The boy steps forward. He is the worst of the two; he didn't need the fury of alcohol or failed business to be cruel. He wears a truly sinister grin. He steps over her small, broken body and sneers down.
"They will burn you at the stake like your mother, you freak."
He punctuates the threat with a casual, violent kick to her side before walking away with a sickening spring in his step.
After crying to exhaustion, the girl suddenly lifts her tear-stained face. Her eyes, identical to my own in their fierce color, fix directly on me.
For a heart-stopping second, she sees me. There is no confusion, only recognition of a shared pain. I rush forward, walking right through the whipping leather and the dust, trying to help her up, trying to touch her, but my hand passes through her shoulder with a sickening sense of nothingness.
She doesn't react to my spectral presence beyond the initial look. She simply turns and walks right past me, a phantom in her own reality.
The entire scene instantly dissolves. The smell of dust and hatred vanishes.
I gasp, my ghostly consciousness struggling to stabilize. The vision shifts again. The air is sharper, the shadows are colder. The girl is taller, now a teenager, and she's standing in a small, cramped kitchen.
The woman of the house, a shrewish figure with tightly pulled hair, is berating her, her face pinched with jealousy and disdain.
"Who are you trying to attract, you jezebel?" the woman spits, waving a flustered hand at the girl's subtle, hopeful makeup. "You slut! Want to attract my boy, don't you, you disgusting hoe?"
The woman's hand swings out in a deafening slap across the girl's face. The sound is visceral, making my phantom ear ring. She collapses to the ground, gasping for air, a thin line of blood appearing at the corner of her lips.
Before she can recover, the woman grabs her by the hair, dragging her violently out the back door and into the biting snow.
The woman forces the girl's small hands flat onto a rough, scarred tree stump in the freezing snow and raises the heavy horse whip high above her head. The silence is terrifying.
The whip descends again and again, striking her exposed hands. Crack. Thwack. The girl makes no sound. She only cries silently, her entire body shaking with the suppressed agony of a child who knows screaming is pointless.
I feel every strike. My ghostly fingers curl and clench, the pain searing through my soul as if the lash is ripping my own reborn flesh to ribbons.
The terrible memories I witness after that are endless and so heartbreaking that I want to kill them all.
The scene shifts again, slamming me back into the tiny wooden shed. The air is stale and cold, filled with the thick smell of despair. The girl is barely conscious, bruised, and weeping silently, huddled in the corner.
My hatred swells inside me, hot and absolute, fueling the spectral projection that is watching this nightmare. This time the failure is clear now, a tragic absurdity.
The hair regrowth potion they told her to make had gone wrong, causing a client to lose his hair, which led to a furious financial loss for her tormentors. They beat her for the lost money, for daring to be useless. She is truly beaten to a pulp her face barely recognizable and thrown carelessly onto the shed's cold floor.
As I watch her body shudder, my gaze drops. Her cold, trembling fingers are drawing something in the dust and grime, the complex, curving lines of a sacrifice spell. A sacrifice spell!
My mind reels. She is an innate witch, yes, but all she knew of the craft came from the fragmented books her mother left. She was never properly taught. She didn't even know how to make a hair growth potion so how could she know me and be able summon my spirit from the great beyond, let alone know how to perform this final, devastating spell?
A cold certainty grips me. She must have had help. And then the final, brutal truth dawns. This is why I am here. This rebirth, this sudden, impossible return from the fire, is the direct, brutal result of her final act. The runes, the violent headache, the transference, it all makes terrible sense.
I watch in detached horror as she uses a splintered shard of wood to slit her own wrist. Blood, thick and sluggish, begins to drip onto the completed spell circle drawn in the dirt. Her soft voice begins to chant the forbidden words, a low, guttural sound I can barely hear. This is the ultimate sacrifice, the trade of her life for my return.
Once the chant is complete, the light in the runes flares once, a blinding flash of red that briefly illuminates the shed, then dies. She collapses, her spirit instantly ripped free from her broken vessel.
I float there, a witness to her final despair. Time passes, slow and excruciating, marked only by the drip of blood in the silence.
Hours later, the door bursts open. It's the man yelling for her to wake up and clean the house. He is already angry again.
When she doesn't move, he starts kicking her, calling her lazy and a parasite. But the frantic energy drains from him when he realizes something is seriously wrong.
He pours cold water over her, drenching her still form, then checks her pulse. The panic is sudden and real. The three figures, the man, the woman, and the boy, are instantly in a frenzy. The casual cruelty is replaced by clumsy terror. They grab her limp body and toss it into a wheelbarrow.
I follow, floating behind them as they push her deep into the snow-covered forest. They dig a fast, deep grave, a shallow trench in the frozen earth, and hastily seal her into a crude wooden crate—a pathetic, broken coffin.
As they shovel dirt onto her grave, they curse her, blaming her for ruining everything, for causing their financial ruin and now, their inevitable legal trouble. They treat her death as an inconvenience.
I stand there, floating above the freshly overturned soil, my heart utterly torn to pieces. This is the final indignity, the last cruel truth of this child's life. They leave, grumbling about their lost money, the scraping of their hurried footsteps receding into the trees.
Then, a voice. Eerie and brittle, it slices the silence from behind me.
"Did you see what they did to me?"
I whirl around. There is no one there. The forest is empty, save for the snow and the disturbed earth. I turn back to the grave, and she is suddenly right in front of me.
The same tear-stained face, but now ghostly and resentful, her eyes hollow and filled with dark magic. She is a powerful shadow, a spirit that has bought my rebirth at the cost of her own peace.
"They treated me like a beast," she whispers, her voice a chilling echo. "Caged me, chained me, and tortured me. What did I do to deserve this?"