The village square filled like a rain barrel during storm season. People dressed in their cleanest linens, some leading children by hand as if to a festival. Whispers slithered through the crowd - they'd caught a witch from the neighboring village. Young. Stubborn. They said she'd laughed as they dragged her to the pyre.
"Are we going?" Lilia asked quietly, watching their father. He didn't answer, just stood and walked toward the door. That was answer enough. Alya edged closer to Eliot. "We'll just... stand there, right? We won't actually..." "We're not involved," he said. "Just witnesses."
Even as he said it, the lie curdled on his tongue. The square pulsed with bodies. Children stretched on tiptoes as if at a carnival. By the bridge stood the condemned figure - hooded, bound. Three Inquisitors flanked the pyre: one reciting charges, another preparing chains, the third...
Eliot's breath caught. The third stood apart. Motionless as carved stone. Tall. Silver-haired. One eyelid twitching spasmodically. The exact face from the wheat field. Eliot stumbled back, his heel catching on Akira's foot. "What's wrong with you?" his brother muttered, not looking away from the spectacle. But Eliot couldn't speak. Couldn't look away. The Inquisitor's gaze locked onto his with terrifying familiarity. Not the old man's pitying look - this was something hollow. Hungry. Then they removed the sackcloth.
The witch was older than rumors suggested. Wrinkled. Her eyes held twin flames - one of defiance, one of raw terror. As the torch touched kindling, the world... ...stuttered. For one impossible moment, everything froze. The rising flames. The cheering crowd. Even the drifting smoke hung suspended. Only the witch moved. She turned her head. Looked straight at Eliot.
"Thou hearest the bell." her voice spoke inside his skull. "They burn that which they comprehend not."
"Thou sawest him, didst thou not? He beholdeth thee. And he shall bide till the end."
Then time snapped back. Heat and screams washed over Eliot as the pyre erupted. The stench of burning hair and meat filled his nostrils. Through tears, The Inquisitor who resembled the old man turned away silently, disappearing into the crowd as if bored by the spectacle. The flames consumed the witch, her final words still ringing in Eliot's skull.
That night, sleep refused to come. Eliot lay stiff on his pallet, staring at the cracks in the ceiling. Two faces flickered behind his eyelids: The old man from the wheat field. Eyes weary with pity and the Inquisitor. Same features, but hollow. A doll with glass eyes. Just before dawn, he gave up. The village slept as Eliot slipped outside. No dogs barked. No owls called. Even the wind held its breath.
The square lay barren. Only charred posts remained, their blackened skeletons jutting from the earth like broken teeth. Ash whispered underfoot as he approached the execution site. His pulse thundered. Too loud. Too fast. Then movement. Something stirred in the cinders.
Eliot crouched. Amid the debris lay an object smooth as river stone, warm as living flesh. A fragment of bone or carved wood, etched with a spiral pattern. His fingers brushed it. The world dissolved.
The Void. Darkness. Then the old man stood before him, his tattered cloak merging with the nothingness. "You returned," he said. "Even after my warning." Eliot tried to speak, but his throat filled with static. The old man stepped closer. "We are not the same. Yet we are bound." A skeletal finger pointed at Eliot's chest. "You were not meant to revisit the ashes. But now the choice is made."
Blackness swallowed them both. Eliot gasped awake on the scorched earth. Dawn bled across the sky. The fragment in his palm was now dull just ordinary wood. But he knew. This was no dream.