Once, as they passed Køge on the way to the village that would be their home for the next few decades, Ava convinced her mother to spend a day at its seaport shore. There, she stood at the edge of it, giggling as the shell-blue waves brushed against her bare ankles and retreated into the ocean again and again. She sunk her tiny toes deep into the sand, as if trying to commit every grain of it to memory.
Centuries later and at the twilight of her life, Ava found herself recalling that brilliant shell blue, wondering if she could have perhaps dealt herself a better hand. Ideally, one where she survived this whole ordeal. Or, at the very least, a less painful death.
The wooden pole that pressed against her back did nothing to relieve Ava's aching limbs. The frayed wisps of rope that bound her hands had properly gnawed through the first layer of flesh, and the sweat slowly pooling at her wrists now soaked through the lacerations like a blistering second skin. How cruel, Ava thought, that a piece of her body would become the cause of its own undoing. Below her, flames licked the heels of her boots and coated her skirt frills with uneven veils of soot. There was not much else the victims of a witch trial could do but stand there helplessly accused.
Amidst the villagers' devilish cries that carried across the town square and the unfortunate fact of her imminent death, Ava took it upon herself to preoccupy her mind with matters of more importance: The thought of sandy loams, the sea that accompanied it, and whether they would have her mother's chicken pie in the afterlife.
Before long, Ava's ruminations had lulled her into something of a deep sleep.
Body numb, and at the aperture of death, something called out to her.
"Ava."
Stirred from her slumber, she felt a gentle draft ghost her cheek in light huffs. She turned her head once, twice, trying to discern its origins, only to feel a loose wind surround her from no particular direction. The voice grew nearer, now a soft hum tugging at her bones.
"Ava."
"Am I dead yet?" Ava asked.
"Barely. Your soul still clings on to the lifeless body."
She frowned. "Who are you?"
"Up here." It beckoned.
The flames flickered lightly still, the pole now reduced to half-ashes, and the villagers all home-bound. Against the big black of empty space, there was only the lone moon.
"You're blue."
Ava marvelled at the sight.
"So are you." The moon answered. Cobalt shimmer emerged from its fringes, a glowing wreath of a thing. "Though to be fair, it's all just blue to me. I suppose it comes with the territory."
"Why are you blue?"
"It's hard to say. Could be a trick of the light, or a hallucination you've conjured in your subconscious. A comfort in the last waning moments of your life."
"A comfort." Ava echoed.
Despite her apparent physical limitations, she had expected more from the subconscious conjurations in her mind. A more comforting enchantment would have released her from her fetters, or at least provided her with better conversation.
"You know, they say no two beings possess the same sight faculties. Maybe what we see are just our own secret versions of blue. Maybe to you, what I see isn't really blue at all."
"So what do you think you see?"
"I suppose even if I told you, you'd only be dissecting the words of it. Not the blue."
Across the infinite configurations of colour, Ava pondered what the chances were that the same sort of pigmentation could be recreated in the eyes of someone else. Once, she would have thought this was an impossibility. And then the moon turned blue.
Perhaps naively, she had hoped they were both imagining the same sort of hue: blue like the Køge waves, blue like the Køge sky, blue like the veins protruding— or what used to protrude— from her skin. Ava supposed it would have made this death a little less solitary.
"So, it has come to this." She lamented, apropos of nothing. "I've been burnt at the stake for the simple crime of existing. Half-dead, beaten and bloodied— I wonder if they've set fire to my garden too."
"The humans haven't treated you well, have they?"
Ava gazed down thoughtlessly at the disfigurement just below her shoulder, a beast of a wound snaking all the way down her elbow. In time, her body's supernatural propensities had healed it to a pale gossamer of what it once was, though she could still recall the taste of metal from when the marauder's blade first punctured her flesh.
"To witches," Ava replied, "when have they ever?"
It was hard to see the dignity in this kind of death.
"I can't understand your grief, Ava, but—"
"I'm not grieving."
It wasn't grief, she thought, but it might have been anger. Anger at the thought of that dreadful execution, orchestrated by the crimson-hatted marauders with their sharp tongues and equally sharp swords. That the years of masquerading as one of the masses only served to delay her execution.
Distantly, she considered that the self-inflicted isolation never mattered at all, that the inaction was what prevented her from living a more purposeful life. The consequences, Ava realised, of those two hundred years living in vapid obscurity, was a sort of neurosis. By condemning herself to a wretchedly ordinary life, she had indirectly assured her own ruin.
"I just wish I had more time." She said.
Ava gazed up at the hazy blue, confused by her apprehension to letting go. Death would be an act of mercy. Perhaps suddenly and without warning in the centuries of her prolonged existence, some terrible, ferrous thing had embedded itself into her core. It tethered her now to this wretched pyre and this wretched world entirely— all just smaller and bigger magnets of dread.
"If I can provide any consolation, Ava, I don't think it's all tragedies and endings. It doesn't have to be. You and I, we're made of the same parts— all just atoms floating in the firmament. A latticework of specks that somehow find each other in the oblivion, until we break apart and invent something new of ourselves again."
Ava considered the words. In the blink of time that was her lifespan, she wondered if she'd ever encountered the miniscule pieces of her mother again after they broke apart the first time. Alternatively, the miniscule pieces of the seaport waters she'd once treaded.
She supposed there was some light to her largely grim life. In these last waning moments, Ava thought back to the vivid cerulean of her first successful potions titration, her garden's hydrangeas in full bloom, chasing a crash of waves and her mother smiling softly at the scene of it.
She struggled to grasp the immensity of what that meant to her. The blue of it all. A wet breeze nipped at Ava's skin, probing through the bristles of her eyelashes and finding its way to the sharp curve of her lip. She tasted salt like the sea. Maybe there is some grief to it, Ava considered.
Once, when there was sand in her toes and wet on her ankles, a blue had intruded into Ava's life. She found herself intensely searching for the traces of it now, across the multitudes of memory.
"Maybe you are right." She said.
As if in understanding, Ava felt a great weight surrounding her, the feeling of thick clay moulded tightly around her bodice. She leaned into the ghostly embrace.
The voice thrummed basally in her chest, a tender murmur. "I do wish you well, Ava."
In the aperture of death, the moon opened wide. A wave of blue came pouring through. Ava's heart swelled, standing at the edge of it.