THE LIFE OF A WITCH

No matter what she did, she could never forget how she had been mocked all her life because of her appearance, which was far from beautiful like the others. Sometimes, she wasn't even treated as a human being. She could never make sense of the reasons behind such behavior. Surrounded by laughter, she constantly found herself alone with the thought, "Can the word ‘beauty’ really be confined to the standards set by a few people?" Why was it that those who didn’t fit into society’s narrow molds were always cast aside? As if it weren’t enough that the townspeople mocked Witch Amy for her natural form—the way she had been born—they also pitied her for being excluded, thinking she was some miserable creature. But she had done nothing to deserve such humiliation. To avoid the hateful stares and smug smiles of people, she kept her head down, fixing her gaze on empty space. Even when she couldn’t see their mocking faces, their cruel words were enough to suffocate her. The curving edges of her lips, stretching to the far corners of her face, and her narrowing eyelids—folding as if to guard her from the world—slowly crept toward her defenseless body with sinister expressions, as if pressing down on her mind. The tears gathered in her eyes, waiting to fall, seemed to be anticipating the moment she would be disgraced. And eventually, a few drops slid down her cheeks—quietly, as if even her tears were against her.

If it had only happened once, it wouldn’t have hurt so much. But the same things kept happening over and over. Over time, she grew to hate everything. The joy within her had fallen into a dungeon sealed off by countless guards, where it lay struggling to survive. All the colors she loved had suddenly turned pale, stripped of meaning, and abandoned her. It had become nearly impossible—perhaps completely impossible—to find anything of the past. She constantly searched for a way to escape those suffocating breaths. But the more she failed to find it, the more she drifted toward complete detachment from life. She could no longer feel anything but hatred and resentment toward people. Every time she tried to think positively, her hopes were crushed—again and again. Each time, a new darkness shimmered in the void within her heart. “Happiness,” she thought, was just a word invented by those who feared the dark, in an attempt to avoid merging with it. But who was to say that darkness, with all its heavy allure layered atop its gloom, couldn’t make people feel better? Maybe those dark souls, bound entirely to the poisonous sorrow of grief, had been happier than the so-called bright ones for years. Maybe the color of happiness—something so many mortals were willing to sacrifice everything for and trample others to obtain—was black all along. Rejected by society, Witch Amy wrestled with thoughts people would only find strange, trying to discover what was truly right. Hanging on by the thinnest thread between life and death, she watched her existence slowly slip into nonexistence. As her strength to hold onto life faded, she lowered her body from the thread, no longer able to cling to it. Despite the burdens piling up on her, she didn’t know how much longer she could endure; she didn’t want to fall from the rope into a ferocious abyss over the slightest thing. After years of tirelessly hoping for a miracle, she now merely waited for her life to reach an end—good or bad. It irritated her that everyone around her kept saying time was flying by. From her point of view, time wasn’t passing at all. She didn’t want day to become night, or night to become day; people stirred up the world to disrupt its order so that a single day wouldn’t be completed, trying to persuade the earth to spin more slowly on its axis. Although the Earth was initially reluctant to embrace this idea, it eventually accepted it—gladly—for reasons it never explained. In such a state, there was no way the days could be said to be passing. This notion that time passed quickly was an invention of those who chose to blind themselves to life’s reality by surrendering to the illusion of happiness. The more society pushed her into despair, the more everything people did and said began to infuriate Witch Amy to the point of madness. When she thought about the things she had gone through just because her natural facial features didn’t match the criteria set by a handful of people, she felt as though she didn’t live in a universe of her own. People she had never even exchanged words with looked down on her with hateful eyes, pushing her to the margins.

Though she often had the urge to whisper through barely parted lips that their actions were wrong, she always remembered they lacked the capacity to understand. She spent her days helping the merchant family, slowly drifting away from the world. That day too, she had traveled the long, rocky road with them to the town; usually, it was just her father who went, but this time, she had joined him and her mother for the first time. Seeing the crowd there astonished her, and amidst them, she felt small and uneasy. The people walking swiftly down the avenue, the statue in the center of the little ornamental fountain of a warrior facing an enemy with fearless pride beside a rearing horse so lifelike it seemed real, the children twirling their fancy new clothes with laughter, the giant houses with chandeliers encrusted with diamonds... All these things absent from her own small town held her gaze in awe. While that wonderment still had her in its grip, her family had already drifted away. She kept looking around, unaware they had left, but couldn’t find the feeling she was searching for in anything she saw. Only after another glance did she realize her family was gone. Pushing past the crowd, she began searching for them—but she couldn’t find them. When she pulled away to a quieter corner of the street, just as she was about to lose hope, a few legs came into her view. As Witch Amy shyly lifted her head, she saw wildly painted faces looking at her with laughter. Starting from her clothes and moving to her "ugly" face, they struck her without shame with mocking words. Witch Amy wished she had never been born. She wanted to die. She was barely holding on—clinging by her fingertips to the thin thread that kept her alive. She was trapped in the same painful cycle. Her prayers to God, soaked by the enduring downpour of her tears, lost their shine. She longed for a breaking point—something that would let her discover the brilliant light people claimed to see. As she waited for a miracle to come to life, she heard the soft flutter of a glittering butterfly with majestic wings, and when her eyes met the butterfly’s, she couldn’t look away from its shimmering wings rising and falling before her.

The butterfly was the only one who could see the pain burning inside Witch Amy—the pain she hid from everyone beneath the mask she wore. It told her to follow, promising to give her what she was searching for. Though she knew it was foolish to trust a tiny butterfly, she chose to follow it. As she walked behind it, they eventually arrived at a place devoid of people. There, pink dust began to swirl around the butterfly. And then, within the dust, the butterfly vanished, and in its place, the form of a gentleman appeared. The man told her not to be afraid. He was careful not to scare the anxious Witch Amy. He introduced himself, saying he wanted to help her, and they talked for a long while. Curious about the bracelet on Chieko’s wrist, Witch Amy gathered her courage and asked what was special about it, and why he always wore it. Chieko tried to hide his true self behind lies—until one day. Unable to silence his heart any longer, he confessed everything to Witch Amy.

Chieko told her of the world of darkness and light. To ease Amy’s pain, he turned her into a bird and himself into a butterfly, and together, they soared through the sky in freedom time and time again. The butterfly flew in circles around the girl with dizzying speed—so fast no human eye could follow—leaving glimmering specks from its wings on her skin. As the floating particles of light pulled her in, Amy stared at them, and in the blink of an eye, she found her body transformed into a small, delicate bird—nothing like her usual self—and she rapidly swooped toward the ground.

She flailed her mismatched wings, trying not to crash into the stones, but since it was her first time flying, she was far from perfect. Just as she was about to slam into a rock, the butterfly came to her aid, nudging her upward with its wings and lifting the bird’s body back into the sky. As Amy struggled to fly, the butterfly calmly explained how to fly with ease. The more she followed his instructions to the letter, the more the suffocating feeling—of her soul barely fitting into such a small body—began to fade.

Taking into account her past experiences of crashing into trees or being tossed by the wind, her current flight was a clear improvement over her clumsy first attempts. The wind breathed through her feathers, making them dance; it was calling Witch Amy to leave the town behind. But Amy didn’t listen—she just kept flying. Now that she had learned how to fly smoothly, all she wanted was to embrace the boundless sky, far from people corrupted by evil, and taste the unmatched joy of freedom. Her wings bent up and down, curving outward from the town’s edge.

Each time she felt the near-white, transparent waves of air that had devoured the blue above, she forgot the weight of her sorrows and found peace in that tranquil stillness. Looking down from above, she saw humans as tiny creatures, trampling over each other in pursuit of their own goals. To Amy, people were undeniably selfish and pitiful beings.

Still, she and Chieko became close friends. And the moment he realized he was developing feelings for Witch Amy—feelings unlike anything he’d felt before—he tried to suppress them. But he couldn’t. With each meeting, he found himself falling deeper in love with her. Witch Amy, too, felt something pure for Chieko. The fact that he could see and understand the emotions no one else could made her heart feel warm. She didn’t want to lose him. She spent almost every moment thinking about him. Chieko taught Witch Amy good magic, and they grew very close.

Chieko was even going to introduce her to his family. Witch Amy had never been so excited in her entire life. But… his family disapproved of Amy’s appearance and deemed her unworthy of him. And because of that, Amy wished to strip humans of their essence and become beautiful forever. She wanted to destroy their lives out of spite. Even though she loved Chieko so deeply...

She couldn't take her eyes off the candle that shrank every second, melting before her eyes; she was mesmerized by it. She watched the melting wax turn into drips with a bitter smile and felt that everything that made up her existence was melting, just like that candle which burned and gave the room a dim light. Like the liquid pooling inside the candle, Witch Amy’s corpse also lay suspended in the void, screaming in the dark, still hoping that someone might save her one last time. She had waited and waited for years without seeing any progress. No one saw the existence of her decaying corpse, and Witch Amy was left to tend to herself in this miserable state. Even though she was afraid, there was nothing she could do but hug her loneliness and cry. When she no longer had tears left to shed, how would she express her pain and vomit the hatred inside her?

She was afraid to face the glass-made material that directly presented the truth without distortion. Whenever she stood in front of the mirror, she felt assassinated, attacked by every sentence spoken in that tone. She grew cold toward all mirrors, naming herself something even beyond worthless. This time, she would never be able to escape the place she had sunk into. When even fate was trying to pull the boy she loved away from her like an enemy, what branch was there left for her to hold onto? Even using her experience would not help her escape this place, which existed beyond even death.

To create her own happiness, she would destroy the lives of helpless people. Until she reached Asahi, she had already ruined many lives, beautifying herself by making hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of people fall in love with her, reactivating the ego that had lain dormant for years. She always wanted more. She hoped people would love, even desire, her enough to become her slaves. In the random axes of the rapidly vanishing plain of chaos in the depths of the sky, she would undoubtedly adopt the decrees of the dark that dimmed by the second and carry them out. She would cause chaos in the world. Through the book she had stolen, she would contact the murderous Moon and learn all the spells, bringing about the world’s end with her own hands. She would fill every speck of the world with people devastated by pain. She would kill all those who clung to life or tried to across the four corners of the earth with a tragic end, and she would derive an indescribable pleasure from it.

Even though Chieko was trying to teach her good spells aiming for the good of humanity and to make the world a better place, Mizuki did not want this. She wished for all people to be damned. She was slowly beginning to believe in the doctrines of the demons around her. There was no point in helping these useless people who did nothing but drag her down, nor in exhausting herself trying to fix the order they had ruined. It was nothing but wasted effort.

The moment she opened the book and summoned the Moon, she was cursed with an irreversible fate. For the rest of her life, until her death, she would be unable to stop serving the darkness, stripped of all human emotion. She would never become aware of this. The hatred Witch Amy harbored within herself toward humanity, which folded and multiplied inside her, would remain forever — and at times, even grow stronger. The salvation of Witch Amy was not even a possibility. She had willingly sought refuge in the Moon and was condemned to live this destiny. She had brought all of it upon herself.

Chieko, who loved Witch Amy with all her heart, was astonished by what she had done. Because of Witch Amy, Chieko had also been found guilty, and her entry into and exit from the World of Darkness had been strictly forbidden. Her life, which was centered around saving those who struggled with feelings of sorrow and despair, had been shattered by such a punishment. Even the magic Chieko could perform had been limited. Now, Chieko could only cast very weak spells. Even the end of her life had been irrevocably rewritten the moment the witch took that book. Chieko was now bound to abide by these decisions.

Her anger toward the witch was growing, slowly transforming into hatred. She wanted to believe that the witch wasn’t truly this kind of person, that she was good… but… the witch had done this, disregarding Chieko, ruining not only her life but the lives of many others. Chieko wished she had never met the witch. She wanted to erase all of her past and rewrite it differently, to stitch it into the fabric of fate from the beginning, thread by thread.

The imagery of burning the paper with those words is powerful—almost like an emotional exorcism, where the act of destruction serves as a symbolic severing of ties with the past. The fire represents the anger, the pain, and the need to rid oneself of the memories, yet the lingering smoke and the tears suggest that the emotional weight is not so easily erased. It seems as though the character, in trying to sever the connection with Cadı Amy, is also confronting the unresolved grief and rage that remain.

The fact that there was nothing she could do upset her. The cries heard from those on the verge of disconnecting from life pushed her further down the path of madness. Just like her father, she too had made a mistake. This was a deeply painful situation for Chieko. This bronze-like grave, activated in Chieko’s veins rebelling against pain, was forcibly melting its own existence and implanting boiling hoses into Chieko’s heart. The imagery in your words is intense and haunting, almost like a poetic description of inner conflict, love, and loss. The metaphor of time's gears being controlled by betrayal, the coldness of separation, and the unyielding presence of memories creating a sense of suffocation is vivid. It feels like a battle against fate, where even declarations of love can't shift the unchangeable. There's something beautifully tragic about how love and pain intermingle in this passage.

(...)

She planned to rid Chieko’s life of Mizuki by casting a spell more powerful than the protective charm Mizuki wore. She violently flipped through the darkest pages of the book, trying to choose the cruelest spell. As her rage flared, the aura around her darkened, radiating like wildfire, scattering sparks in every direction. She had to finish Mizuki off quickly, or else she would spiral into sleepless fury for days. Her presence was as fierce and sharp as marble cracked by hatred. Her eyes darted over the book’s pages, scanning every word—