Candied Secrets- A. Morozova

If madness had a name...

I had just waken up and I already knew something was horribly wrong.

Two days before, Madraya, Kaz and I had woken up to a fever shaken Jordie with angrily red pustules tarnishing the lily white of his face until it became almost unreckognizable.

He had already looked dead then.

And although it tore my heart into shreds, I had restrained a flailing and screaming Kaz from reaching his brother.

In that moment I had fully realised that the Rietveld brothers were Otkazats'ya, prone to sickness, prone to dying because their body was too weak to protect itself from parasites, unlike the Grisha.

I had to keep Kaz as far away from Jordie as I possibly could, even if it could haven been already too late.

The first thing I noticed was that Kaz wasn't in my arms anymore, the second thing was that the faint signature metabolism in the far off corner was gone.

I couldn't detect it anymore.

My eyes shot open as I frantically turned around.

Jordie's multilated chest wasn't moving.

I retched as I registered the smell was no longer comming from an unwashed boy, but from the decomposing corpse of a once familiar and beloved face, that was now distorted into a demonical grimace of rotting flesh.

Tears were streaming down my face as choked sounds of despair reached me through the sound of my uncontrollable gagging.

Kaz.

My eyes widened when I saw the pustules on his face as he wildly trashed about in his sleep, whimpering in pain.

Madraya stood over the corpse.

"He's not gone, Rose... Not yet, but it wouldn't take long if I ceased holding up his vitals." She softly mumured.

"I had to remove Kaz from you. The fever broke out in the middle of the night and he was going to hurt you and himself. The boy had sneaked out of your arms once you fell asleep and begged me to keep his brother alive. I couldn't keep him away, my Rose."

I saw her own tears streaming down her face as her Madraya's shoulders shook under the pressure of both trying to hold her grief in and trying to be our stronghold.

Aleksander.

It must have reminded her like it reminded me. The sense of failure as a mother... Her highest duty as a mother had been to protect her children... the biggest pain was to have to watch one of them perish in front of her eyes.

A child should never die before their parents, for it destroyed them.

But Madraya had been so incredibly strong when Aleksander died. She had burried him after we both washed his small body and I will never forget what she said once we had lied him down into the earth.

"We come from God and to him is the best return." It was the day I had decided to learn Merzost, that I needed to be Grisha, because Aleksander had been taken by the fever as well.

I didn't want Madraya to have to go though that kind of pain ever again.

Now she wasn't letting go. She couldn't, for she had promised, but all she achieved was that Jordie was rotting alive, suffering an unnatural and slow death.

His body wasn't capable of fighting anymore.

There had been no way to have Madraya heal him, Healers did not influence parasites, but humans and Jordie needed nutrients to build up strength. Nutrients that we barely had.