Once upon a time, in a small village, there lived a young girl and her mother. They were travelers, you see, and seldom stayed in one place for long. But the woman, Enor, had fallen in love, and because she did not know how to say goodbye, she stayed.

Mother and daughter were curious creatures. They came into the town in the middle of a most terrible winter, and had, through their strange herbs and potions, staved off the worst of the illness that plagued the little village. It came once every decade, you see, and it just so happened that the illness came on that particular winter, and that the wild-haired Enor and her child had also arrived that particular winter, and a more curious – or a more fortunate – coincidence had never been witnessed in the village.

Many of the villagers were ecstatic. Their loved ones had been saved, and they owed their lives to these strangers. One of them was a widowed man whose son had been a hair’s breadth away from perishing of the unstoppable disease. He had watched the illness ravage his son’s body, and he sat beside him and felt helpless and forsaken, and then the two strangers came. The woman had taken one look at the child – one look at the little boy on the verge of death, barely clinging on to life – and given him a potion.

So simple – so quick. Within hours, the boy’s energy had been returned. The child that was dying had been saved by some odd miracle. And that miracle – the man was sure – was the woman. Her arrival to the town could have been nothing other than destiny. Some wonderful gift to keep his son alive. Not just his son, either – so many of the villagers had been saved from a horrible fate.

He’d decided, then, that he was very much in love with Enor. It was admiration, at first, and a slight feeling of awe, and lots of gratitude. He felt that was love, and Enor, who had been traveling alone with her daughter for so long, felt that perhaps it would be alright to stave off her loneliness for a little while. And maybe she decided that it was love for her, too.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

But it was not to last.

One young woman in particular found the stranger a threat. Kaleena had long set her sights on the widowed father of one, and the small but prosperous farm which he managed. She would not be so easily thrown aside – not for some wild-haired woman who’d stumbled into town in the middle of winter, with nothing to show for herself but two suitcases and a case of potions.

And so, she began to plant seeds of doubt about the mysterious Enor and her daughter.

Soon, the people who once heralded the strange woman a hero began to whisper. They spoke of malicious things, of a craft not practiced, of a power most unnatural, and a covenant most evil...

One by one, the villagers’ minds were changed. While the man had decided that he was in love, and the blissfully ignorant Enor had decided that she might have been, too, these villagers had decided that she was a witch.

These thoughts festered and grew in the collective psyche of the little village. They began to suspect all that the witch and her spawn did – all the remedies they offered the sick, all the advice they gave to those suffering, all the items they purchased and the herbs they picked and the potions they made. And day by day, while the two of them were settling into a comfortable daily life in the small, quiet town, hosted most graciously by the farmer whose son they had saved, the people grew increasingly unsettled.

It all came to a head one fateful night. The wife of a merchant was in labor, and all was not well. There was banging on the door, and Enor was asked to come – desperate as the merchant was, there was nothing he would not resort to, nobody he would not seek aid in. And, of course, Enor went. And, as always, her daughter followed.

The night was long. There was much yelling, much blood, much pain, and all the while Enor did her best to help the merchant’s wife. But there is only so much that a person can do to keep someone alive when fate has ordained otherwise.

That night, the merchant lost his loving wife, and the child – a boy born too early, and unable to survive. It happened – it happened often – for childbirth was a terribly dangerous thing.

But the merchant could not find reason in his sudden grief. He accused the stranger – the cursed, evil sorceress – of murdering his wife and his newborn son, of sacrificing them to some evil power.

Winter turned to spring, and the people of the village ushered in the season of life with the burning of a witch.