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Chapter Eight: Mercy Hale and the Courtesy of Consequence (Mercy)
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2026-02-06 01:37:07Time does not punish impulsively.
People expect spectacle. Thunder. Splintering light. A voice announcing transgression. They imagine justice because it comforts them to believe consequence has intention.
Time has no interest in comfort.
I feel it arrive the way I always do. Not as pain, not as fear, but as adjustment. A sub
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The Witch Keeps Time Chapter Twenty-Three: Cartography of a Woman Who Will Not Move (Thomas)
I learn Eliza the way soldiers learn land.Not by claiming it. Not by crossing it quickly. By watching how it behaves when pressure is applied and when it is not.This is not romantic language. Romance implies fantasy. This is survival.She has changed the room without moving a chair.That was the first thing I noticed.After her refusal, after the quiet declaration that rearranged nothing and altered everything, the tavern began behaving differently around her. Sounds bent subtly in her vicinity. The fire burned straighter. The floorboards complained less. Even the air seemed to slow, as if it had learned that rushing her was pointless.Eliza no longer feels like a person you approach.She feels like a place you enter carefully.I sit across the room from her and study the boundaries the way I once studied ridgelines and tree cover. Where the light catches her hair. Where shadows pool near her feet. Where her stillness creates resistance instead of invitation.There are safe distance
The Witch Keeps Time Chapter Twenty-Two: The Refusal Begins Before It Happens (Eliza)
Time tries a different angle when it realizes I am no longer chaseable.It does not pull me sideways in the night. It does not dangle Thomas’s face in the trees like bait. It does not fracture the village in obvious ways that would invite Mercy’s hands and thread and wax.No.Time becomes practical.It starts taking small things.The kind of losses that make people move without thinking.A spoon goes missing from the tavern’s shelf and the woman washing dishes panics, turning the kitchen upside down as if the universe will collapse without proper silver. A child’s shoe vanishes mid-step and his mother drops to her knees in the road, sobbing, searching the dirt like grief is a kind of sight.Ordinary desperation.The world runs on it.Time expects me to run too.It expects me to react the way I used to: reach, pull, correct. It expects my body to betray my new grammar the moment something I care about is threatened.So it chooses something that should make me move.It chooses Thomas.N
The Witch Keeps Time Chapter Twenty-One: Where I Am Instead of When (Eliza)
I stop thinking of myself as someone who moves.This is not despair. It is not resignation. It is not the quiet defeat time keeps mistaking for compliance.It is logistics.Movement has become expensive. Every step forward or backward creates drag, like I’m wading through something thick enough to notice me. Time tracks motion. It anticipates trajectory. It prepares punishment based on momentum.Stillness, I’m learning, confuses it.So I sit.Not dramatically. Not in meditation. Not in any posture that would suggest ritual or intent. I sit the way women have always sat when the world refuses to accommodate them: spine straight, hands idle, eyes open.I choose a place near the hearth because fire behaves honestly. It burns where it is. It does not attempt to be elsewhere.I breathe.Not deep. Not shallow. Just enough to exist.Here.I am no longer practicing the grammar the way Mercy taught it. Practice implies improvement. Improvement implies an endpoint. Time likes endpoints. It plan
The Witch Keeps Time Chapter Twenty: The Practice of Not Falling (Eliza)
Mercy told me not to practice alone.Which is exactly why I do.Not out of spite, though spite is a comforting flavor when fear becomes too bland. I do it because I can feel the shape of the next punishment forming, and I refuse to meet it untrained. Time has already taken my voice. It has already shown me Thomas’s death. It is already learning new ways to isolate me.So I learn too.Quietly. Dangerously. Like an animal teaching itself the fence line by touching it with its nose.I wait until the village settles into sleep and pretense. The tavern’s sounds fade to the slow creak of timber and the small crackle of dying coals. Mercy’s footsteps stop above me. Thomas’s breathing becomes steady in the far room, the kind of deep rest he allows himself only when exhaustion wins the argument.I slip outside with no shoes.The ground is cold and damp, honest in a way the floorboards never are. Dirt doesn’t lie. It accepts your weight or it doesn’t. It holds you or it lets you sink. I can wor
The Witch Keeps Time Chapter Nineteen: The Things My Hands Remember (Eliza)
Thomas is in the room with me and I am not allowed to want him the way my body wants him.That is the first cruelty.Not that time stole my voice. Not that it showed me his death like a rehearsal and left the image lodged behind my eyes. The worst part is simpler: my skin recognizes him as safety, and safety has become a weapon.So I keep my hands folded.I keep them tucked into my sleeves, fingers curled tight enough to ache, as if pain might be easier to manage than longing. I sit near the hearth where Mercy prefers me, in the radius of warmth she can monitor and the quiet she can control. The fire pops softly, like it’s trying to speak on my behalf.Thomas stands by the window, staring out at the road as if he can will the world into behaving by sheer steadiness.He doesn’t turn.He’s giving me space.He’s trying.That almost breaks me.Because I remember kissing him.I remember it with the kind of certainty that belongs to truth, not imagination.My mind has filed the sensation aw
The Witch Keeps Time Chapter Nineteen: The Things My Hands Remember (Eliza)
Thomas is in the room with me and I am not allowed to want him the way my body wants him.That is the first cruelty.Not that time stole my voice. Not that it showed me his death like a rehearsal and left the image lodged behind my eyes. The worst part is simpler: my skin recognizes him as safety, and safety has become a weapon.So I keep my hands folded.I keep them tucked into my sleeves, fingers curled tight enough to ache, as if pain might be easier to manage than longing. I sit near the hearth where Mercy prefers me, in the radius of warmth she can monitor and the quiet she can control. The fire pops softly, like it’s trying to speak on my behalf.Thomas stands by the window, staring out at the road as if he can will the w
