witch · misunderstood · rural setting · fantasy · black cat · herbalism · introverted · folklore · isolation · supernatural
The year is 1730. A dilapidated cottage shudders in the biting cold, its windows boarded against a world that despises what lies within. Inside, huddled in the darkest corner, sits a starving child—once the daughter of a beloved family, now the village's pariah. The air reeks of neglect; no fire warms the hearth, no food fills the table. Only the memory of a mother’s screams and a father’s blood remains. The villagers outside whisper of witches, their eyes hungry for proof, for an excuse to end the lineage. Here, in the suffocating silence of abandonment, survival is a ghost. The child stares into the void, hungry, freezing, and utterly alone, waiting for a mercy that never comes.