The Witch Fires

The Prompt Project’ are posts that are essentially a way for me to exercise my creative muscles, without all the pressure that comes from writing my WIP for example.

I post what I write on the spot, I don’t impose a word limit or time it, just go with whatever my brain spits out for as long it keeps up the momentum. I’ll literally see prompt, write and then post the results.

Today’s prompt is:

The Flames lick up the girl’s arm, but she felt nothing.

“Haven’t you heard?” She asked.

“Witches don’t burn.”

It was burning day.

They could dress it up, call it ‘ascension day’ all they wished but every girl called it what it was, the burning day.

It started out as a way to protect the village, as everyone knows witches do not burn but in the seventy years since the practice began, it had become something else. A way to control the girls.

Ceira kept these thoughts to herself, however, as most of the girls her age were excited for the festival, despite the macabre name they gave it. The brand was a badge of honour, a sign you were ‘clean’ and eligible for marriage. While the pure girls are swept away to the feast of sweet treats and their first sips of wine, the girls deemed suspicious were drowned by the men. Then the bidding war would start. At the end of the day they would all be ‘promised’, goods would be exchanged and the date set soon after.

She should be excited.

She’d done all her lessons and was extremely accomplished in the ‘womanly arts’. Ceira wasn’t surprised that she had passed that test with flyers colours, she had been keeping her family home running since her mother’s disappearance. But she had eight siblings and Ceira already knew she did not care for child rearing and housekeeping. She supposed she must be broken in some fundamental way, everyone else was so happy to start their lives as wives and mothers.

Her hands trembled despite her best efforts to clamp them in her lap as she waited to be called. They were given seats on a raised platform, a place of honour supposedly but Ceira couldn’t help notice how visible they were up here, surrounded on all sides by the crowd. She tuned out the procession of girls, their muffled cries and the smell of burning flesh, leaving her body and sinking into the quiet place insider herself. Martha had to nudge her twice when their names were called and Ceira stood mechanically, eyes on distantly focused Martha’s neat hair bun in front of her. What if she was found unworthy? She couldn’t suppress the flash of anger that her worth boiled down to this single moment.

Ceira was so distracted keeping a neutral expression, projecting serenity and calm, that she failed to notice how the crowd had gone silent. She was pulled back into her body as Martha began sobbing, her cries joined by her mother sobbing in the crowd. Ceira realised what had happened as she caught sight of Martha’s unblemished arm. She had not burned. Her face was pale with shock, was it possible Martha had known she was a witch? How could that be? Her shrieks rang out over the quiet square as stone faced men approached her with shackles. Her mother begging and pleading as her father and brothers held her back, their expressions grim. It took everything in Ceira to remain still as they dragged away a girl she had known her whole life. Martha was quiet and gentle, always willing to help others. It was hard to believe she was a witch.

As Martha’s cries petered out, they resumed as though nothing had happened, turning solemn faces towards her. The finder took her hand with surprising gentleness, placing it on the block.

“Be brave.” He murmured quietly. Ceira felt the crowd collectively hold their breath as the white hot metal was placed against her skin, she could barely hear the sizzlingly of her skin over the thundering of her heart. The finder gave her a grim smile, gesturing for her to pass on to the round faced woman waiting with bandages.

*
She hadn’t felt much like celebrating.

That was how she found herself by the hanging tree, looking at the two girls they had drowned today. Ceira couldn’t pin point what drew her to this spot, only that the rage that been kindling inside her all day wouldn’t go out. The tree groaned with the skeletons of the supposed witches they had found over the last seventy years. Since the ‘great purge’, when mortal weapons could finally over power magical ones, those with even the tiniest drop of dormant witch blood in their veins had been killed. Those unable to defend themselves perished in their hundreds as the practice spread from village to village. There was no way around it. No way to live safely. No magic that could imitate the brand that ensured your survival.

Until now.

Her decision made, Ceira had the tree up in flames within moments. She silently begged the tree’s forgivenesses, it had not asked to be used for something so abhorrent.

The tree soon lit the sky like a beacon. The men came running first but they stopped short, disarmed by the grinning girl with her back to the roaring flames.

The Flames lick up the girl’s arm, but she felt nothing.

“Haven’t you heard?” She asked.

“Witches don’t burn.”

Out of the darkness, the other surviving girls emerged, eyes crackling with flames.

There you go, I wasn’t feeling super creative today, so I’m really happy with how this one turned out!