Not All Chains Bind

Date: Unknown
Location: Unknown
 
The child’s name was Tessa. She couldn’t have been older than seven—mud-streaked, barefoot, and trembling with fever beneath a collapsed cart on the side of the old road. Her cries were weak, barely audible over the distant clang of bells from the nearby chapel. I almost missed her.
 
I didn’t.
 
She flinched when I approached—saw the horns, the eyes, the shadows curling behind my heels like waiting wolves. She asked if I was a ghost. I told her no.
 
“Then why do you look like one?” she whispered.
 
Because ghosts are what the Church makes us into.
 
Her ankle was twisted badly, and the wounds on her arms were half-infected. I called a small, flickering flame into my palm—soft and controlled—and used it to sterilize a cloth from my pack. She didn’t scream when I cleaned the cuts. She just looked at me like I was something impossible.
 
“Why are you helping me?”
“Because no one else did.”
“…Are you a witch?”
“No. I’m worse, to some people.”
“Are you going to curse me?”
“No, little ember. I’m going to make sure you stand again.”
 
I was still binding her ankle when the shouting started.
 
A Brother of the Church of the Radiant Flame came striding through the brush, his blade already drawn. He looked from me to the child, and in his eyes—ah, yes—I saw exactly what he wanted to see: a devil cradling a broken child in the woods. The oldest lie in their book.
 
He roared that I had taken her. That I had cursed her blood. That I was feeding on her purity like some storybook fiend.
 
Tessa tried to speak. She told him I helped her. That I healed her. That I was kind.
 
He struck her across the mouth.
 
I didn’t kill him. I could have. I almost did.
 
Instead, I stood between them, summoned the chains from my pact, and held him there—hovering an inch above the earth, suspended like a spider in her web. I leaned close, and I whispered:
 
“If you ever raise a hand to a child again, I will show you what true damnation looks like. You call yourself a servant of the flame. I am the flame.”
 
He ran. As they always do.
But not before swearing he’d report me to the cathedral. That a hunt would come. That they’d burn the forest to smoke me out.
 
Let them try.
 
I carried Tessa on my back all the way to Solrest. Left her with a healer who owed me a favor. Gave her a satchel of food, some silver, and a tiny chain-link pendant I’d carved from scrap iron.
 
“For protection?” she asked.
 
“For truth,” I told her.
 
Not all chains are cages.
Some are choices.
 
And mine was forged long ago.
 
—V