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.