was glum. If it wasn’t about the city, the church, or the starving masses, it was a topic that was somehow adjacent.

“My father says the rats are getting worse,” Zethenia said finally. “Can you imagine a rat the size of a dog?”

“Why would he tell you such awful things,” the Princess asked.

“Oh, he didn’t,” she laughed. “I was snooping, you see. He was telling my brother about how one of his guards had been on the lower levels and lost a leg to—”

“Hush!” the Princess commanded. “You’ll give me nightmares.”

She picked up her pillow and began working on another of the yellow daises she was sewing on it to calm herself, and then she turned to her other lady in waiting instead. “How about you, Melania? Surely you must have some juicy gossip to share that doesn’t involve legs or rats or anything else that’s full of awfulness?”

She was quiet for a moment, uncharacteristically quiet. It was only after Princess Trianna looked up at her that she started to speak. “I heard an interesting story two days ago, actually. It's a sort of myth or prophecy, but it’s much too dark to share with you, my lady. You would certainly have nightmares.”

“A prophecy?” the Princess asked. “But all the priests have lost their sight. How could there be a new prophecy?”

“Those poor priests can’t even say when the sun will rise,” Zethenia smirked. “I pity them. The ladies of Lunaris still speak to their Goddess, though, do they not? Perhaps such a thing is her work or one of the lesser cults.”

“I think that a prophecy from the moon Goddess would be filled with more hope,” Melania smiled sadly. “Alas, I have none to give. That’s why I think that I shouldn’t—”A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“Oh, don’t be like this,” Zethenia said. “Spill it. The Princess wants to hear it, don’t you, my lady?”

“I do,” she said tentatively. She wasn’t sure if that was true, though. She did want to hear anything to get her mind off that terrible rat joke that Zethenia had told, even if it couldn’t have possibly been true.

Melania’s eyes twinkled then like she was considering holding out on her friends a while longer, but instead, she sat down her sewing and leaned forward. “If I tell you this, you must swear not to tell anyone. Not your priest. Not your father. If the wrong people found out this story, then the poor washerwoman I heard it from would get beaten quite severely, and the poor dear has given me such wonderful charms over the years. I want only the best for her.”

Both of them promised of course, though Zethenia did want to know if she was a worshiper of Oroza as she was a washerwoman, but both of her friends laughed at her for that.

“The Oroza River is hundreds of miles from here,” Melania teased. “I do not think she goes that far each day to wash my petticoats. She worships our own river Narridar, as most of the right-thinking servants do, and to the best of my knowledge, there’s never been any evil to be found within it.”

The Princess nodded at that and was about to ask about the prophecy, but her lady-in-waiting continued. “None of this has to do with what I heard, though. This is not a river prophecy. It's the kind of warning that would get you burned in the square if Siddrim’s flock were still with us. It's a prophecy of darkness and a warning delivered in dreams. Knowing all that, are you sure you still wish to know? It won’t be on my if you have nightmares over this.”

They both insisted they were ready, so Melania plowed ahead. “There’s a certain story that travels from servant to servant and from household to household, even if no one tells each other. It is not spread by whispers. Instead, it is spread by the night and the spirits that fear the light. Some say it started far to the west, and others say it comes from somewhere to the south, where the dead have risen and—”

“Those are just stories,” the Princess interrupted. “If the dead had risen, my father would have raised an army already.”

The fact that he was in the midst of raising an army, or that he sometimes looked incredibly afraid after discussions with his generals, were beside the point here. Her father had told her that there was no evil magic, and that he was merely raising men to defeat the rising tide of banditry, and she believed him.

“As you say, my lady,” Melania nodded. “Wherever the story comes from, it is always the same. The shadows warn a village or a town or a city: ‘Give us your strongest. Give us your bravest. Give us your most revered, or doom shall befall all who live here.’ It’s a terrifying thing, but according to the rumors spread by merchants and travelers, the worst thing about it is that it’s true.”

“True?” Zethenia asked. “True that the people in these places are killing their own, or that doing so averts the promised doom?”

“Both,” Melania said with a smile that the Princess felt like a punch to the gut. “The places that ignore the rumor curse the day they did, but many of those that are forced to sacrifice so much to save themselves curse that too. Wives kill husbands. Children kill mothers. People do whatever they have to to get through this awful winter, and if they don’t, then one day, disaster befalls the village, and everyone dies anyway. There’s no happy ending to this story. Sometimes everyone dies, but most of the time, even the survivors are still miserable.”

“What a dreadful story,” Princess Trianna said, struggling not with the actual words but with the feeling of dread they had given her.

“I agree,” Zethenia said. “It’s absolute rubbish. There’s no way so many good people would kill someone close to them just because of the story.”

“Probably not,” Melania agreed, “But you wanted a rumor to pass the time, and now you have one. Maybe next time you can think of a better story for us instead.”

They returned to their sewing, but the Princess wasn’t able to escape those terrible thoughts. She could tell herself that what her lady-in-waiting had said wasn’t true all she wanted, but even if she believed that urge, some part of what it had said resonated. If it wasn’t the actual truth, it was certainly close, and that was frightening to think about.

That night, dinner was a somber affair, as it usually was. Soups had replaced salads with almost every meal now because fresh vegetables were in such short supply. At least the thick slices of bread were good, though.

It used to be that Princess Trianna didn’t much care for them, but now she ate as much as she could without appearing greedy. Her plates had never been so clean, but then the portions had never been smaller. She listened to her father drone on and on about tax revenue and requests from the Bishop but mentioned absolutely nothing that might lead her to believe the world was ending.

Once, she worked up the nerve near the end to ask him about the fire she’d seen earlier, but he merely shrugged. “I was told that nothing of importance burned down, and no one that mattered was harmed by the deputy guard captain,” he said with a shrug. “I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s only a few less mouths to feed. Nothing more. Already, the weather is turning, and things shall straighten right out.”

She wanted to believe him, of course. Her brothers did, and her mother seemed to, too. Still, she worried. Something was very wrong. She’d felt it for weeks now, but Melania’s prophecy had clarified it. Those dark words had crawled up into her ear and made themselves right at home.

That night, she dreamed of the hunger spreading through the city. She watched herself waste away in the mirror as it happened. The rats boiled up out of the sewers and the tunnels, and they chewed away at the walls of the buildings, only they began to shrink. Day after day, the city got smaller. The castle was affected too, and eventually, her high tower window was only a few feet above the stinking cesspool that was the rat-filled streets.

That was when she woke up, just when her sill had gotten low enough that the rats were trying to crawl inside her rooms. She would have kept them out, but she was too weak from starvation by then and practically a skeleton herself.

That wasn’t what she thought about, though, as she lay there in her sweat-soaked nightgown, though. She didn’t think about the rats or her beautiful body wasting away or anything. All she could think about was how her father had stayed pleasantly plump on his throne right until the end. Even when the city had been reduced to rubble and a seething sea of vermin, he still sat there amiably on the throne, and all she could do was wonder at what that might mean.