3 From Ashes They Rise

The gloomy feeling within the makeshift graveyard behind the Holy Church situated in the town of Yerstien would eerily scare off anyone attempting to enter it within this pitch-black night.

Weird noises followed by the howling of wild wolves from the distance made the place even scarier; The emptiness of the place was deafeningly silent.

A bright lightning followed by a loud thunder roared as heavy rain started pouring. The rainwater softened the ground as the soil started eroding on the sides of the open-pit where Ryia's charcoaled corpse was laid.

The burnt ashes that were shed from her body when she was carried here were then mixed back with the corpse as the ground started swallowing her entirety. The open pit flooded was swamped as her body started floating atop the open pit. The downpour did not stop till morning...

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Crawling through the sloppy soil, a figure covered in mud rose from the ground as she wiped the dirt off of her face revealing her snow white skin with jade-like beauty. Her figure was slim, yet shows a hint of maturity; it was still highly evident even if her dress was all covered in dirt.

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"Where… Am I?"

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She slowly inspected herself... The last thing she remembers was that she was already bed-ridden because of her illness and was just waiting for her imminent departure into the afterlife... But it seems that...

Looking behind on where she was, the supposed open pit was nowhere to be seen as the mud-covered burial grounds was still sloppy from the rain last evening. The grand walls at the back of the church were contradicting the eerie and desolate feeling this place was emitting.

Moving to and fro as confusion was taking over her... she knelt as she tried to compose herself and understand the situation thoroughly...

"I am supposedly dead right now..." thinking deeply, Helen suddenly had a jolting pain in her head as the memories of Ryia flowed through her consciousness... Every single painful experience, every success in her life; Her joy, her sorrow, her downfall... Everything that Ryia suffered, Helen immediately experience it in a matter of a few seconds...

Screaming in anguish as tears flowed from her eyes; The sound of her cries alerted the people within the Church that were still barely awake in the early morning...

Helen noticed the sudden commotion as she instinctively felt that people were coming towards her direction... She forced her way through the indescribable pain that she was suffering as she remembered the last few memories of the owner of this body, Ryia...

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'She was accused of being a witch...'

Helen nimbly stood up as she ran within this sloppy grounds barefooted... away from the Church, both of them had died but were given the opportunity to live once more... It would be a waste to be caught again... and be pinned down by some false accusation...

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She ran for the entirety of the morning, as far as her bare feet could go...

Although confusion and pain were still evident on her face, Helen was smart enough to understand what was going on, even though it was unexplainable and something that should have never been possible... The fact that she was already here disproved everything that she had thought could be real...

"This might be a dream of some sort... or is this the afterlife?" Pinching her face as to awake herself, she felt... physical pain... she noticed the sores on her feet was starting to felt painful as well...

She kept walking towards a place from the memory of Ryia, the riverbank near the town of Yerstien...

Washing both her body and the clothes that she was using, Helen noticed that none of the burnt scars that were supposed to be there from the execution of Ryia were evident...

"But, in her memories... she was definitely not a witch... How was this possible?"...

Thoroughly cleaning the wounds in her feet, Helen sat on the riverbank as she pondered the reason on why she was sent here in the first place...

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Her naked body rose from the river as she went over to the sides, drying herself and the clothes that she had just washed... She felt cold from all the bathing that she instinctively rubbed her arms with her hands.

Steam slowly dispersed from her body as she felt a slight sensation of heat coming out of her palms...

The grass below her feet caught fire as the water below her feet boiled from the sudden surge of heat...