I wanted to stay near the sea in choosing a new place to settle down to live, but I also had to move where no one would know me. I traveled almost aimlessly, staying in taverns and inns when I found a town and sleeping on the ground when I didn't. When I reached the sea again I took a ship heading west that would land in Portugal. I figured that there would be as good a place as any to start over.

It took six months to get there, and once more I set up shop. I slowly stopped being wary of men as much as I had been before. Though at the same time there were some bad experiences where I was violated, sometimes violently. But at the same time, there were some very pleasurable experiences as well. I became the herbalist I always did, and I was busy. Now and then I wondered about the male I had spent my life in Greece with, and I wondered about my stolen son.

In all of the years since I had left Rome, I had never had another conception of a child. In Greece, in five hundred years of a very healthy and active sex life, I hadn't once conceived. At one point, I had gone to see Isis, and found out that I would never have children. Rome and the birth of my son had destroyed my body. It broke my heart, but at the same time it sent me into a spiral of random encounters with no regard to anything except my own pleasure. There weren't any consequences, so why bother being careful?

It was freeing, and at one point I decided to open an inn in a town I traveled to to settle in. I lived in the inn, that way I was able to help guests who arrived late in the night. But it also allowed for me to come across many people of all sorts of types and classes. The inn made me wealthier than I had ever been running the herbalist's shop. It wasn't the goal, but it was a perk. And I was able to help people as well because I still gathered herbs and put them into the food that was served. Owning the inn also allowed me to come across a multitude of lovers, most of which were just passing through, so my reputation within the town didn't tarnish.

Decades turned to centuries in this manner. I'd find a town and move countries after a couple of decades, criss-crossing the continents, purposefully skipping returning to Italy as it was now called. I would never set foot in that country again. France, Spain, Ireland, England, Poland, Scandinavia. Small countries, large ones, towns, villages, big cities. I went everywhere. I learned new languages and cultures. I met countless people and lived in a way I never had when I had been young.

I always wondered when I moved to a new place if the man I had spent my time in Greece with would somehow pop up again. And once in a while it felt as if he had. There would be nights where I would find a particularly good looking stranger to go home with and it would feel like a fever dream.

I never conceived again. Rome had ruined my body for bearing children. I didn't even bother trying to prevent it either. There were times when I brought home someone new on a nightly basis. Every town I lived in I would open a new inn, but as time passed and things changed everywhere, I had to stop healing people, and herbalists lost their place to be replaced by doctors and modern medicine. I stuck to running inns, feeling as though giving people comfortable spaces, jobs and good food and rest was still helping, though I knew somehow that I had fallen out of the job I had been given.

Eventually, I gave up on inns as they turned into hotels and opened taverns when I moved. I still lived on sight, and I continued my path of bedding half the people that came through the doors. Looking back now as I write this, I know it was because I had lost my purpose and I was spiraling. I was drinking enough to kill a dozen men as well, but I never suffered even a hangover. In hindsight, I was lost. I didn't know what to do with myself. I was not able to get close to anyone for fear of being discovered. After hearing what the Christians had done to 'witches' not long before, I was terrified.

And that was when something happened. During the time I was running inns somewhere in the fifteenth century, when I was living in Scotland again. I was in Dunbar, running an inn and living quietly. It was a terrifying time for women, as witch hunts were a very common thing at that time. Innocents were hung and burned for no reason. The lack of sense in the humans at that time was staggering. Confessions were obtained through torture. I myself didn't have much to do with the townspeople out of fear. They thought I was just an abnormally beautiful woman past marrying age. I had come to the town at the wrong time it seemed, because the fact that no one knew anything of my background frightened them.

A friendly, beautiful woman, running her own business who never went to church but was successful in her business. Women didn't work in those days, spinsters were cared for by their families, and there weren't many of them to begin with. I was cordial with the townspeople, but I was still taking travelers to my bed whenever the opportunity arose. This was frowned on, but the people of the town didn't know what I was doing. But part of the reason I was so successful was because word of mouth among young, unmarried men and merchants alike spread. But it had it's drawbacks, because my reputation reached the ears of the townspeople. At first no one believed it because they knew me to be something else entirely. But as time went on, and word spread, people started to think something was funny. I didn't know how word was getting so twisted. There was someone else new in town, whom I had bedded, and it seemed that he was the one talking. He claimed I had bewitched him somehow.

The fact was, he had approached me, and it had been that same old familiarity that I periodically encountered with different men. They never looked the same, but the way that things went was always the same. And I hadn't been able to resist him even if I had wanted to, despite knowing he intended to settle in the town. This man came to me more than once. He lived alone, was new to town. I didn't think anything of it and took him to bed several times a month because it was the kind of pleasure that I didn't seem to have the power to resist.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

I should have stuck to my rule and not done so though. I knew bedding someone who lived in town was a bad idea. The townspeople started to avoid the inn and me personally. I had only been in the town for five years, but it was already looking as though it was getting near the time to move on again.

It happened in the winter. The inn was suffering due to the lack of travelers and the townspeople avoiding the place. I awoke one morning after spending the night with that man in my bed to him being gone as usual. But what was different was the pounding on my door. I quickly dressed with magic to make myself presentable and went to the door to find many townspeople there, including the magistrate.

I was arrested for witchcraft and being a slut, which was against the law at the time. Unmarried women were celibate, and I certainly wasn't. I was taken to the prison and shackled to the wall. But at least the place was above ground and had windows, albeit barred ones. The shackled chains were long enough for me to sit semi comfortably, but not long enough for me to reach the cell door.

I could have gotten out in the blink of an eye, but I hoped to prove that I at least wasn't a danger to the townspeople and I hadn't bewitched anyone, so I stayed. I should have done the smart thing and fled when I had the chance, because a few weeks later when my 'trial' was held, the man I had been sleeping with testified to his 'bewitchment' and I was convicted without any defense at all. Sentenced to burn. I was frightened. I planned to wait until the town was asleep since my burning was one week hence, and leave. I wasn't about to let them burn me at the stake just because some man had decided that he didn't want to have sex with me anymore, or that he'd been caught talking of me, or something.

Night fell, and I was waiting for the town to be silent. I had already opened my shackles by magic when I knew there would be no one else coming by for the rest of the night. I occasionally looked out the barred window to see if lights were on in the houses and if people were on the streets. At first it seemed as though everything was fine, but just as I was magically opening the lock on my cell door the key rattled in the lock and the door yanked open.

My former lover had a torch in his hands, and he was smiling maliciously at my pale face. His eyes were crimson for a moment, and I knew he was neither human nor bewitched as he had said. His eyes turned brown again, but he grabbed me, and my strength was no match for his somehow.

He half dragged me out of the prison and yelled that he'd caught me free in my cell trying to escape. That was when I saw the small crowd of townspeople. The stake had been set up after my trial, and there were men putting straw and wood at the bottom in bundles. I was so stunned and frightened by the sight I forgot that I should have just blinked as far away as I could get. My hands were bound with rope behind my back and my lover and another townsman manhandled me up to the platform and tied me to the stake. I was going to burn right then and there.

No matter what I had endured in my life, I had always survived. I had never died. Death frightened me. I pleaded with the people not to do this, I had not bewitched anyone. Had I not lived quietly in peace for five years? Why would I do something now if I were a witch? I was lying obviously, as I am in fact a magic user and not even human at that time. But I wanted to save my life.

The man who had accused me, the one with the disguised red eyes, spun some sort of tale where I had been using magic to get visitors into my bed. That I was some sort of demon who used sex as a way to kill men and that was why male visitors passed in and out of town at such an alarming rate. I actually laughed at how ridiculous it was. If I was killing the men I bedded then why was he not dead when he had been sleeping with me since his arrival in town nine months prior. At that point even a few of the townspeople murmured doubt in the face of my logic.

I was honest now, hoping to save my life by telling the truth. I had been using my inn to bed travelers since I had come to town. I didn't generally sleep with the townspeople out of fear of being branded a pariah and losing my livelihood. The men I took to my bed were unmarried and just passing through town and agreed to keep the encounter quiet so that I could keep my reputation. The people surrounding the stake I was tied to were murmuring among themselves. Maybe I should just be cast out of town for my immorality. It didn't sound as if I had done anything except be a monumental slut. I wasn't married so the death penalty for adultery didn't apply to me. At most I would be banished from the town and my inn taken away.

But just as I was beginning to get my hopes up the man I'd been sleeping with piped up again that he'd found me free in my cell and the shackles were open. How had I gotten free if not by magic? Thankfully I had pockets on my dress, and I manifested a pin into my pocket without anyone seeing. Something that could pick locks easily enough. I told the nearest townsperson to go into my pocket and he would know how I'd gotten free. The man cautiously did so, and pulled the pin out of my pocket while I stood tied to the stake.

It looked as though I was going to be freed for a few minutes while the people talked in rushed whispers. Even the judge who had convicted me of witchcraft was no longer convinced I was anything more than a beautiful woman who had no morals. Which wasn't a death sentence. I could hear them all talking, but suddenly I could smell something. Something burning. The man with red eyes had gone behind me and set fire to the bundles of straw in several places before he came back around the front, yelling that a witch needed to burn, and threw his torch in the bundles of kindling and straw at my feet. He was inhuman, I could see his red eyes, and the moment I thought to blink and flee, the flames suddenly exploded as if by magic. I tried to blink. I couldn't. To this day I don't know how I could not blink. But somehow I knew it was the red eyed man. The fire was so hot it burned my lungs. I couldn't scream, I couldn't breathe, and the fire moved far too fast for normal fire. No one was trying to help me. My hair burned, my dress burned and so burned my flesh. My body was trying to heal, but the fire was too hot and too unnatural. I could smell my flesh cooking, and if you've never smelled burning flesh count yourself lucky. It's a foul, acrid smell.

My lungs singed, my flesh cooked, and the people stood there just watching. I was consumed by darkness. The pain ended, though somehow I remained mentally aware even though I knew that I had died. I couldn't feel anything, it's was as if I was trapped in a body that didn't exist anymore. I couldn't hear, or see, or smell. I don't know how long it lasted. I knew I had died, but I didn't leave my body like I was supposed to. I wondered if I would be trapped in a burned out husk for eternity.