Six Scorched Roses

its.brittanyb
May 24
9 min read

“I suppose that once someone has seen my bare ass, we can drop the titles.”

REVIEW

Would I read this again? Yes No Maybe

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Tropes	Trigger Warnings
Vampires, Forbidden love, Strangers to lovers	Death, Violence, Terminal illness

This Novella is part of the Crowns of Nyaxia series. Recommended reading order can be found here.

SUMMARY

Lilith has been dying from the day she was born. I don’t believe it ever says exactly what is wrong with her but she has always been weak and frail. When she was a teenager, she saw her dad communicating with the god, Vitarus. She thought her dad was cursing him because the whole village had had months of dying crops. This idea was solidified when the plague came. People started dying - starting with her dad first. The plague made people literally flake away until they disappeared. The weird thing was, she stopped getting worse. She wasn’t 100% but she wasn’t as weak and frail as before. She was expected to die very young, instead, she watched others get the plague, while she never did.

Lilith couldn’t handle watching her younger sister, Mina, battle with the plague. She knew she had to do something. She ventured off into the woods to where a vampire named Vale lived. Everyone knew he was there but he kept to himself and they left him alone. Vale was a child of Nyaxia, another god, and her and Vitarus did not get along. The people of the village did not want to risk more wrath from Vitarus, but they also didn’t want to anger Nyaxia, so leaving Vale alone was the best plan.

But Lilith had an idea. Vampires live for a very long time. They don’t get sick and die like humans. What if the answer lives in science? What if the answer lies in their blood?

Without anything really to lose, she marches up to Vale's house, and knocks on the door. He is really shocked to see a human standing there. Especially one that is not scared of him at all. She asked him for a deal. If he will give her some vials of his blood, every month for 6 months, she will give him a present each time. He’s like oh, is it you? But it's not. It's a rose. From her garden. He’s like why do I want this? She tells him it's not just any rose, it's special. But he has to wait to find out why it's special. Vampires live for a long time, they get bored. This…now this was something different, new, and intriguing for Vale. He was like yeah sure why not? So she takes some vials of his blood, leaves the rose, and goes home to conduct some experiments.

Lilith realizes that his blood is beautiful. It resembles human blood but it's darker and has some mysterious qualities that makes her want to stare at it for long periods of time.

She goes into another village and consults with an old college friend, Farrow. She is hesitant to tell people what she is doing because again - Vitarus and Nyaxia are not friends. But she implies what she is doing. Farrow begs her to not continue but she says she knows the answer to the plague lives in Vale’s blood.

She returns to Vale’s for month 2. Vale doesn’t answer the door when she knocks and the door is unlocked, so she lets herself in. She figures hey, he knew I was coming. Vale isn’t alone though. He’s boinking another vampire. Lilith is so shocked that she just stands there and watches. Vale seems slightly embarrassed when he catches her. Which is funny, seeing as how I’m sure in his very long life, he has done many questionable things with many a people.

Anyways - she learns that he is from the Rishan group of vampires from the House of the Night. He left his home continent of Obitraes after the war between the Rishan and the Hiaj. The Hiaj won and have been ruling ever since.

Before she leaves, Vale asks her to stay the night. But she’s like you already had a bed companion tonight so no thank you. Even though she really does want to say yes.

For the next month, Lilith works almost 24/7 conducting experiments with Vale’s blood. She produces a potion that responds well to her tests so she decides to go for it and tests it on a rat. Animals don’t have the same reaction to the plague as humans but they are still dying from it. But this rat - doesn’t die. He doesn’t get better, but he doesn’t die. Lilith gets hopeful but then realizes she is out of blood. She isn’t due to visit Vale for a few more days but she can’t stop now, so in the middle of the night, she heads to his place.

Should she be traveling in the middle of the night through the woods? Of course not, nobody should. She encounters some men (would have been safer if she had encountered a pack of bears) who try to steal from her. She tells them she has nothing and they demand her dress. That she is wearing. She says ok. Better them take the dress than do anything else. But she doesn’t have to follow through with that decision because she hears wings and then Vale is there. He kills them all but before he does, one of them manages to strike Lilith and she collapses. She wakes up in Vale's house. She has been out for 3 days. Not only was she exhausted from working 24/7, then getting accosted by a bunch of men, but she still isn’t completely healthy and it's catching up to her.

She is still weak and Vale won’t let her leave the house. He sends an errand boy to check on Mina but insists that Lilith stay and get better at his house. She tells him that if he is basically going to hold her there, he needs to entertain her. Read to her. He has all these books written in his old language that she can’t read. He acts like this is the most ridiculous thing anyone has ever asked him but then proceeds to her story after story.

A day or so later, Vale gets another visitor. This is a faceless entity that has a message for him. It’s from Obitraes. They want him to come back and help them overthrow the Hiaj and put a Rishan on the throne (not just any Rishan. If you’ve already read The Serpent and the Wings of Night, you know who it is). He wants nothing to do with this. He doesn’t want to be involved in another war. He doesn’t want to put a “nobody” on the throne. He just … doesn’t want to. Lilith gets mad at him. Because he is able to help his people but he doesn’t want to because of “principle”. She’s like my sister, and this whole village is dying. She is killing herself faster working nonstop to find a cure. If there was someone out there who could help, but just didn’t want to on principle….well that’s just pretty shitty. She yells at him that he has no idea what it’s like to feel helpless but she does. He apologizes and from that moment decides to use all of his available resources (aka books) to help her research how to use his blood as a cure.

After a week, Lilith was back to her normal self and she knew she needed to get home to her sister. She was already feeling guilty for staying so long. Vale asks if he can write to her, which might be the most adorable thing ever, and of course she says yes.

Vale uses magic, or ravens, to send her letters. He sends her things he finds in books that he thinks might help her. When it's been almost a month, she wakes up and finds a bunch of letters. He made a discovery and sent page after page from a book with his handwritten translations. A couple sleepless days later, after multiple potions, she was standing in front of a rat cage, full of healthy rats. They did it. They found a cure.

The next day, Farrow shows up. He tells her that somehow people have found out what she has been doing and they think Vale is the cause of the plague. A bunch of villagers have decided to go to his place and kill him and then maybe Vitarus will be happy. Lilith and Farrow race to Vale’s house. When they get there, Vale has managed to fight some of them, but they have gotten him outside, where it's sunny. The sun is burning him, but like slowly, not like up in flames. They are basically torturing him and toying with him at this point. Lilith runs over and stands in front of him. She begs them to leave him alone. But stupid men are stupid and they believe they are right. Lilith attempts to fight them, she hits one of them with an ax but unfortunately, it isn’t a fatal wound. Farrow starts fighting them off too and when one of them stabs Lilith, Vale gets a resurgence of strength, kills the rest. Including a priest. An acolyte of Vitarus. Lilith and Farrow manage to get Vale in the house and out of the sun. Lilith tells Farrow to go back to the village. Maybe since Vitarus has been ignoring their cries for help for years, maybe he isn’t paying attention that a child of Nyaxia has just killed an acolyte of his. Farrow goes home and Lilith goes into the yard and burns the bodies. She then goes inside and puts some ointment on Vale’s burns to help them heal.

Vale implies he has feelings for Lilith and Lilith tells him that she doesn’t have anything to give him. He still doesn’t know she is dying, slowly. She doesn’t feel like she can give anybody her love because it's so short-term. He tells her he will take whatever she can give him because he only wants her. She then tells him that she is dying and he is still insistent he wants her, however much she can give. They, finally, break the sexual tension and hook up.

The next morning, Lilith looks towards the village and realizes that Vitarus did not choose to ignore the killing. But he also didn’t come to the house, he went to the village. Vale says he will come help and Lilith is like dude, you’re a child of his enemy, you’ll make it worse. Vale begs her to go with him to Obitraes and just leave and she says she can’t leave all those people, including her sister.

She races back to the village and finds her sister in the garden, exactly where her dad had been all those years ago, in front of Vitarus. She pushes Mina out of the way and tells Vitarus that he doesn’t want Mina, She is innocent. They kinda argue for a bit. She is trying to be respectful because he's a god and all that but also, he’s an asshole. He makes some comment about wiping the whole village away and she said, how about we make a deal? He says, oh, like your dad?

Lilith had no idea that her dad had made a deal with Vitarus. All the crops were dying, they couldn’t grow any food. So her dad made a deal with Vitarus. Help their soil be fertile and save his daughter. Vitarus agreed to make the soil fertile, but told him that life requires death. Her dad didn’t care what the price was. Vitarus made the ground he stood on fertile….but for roses. Not food. The roses never die - that's what makes them so special. And Lilith, who should have died as a teen, is now 30, and still alive. While those around her are literally flaking away and dying. She tells Vitarus that if she gives back everything that he gave her father, then Vitarus takes the plague, and he can go back to ignoring their village as before. He’s like what are you going to give me? She says soil, flowers, and me. Vitarus says deal and seals it with a kiss. Basically sucking out her life force because after he’s done, “fifteen years of illness” “crashed back into” her body at once. Vitarus leaves and she collapses but not before she hears a familiar voice calling her name. Vale didn’t listen and he showed up anyways. She is clearly almost dead and Vale asks her “do you want to live”? He asks her multiple times before she is coherent enough to say Yes. Because he will not do this without her consent. Then he bites her and starts feeding her his blood.

When she wakes up, it's been weeks. Vale is there, looking extremely tired. Tells her he didn’t know if she was going to make it or not. He tells her that her village has been saved. No new illnesses and a new drug has been discovered that has cured the ones already infected (aka the cure she made).

Mina is there. Looking healthy and back to her old pre-plague self. She tells Lilith to go with Vale, go see the world, and help Obitraes. Mina is going back home but Lilith should go live her life for once. Days later, when Vale asks her again to go with him, she agrees.

For what happens next check out -

Crowns of Nyaxia Book 1 (The Serpent and the Wings of Night) and Book 2 (The Ashes and the Star-Cursed King).