Reincarnate

Men chanted all around Valorie Flare, sweat gleaming off their exposed chests and sticking to their hairs. Spray flew from their violent mouths as they raged in fear disguised as anger. They beat their hands against their hearts, grunting with each pang. They roared as if they had succeeded in eliminating her, but she would come back. Even burning at the stake did not eliminate a witch, it only killed one. 

Valorie stared out from her pike, the men cackling as they tied her hands poorly behind her back. “There is no way the beast is worming her way out if this one.” 

And Valorie had let them. 

It was a simple knot and Valorie could escape it easily if she wanted to. But today, she felt like burning. 

Her feet sunk deep into the thousands of pine needles piled up to create a loft, a platform so everyone could watch her burn. She had never hated pine so much before, when once it had been her favourite scent. For it was there she met him. 

With soft, pattering steps like that of a deer, Valorie hummed as she collected the dry pine needles off the forest floor, thanking the trees for their shade. Nearby, the steady thunk of his axe lured her to where he gathered pine wood for his hearth. His elderly mother liked the scent when it burned, he had claimed.

But now, piled up upon the very thing that brought them together, she knew it was not for his mother he was collecting the pine wood, but for another witch trial. 

The man who had betrayed her stood a small distance from her mountain of wood and leaves. The man who smelt like pine in the mornings and smoke in the evenings, whose hair was as black as night and eyes as bright as the sky. Whose hands had fit into hers, whose laugh had echoed her own, and whose bed had warmed her. 

She was foolish to trust a human man. Just yesterday, she had sat in his cottage’s kitchen grinding eggshells, bones and herbs. She’d sung a song that had come to her in her sleep. As she sang in the language of the forest, the nearby birds sat at the edge of the kitchen window and listened. 

As enchanting as the forest could be, Valorie also knew its danger. Awful creatures lurked in darkness, creatures with fur and fangs and who sensed their way with holes where their eyes were meant to be; ghostly figures rippling like water as they swam through the air, snatching souls from their warm bodies; and the wooden limbs of branches who were once cursed men trapped in the trees. Valorie knew her forest was a dangerous place, and she would not let its creatures harm her pine-smelling man. 

So, as she ground the hollow bones of a lizard and mixed it with the venom of a snake, three drops of eucalyptus, and a splash of morning dew, she cast a spell of protection on the human man she loved. 

Her heart broke when he barged through that wooden door, and his kind stare turned feral as he glanced at the conjuring she held in her hands, her spellbook on display for him to see. Steam flew from his nostrils as he took in her craft. His thick brown eyebrows furrowed so close together they almost formed one. In one swift motion, he lunged for her, wrapping a single large hand around both her arms and pulling her from her spell station, holding her away from his body as if she were a wild, snapping fox. She stumbled from the strength of his grip and he glanced over her ingredients. Laid before him was a jar of rusted nails, tiny pebbles she had collected from his boots, a fragment of his thick black hair and a single pine needle. The smell of him. 

“My love,” she cried in shock and disbelief. “My love, I do you no harm—”

“Do not call me that!” his deep voice rumbled with anger and confusion, causing the small sparrows to leap from the window and fly home. 

Valorie did not struggle in her lover's arms. Her arms were limp and her cheeks were wet. Even his eyes were brimmed with red, the only sign his heart betrayed his actions. 

“Witch,” his warm breath whispered against her face and, as if casting a spell himself, the girl in his hands turned from lover to wretched monster. 

“The woman on this pike is not a woman at all,” he now declared as he rode into the crowd, “but a beast, a witch, an abomination on our good society.” The crowd roared and riled him up.

“This creature was lured into the woods, and tricked into believing I myself could love a beast like her.” He cackled as if she were pathetic and the hundred voices joined him in mockery. The people did not realise the man giving the speech had red-rimmed eyes from burning his almost-wife. 

He dared a look back at Valorie, but Valorie’s tears were all dried up whereas his were not. He broke both their hearts when he called her a witch that day. She was stronger than he was and cleverer too, but her heart did not fight him. She had cried all her tears and wailed into the open air and now she had no more love or care for her pine-smelling man. So she smiled back at the dangerous man, smiled too widely, flashing her once human teeth that had sharpened into fangs. She watched his face flush in fear as he remembered his lips once pressed against that fanged mouth, knowing it was once soft and welcoming for him where now she flashed her fangs threateningly. Her long, wild hair gushed all about her like a storm cloud in the sky, her auburn locks which had once been perfectly braided behind her. He was the cause of wildness. He couldn’t help but think maybe he could have somehow cured the wickedness out of her, but he could not go back and change the past. The wild thing must burn.

“This creature dared perform magik in my own home, under my own nose, and now she will burn for her sins! Burn for her crimes! She will burn with every witch we have set aflame before her and every witch we continue to hunt.” The crowd roared with energy until they finally began to shout.

“Burn the witch!” People began to chant in the crowd. First their shouts were scattered, but quickly they became unified. 

Two men climbed upon Valorie’s pine perch, drizzling gasoline by her feet, soaking her skirts, then holding the large bucket over her head so that it oozed over her skin, trickling down her limbs. Valorie’s eyes did not leave her once pine-loving man even as a match was lit and thrown at her feet. She held his stare as fire erupted all around her, tickling her thighs, neck and arms. 

“I will come back for you,” she whispered into the raging fire, her once-lover reading her reddened lips. 

Fire exploded and the crowd cheered. Throwing her head back, she laughed into the sky, promising she would seek her revenge when she came back with a new face in another life. She would find him and get revenge. The crowd took her wicked cackles and cries as suffering and cheered for her death. 

Her once pine-loving man watched the woman he thought he loved laugh into the sky. He heard her promise, but did she see his apology written all over his heart? Wet slid down his cheek as he watched her disintegrate into nothing but ash. He would not know whether she would come back as a lover or for revenge. And he did not know when.