Jemima Wroughtforth had not intended to raise such armies as she had.

She was young when the blight began, scarcely twelve when the crops began to fail and she was placed under protection of Talontar nunnery in order to secure her future. Her mother, an abbess, her father, cast out when he refused to cull his cattle when they succumbed to the Reaper’s Malady.

Where the Malady went, so did they. Jemima thought it something like beauty—the way the Malady had eaten through flesh and flowerstem like it was its to take. The way the resilient appeared to stand stronger in a field of its peers’ corpses.

The first of her convictions was cemented when she had plucked the wiry fibers from a vine, flowers withered and dead, stem green and healthy, and sewn it into her prayer robes. It was the perfect manifestation of her Goddess, Talona, Mistress of Fever, the perfect incarnation of her Holy miracle of inoculation.

That was the balance of nature, Jemima decided. The Reaper’s Malady was a blessing, a test to all of humanity, where the weak would fall and the strong would emerge even stronger.

Jemima Wroughtforth did not preach, not at first.

She was too strange in the way children are when they have seen death too young to make sense of it to wield any power then. The nunnery kept her busy with chores: grinding herbs, boiling linens, carrying buckets of water that steamed with the scent of vinegar. She did these without complaint, without the little flinches the other novices made when a corpse was carried past.

Fear, she had decided, was for the unchosen.

She wore it stitched into the hem of her prayer robe, a thin, wiry thread of green pulled from a plant that should have been dead. The other girls whispered about it, and the older sisters frowned, but no one stopped her. Talona’s faithful were accustomed to strange devotions.

It was Sister Marwen who first asked.

“What is that on your robe, child?”

Jemima looked up from the basin she was scrubbing. “It survived,” she said simply.

Marwen blinked. “Survived what?”

“The Malady. The flowers died. The stem lived. It was chosen.”

***

The next time Jemima preached, it was a complete accident: not meant to be heard by any ears other than her own. She was kneeling beside a dying man, a farmer whose lungs rattled like seeds in a dry gourd. She held his hand, no gloves, no barrier, and whispered to him as he struggled for breath.

“You are not being punished,” she murmured. “You are being measured.”

The man’s wife heard her. By evening, three people had asked Jemima what she meant. By morning, ten. She did not know how to answer them.

“The Malady reveals strength,” she said. “It shows who is meant to endure.”

It was not a proclamation. But the nunnery was full of frightened people looking for meaning, and frightened people cling to certainty like drowning men to driftwood.

***

Two weeks later, a novice fell ill. Her name was Lysandra — a girl Jemima’s age, soft‑spoken, always humming.

Jemima sat beside her cot, watching the sweat bead on Lysa’s brow.

“She is strong,” Jemima said.

Sister Marwen snapped, “She is dying.”

Jemima shook her head. “If she dies, she was not meant to remain. If she lives, she will be stronger.”

Lysandra died that night.

And in the morning, the sisters whispered:

“Jemima said it was her time.”

“Jemima knew the Goddess’ will.”

Jemima did not correct them. She did not know how.

She only knew that, weeks later, when the nunnery’s roof leaked under the weight of the storm, they would listen to her again. The sick moaned in chorus with the sisters, bickering about whether to move the patients or risk the rainwater spreading the infection.

Jemima stood, lifted her chin, and said:

“Let the water fall. Talona will take who she chooses.”

The room fell silent then, like the prayer hall during worship. The nuns dispersed and the rain continued to fall — two died by morning.

The rain fell.The sick coughed.Two died by morning.

And the sisters said:

“She was right.”

“She knew they were too weak.”

“She sees the balance.”