I died in a fire I didn’t start.
Not because I cursed anyone, not because I talked to demons… but because my hair was too red, my eyes were too light, and my laughter made scared people uncomfortable.

I grew up in one of those villages you never read about in history books – mud streets, thatched roofs, empty plates on the table. Hunger was normal. Fear was normal. What wasn’t normal… was me. My mother used to say I was born with the wrong kind of beauty, the kind that made people whisper. Pale skin, wild red hair, green eyes that looked “too sharp.” In a world that didn’t understand much, “different” quickly became “dangerous.”

My mother taught me to gather herbs by the edge of the woods. We had no doctors, no hospitals, just roots and leaves and hope. She showed me which flowers calmed a fever, which bitter plant eased a cough. When a sick child got better after my tea, they thanked God. When someone died despite everything we tried, they looked at me… and didn’t say thank you.

At thirteen, I heard it clearly for the first time.
“Daughter of the devil.”
They said it with a laugh, but their eyes weren’t laughing.

After that, every misfortune had my name on it. A cow died giving birth? I must have cursed it. A baby coughed through the night? They were sure someone had seen me smiling alone that afternoon. The harvest failed? It wasn’t the hail, or the poor soil, or the never-ending cold. It was the “witch girl” with the strange eyes and the knowledge of plants.

Then one day, men with crosses on their chests came riding into our village.

They said they were here to protect us from evil. But they didn’t come looking for truth. They came looking for someone to blame. By the time they arrived, the villagers had already decided who that someone was. They didn’t see a child who had spent years trying to heal them. They saw an easy answer. They saw me.

The interrogation was in a dark room that smelled of sweat and fear. A heavy wooden table, a candle, a book of prayers. And me. No mother. No friend. No one.

“Do you speak with the devil?”
“How many pacts have you signed in blood?”
“What spell did you cast on the fields?”

There were no right answers.
“No” meant I was lying.
“Yes” meant I deserved to burn.

They asked the same questions over and over until my head spun. Every time I cried or stumbled on my words, they wrote it down as proof. Even my fear became evidence against me.

Then came the “test.”

They tied my hands and feet and threw me into the freezing river while the whole village watched. If I sank and drowned, I would be innocent… and dead. If I floated, that meant the water rejected me, and I was guilty.

I floated.

People screamed as if they had just watched the devil herself rise from the water. No one talked about the rope that held my body stiff, or the way panic makes you fight to stay above the surface. They didn’t want logic. They wanted a monster. And it was easier to turn a girl into a monster than to face their own fear and ignorance.

On the morning of my execution, they paraded me through the village. Barefoot. Dirty. Bound. The same streets where I had carried herbs and hope, I now walked as a “witch.” Some spat on me. Some threw stones. Some turned their faces away, worried that defending me would make them next.

The church bells rang. Not for a wedding. Not for a funeral. For a show.

In the center of the square, the stake was ready. Logs stacked high. Rope cutting into my wrists. I looked around and saw so many familiar faces. People whose children I had tried to save. People who had accepted my herbs and my kindness when it suited them.

None of that mattered now.

The flames climbed fast. First warmth. Then pain. The kind of pain that steals your breath before you can even scream. Smoke clawed at my lungs. My tears evaporated before they could fall. Somewhere in the crowd, someone shouted “Burn, witch!” and others echoed it like a song.

In my last moments, I didn’t think about hell.
I thought about how unfair it was to die for being different.
For being a girl who knew too much in a world that wanted her silent.

History never wrote my name. There’s no statue of me, no page in a book. To most, I was just one of many “witches,” another nameless victim of a bonfire no one wants to remember.

But here’s the part that should scare you:

We still do this.
We may not light literal fires anymore, but we still burn people with our words, our gossip, our need to blame someone when life hurts. We still point at the quiet girl, the weird boy, the person who doesn’t fit the mold… and say, in different words, “witch.”

So tell me, honestly:
If you had been in that crowd with a torch in your hand and fear in your heart… would you have thrown the stone? Looked away? Or stepped forward and said, “Enough”?

I’m not here to haunt you. I’m here to ask you:
In your world, in your timeline, who is the “witch” you’re letting burn right now?

Let me know what you truly think in the comments.