Today's theme I found to be an interesting one, here is what I did with it.
Write about a witch’s curse:
The woods next to the village of St
Aubrens were dark and oppressive.
Somehow sadness and pain seem to radiate out from the branches and
whether it was summer or winter, the leaves on the trees were always black.
The village itself was also a
strange place. There was a section in
the village with rows of cottages that no one wanted to pass. Misery seemed to hang in the air like an ever
present cloud and the residents always looked like the weight of the world rested
on their shoulders.
Whenever there was a celebration
within the village, the festivities never reached those cottages. Decorations were never hung, the brightly
coloured lanterns were never lit, the people never seemed to smile.
Newcomers to the village never
stayed long. People were actively
discouraged from buying in the area and the children who lived there moved away
as soon as could. This was not a happy
town. Because decades earlier, the
village people had made a mistake, they had crossed a witch.
The villagers had always known
about the witch who lived alone, or so they thought, in a tiny cottage in the
woods. Uneasy at the thought of a witch
in their midst, the unspoken rule was that they left her alone and in turn, she
would stay away from the village.
After several years particularly
bad harvests, the villagers started to mutter about the witch and about how she
was bringing them bad luck. One night, fuelled
after a night at the local tavern, those mutterings turned to anger, and the
anger turned to fury. The men of the
village tore through the woods with torches alight, intent of burning the witch
out of her home and getting her well away from their village.
It was only when they had set
fire to the witch’s cottage that the villagers heard screams of “My children!
My children!” coming from behind them.
The witch raced through the trees towards the cottage which was now fully
ablaze. There was no way anyone, even
the witch could have saved anyone inside.
The men had raced back to
village, horrified at what had just occurred.
The next day, the witch had
appeared in the village square, stricken with grief at the loss of her
children. The smell of the fire was all
around her and black smoke seemed to follow in her wake. She proclaimed
that every man who had entered the woods that night would suffer, that he would
never know happiness again without pain.
The witch was never seen
again. Too afraid now to pursue her, the
villagers never entered the woods again, and with good reason. All the men who had entered the woods that
night soon felt the consequences of her curse.
Any feeling of happiness was followed by strong physical pain. The
sensation was described as having your heart pulled from your chest. From a chuckle from a joke to a feeling of love or happiness caused hours of excruciating agony.
The men soon realised that in
order to survive the curse, they had to cut all happiness from their
lives. Their loved ones were sent away,
they chose their food from the scraps left by others and they now eached lived alone, on the same street in the village.
No one in the village knew
exactly how long the cursed men had actually lived. The years and decades passed and yet they
still lived on. Some said that they
would die when the witch did. When her pain had died, so to could theirs.
No one ever entered the St
Aubrens Woods again.
