The Year of the Witching

by Alexis Henderson

“Isn’t it strange how reading a book is a sin, but locking a girl in the stocks and leaving her to the dogs is another day of the Good Father’s work?”

It doesn’t give you the power to shape it. I know that you’re afraid, Ezra. I am too. But that doesn’t give us the right to close our eyes and pretend what scares us doesn’t exist.

I often wonder if my spirit will live on in her. Sometimes I hope that it will, if only so I won’t be forgotten.

This was the great shame of Bethel: complacency and complicity that were responsible for the deaths of generations of girls. It was the sickness that placed the pride of men before the innocents they were sworn to protect. It was a structure that exploited the weakest among them for the benefit of those born to power.

To be a woman is to be a sacrifice.

“Good people don’t bow their heads and bite their tongues while other good people suffer. Good people are not complicit.”

And it was in that strange abstraction of timelessness, where the seconds seemed suspended in the torpor of the infinite, that Immanuelle’s thoughts turned dark. That thing within her—the maelstrom, the monster, the witch—stirred to life.

True evil, Immanuelle realized now, wore the skin of good men. It uttered prayers, not curses. It feigned mercy where there was only malice. It studied Scriptures only to spit out lies.

It was not the Prophet who bore Bethel, bound to his back like a millstone. It was all of the innocent girls and women—like Miriam and Leah—who suffered and died at the hands of men who exploited them. They were Bethel’s sacrifice. They were the bones upon which the Church was built.

These were the casualties of a war that could never be won. Immanuelle knew this now. The violence would continue. A new man would claim the title of Prophet. The cathedral would be rebuilt, and the covens of the dead would one day rise again. The war between witch and Prophet, Church and coven, darkness and light, would wage on and on until the day there would be nothing and no one left to mourn.