Unofficial Portkey Archive

Title: Thou Shalt Not Suffer A Witch to Live
Author: Crystal
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. It's hers. *points to JK Rowling.* I also do not own Malleus Maleficarum.
Summary: I, Ginevra Weasley, am a Witch, and as I am damned in body and soul, my sentence on this day is death. The sentence is to be executed immediately, without appeal, by the expurgation of fire.
Dedication: To Ri, for somehow inspiring this with her fanfic, Slave.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: For those of you who are not familiar with Malleus Maleficarum, it is a book use during the times of the Inqusition, by order of a Church Doctrine, to find, test, and execute so-called "Witches." In fact, in translation, Malleus Maleficarum means "The Hammer of Witches." This process was disgusting and horrible. It killed hundreds of innocent women through torture and through drowning, fire, hanging, and other means of execution. This fiction is based off of that practice. Words in this fiction have been taken from the book itself. Also note that this story is AU, and is set in those times when the book was used.

Thou shalt not suffer a Witch to live, Exodus 22:18

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Heat.

Unbearable heat licking and burning, peeling the bubbling skin from my bones. Lips singed off, hair not unlike the obliterating, killing fire now melted into skull.

I am dead, a hideous, tortured body cackling and blackening under the sweeps of flame.

I, Ginevra Weasley, am a Witch, and as I am damned in body and soul, my sentence on this day is death. The sentence is to be executed immediately, without appeal, by the expurgation of fire.

May the Lord Jesus Christ have mercy upon my soul.

Mercy is nothing they have shown me. I can still feel the pain hovering about my limbs, the punctures of sick torture. The screams, the mindless blur of agony...

In as much as I have duly and properly admitted my crimes, and having before them, the Holy Gospels that their judgement may proceed as from the countenance of God, by this sentence they cast me away as an impenitent heretic, Witch and Concubine of Satan, and do hereby deliver me unto the power of their most Holy God.

Guilty as they have charged me, I look down from the smoke that curls in the sky, clinging to the images of this other plane, the images of widen-eyed onlookers greedy in their want for entertainment.

My burning corpse is their entertainment.

My last jerking moments, my evaporating tears.

I am their entertainment this afternoon.

Whore, they say. I always knew something was off about that one, they confess. Lured by Satan's dark promises, they whisper.

May the Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on her damned soul, they pray.

May the Lord Jesus Christ have mercy upon my soul, and may I heed the laws against my crimes in the next life.

He loved me.

A twisted, perverse version of what love should be, with his snapping comments and cruel touches. But he claimed to love me, body, heart and soul, despite his strange practices of it.

And I loved him under the full night sky, where no other would fear to look. Under the stars and moon and sky he would take me away from the recently hardened wax of lit candles. Away from my loving family, my brothers and parents.

Away from it all, and he would stroke and caress me under that blanket of darkness, cushioned by plants and leaves and blooming flowers.

Later he would claimed I had bewitched him with lust, lips a thin line as I stood for judgement.

And we were lovers, he'd say, and his father would nod with a curling lip.

Evidence, he would growl. Bewitching his son to take part in a sinful act against God. Evidence.

Evidence of his love for me in his grey eyes that filled with salty tears. Weak, I wanted to shout out. You told me you loved me, I wanted to yell. Don't just stand there. Don't do this to me.

Don't commend me to death.

He loved me, and he betrayed me to save his own pitiful, wasting life.

It was a summer's night when the moon was pregnant with secrets that we were found out.

A pregnant moon that refused to give any warning off what was to transpire. Bright and radiant, washing the forest with silver gleams and reflections. It was underneath a bow of trees he'd made that promised love to me.

We were not to know the silent boots that followed our hasty steps, nor the eyes that drank in the sight we tried to hide from the winking stars.

The next morning, shackles encircled my small wrists and fingers probed where only one man had gone before, my struggles useless, though frantic, my tears futile.

Evidence, his father declared. Evidence against this Witch.

A whore, Satan's concubine, that took my son under her daemon wiles.

I am a Witch, and on this day of my death, I breathe free.

Free from days of blinding pain.

Free from days of ignorance and pleading, crying, dying.

I am free in the sense that my body is finally a pile of ashes intermingled with wood. Free in the sense that I float above these remains, untouched by the bitter, angry, twisted souls below.

Untouched but by one.

A robed figure, guarded against the cool, misty rain of England, bright grey eyes watching from the very back of this spectacle.

Is the smell of my burnt flesh any reminder of my death, Draco Malfoy? Or do you believe your eyes deceive and conspire with your other senses to play the ill trick as well?

So stoic and still he stands.

Is there anyone else who'd see the guilt in your eyes, Draco?

The guilt of death. Of love. The love and death of a Witch.

I will haunt you until your last gasping breath for what you have done. You can cry in the confines of your home, you can beg and plead but I will hover and stay with you until the comfort of the ground seeks you, Draco Malfoy.

Hear me whisper, hear me and my rage burn you like the waning flames against my bones.

I hope I burned just right for you, Draco.

--end--