Nothing truly died in An Ghrian.
Death, if marked by fading vitality, ailments, by the grotesque and unsightly, was alien to the kingdom in which everything was beautiful.
Its residents lived well past a century. Their wounds healed rapidly, and their immunities were of iron will. Its plants and flowers, the products of the royal family's magic, were unflinching and undying even beneath snowdrop and rainfall.
Only Princess Aife, the eldest of ten, appeared as though dead. Her skin was sickly pale, cheeks limp and saggy. Her face was dominated by bulging eyes, which were in turn dominated by endlessly black pupils.
As she walked to her makeshift cemetery in the palace gardens, she passed by some of her sisters enjoying an outdoor tea party. Their eyes followed her, pretty smiles jagged as they sneered.
"Aife, you're not still burying those shriveled up things, are you?" one of them called.
She said nothing, walking onwards with dignity.
Upon arriving, she found the mounds of fertile earth flattened; the little pebbles she had used as headstones upended and strewn about. Several miniature footsteps tread across the area as evidence of the culprits' identities. Her younger siblings never heeded her requests to not play there.
She set down the withered petals she had been holding in her palm, and got to work, trying to reverse the damage they had done.
Her magic was the only one with an unglamorous end, after all. The younger princesses twirled through grasslands made by their siblings, leaving behind rigid lavender and fuchsia in their wake. The eldest princes produced trees with the finest bark, practically raising fortress walls from roots, not mere green shade.
They were the pride of An Ghrian.
And her?
Hardly the heiress to the throne, she was nothing more than a spectacle paraded by her family.
She could transform the potted roses surrounding her glass gazebo walls into baby sparrows whenever she sang her haunting lullaby.
The merry birds would chirp alongside her, entertaining guests both foreign and native.
But soon they would rot away, returning to petals again: shrunken, crinkled, and dead.
And though new roses would eventually bloom at the stems, it was the illusion of renewal. The roses being replaced did nothing to erase the once-birds' existence. And so she mourned them, again and again.
She could not blame her siblings for not understanding her or her recurrent funeral processions. They did not understand death.
Hardly anyone in An Ghrian did. Guests would clap uproariously, marveling at the birds' remains. Toying with them. Asking morbidly curious questions. Then they would leave, and alone she would scoop up the corpses to bid them farewell.
Nobody really looked at her roses themselves, how they stood apart.
They were smaller. Humbler. While bright, seemed muted when compared to her siblings' flowers.
Their petals huddled inwards, shy. They rocked gently when grazed by wind; fragile when touched.
The only flowers in the kingdom that died were the only ones that were alive.