Part 4

Sirene knew in her heart what she was about to do was for the best, but it didn't make her feel any better about it. To kill nearly sixty people, people she had known for her entire life, just to spare them the agonizing death of this disease. People who had already suspected her for causing this, and had just burned down her home with the bodies of her parents still inside.

The first person she saw was someone she had long considered a friend, the next door neighbour who always shared his extra crops with them. The rage in his eyes when he saw her walking out of the woods gave her the resolve to go through with this.

"Die!" Sirene shouted, and he simply ceased to live. He fell over, the light gone from his eyes forever.

Sirene stopped in her tracks. It really was that easy. She really could kill with a word if there was killing intent behind it. She decided to look for the young boys who had been bullying her.

Sirene moved from house to house in the village, extinguishing the flame of life household by household, and even taking some sadistic joy in those who had bullied her or otherwise wronged her, torturing them by killing their family one person at a time while they were forced to watch.

It took hours, but finally, she was done. She was the last person left alive in this village. She walked to what was once the town square, and looked around. She did feel sad when it was over, wondering why it had to come to this. Slowly, she walked back to her parent's farm, and to the smouldering ashes of her home. She sat in the rubble for some time, quietly reflecting on her life, when Eigengrau arrived.

"Does my apprentice have regrets?" Eigengrau asked, sitting next to Sirene. "It is only natural, those feelings are what make you human."

"Does it ever get easier?" Sirene asked quietly.

"No. But you get to the point where it does not bother you as much." Eigengrau said, smiling sadly. "There is a single other spell I need to teach you."

"Do I want to know it?"

"It is to close the loop. A spell to let you look as young or as old as you wish. Permanently." Eigengrau replied.

"Close the loop?" Sirene asked, confused. "What's that mean?"

Eigengrau shook her head. "I cannot tell you. Not yet. Go and explore the world, Sirene. There is much beyond this doomed village. Your parents truly loved you, Sirene. They whispered to me as they passed, so hold no regrets for their death, only joy for their life."

When Eigengrau finished speaking, she stood up and carved a mark on a burned timber. She pointed at it, then walked away into the woods. Sirene sat in the burned house throughout the night, interrupted only by occasional pacing. She experimented with the spell Eigengrau left her, but without a mirror she could only judge based on what she could see with her eyes.

In the morning, Sirene buried her parents. She couldn't find much of them, but they deserved it. She marked their graves with wood stakes, and resolved to keep visiting the graves for as long as she could remember their location.

Known to nobody except Eigengrau, the location of their graves is now the graveyard outside of the Hissing Lobster in the Dragontail Mountains, and is the reason she returns to the Inn every winter, and has for hundreds of years. The Inn itself was built nearly seven hundred years after they had died, but it's made it easier on Sirene for the three months out of every year she visits her parents, and has for the past two thousand years.