No, this is not—
Popa Dorin steps closer.
"May God receive… what is broken…"
"…purified…"
"…restored…"
None of it makes sense.
He takes the torch. For a moment, it hovers there, just below me, the flame trembling, alive in a way nothing else feels anymore.
Then he lowers it. There is a crackle, small at first. Almost nothing.
Mama’s cry breaks through the square, louder than anything that has come before. It tears across the air, but I cannot reach for it.
The fire catches.
It spreads quickly along the base, feeding on the dry wood, licking upward in thin, eager tongues. I feel it then, a warmth against my legs, creeping upward.
For a moment—
It is almost gentle.
A strange, unfurling heat, like the memory of sunlight on skin, like the warmth of the hearth when reaching for a pie. It does not feel like what I feared. It does not feel like—
Then it changes.
The flames rise, catch the fabric. It licks higher, finding the hem of my dress, catching there, climbing with a hunger both sudden and insistent. Fabric darkens, curls, blackens, then bursts into flame. The heat deepens, thickens, pressing closer, closer—
My leg. The wound.
The fire finds it.
The exposed flesh, the torn skin, the blood that has not yet dried—everything answers at once. The heat sears into it, raw and immediate, and the iron of the trap begins to glow beneath it, warming, heating, until it burns where it touches me.
Pain explodes.
It is not a single thing. It is everywhere. It devours, floods through me so completely that there is no space left for breath or thought or anything else. My body arches against the stake, a scream tearing free of me so violently the cloth at my mouth gives way.
I gasp, but air does not come.
Smoke fills my lungs instead, thick and choking, forcing its way down my throat, burning as it goes. My chest seizes as a cough tears from me, each breath worse than the last. My eyes sting, tears spilling freely now, blurring everything into light and shadow and flame.
It climbs higher.
I feel it on my skin, on my stomach, my chest, my arms bound tight behind me, unable to move away, unable to shield anything. The heat is no longer outside me—it is inside, tearing through nerve and muscle, turning everything into something unrecognizable.
"Mama—"
The name breaks from me, desperate.
"Mama—please—"
I cannotsee her.
My voice cracks, rises, falls again, dissolving into sobs, into cries that do not belong to the woman I was but to something smaller, something stripped down to fear alone.
