The grove should not be silent.

  I remember—no, we remember—how it once breathed. Leaves like stained glass, blues so deep they felt like dusk caught in motion, purples bruised and royal, yellows sharp as laughter. Birch trees stood pale and slender, their bark like the skin of young things, easily wounded yet persistent. The air had hummed then, not with sound but with recognition, as though the land itself knew who walked upon it and approved.

  Now it knows only what has been done.

  Ash drifts beneath my boots, fine as flour, clinging to the hem of my skirts and the strands of my hair. Each step disturbs a history I did not witness but have carried regardless, like a scar inherited rather than earned. Charred stumps rise from the earth in uneven rows, blackened spines of what were once trees that whispered secrets and shelter. The ground is warm in places, though no fire has burned here in years.

  It remembers.

  “Yes,” I murmur, though my lips barely move. Speech feels unnecessary in a place so accustomed to listening without ears.

  The Witch Groves of Vermia—there were hundreds once, scattered across the kingdom like careful omissions on a map. Spaces the monarchy pretended not to notice, because witches did not disturb their roads or their cities. We did not trade. We did not govern. We did not kneel. We kept to the old paths, and in return, the land kept us.

  That was our crime.

  A tremor runs through the soil as I pass deeper into the clearing, subtle enough that a human would miss it entirely. I feel it through the bones of my feet, through the tight coil behind my eyes. Magic answers magic. Always has.

  My eyes sting. Red, they say. That is how they knew us. That is how they justified it.

  I reach down and press my bare palm to the ground. The ash darkens beneath my touch, drawing inward, revealing soil beneath—scarred, but alive. A thin green shoot curls up between my fingers, fragile as a promise spoken too late.

  I laugh. It comes out wrong. Broken.

  “Don’t,” I whisper, though I do not know whether I am pleading with the land or myself. “Don’t pretend it’s all right.”

  It never pretended, the thought answers, sharp and gentle all at once. Neither did you.

  The air thickens. I am not alone, though I have been alone for years.

  Shapes hover at the edge of my sight—never fully formed, never still. Dissatisfied spirits, the stories would say, bound to the place of their deaths. But I do not think of them as ghosts. They are too familiar for that. Too intimate. They feel like memories I did not live long enough to earn, pressing against the inside of my skull.

  I have always had this—a mind too crowded for one voice.

  When I was small, I thought everyone did.

  I step around a scorched birch trunk, its white bark split and blistered. I remember hiding behind one like it, fingers digging into the papery skin as my mother knelt before me, her face too calm for the violence in her hands.

  Run, Sybil.

  The memory does not arrive whole. It never does. It comes in shards: her voice low and urgent, the iron grip of unfamiliar men, the flash of green fabric and polished steel. The sound of boots against earth. My own breath, thin and animal.

  I stop walking.

  My heart beats too fast, like it is trying to escape.

  “I ran,” I say aloud, as though the grove might accuse me otherwise. “I did what she told me.”

  You always did, comes the response, weary rather than kind. That was never the sin.

  They came for her at dawn. Crusaders, they called themselves—soldiers of a righteous fear dressed up as devotion. Vermia’s monarchy did not soil its own hands; it issued decrees, stamped with wax and sanctimony, and let men with swords do the rest.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Witches are dangerous, the proclamation said. Witches consort with unnatural forces. Witches corrupt the land.

  As though the land had not chosen us first.

  I did not see her die. That truth circles me like a carrion bird, pecking at my ribs whenever I allow myself stillness. I saw her taken—dragged, really—her heels carving furrows in the path she had walked all her life. She did not look scared. She looked as if she had accepted her fate long ago. That is what haunts me most.

  She looked back once.

  Her eyes were red, bright even in the low morning light. Not with magic—she had not summoned anything. Just fear and love, sharpened into something unbreakable.

  Run.

  I obeyed.

  I always obeyed.

  The grove opens into what was once its heart: a wide ring of stones now split and blackened, the center collapsed inward as though the earth itself had tried to swallow the fire. This is where they burned them. Not just my mother—others too. Names I never learned. Voices I carry regardless.

  My magic stirs without permission, a reflex born of grief and fury. The ash lifts, swirling around my ankles in a slow, deliberate spiral. Embers glow faintly beneath the surface, responding to my pulse.

  “Stop,” I hiss, though my hands are trembling. “I don’t want—”

  You always want, the thought interrupts, sharper now. You just don’t know how to hold it.

  A birch sapling pushes up through the cracked stone, its leaves pale and small. It should not be possible. The land has been dead too long.

  I drop to my knees before it, breath hitching, and press my forehead to the ground. The soil is damp here, fed by tears I refuse to acknowledge.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper, to my mother, to the grove, to the girl I was. “I should have stayed. I should have—”

  You would have died, comes the answer, immediate and cold. And then what? Another voice for the ash?

  I bite down hard enough to taste blood.

  They say witches are born knowing. That we arrive in the world already bent toward the unnatural, already listening for things others cannot hear. It is a comforting lie, told by those who prefer destinies neat and blame easily assigned.

  The truth is messier.

  Magic did not bloom in me until after my mother was gone. It came in fits and starts, wild and uncontrolled, like grief trying to escape my skin. Vines cracking through floorboards. Frost blooming on windows in summer. Animals watching me with knowing eyes, unafraid.

  I learned to survive by leaving. By never staying long enough for anyone to notice the red in my gaze. By sleeping under hedges and in hollows, by letting the land feed me when it could and punishing myself when it could not.

  Love was a luxury I could not afford.

  The spirits press closer now. The air feels thick with attention, heavy with expectation. I am nineteen years old, and I feel ancient.

  “I will not forget you,” I say, rising unsteadily to my feet. My voice carries farther than it should, echoing against burned stone and memory alike. “I will not let this be all that remains.”

  Words, the thought murmurs, neither mocking nor approving. You have always been good at them.

  Anger surges, hot and sudden. The ash ignites briefly, flaring orange before collapsing back into grey. I clench my fists, forcing the magic down, down, into something manageable.

  “I know his face,” I say, and the grove seems to lean closer. “I didn’t then. But I do now.”

  Green eyes. That is what returns to me in dreams—unnaturally bright, almost luminous against the soot and shadow of memory. Blond hair, cropped short in the style of Vermian officers. A man who did not look at my mother as though she were human.

  A man who smiled.

  “I will find him,” I vow, the words settling into my bones like a second spine. “I will find the one who gave the order, and the ones who carried it out. I will make them remember.”

  The sapling shudders. Leaves unfurl, greener now, stronger.

  Careful, the thought warns, quieter than before. Vengeance is a hunger. It does not know when to stop.

  “I don’t need it to,” I reply, though even as I say it, something in me recoils. I am so tired of being hungry.

  I turn away from the grove, though every step feels like a betrayal. The apparitions recede, watching, waiting. They will not leave me. They never do.

  Beyond the treeline, the land slopes upward toward the road—a pale scar cutting through fields that no longer bloom as they should. In the distance, rising above the low hills like a promise and a threat, stands the castle of Vermia. White stone, immaculate and unburned. Untouched by ash.

  My chest tightens.

  I begin to walk.

  Each step carries me farther from the girl who ran and closer to the woman I do not yet know how to be. My magic hums low and restless beneath my skin, drawn inexorably toward the seat of the kingdom that tried to erase us.

  You could still turn back, the thought offers, almost tender. Find a quiet place. Let the land heal you.

  I picture green eyes again. The smile.

  “No,” I whisper.

  The castle grows larger with every step.

  And somewhere deep within me, the grove remembers—and waits.