Had there been a reason to live, Agrona never found it.
Perhaps, for better or for worse, her story should not be seen in such a dreadful way. For Agrona was once the woman all men would fall in love with. Slender, full breasts, golden hair that fell to her waist, eyes as bright as crystals. It was common that while dunking her family’s muddy clothes into the bubbly water or preparing water over a fire for tea, her father’s friends would find their way to her. Their hands would find her waist, her thighs, her calves, her stomach; anywhere and everywhere while her father lay slouched in the common room, drunk and without a care for her daughter.
Her father made it clear her body was not for sale. She was to be preserved for a wealthy man, to which none of her father’s friends were. Nonetheless, the attention only grew. And by the time she had turned seventeen, all men had taken their turn to touch her.
But never anything more.
The behavior was normal for Agrona, and she had grown so used to it that she started to love it. Craved it, at times. She had no choice but to love what was forced upon her.
She loved all things in her mundane life. Bathing her brothers. Cooking stew and bread. Filling her father’s liquor glass each night. Fetching water from the well. Sweeping the floors and tidying the small, cramped home. Daily prayers.
That was, until her life lost meaning altogether, on the night she had foolishly spent with a merchant’s son. That night had she sinned, and the next morning she was on the streets. No one in her family cared and threw her out just as quickly as she had come into this world.
However, there was one problem on the streets of Edinburgh: you could not live on them.
If anyone were caught sleeping outside past curfew, they would be hung. A way this kingdom found control when there perhaps was none.
So she wandered the first day alone, begging for scraps and for anyone to let her in. Her beauty was deadly, but no one fell for the girl. No one fell for the angel herself. So when the last bits of daylight crept behind the castle and the darkness swallowed the city, Agrona sauntered alone. The streets, bustling only hours ago, emptied like a cracked bottle. The cold Edinburgh air bit at her bare arms as she searched for any corner, any crevice to disappear into. She had nowhere to go, no home, and no one who cared if she lived or died.
The thought crossed her mind: Perhaps it would be easier if I did not wake tomorrow. But it was a fleeting thought, drowned by the gnawing hunger in her stomach and the raw ache in her legs. There was nothing easy about meeting Death, she reckoned, and she was not brave enough to seek him out.
But, like her prayers were answered, she met him. A tall man, cloaked in black, his face shadowed beneath a wide-brimmed hat. William, she learned later, moved with a quiet, unhurried confidence, as though the city belonged to him. His eyes—she could feel them before she saw them—pinned her in place.
“Lost?” His voice was smooth, lilting with the same accent as the city but richer, deeper, like the pull of the sea.
Agrona hesitated, her instincts screamed to run, but where would she go? There was no one. Nowhere. He took a step closer, his eyes catching the faint glimmer of moonlight—green, unsettling, yet oddly magnetic.
“I know a place for you to rest,” he continued, gesturing down the alleyway. “Warmth. Food.”
She should have said no. She should have turned and ran, consequences be damned. But the deadly hunger in her belly and the weariness in her bones made the decision for her. Nodding, she followed him deeper into the alley, her eyes darting to the shadows that seemed to grow taller and darker the farther they walked.
They found themselves under a bridge she did not recognize. Beneath it, William silently removed one loose stone. It was then, when he pulled back the stone, and the whispered voices grew, did she know exactly where she was.
~~~
The Vaults.
She had heard dark tales of the poor and the lost, of thieves and whores—those who had been driven underground, into the forgotten chambers beneath the city. It was said that once you entered, you might never see daylight again.
~~~
Agrona was taught to fear hell. Now, she was living in it.
She had begun to see shadows in the darkness. She would curl up, cowardly, in the corner, eating only what William had scourged for her. With no sun, no light, they were left to their primal instincts. Screams ripped through the stone walls and the air perfused with a dreadful smell of decay and feces.
Soon enough, William had used her. Her body. And she was discarded.
With nowhere and no one, she floated through The Vaults like a ghost. That is what she was, after all. But she knew that was not the life destined for her, and perhaps by luck, or misfortune, she met Caelan—young and rough and terrifying—who made one request: Kill someone for me and I will feed you.
Agrona would have never accepted such a request, but somewhere in her heart, after days of endless darkness and loneliness eating at her soul, she found herself agreeing. To survive, she told herself.
To survive.
That first kill—a girl around her age who ran away with one of Calean’s men—was easier than she had thought. The girl’s eyes—with a color she could not see—haunted her dreams, but that became a mere afterthought as time moved forward.
Each time she took a life, the darkness seemed to lift just a fraction, and with each death, she felt herself slipping further from the human she once was. She was slipping further down; down The Vaults to kill more for Caelan, down a pit of despair, and down a path of gruesome desires.
To survive.
She grew to appreciate this hellish reality, for the fear that she was so far in hell that heaven would only accept her if the Devil itself deemed her too sinful.
The beauty of death had never enthralled her so much. On the days she would be tasked with killing little boys who stole from her employer, she would take her time, plan the routes, deem the most fitting death, and then deliver their broken bodies to him.
She not only fell in love with power—the possibility of control never offered in her once useless life—but she fell in love with chaos.
Mortui Vivos.
The name they had begun to call her. At the time, she did not know what it meant. Even now, there is no proof she ever did.
The death teach the living—these filthy men called her. A reincarnation of the Devil itself. No one would question her. And soon, when she forged a mask of stone and wood to keep her identity hidden, no one remembered the beauty of the girl, and she, too, forgot what beauty meant.
The only beauty she knew was the final breaths of humans, the delicate decay of human flesh, the soft whisper of a soul slipping into eternal sleep, and the haunting grace of life’s last tremors echoing through the shadows as if the very darkness itself wept for the beauty of its own creation.
~~~
To live, she said to justify everything she had done. To live is to feel, she repeated. And to feel is to please no one but oneself.
~~~
Mortui Vivos no longer believed in the heavens. She could not believe when the light that once guided her had vanished—the light of another, or the simple touch of sunlight; she did not know. The heavens, with their promises of salvation and peace, had become a distant, laughable illusion. In their place, she had embraced the raw, untamed splendor of hell, where every whispered cry and every anguished plea became a symphony to please a thousand rotten ears.
Mortui Vivos no longer looked up to pray. She ventured to the lowest parts of The Vaults; where even the grandest lords were too afraid to go, to simply be closer to Him. So she could look down and thank Him personally for granting her the power to feel.
Mortui Vivos no longer recoiled from the grotesque forms that inhabited the deeper recesses. She welcomed their anguished faces as her audience; an audience to her prayers. The monstrous figures, with their hollow eyes and gaping maws, became spectators to her dance of death. The power she wielded, once so intoxicating, had evolved into an unholy communion with the damned. The cacophony of suffering was a divine orchestra; all of which orchestrated by her own hand.
Mortui Vivos did something she had never done before. She lifted her mask, revealing her once beautiful face now scarred and wretched and unlovable. At that moment, she embraced her reflection in a tarnished mirror—a visage of pure, unadulterated madness. With a throaty cry that shattered the silence, she plunged a dagger into her own heart. Not a plea for release, but in a final, bonding ritual, a way to become one with the eternal darkness she had become. As the blood pooled around her, mingling with the unholy filth of The Vaults, she laughed—a sound both jubilant and mournful that even I, at the very heart of my hell, ready to collect her, shuddered.