He never told anyone, but Jack remembers everything.

“Why do I have to be quiet, Lee-Lee?”

Lee-Lee. That’s what Jack used to call Lyia when he was a kid. It took him forever to figure out how to make that “y” sound in her name.

“Hush, Pinny. Hush and pay attention.” Lyia’s face was set. A serious icing on a cake made of terror.

Jack had no idea what was going on at the time. She had to explain it to him later. All he knew was that something bad was happening. They had to get out and Jack had to keep his yap shut. He sucked at both of those. But it was to be expected. He was five.

The siege on the Shadowfold’s compound was sudden, but it wasn’t like it was unexpected. The Fold had put a mean dent in the number of new recruits for both the Karui and the Umbrati. Of course, they did it by killing folks before they could be conscripted. “Mercies,” they called them. Jack was part of the “they.” He might have been a little kid, but Jack was for-sure in the Shadowfold. He’d already started his training in soulmancy.

In any case, the Shadowfold had a pretty shitty solution to the whole conscription thing, but their body count wasn’t a fraction of what had been taken by the Karui and Umbrati. It wasn’t just their raids. Cities and mountains had been flattened for just being in the way during the huge battles they’d have. And as ugly of a solution as it was, the Fold’s approach was actually working. Fewer reports of raids. Battles reduced to skirmishes. The hope was that without a steady stream of new blood in the ranks on each side, the war could simply peter out. That it would go back to a time where although there was still fighting, it took place in the shadows, out of view for most people. At the very least, most folks might be able to return to dying on their own terms. They could avoid getting their souls dragged into a never-ending fight for the rest of forever.

But, again, none of that was on Jack’s mind at the time. He’d been in lessons that morning. The Fold’s compound had been under siege for about a week, attacked in alternating waves by raids from the Karui and then the Umbrati. The Shadowfold had supplies, though, and their perimeter was strong. They could’ve held out for months. So they kept to their regular routines like nothing was different. For Jack, that meant a morning of beginner magecraft drills. The folks in the Fold always liked to give fancy names to things. Magecraft was just their word for soulmancy.

An alarm had gone off during the morning lessons, but they’d been going like that for a few days. Jack and most of the children in his class had just gotten used to it. Still, they were all pretty restless. The teacher lady—she liked cats, so Jack remembered her as Teacher Meow—had told them to ignore the alarm and focus on imbuing their sets of glass beads. It wasn’t five minutes after that when Lyia busted in, fifteen years old and all out of breath. She had a look of panic in her eyes that Jack had never seen before.

“Crows.”

She said it like it was supposed to mean something. It didn’t to Jack, but it did to the teacher. She’d leapt to her feet in an instant and hissed, “Scatter!”

That was something the children did understand. Every kid in the class—there were about ten of them—dropped what they were doing and shot for their designated hiding places. Jack was the youngest, so his spot was the smallest; a little Jack-sized lean-to gap under a stack of portable shielding walls.

Lyia didn’t have a pre-arranged spot in the room, so she managed as best as she could. She grabbed one of the portable walls from Jack’s stack and crouched beneath it. She pulled a knife from her boot and held it, reversed grip. Jack called out to her in a five-year-old not-really-whisper.

“Hi Lee-Lee!”

She flinched at the sound of Jack’s voice. It’s unlikely that she even knew Jack was under the stack next to her. That’s when she told him to be quiet.

“But what’s going on, Lee-Lee? You look scared.”

“They think the Karui have activated the last of the Four. Now hush, Pin. Seriously.”

And Jack did hush. For at least a whole minute. But it was boring to just sit there with nothing to do. Waiting for some unknown scary thing to happen. Jack could hear some of the other kids from my class starting to fidget in their spots. Even Lyia had to adjust herself from a crouch to a kneel.

Jack couldn’t help himself. He had more questions. “How do they know it’s him? How do they know it’s Death?”

He could tell Lyia was agitated, but she still tried to give him a reassuring smile. She didn’t answer, though. And, really, she didn’t have to. The answer came on its own when they heard a pecking at the window.

At first it was just one set of pecks. A clacking, like someone throwing pebbles at the room. Then it got louder, and there were more of them. A lot more. There was so much tapping and pecking. It was like thunder that wouldn’t stop. Jack couldn’t hear anything else. He could’ve shouted at the top of his lungs and Lyia wouldn’t have heard him, even though he was close enough to almost touch her.

The rumble of pecks gave way to loud caws and a rackety flapping of wings as the windows shattered, salting the room with shards of glass.

Jack couldn’t see much from his hiding spot, but it sounded like the crows were everywhere. Their shadows oozed over every surface in sight. Everything they touched seemed to lose color and look sadder. Jack saw Lyia cower and try to make herself small. Her knuckles turned white from how tightly she gripped her knife.

That was the first time in Jack’s life that he was ever really scared. Like, truly, I-don’t-wanna-die scared. There were certainly times before that. Kids get scared all the time. But that’s the first time Jack really remembers. He froze. He couldn’t move even if he’d wanted to. He could feel his pulse thumping in his ears, and his stomach did cartwheels in his belly.

Jack has never gotten used to that feeling.

One of the crows hopped into the space between Jack and Lyia. He could tell it wasn’t a normal crow. Its eyes were the wrong color. And it moved strangely. It didn’t have the jerky twitch movements of a bird. It was smooth, almost casual, in how it looked around. But it was most certainly searching. Hunting.

The thing caught sight of Jack, and he could feel a searing, scorching pain at the top of his head, just at his hairline. He screamed and grabbed his head. His vision blurred. It could’ve been from the pain or the tears that were welling up. It didn’t matter; he just started bucking around in his hiding spot, like a panicked baby cow. Jack didn’t know it then, but that’s when he received Death’s Mark.

A second later, the pain was gone. Jack stopped moving and looked across the gap at Lyia. The bird was still between them, but it wasn’t moving anymore. Lyia had taken care of it. She’d stabbed the tip of her knife right through that creepy bird’s head. She let go of the knife immediately like it burned, leaving it buried in the crow.

The two of them stared at each other for a moment, not sure whether they were saved or screwed. A long stretch of Lyia’s hair looked like it’d turned white. Jack had no idea at the time that a bit of his had done the same. In any case, their moment didn’t last long.

A bloodcurdling scream cut through the din of feathers and cackles. It was Teacher Meow. Her hidey-hole was at the center of the room, not far from Jack. He chanced a peek out from his spot despite Lyia shaking her head that he shouldn’t. Jack didn’t particularly like putting his head that close to the dead crow between them, but he just had to see what was going on.

He was better off not knowing.

Teacher Meow was right there. It’s likely that she’d lost her nerve and had stepped out to try and escape. But she wasn’t alone. Standing in front of her was the Reaper. Death. Old Wrinkles himself. Of course, Jack didn’t know it was Wrinkles back then. He never saw the Reaper’s face. The hood of his big black cloak was drawn up and the rest of the thing was flapping everywhere, surrounded by the beating wings of flying crows all around. All Jack could see was a hint of his wiry beard sticking out.

Teacher Meow didn’t even try to put up a fight. She turned in Jack’s direction and bolted for the door. It was no use. Death’s scythe was already out. She didn’t make it two steps. Faster than fast, there was a blur near her neck and it was over. Her legs kept moving, but there was no control, no direction. Her momentum carried her body crashing into Jack’s and Lyia’s hiding spot. Their lean-tos held, but Teacher Meow’s additional weight, small as she was, trapped them in place. Her body slumped down over the gap between Jack and Lyia, shrouding them in her frail shadow.

They weren’t in complete darkness, though. Light leaked through at the top as the teacher’s head rolled forward. But it didn’t stop where it should’ve. It kept going and dropped right off her neck. The mass of it bounced off the stabbed crow’s carcass and thumped to a stop.

Her eyes were still open, staring at Jack. A terrified look of shock was frozen on her face.

It took a bit for Jack’s brain to register what had just happened. He caught himself staring back at his teacher’s stock-still face, wondering when she was going to blink. Things didn’t really sink in until Jack looked up to Lyia, thinking that maybe she had an answer.

She didn’t.

Lyia’s hands were clapped over her mouth. She shook like she was an ice cube holding back a scream. Tears flooded the bottoms of her eyes. It was at that point that Jack noticed the blood. It’d sprayed out from Teacher Meow’s neck and splattered against the wall. But it didn’t stay there. There was so much. The blood slid down the wall, into and on their lean-tos. It dripped all around them, forming a pool around the crow and Teacher Meow’s head.

It’s amazing how sometimes a person’s senses don’t always notice things at the same time. Jack was suddenly hit with the nastiest stink. He hadn’t learned yet that most people end up shitting themselves when they die. This was a hell of a way to learn that. Jack felt so sick. He mirrored Lyia, clamping his hands over his mouth. Thanks for the lesson, Teacher Meow.

Jack and Lyia exchanged a look. That may have been the moment where everything started going wrong. Jack was pretty sure her look meant something like, “There’s no way we can stay here,” while his own look said, “Sure we can.”

The worst of it was that it didn’t stop there. Teacher Meow was just the first. From where Jack and Lyia were, they couldn’t see what was going on in the room. But they could hear. The roar of the crows had gone away and was replaced by the crying and screaming of Jack’s classmates. There were more thumps on their lean-tos. It seemed that the Reaper had decided that Jack’s stack of shielding was the best place for piling up bodies.

Jack looked up at the gap in front of Teacher Meow’s neck where her head should’ve been just in time to see the head of one of his classmates land in the space. Orris was his name. His bushy little head nearly blotted out the rest of what little light Jack and Lyia had left. But Jack could still see Orris’s eyes staring down at him. Tear-filled. Confused. His mouth gaped soundlessly. It was like he kept silently asking, “Why?” Why was he and everyone else dead while Jack somehow was still alive?

Jack has no idea why the Reaper never found Lyia and him. Maybe it was the shielding walls they were under. Maybe it was the mound of bodies over them. Maybe Death is just a lazy old fuck. Who knows? The only thing that’s certain is that it got very quiet after that. No crows. No screams. No thumping of bodies. Just the steady drip into the growing puddle of blood between Jack and Lyia. They stayed there, trembling scared, for longer than either of them will ever know.

But it was after they finally crawled our way out, clawing through bodies and blood and filth, that they really started to understand the size of things. The stink of death was everywhere. The Reaper had killed the whole Shadowfold compound, their whole town. How was he able to do that so fast?

There were corpses everywhere they looked. Steam raised off them, forming a muggy evening fog over the whole place. A miasma of souls. That’s actually where Jack learned that word. Miasma. Even the sound of it seeps out of your mouth like it doesn’t want to be there. Lyia taught it to him. She’d tried healing half a dozen folks that hadn’t fully died yet, but it was no use. They were gone. Everyone.

Gone.

It’s something Jack will never forget.