The Weight of Ashes

a piece inspired by the Salem witch trials

The church bell tolled over the damp, fog-cloaked village, carrying its mournful clang like an omen into every shadowed heart. In the heart of the square, under the watchful eyes of St. Elara's steeple, a frail boy no older than twelve stood in tattered clothes before a gathering of grim-faced villagers. His name was Ashen, though most had simply taken to calling him "the cursed one" since his world unraveled.

Ashen's parents had withered from sickness months before, their passing swift and merciless. The boy, left wandering alone, fell into silence, clutching only his mother's charm, a simple iron pendant, as a tether to sanity. He lived on scraps and murmurs, too timid to beg and too naïve to flee far. Yet for all his innocence, suspicion clung to him like soot. It began with whispers, curious glances, then accusations louder than the creaking pews during the sermon.

"Is it not convenient," queried Father Bramwell during one rain-drenched Mass, "that death brushed his home first and spared him?" His deep voice reverberated, commanding attention with the authority of scripture.

Shortly after, a blight overtook the village's crops. The river's fish became diseased. Livestock gave birth to stillborns. Ashen became the focal point—a scapegoat in their desperate search for answers.

"There is evil in him," wild-eyed Mrs. Callia cried at the market one morning when she caught sight of Ashen lurking in the alley. "You mark my words! The boy is cursed."

Father Bramwell, whose sermons had grown increasingly fervent, fanned the flames. "Where there is sin unaccounted for, there is wrath unbridled." He spoke of cleansing fires, Old Testament warnings of humanity's folly when straying from divine judgment. Though Ashen hardly understood the sermons' weight, his name surfaced more frequently in prayer than he could count.

Before long, they came for him.

It was Father Bramwell who demanded Ashen's face the judgement of divine truth. Dragged from the barn where he'd been sleeping that night, he barely put up a fight, his tiny frame no match for their iron-fisted conviction. The words they flung—"Heretic," "Blightbearer," "Child of affliction"—may as well have been in another tongue. He only started, wide-eyed, and clutched his charm until the villagers prised it away.

The trial was brief—a cruel charade masked as justice. Villagers wept as they told the stories of their losses. "My cows have dwindled to skeletons since that child began wandering by!" one bellowed. "My daughter cannot nurse her second child; her milk curdles!" cried another. What proof was needed beyond the torture of collective suffering, the weight of despair?

As the gallows were erected in the square, the storm overhead brewed darker than any seen all year, as if the clouds themselves held their breath. In those moments, Ashen was silent as ever. No pleas for mercy came, for he did not yet understand why he was to die. He simply tried to remember his mother's face and clung to the hope that he might see it again someday.

When the noose was tightened around his neck, he gazed towards Father Bramwell. The priest, draped in somber vestments, led the final prayers—a stern mask of righteousness upon his face. Though inwardly, a sickness churned within the priest.

He knew.

The night before Ashen was seized, Father Bramwell had spent hours alone in his study, poring over old deeds and letters brought forth by a traveling merchant. There, buried in the accounts of the village's land rights and disputes, lay the truth—the village's fertile fields were poisoned not by divine anger, but by runoff from an iron quarry upstream. The church had once made deals to enrich its coffers by allowing the quarry's operation under its protection. The sickened fish, the ruined crops—it was all the consequence of greed and poor judgment.

Yet this was a truth too heavy to speak aloud. To admit it now, after so many sermons of fire and brimstone, would dismantle the faith the village held in Bramwell and the church he led. It would turn their anger elsewhere... but also toward him. So he watched as the boy's small body fell, as innocence was strangled in place of penance.

The villagers cheered hallelujahs, convinced the curse was lifted when the storm broke hours later. No one noticed Father Bramwell slipping from the square, his face pale and haunted as if he'd seen a ghost.

For years afterward, the village prospered. The rains returned, the blight vanished, and everything they had lost rebounded in time. Ashen became a footnote in their history, brushed aside as a necessary casualty of faith.

But Father Bramwell lingered in his remorse like a man haunted by shadows only he could see. He bore his secret as if he, too, wore the noose—not on his neck but around his soul. Some days, his reflection in the altar's polished brass mocked him. Other nights, he found himself staring at the spot near the gallows where the boy last stood, imagining what Ashen's life might have been.

He penned letters he never sent, confessions he never spoke, locking them all away in the crypt beneath the church. As the years wore on, his hair whitened and his steps slowed, the weight of what he had done growing heavier each day.

When his final breath came, it was in silence, alone in his bedchamber. None knew of the truth he carried to his grave. And though the village mourned him as a righteous man, few passed St. Elara's at night without shivering. Some claimed the faint cry of a boy could still be heard near the gallows, though none dared whisper it aloud.