The first thing she heard was a shuffle above, indicating an illicit opening of the front door. A single, dancing slit of firelight illuminated the girl’s slowly stirring body as it woke — reacting instinctively to the additional visitor in her abode. And then stillness. All she could hear above the din of the world outside burning was her own shallow breathing, that of a creature of the night resting fearfully in its nest. Before she could rise, she would be stopped. This was all her attacker, lurking omnisciently above, knew for certain.
There was a crash and a splintering of drywall as the ceiling shattered. Descending in a glowing pillar of dust and foreboding, the attacker landed gracefully at the foot of the bed. The Girl’s red eyes darted upward with a visceral fear exclusive to the undead: the dispassionate crave of self-preservation.
“You?” She asked, her voice harsh from lack of use.
“Yes,” came the instantaneous reply. Suddenly, in a movement faster than those of this world are primed to expect, the attacker drew its wooden stake and plunged it deep into the girl’s very soul. The girl struggled with the weapon, attempting fruitlessly to remove it from her body. Light began to leak out from the edges of the wound. A crimson flash emanated from the stilling girl, basking the room in the essence of hellfire itself. “It is I.”
And the girl’s very being was purged from this existence, ripped from her broken body, damned eternally to its next.
Her consciousness, flung from her mortal self, landed squarely at the feet of her oppressor, the one that had bound her to this ever-present fate.
“I am sorry,” said God. “This is the way it had to be.”
The girl’s retort emerged as ephemerally as the substanceless clouds which made up the ground beneath her feet: “I am not a witch.”