A shadow fell over her. Her hands stilled momentarily before she continued with her embroidery, fingers trembling slightly.

“The sacrifice was returned.”

She closed her eyes. So her sister was dead. Washed up on the rocks, probably, long dark hair tangled like seaweed around her pale face and large eyes closed in death. Her sister had been one of the loveliest girls for miles around though there weren’t many left. All of the young and beautiful were dead.

And now it was her turn.

They dressed her in pure white robes, like she was going to a funeral, not her own wedding. Perhaps it was one and the same.

Village women she had known all her life brushed her dark hair, rubbing oil into it, twisting and braiding and lifting as they slid three long golden hairpins with small bells into the coils. Her hair ornaments were her only decoration, a parting gift of sorts from the village. Her small earrings that had marked her transition from childhood and the slim bracelets that had been a birthday gift from her father the year before were all taken from her by gentle, firm hands. One powdered her face, not quite meeting her eyes. They were silent.

She no longer belonged to them.

Once she entered the palanquin, she would no longer be Hwang Miyoung. In death, she would only be one of the many who had died to try to save their village, a nameless sacrifice. It was easier for those who had offered her to forget their own guilt and loss by pretending the dead had never existed. She understood that. But it still hurt, to imagine that after years without the mention of her name or the recall of her presence, even the very memory of her would cease to exist.

Miyoung didn’t want to be forgotten.

Light fingers pressed crimson paint onto her lips. They trembled. Her mother was crying, tears leaving shimmering trails down her cheeks even as she prepared her youngest daughter for what should have been a merry occasion.

It was cruel for a mother to have to send two daughters to their death.

Miyoung’s heart ached even as her own eyes filled with tears. This was one person who would not forget her, but Miyoung regretted the pain her death would cause.

She willed herself to be brave, trying to comfort her mother as she reached up to wipe the tears from the older woman’s face. Even in sorrow, she could see the beauty her mother used to be, that her older sister had inherited, that she was barely growing into.

Beauty was a curse for the women in their family.

“Maybe he will choose you,” her mother whispered, though her voice faltered. All of them had seen the countless other sacrifices who had been rejected, pale, slender bodies tossed onto the beach carelessly by the harsh waves. “You’re beautiful….perhaps—”

Her voice had failed her then, and she had pressed her face into her sleeve like a child before sympathetic hands had ushered her from the room. Miyoung knew she would not see her mother again.

Her sister had been beautiful too.

They led her to the palanquin, helping her arrange the plain white skirts around her before carefully shutting the door. It was dark inside, the air stifled and unmoving. The curtains had been drawn—perhaps to make the parting less sorrowful for both sides, to make the sacrifice a faceless one, to make the village only a place in her memory before she even left.

She can paint the scene in her mind’s eye: the villagers lining up in their doorways, faces solemn, eyes filled with the oddest mixture of guilt and hope and relief. Guilt, because one barely a child was being sent to an early grave in exchange for a chance at obtaining divine blessing. Hope, because if she was accepted as a sacrifice, the storms on the seas would stop and the fishermen could fish and the rains would come on the land and the farmers could plant. Relief, because at least, it was not one of their daughters who was taken.

And she cannot find it in herself to condemn them. When her sister left, Miyoung had cried because it was her sister, and also because it was her sister and not her.

A lone drum started, a harsh tattoo of sound that beat a rhythm the men carrying her palanquin moved to. Farmers, fishermen, hunters….men she had known all of her life. Men whose daughters and sisters had played with her as children, men who had given her little treats during festivals or joked about having her marry their sons.

She would never marry or have her own family.

Her fingers trembled and she gripped her skirts, if only to make herself stop shaking. She could feel her heart slamming against her ribs; her eyes were burning with the threat of tears. Perhaps this was really why they closed the palanquin: to allow the intended sacrifice to mourn their own death.

In the privacy of her shadowy palanquin, she sobbed silently, because Miyoung did not want to die.