Song fic? Maybe? Idk
A witch of the earth is doing a ritual on the mountain outside of the village she lives near. It’s almost winter and so the ritual is for fortifying the plants that have gone/are going dormant. A villager catches her doing the blood magic and causes a mob to torch her home that night, killing the two week old litter of kittens she had been raising.
They drag her into the center of town afterwards and burn her at the stake. They think that is that, that by the end of winter the witch will be nothing but a faint memory—they were wrong.
She’s in the trees,
she’s in the breeze,
they see her footsteps on the ground. They see shadows of her in every place but no one can ever catch a true glance. Twirling figures of fire dance in their periphery, what seems to be a person and three little shapes trailing at their feet.
As the months pass all of the village comes to realize that just because the witch left doesn’t mean she’s gone. It was a particularly cold winter, the storms harsher than any of them had ever known before. Many were lost.
By the first green of spring, the remaining villagers know they are damned.
For there is no green.
The mountain grows more red with every leaf and stalk sprouted, every flower to bloom is a sign of what they have done.
Her blood is on the mountain, sunken into the roots of the plants she cared for every year. She had poured her heart and soul into her work, and so she stays. The first storm of spring floods where the village lays. Lighting ignites their homes and the villagers are trapped by the steadily deepening and regularly electrified water.
They are all dead now.
The witch can rest.