A mother sat by her sick child's cradle, her heart heavy with fear. The child was pale, its eyes closed, its breath faint and labored. A knock came at the door, and in stepped a poor old man wrapped in a large cloth against the bitter winter cold. As the child slept, the mother warmed some ale for the visitor. The old man—Death himself—rocked the cradle. The mother, exhausted from three sleepless nights, dozed for a moment. When she awoke, both the old man and her child were gone.
The desperate mother ran into the snowy night, where she met Night, a woman in black. To learn Death's path, the mother had to sing all the lullabies she had sung to her child, her tears flowing with each note. Night directed her to a dark pine forest.
Lost at a crossroads, she encountered a frozen thorn-bush. It demanded warmth before giving direction. The mother pressed it to her breast, the thorns piercing her flesh, her blood reviving the bush, which then bloomed in the winter cold and showed her the way.
She reached a vast lake with no way across. In her despair, she wept so bitterly that her eyes fell into the water as two precious pearls. The lake bore her to the opposite shore, where a vast, strange structure stood—Death's greenhouse. Now blind, she was met by an old grave-woman who guarded the place. In exchange for directions, the mother gave her long black hair for the woman's white hair.
Inside the greenhouse, every plant was a human life. The mother, listening for her child's heartbeat, found a sickly blue crocus. The old woman warned her to threaten Death when he came to claim it.
Death arrived, an icy presence. The mother pleaded for her child, but Death explained he was God's gardener, transplanting lives to Paradise. In a moment of despair, she threatened to destroy other flowers, but Death stopped her, asking if she would make another mother suffer.
He returned her eyes, now brighter, and bade her look into a well. There she saw the futures of two lives: one full of joy and blessing, the other of sorrow and misery. Death revealed one was her child's fate but would not say which. Horrified, the mother begged him to spare her child from suffering, even if it meant taking him to God's kingdom.
Finally, understanding, she knelt and prayed, "Oh, hear me not when I pray against Thy will, which is the best!"
Death took her child and vanished into the unknown land.