Divine Dragons Book 5: A Bride for the Death God
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Raven Flanagan
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220K
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15
Chapter 1
Book 5: A Bride for the Death God
Life didn’t mean to hate me, to leave me to wallow in my own misery. Maybe life wasn’t aware of its disdain for me, but it was there, and I felt it. So, I was left alone, shouldering the burden of my existence, the curse of my lineage, and the bitterness of a father who despised me more than life itself.
On a grim, cold winter morning, I encountered Death for the first time as a little girl, too naive to comprehend the world. My grandmother had been ill for a long time, so it wasn’t shocking to find her lifeless in bed. I tried to wake her for breakfast, but no matter how much I nudged her or called her name, she never woke up.
Grandmother was different from us. She wasn’t mortal like my parents. She was a water spirit, cursed with a terrifying power—a curse that wasn’t supposed to affect mortals. She had a child with a human man to prevent the curse from passing on to her descendants.
Despite her affliction, she was content. Then my mother met a man, and they had a child. A son who was born robust, healthy, and full of life.
Jonas was five when I came into the world. I was born quiet, motionless, and too tiny. My first time letting my father down, but definitely not the last.
So, I discovered my grandmother lifeless in her bed. We were always close, Grandmother and I. Maybe she knew she had passed something onto me from her lineage that she had hoped to avoid.
Something that her death triggered in me. Nothing activates a curse better than death.
At her funeral on a cold, rainy, gloomy day, I cried louder than the thunder overhead. My grief was so profound, so endless, that the mortal tether in my core snapped. A necrotic, nauseating power surged from my frail body and latched onto the first living thing near me.
Jonas, my brother, my guardian, my confidant, my only friend, bore the brunt of that unfortunate power surge. He was eleven when he fell in the frozen mud and never got up. I was six, and I still didn’t understand. But I had let my father down again.
For the second time, I encountered Death. He was always there, lurking in the shadows, watching—courting the tragic girl who would grow to relish the taste of blood on her hands.
Mother knew. She had to have known. She stopped looking me in the eye that day. Sometimes I struggle to remember the color of her eyes. I liked to think they were bright and blue, as radiant as a clear spring sky.
Regardless, I remember the sorrow that pulled her under until she was lost in its depths. Mother’s grief made her sick. It consumed her until she became as weak and frail as me, then even more so. She withered away before our eyes, and Father’s resentment intensified.
The third time I met Death was on a summer day. The sun was scorching, sweat dripped down my forehead and trickled down my back. I placed a handful of daisies on her fresh grave and made the long, hot journey home.
A shadow, a growl, a dark beast trailed behind me. It stayed out of sight, just at the edge of my vision, but I knew Death was there. But I was still lonely. So incredibly lonely.
Father drowned himself in alcohol, drinking as if it was the air he needed to survive. And I became the loneliest child in our small village, craving affection, love, and companionship. But I knew better than to ask for those things.
Grandmother was gone. Jonas was gone. Mother was gone. Father barely acknowledged me on the rare days he remembered I existed. Life despised me. If I deserved love and affection, it would be there. I wouldn’t need to ask for it.
I must have done something to earn the glares when I went into the village or the whispered insults behind my back.
“Monster.”
“Cursed.”
“Better off dead.”
My hatred for them grew, festering like an open wound in my heart as the years went by. I became a living ghost haunting my village. Some days, I had to drag my father from the bar where he drowned his sorrows or plead with the debt collectors not to harm him.
A living, frail skeleton they looked down on, spat at, and sneered at. And I despised them. I despised them all.
The day after I turned eighteen, I crossed paths with Death once more. That was the day I pieced together the puzzle of my life, understanding why I was destined to live alone, despised by everyone around me.
Dad was late getting home that night. The weather was stormy and unusually cold for the time of year. The clouds hid the stars and the moon, leaving me to navigate the familiar route to the local tavern by memory alone.
I found Dad in the back alley of the tavern, just as two burly men shoved him against a wall. His head hit the bricks with a sickening thud, and a primal instinct took over me—the same dark force that had surfaced at my grandmother’s funeral and had taken my brother from me.
My hand shot out, fingers curled like claws, but stopped mid-air. The man closest to my father froze as if turned to stone. His companion noticed, shaking him and shouting a name that I had since forgotten.
He wasn’t the first man I had hurt, and he wouldn’t be the last. But soon, he started to convulse, clawing at his throat. My eyes widened as I saw blood seeping from his eyes and ears, then trickling from his mouth.
When I clenched my hand into a fist, the man collapsed. A gruesome wet sound echoed as blood gushed from his lips and spread across the rain-soaked cobblestones.
I knew Death was there, lurking over my shoulder, silently observing the unfolding scene. He didn’t interfere, didn’t say a word. But his oppressive presence wrapped around me, pushing me closer to the horrifying spectacle.
The second man saw me.
“Cursed bitch,” he hissed, lunging at me with a small dagger.
I swept my hands in front of me, and he too became paralyzed. I could feel the power surging through me, a strange connection forming between me and this man. I could feel his heartbeat in my palms, his blood coursing through my fingers.
I was controlling him—controlling his heart, his blood. I had inherited my grandmother’s curse. I was a Bloodwielder, possessing the most feared and rarest of water spirit abilities.
But I didn’t know how to release him. How to free him from my terrifying power and let him go home. It was overwhelming, and yet not enough.
With his life in my hands and the taste of hatred and death lingering like poison on my tongue, I tightened my grip on my power and watched as his blood seeped from his pores. His tears were red as he choked on his own blood, stumbling as I drained him.
Then he collapsed next to his friend, gasping his last breath.
Dad had managed to get up, leaning against the brick wall, gasping for air. With the veil of innocence lifted from my eyes, I finally saw him for what he truly was. His wicked, greedy eyes said it all.
But I was desperate—so starved for attention, so hungry for a kind gesture, that I followed him. I trailed behind my father in the shadow of Death as he exploited me, manipulating my terrifying power to build his empire.
It was amazing how quickly the corrupt could rise to the top in a small, dirty world. Dad became a kingpin in a crime syndicate, and I was reduced to his obedient pet, always at his heels.
As long as he didn’t look at me with disappointment, as long as he tossed me scraps of affection, I stayed by his side, letting him use my horrifying ability to expand his rotten kingdom.
Because life had forsaken me, because happiness eluded me, I knew Death. Or at least I thought I did. How could I not when I had seen so many faces of death throughout my life?
Death haunted me, hunted me, followed me, I knew. And so, I spent my youth and teenage years cloaked in hatred.
But life didn’t want me, and hatred made me sick—Dad made me sick. Sick of watching people die. Sick of losing loved ones. Sick of the guilt and remorse draining the will to live from my very bones.
So, I knew Death. As well as any mortal could, I suppose.
Dad was nothing more than a thug with a sharpened tool at his disposal. I became a weapon, learning to savor the taste of blood on my hands. My world turned red, violent, and dangerous. My world became death.
Over the years, I found myself yearning for violence, much like lovers yearn for each other’s touch. It was a twisted desire that was fed by my father’s twisted form of love.
But, just like my grandmother, this power, this curse, was slowly killing me. It wasn’t a gentle death, either. It was draining me, sapping the strength from my muscles, the stability from my bones, and the warmth from my blood.
Every time I tapped into that power, I felt myself fading, withering away until I was nothing more than skin and bones. My reflection in the mirror was a pair of haunting hazel eyes.
My long black hair hung lifelessly around my shoulders, cascading down my back like spilled ink. My face was gaunt and hollow. But I could control the blood and hearts of others. That had to mean there was still some strength left in me.
Right?
But the whispered warnings followed me everywhere. “Beware of Brynna Hadeon. She’s wicked,” they’d murmur. “Cursed. Monster. Bloodwielder.”
Death was my constant companion, revealing another terrifying yet mesmerizing aspect of himself with each life I handed over to him. He was there for years, until I became numb to the act of taking a life.
I was the perfect weapon for my father to wield against his enemies.
I was his obedient servant, until I wasn’t.
Until the day I remembered that life had always despised me, and the sorrow that tore a hole in my heart. Until the day I opened my eyes to see the blood of an innocent person on my hands.
The day I turned against the one who had nurtured me, and the day I met my own end.
