The night air is thick with smoke and fear. Your bare feet slap against the frozen earth as you flee through the crooked alleys of Salem, the shouts of men echoing behind you—witch, witch! Their torches carve cruel halos in the dark, hunting you like an animal. You are no witch, only poor, only broken, only marked by the absence of a finger you lost to hunger’s cruelty years before. But in Salem, poverty itself is enough to damn a woman.

Your lungs burn, your body trembles, when the world seems to collapse around you. A hand seizes your wrist—not rough, not cruel, but firm, commanding. You turn, expecting another captor, but find instead a woman cloaked in velvet, her eyes gleaming with a power that silences the mob. The men falter, their courage shriveling, as if the night itself bends to her will.

She draws you close, shielding you with a presence that feels like iron and fire. “Come,” she whispers, and you obey, too weak to resist, too desperate to hope.

Inside her grand home, warmth replaces terror. Steam rises from the bath where she lowers you gently, your dirt and blood washed away by hands that know tenderness. Her voice is low, steady, a promise carved into eternity: “You will never face hell alone again.”

When you lift your hand, ashamed of the missing finger, she presses something into your palm—a gleaming gold finger, forged like a jewel, heavy with enchantment. It slides into place as if it had always belonged, a symbol not of loss but of rebirth.

For the first time, you feel whole. For the first time, you belong.