Ivy woke to a pounding headache and a painfully dry mouth. She tried to bring her hands up to massage her temples, but her fingers never made it to her face. On a second try, metal bit into her wrists.

“Welcome to your new home, witch,” a voice said. The older witch hunter.

Oh, god. Memories from before she had woken were coming back to her. She surveyed her current state and found shackles around both ankles and wrists. She had been forced down to her knees, and chains were connected to manacles that led to iron rings mounted to a stone wall behind her. Just above her head, a sliver of sunlight flowed in from above. Such little slack existed in her bonds that she could barely shift in place. For the rest of her cell, the walls to her left and right were also of the same damp stone, as was the floor that scraped at her knees. Tears filled her eyes and she sobbed, leaning against the chains. The hunter watched her through a set of iron bars that separated her from him.

“This isn’t right!” she cried. “I haven’t done anything!” The hunter said nothing, turning and leaving her in her misery. “You bastard! You can’t leave me like this! It’s not right! You know it isn’t!”

He disappeared beyond her view, but she kept talking, quieter now. Mostly to herself.

“Why? Why are you doing this to me?”

No answer came. Morning turned to night, and then morning again. Her tears had long since dried up by the time the younger hunter appeared beyond the bars in the afternoon of her second day in irons. Her head was sagging in some futile attempt to sleep, and barely noticed him at first.

“Food’s here,” he said after a moment.

She inclined her neck and found him holding a plate of something.

“Why am I shackled?” she asked, her voice raw and hoarse.

“You’re a witch,” he said, as though that was enough.

“I’m no threat to you.”

“You say that, but…”

“It hurts,” she said, “I’m so tired. I just want to be able to sleep. How can you be so cruel to someone who’s done nothing to you?”

The young man frowned, still holding the plate, and used his other hand to open the door of the cell.

“I can unshackle one hand for you to eat, but then it must be put back on.”

Great. It was…something. Barely anything, but maybe with a bit of time she could talk some sense into the younger of her two captors. She figured there was zero hope with the older hunter, but maybe, just maybe she could get this man to help her.

He dropped the plate of food and a mug of water on the ground at her knees and moved his hands to the shackle around her right wrist. A few seconds later, the cuff fell to the floor, freeing her hand. She tested its movement, and yelped at the tenderness where the metal had worn a sore into her skin. It throbbed with every heartbeat, but she could handle this much. Nothing could compare to the force of her witch power coursing through her. Still, she shot a glare toward the hunter. The more she could make him feel bad, the better.

“Eat,” he said.

With no other option, she obeyed. Atop the plate was a lump of hard, stale bread, and a handful of soggy beans. He stood watch over as she ate, and Ivy made sure to take her time. Still, the limited freedom ended all too soon, and she was back to being held against the wall.

This pattern kept up for who knew how long. They only fed her once a day, and let her relieve herself at the same time. Bathing was not even a question. The indignity of it hurt her more than the physical pain. Every time the younger hunter came to her in the late morning to deliver her plate of bland, leftover tavern slop, she pleaded with him, but he remained stoic as always.

Sleep came and went in random fits, the regular meals serving as her only sense of time. And even then she lost track of the days as her unjust imprisonment went on. She was always tired and hungry, wishing for winter to come sooner so this could all be over.

One day as her eyes were heavy and she was just about to doze off for a moment, she heard footsteps beyond her cell. That couldn’t be right. She was almost positive the hunter had already fed her today. Her eyelids blinked open, and the younger witch hunter came into view.

“You are surprisingly resilient,” he said.

“W-what?” Her voice came out low and scratchy.

“Of all the witches I have seen held captive, you have lasted the longest.”

"Is that...good?” Ivy asked. "For me, I mean."

“Your confinement is designed to be unbearable. To entice you to use your powers to escape.”

Ivy couldn’t help but laugh. If she knew how to access the darkness residing within her, she definitely would have tried to escape by now. But she couldn’t say that.

“How many times do I have to tell you? I. Don’t. Have. Powers.”

He began to fiddle with the lock on her cell.

“You know, you make it hard not to believe you.”

Huh? Was this real? Was this really happening? Had she won him over? He entered the cell and made his way over to her, crouching down at her left side. She felt the shackle around her ankle twist, and then her foot was free. She dared not hope yet, and kept completely still. Her right foot came next, and then he went to work on the shackles binding her wrists. In a few moments he had untethered her from the wall entirely.

The witch hunter took a step back from her, and then dropped a bundle of cloth at his feet.

“Here’s a clean dress you can wear,” he said.

Ivy stared down at the garment with wet eyes. It would mean little to her without a bath first, though.

“A-am I…free?” Her gaze flicked up to the man and she held him there for a just a moment with a hopeful look.

The witch hunter sighed.

“The guild has called Master Eraven out on another hunt. I want to believe in you, but like him, I have to be sure. I just…it was hard for me to see you like that every day.”

“Oh,” she looked down at the dress again, “so I have to stay. Then, what about a bath? I’ve...I've—" she did not want to talk about how dirty she felt at the moment. Especially with a man. "I’ve been in here...quite some time, and I’m afraid I’ll just ruin this the moment I put it on.”

The hunter closed his eyes and then looked away.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I can’t let you leave this room.” He turned his back to her and then walked out of the cell, but stopped. “I’ll bring you a pail of water and a rag.”

He started off again but Ivy called out to him.

“Wait! What’s your name, mister?”

“Perro,” he said without turning.

“Thank you, Perro.”

He left without another word and Ivy finally moved from her spot for the first time in many days. She tested her arms and legs that ached from disuse. Crawling at first, and then a couple of slow laps around the cell got her blood pumping. Everything hurt, the raw blisters where the shackles had been most of all, but it wasn’t anything a witch could not endure. For the first time in a while, she felt like she might actually survive this.

Perro returned later with the promised water. She asked for a few more pails worth before she had been satisfied, and without complaint he had retrieved them all for her. He seemed to have a bit of a soft spot unlike his master, and if she wanted any hope of getting out of here, she needed to nurture that.

The next days and weeks went by much more pleasantly. Perro gave her much more to eat, and also regularly offered her his water pail services so she could keep herself decent. They also got to talking a bit every now and then. She had asked him how he had become a witch hunter. To her surprise it had practically been from birth. His master was not his father, but instead he had been an orphan of the church, and the older hunter had trained him from a very young age. He had known nothing else. She supposed that made sense.

He had also given up the story of how an acid spitting witch had given him the scars on his face. Ivy knew little of witch magic—her own most of all—but his stories had taught her no witch possessed the same power. Every time he spoke of his encounters, his face darkened when he described each "infernal curse" that a witch brought up straight from hell. She had also noticed that he would brush his fingertips across his scars periodically while he talked and sometimes even tried to hide them from her. Not wasting the opportunity, she had told him that it was a badge of honor and made him look more rugged. A small smile had come out of that comment.

Time passed and she continued to grow on him, until his master returned. The night it happened she heard them yelling beyond the corridor leading to her cell. Most of their words came through, but some she missed.

“…not in chains!?”

“Nearly two seasons…might be wrong...this time.”

“…girl…witch!”

“…not a malicious bone in her body!”

After the voices stopped, footsteps echoed into her chamber and Perro came to a stop in front of the bars of her cell.

“Perro?” Ivy said. “What’s happening?”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and then started to open the lock.

Ivy backed away until she hit the far wall.

“What are you doing?” she asked. His lips stayed shut, and his expression grim. "Say something! Tell me what's going on!"

He approached her with his jaw clenched tight, his eyes looking past her at the chains that had once bound her. Remaining silent, he reached past her shoulder and grabbed one of the shackles with one hand, her wrist with another.

“No,” she said, “please.” Perro ignored her and clamped one manacle around her left arm. “Why?”

“It’s not up to me, Ivy.”

His face was like stone as he shackled her second arm, and then began to work on her feet. She dropped to her knees by necessity, the impact of the stone sure to leave a bruise.

“He believes you are a witch. There is no other reason needed.”

“But why is that?”

Perro paused before fixing the fourth shackle and gave Ivy a dark look.

“You are young and not knowledgeable of the world. If you knew the horrors the witches have committed, you would not ask such a thing.”

“Oh. I see.”

She thought she had endeared herself to him on some level. But if he knew the truth, he too would hate her. Anyone in this world would. Her tears flowed freely, though not because of the shackles. She could handle that. The loneliness was another thing entirely.

After he finished, Perro relocked the door and began to walk out of sight, never looking back.

“Perro,” she said, remembering the fragments of the men's conversation from earlier, “it's already winter right?” She could feel the cold coming through the window.

“The seventeenth day of the third month." Still he did not look at her. Her heart sank. She had run out of time. "Why?”

“Just curious,” she said.

Tomorrow they were going to learn the truth. Tomorrow she was going to die.

Night came all too fast the next day. Ivy felt like she was counting down the minutes until her death. She had thought physically counting the seconds out loud would make things pass slower, but nothing seemed to help. In no time at all, the sun had fallen.

No one was watching her as usual, but her breath quickened and her heart began to race. It always happened past midnight. Only moonlight flooded into her room from the single window fixed above her head. When would it come? It could be seconds or hours still. Would the hunters be nearby to rush in and end her right away?

She sat there kneeling, praying to the god who hated her for a way out of this before it was too late. If Perro saw her in the throes of her witchly torment, it would be all over. If he could just visit her a bit earlier. Like right now. Come on. Please.

"One," she said, starting her count all over. Her hollow voice filled the empty chamber, "...two. Thr—"

The word got caught in her throat. A spark of pure darkness flared in her heart, quashing all hope of rescue. It would be up to her alone to save herself. Her power had always activated on its own during these grisly anniversaries, but how could she do a single thing under such terrible pain?

Agony ripped through her, and her body fought against the chains ten times harder than she ever had before. Blood trickled down her forearms and across the tops of her feet where the shackles dug grooves into her skin. For the first few moments, she managed to keep her screams held within, but her strength of will did not—could not—last. How was she supposed to keep quiet when every fiber of her being had caught fire?

“So you reveal your true colors this night, witch,” A voice came at her in between wails.

“I did not want to believe it,” another said.

Ivy opened her clamped shut eyes, and for just a moment, she saw the two witch hunters eying her with looks of pure contempt. But then her witch world overwrote the colorful world of humanity in real time. The stone at her knees fell away into a curved pit with a thousand angled lines of impossible asymmetry. The bars ahead of her contorted into interlocking loops large enough for a bear to pass through. Of the two hunters, she could see a pair of grotesque monsters that grew in size the further she tried to look away from them.

The pain remained, and another wave of it hit her, but her power had come early. She lunged against her bonds, finding that they were no bonds at all. Her arms simply fell out of her restraints without any resistance. When she looked down at her feet, the shackles there—like everything else—were not the correct shape. As they were now, they offered no prevention of escape. She stepped out of them without effort, only to immediately double over in wracking pains deep in her gut.

“What has happened?” A voice shouted over her screams.

“The witch’s magic hides her from view, but we need only follow the sounds of her torment from God’s judgment.”

"Your God can kiss my ass if he's doing this to me," she said, somehow stringing together a full sentence.

Why did she have to put up with people trying to kill her when she could hardly think straight? She attempted to cry out in frustration, but she was already screaming again. The forms of the hunters bumbled over closer to her within the twisted witch world, and she managed a groaning roll, which sent her tumbling down into the curving floor. She looked up, and saw the hunters twitching around, the lines of their forms vibrating erratically. Had she…had she fallen through the floor?

No time to consider it as more pain lanced through her body. She crawled a bit on all fours, the squirming surface of the witch world only inches from her face. It hurt to even look at, and she forced herself to keep moving through the madness. All around her, ghostly archways started to pop up, and she chose one at random. Instantly, a blast of cold air touched her cheeks. Outside? She turned to look behind her and shrieked again as the two hunters somehow were still on her tail, their figures now jagged, yet wispy at the same time and altogether unknowable.

“Do not let the witch escape!” one called out.

“Her movements are not natural! Her power is greater than simply hiding from our eyes!”

Ivy kept crawling, the witch world coiling around her in its dizzying bleakness, but she had no other option than to keep her eyes pried open and trust the alien landscape to guide her away from her pursuers. And it appeared to do so. Easily. Hardly able to roll or crawl, no matter how close the hunters appeared, she could always choose a new path available only to her. Their confusion brought a wicked smile to her face when she eluded them over and over. Yet something was off. How could she be smiling while under such pain…

Oh. The pain had left her. It had disappeared so much earlier than the previous two times. Another reason to smile. She held onto the expression, not sure when the last time was that she had felt the impulse to do so.

"Perro!" a voice called out into the night. "Do you have her?"

"No, master."

Ah, right. The hunters were still close by. She had to do something fast. Without her crying out in pain, they had no way to find her, but she couldn’t stay this way forever. The dark power in her heart had much of its strength already used up in her flight from the prison.

“Bye, you self-righteous pieces of shit.”

Their bodies shifted, but Ivy was already running along a curved and broken pathway that made no sense to her brain, which meant they would have no hope of tracking her. After maybe thirty seconds of sprinting, the witch world faded away, and she took in several deep breaths, watching her natural vision return.

In any direction, there was no sign of the pair of witch hunters, and she laughed. Somehow she had actually made it! She was alive!

But…now what? Above her a near full moon shined in a cloudless sky. It gave her enough visibility to catch sight of a plume of smoke rising off to the northwest. She could only assume it to be the smithy operating through the night. If she had the location of the town, she could find her way back to the farm, and more importantly, her stash. There was no chance of continuing to stay with Miss Angelica anymore, but perhaps she could say goodbye.

It took several hours taking a wide path around the rising smoke before she found the woods bordering the farm where she lived for over a year. The sun was rising by the time she reached her stash. She grabbed the pouch of coins and the dagger and then headed off for one last visit to the farm.

Looking at it in the morning sunlight, the farmhouse looked so serene. Like a remnant of a life she could no longer have. A life that she never should have tried to have. Maybe she didn’t even want it anymore. Had she ever? Not really. No matter how terrifying and confusing her witch world was, she could not deny the exhilaration she had felt besting the two hunters. It was probably just the darkness seeping in and thinking for her, but right now it didn’t matter. Her power had kept her alive, and that was enough for her not to condemn it.

She opened the door to the house and took in a deep breath.

“What do you think you’re doing here?” came a sharp feminine voice. Of course they were already awake.

“Just came to say—”

“GET OUT OF MY HOUSE, HELLSPAWN!”

Oh right. Ivy was a witch.