She Who Walks in Shadow

The cycle breaks here...

The chains bite into her arms and wrists like metal teeth, but Morgraine Nyx has felt worse. Much worse. The iron tastes of blood and rust and the desperate sweating palms of every poor bastard who wore them before her.

She flexes her fingers, feeling the familiar tingle of power beneath her skin, and watches the crowd below with the detached interest of a predator observing prey.

You stood in that glass tower in Manhattan, watching the protesters march for reproductive rights, and you thought humanity had evolved. You naïve, ancient fool.

The memory slides through her consciousness like silk over broken glass. You'd been standing at your office window on the seventy-second floor, your reflection ghostlike against the skyline, when that smarmy partner — what was his name? Davidson? — had slithered up behind you with his coffee breath and wandering hands.

"Getting a little worked up over the ladies' march, aren't we, Imogen?" he'd whispered, using the false name you'd worn for that particular decade. His fingers had brushed your shoulder with the casual entitlement of a man who'd never faced real consequences.

But that was then. This is now. And now is apparently 1220, give or take a few years of medieval ignorance.

"Witch!"

The word explodes from the crowd like a curse, and Morgraine almost laughs. Almost. The irony is so thick she could slice it with a blade and serve it for dinner.

"Burn the devil's whore!"

A portly man in mud-stained robes — the local magistrate, she assumes — climbs the wooden steps toward her platform. His face is flushed with righteous fury and probably too much ale. Behind him trails a thin priest whose eyes hold the particular brand of fanatical gleam that she's learned to recognise across centuries.

"Confess your sins before God and man," the magistrate wheezes, "and perhaps the Lord will show mercy upon your corrupted soul."

Morgraine tilts her head, red hair catching the torchlight like flame itself. "Mercy?" The word rolls off her tongue like honey laced with poison.

"Tell me, good sir, what mercy did you show the baker's daughter when you had her stripped and flogged for refusing your advances?"

The man's face goes from red to white to purple in the span of a heartbeat. "I... how dare you..."

"Or perhaps we should discuss the young widow whose land you seized after her husband's death? The one who 'mysteriously' disappeared when she threatened to appeal to the King?"

You remember the executive boardroom in 2019, don't you? The pharmaceutical company that was hiking insulin prices. The CEO who looked you straight in the eye and said, "Supply and demand, sweetheart. Basic economics." His wife left him three weeks later when she discovered the photos you'd anonymously delivered — photos of him with the company's teenage intern. Funny how basic economics worked both ways.

The priest steps forward, his crucifix catching the firelight. "The devil speaks through her! Do not be deceived by Satan's lies!"

But the crowd is murmuring now, shifting like water disturbed by stones. Because men, regardless of century, share certain universal truths: they are petty, they are insecure, and they absolutely cannot stand having their secrets exposed by a woman.

Morgraine feels the first tendrils of her power unfurling, warm and dark and infinitely patient. The chains around her wrists begin to heat, the metal expanding just enough to loosen their grip. She's been perfecting this particular escape for eight hundred years, after all.

"You know what's funny?" she says conversationally, as if she's discussing the weather rather than her impending execution.

"I've lived through plagues, wars, the rise and fall of empires. I've seen humanity's greatest achievements and most spectacular failures. And do you know what never changes?"

The magistrate has backed away from her now, his earlier bravado evaporating like morning mist.

"Silence her! Silence the witch!"

"Men," Morgraine continues, her voice carrying across the square with supernatural clarity, "always, always believe they're the heroes of their own stories. Even when they're burning women alive for the crime of existing without permission."

You learned that lesson early, didn't you? In 1348, during the plague years. You were barely fifty then — still young for your kind — trying to help heal the sick with herb lore and basic hygiene. But when the death toll kept rising despite your efforts, they needed someone to blame. Always easier to point fingers at the foreign woman with the healing hands than accept that sometimes, shit just happens.

The chains are properly loose now, though she keeps her arms and wrists positioned as if still bound. The crowd hasn't noticed yet — they're too busy arguing among themselves about whether her words hold truth. Seeds of doubt, planted in the fertile soil of guilty consciences.

"She speaks of things no mortal could know," someone shouts from the back.

"Witchcraft!"

"Or maybe," calls out a voice Morgraine recognises — the blacksmith's wife, whose bruises she'd noticed earlier, "maybe she just has eyes to see what we all pretend doesn't happen."

The priest raises his crucifix higher, his voice cracking with strain. "Do not listen to her poisoned words! She seeks to corrupt your souls with—"

"With what?" Morgraine interrupts, and this time she does laugh — a sound like wind chimes.

"Truth? The radical notion that women are human beings with rights and dignity?"

You tried the subtle approach in 2023, remember? Working within the system, using the law as your weapon. You spent months building a case against that tech billionaire who was trafficking girls through his 'modeling agencies.' Rock-solid evidence, airtight prosecution. And then the judge — bought and paid for — dismissed it on a technicality. The girls? Vanished into the system, their voices silenced once again.

The wood beneath her feet groans as the platform shifts. Someone in the crowd has thrown a stone, and more follow. The magistrate is shouting orders, but his authority is crumbling faster than parchment through time.

Because once you plant the idea that the powerful might not be righteous, once you suggest that authority might be corrupt, people start remembering their own grievances.

"Kill the witch!" The cry comes from a young man near the front, his face twisted with rage. But Morgraine can see past the anger to the fear beneath. Fear of change, fear of losing what little power he has in his own small world.

You saw that same expression on Davidson's face when the harassment allegations finally caught up with him. The shock, the indignation, the desperate scrambling to maintain control of a narrative that was slipping through his fingers like water. "This isn't how things work," he'd sputtered during his deposition. "I've been nothing but supportive of women in the workplace."

Sure, Dave. Nothing says support like cornering your female employees in supply closets.

The first torch is lit and passed forward through the crowd. Then another. The priest is chanting Latin now, his words mixing with the growing roar of mob mentality.

But Morgraine can feel something else building in the air — a tension that has nothing to do with her impending execution and everything to do with centuries of accumulated grievances finally finding voice.

She lets the chains fall from her arms and wrists.

The sound of metal hitting wood cuts through the noise like a blade through silk. The crowd falls silent, hundreds of eyes fixed on her now-free hands. In the flickering torchlight, her hair seems to move with its own wind, and her eyes... her eyes hold depths that speak of ages beyond mortal comprehension.

"You want to know what I am?" she asks, her voice carrying to every corner of the square.

"I am every woman you've silenced. Every voice you've stolen. Every life you've diminished because it threatened your fragile sense of superiority."

The magistrate stumbles backward, his mouth working soundlessly. The priest has gone pale, his crucifix trembling in his grip.

"I am the baker's daughter," Morgraine continues, stepping down from the platform with fluid grace.

"I am the widow whose land you stole. I am every girl you've called whore for the crime of saying no. Every woman you've labeled witch for being inconveniently intelligent."

You think about all of them, don't you? The faces that blur together across the centuries. The woman burned in Salem for knowing how to read. The suffragette beaten bloody for demanding the vote. The rape victim in 2020 who was asked what she was wearing. The pattern never changes, only the costumes.

The crowd parts before her like the biblical parting of the sea, some falling to their knees, others scrambling to escape. But she's not interested in the crowd anymore. Her attention is fixed on the magistrate and the priest — the twin pillars of patriarchal authority who thought they could reduce her to ash and memory.

"Please," the magistrate whispers, all his bluster gone. "I... I have a family..."

"So did they," Morgraine replies simply.

The fire starts small — just a whisper of flame around her fingertips. But it spreads, flowing like liquid light across the platform, consuming the chains that bound her, the stake they tied her to, the very structure of their righteous judgment.

But she leaves the men untouched. For now.

"This is your choice," she tells them, her voice carrying the weight of centuries of witnessed pain.

"Learn, or burn. Change, or face the consequences of your own making. Because I've tried the gentle way, the legal way, the civilised way. And nothing changes."

You remember the last straw, don't you? The case that broke you. A fourteen-year-old girl, trafficked and brutalised, who finally found the courage to testify. And the defense attorney — a woman, which made it worse somehow — who tore her apart on the stand. "If you're telling the truth, why didn't you scream louder?"

That's when you'd started planning the ritual. The spell that was supposed to enhance your power to protect women across the globe. The spell that brought you here instead, back through time, to this moment, to this choice.

The fire dies away, leaving only the scent of smoke and the promise of retribution. Morgraine looks out over the crowd — at the women who've crept closer, drawn by something they can't name, and the men who huddle in fear of change.

"I am Morgraine Nyx," she says, and her name rolls across the square like thunder.

"I am She Who Walks in Shadow, and I have been fighting this same fight for eight hundred years. The faces change, the technology advances, but the story remains the same. Men fear what they cannot control, and they seek to destroy what they fear."

She turns to face the magistrate one last time. "Tell me, good sir — are you ready to learn? Or shall we continue this dance for another eight centuries?"

The magistrate opens his mouth, closes it, then opens it again. But no words come. Because what do you say to a woman who has seen the birth and death of empires, who has walked through centuries of oppression and emerged unbroken?

What do you say to a force of nature that refuses to be tamed?

Morgraine smiles — not the gentle, accommodating smile she wore in boardrooms and courtrooms, but something older and more dangerous. Something that promises change, whether they're ready for it or not.

The future, she realises, is about to become very interesting indeed.

And somewhere in the crowd, a young girl watches with wide eyes, seeing for the first time that women can be more than victims. More than property. More than the sum of men's expectations.

The cycle breaks here. Tonight. Whether they like it or not…