For the first time in her life, Ava had no idea what to do. She was now looking at a person, who should have been dead, but was somehow breathing. She was being kept alive by sheer willpower; or by something else.
Ava checked her temperature and her pulse. She was burning up and could feel the radiating heat, but her entire body was cold and stiff. Her pulse was slow, but Ava could hear the woman´s heart beating rapidly in her chest. Each time she touched the woman, it sounded like a bone in the frail body broke - yet the woman did not flinch.
Ava mustered the courage to investigate the injuries and pulled off the blanket to reveal the rest of the old body. Immediately she covered her nose due to the smell of death, which the cloth had concealed. Her entire body tensed up, threatening to deliver all of the little food she had eaten before this moment.
Boils covered the entire body; all appeared to be glowing in a yellow hue with a hint of green around each boil. The skin melted around the bones, and Ava couldn´t see a single piece of muscle or fat on the fragile legs. They were like two thin sticks in the autumn, ready to fall off the soon as snow touched them.
She was at a loss; Ava had no idea what the woman was suffering from and why she was still breathing.
"What have you figured out?"
Ava turned her head in the direction of the door, where a man had now walked in. He was wearing a dark, long mask, shaped like the beak of a crow. The nervousness took over her as she wondered why the man came in wearing a mask. Was he worried that whatever the woman on the table carried was infectious? Was he covering his face so he would be safe against witchcraft? The questions thundered in her head, and she was still at the same loss as she was with the sickness.
"Nothing", Ava answered. "From my assumptions and what I know of medical care, she should have been dead."
The man stopped a few meters away from Ava and the table. His hands buried deep into the pockets of his jacket. Ava was an ant in the presence of this stranger and tried to think back to a time she felt just as small. Standing in his presence felt like if she took a breath the wrong way, he would behead her in an instant.
"I thought you were a doctor."
"I am, sir," she stated, with a little more confidence than she had earlier. Right as she had spoken, the bracelet under her foot started to burn. Now, it was trying to burn through her skin, yet it couldn´t hurt her.
Out of nowhere, the woman started to scream in agony. Ava looked confused at the woman whose back had arched on the table; as she started to shake uncontrollably.
"Her foot is burning!"
Shocked, Ava whipped her head around to look at the right foot, which burned without a fire. It was in the same spot where the bracelet was warming up beneath her foot, and the realization made her heart stop in her chest for a brief moment. Her entire chest tightened as she fully realized that it was witchcraft that was both keeping this woman alive and killing her at the same time.
Ava took a step away as the masked man lunged forwards and grabbed the woman's shoulders, and tried to keep her against the table. He called out to Ava to hold the woman´s legs, but the second she touched the legs, they broke and evaporated into dust.
Looking over to see if the man had managed to keep the woman down without evaporating her, she saw that her shoulders were slowly but surely burning away. Leaving only pieces of charred skin where the man was holding.
He was muttering words under his breath, to what Ava only could assume was Latin. She wasn´t familiar with the language herself, but she had heard the priests speak sentences in the language before. For each word the man spoke, the woman twisted and turned in his grip whilst hissing curses. Ava couldn´t understand a single word of what the woman said, nor could she comprehend what was going on.
She had no time to react as the man suddenly jumped away as the woman sat up and opened her mouth into what could be assumed to be a scream - yet no voice came out. The dark blood sprayed out of the woman's mouth, hitting Ava right in the face. She couldn´t do anything but stand frozen in shock due to the sudden bath of blood.
As the woman finished with the blood vomiting, Ava dared to open her eyes. She looked directly into a pair of vibrant golden eyes, which were just the same ones from her dream.
Ava stood frozen in shock as the blood ran down her body from her face. Her mind went immediately back to her dream, where she had showered in blood. The warm blood continued to run down her face as she mustered all of the strength in her frozen body to wipe away the blood from her face.
As she cleared the area around her eyes, she could see what the masked man was doing. He held his fingers against the neck of the woman, where the boils quickly started to lose color until they all vanished. Her ankles, which had evaporated as Ava touched them, were still gone. The burns on her shoulders were still present also.
Taken aback with both shock and confusion, she could only stare as the now declared dead woman got covered up by the white blanket once again.
"There was nothing you could have done," the man spoke reassuringly. "This was witchcraft."
Ava, who would usually speak up against the man, only lowered her head. Her mind raced as it was trying to rationalize how the woman had died of natural causes. Yet, she couldn't think of a single sickness that would kill someone in this way. Before walking into this room, Ava hadn´t believed in witchcraft. After witnessing this, she got somewhat convinced.
Her mind tried to reason with her and told her that she knew a medical explanation for this phenomenon. Yet, she couldn´t think of a single sickness that would make a body burn without it being any fire or evaporating legs by a single touch. It was as if the woman was already dead and had been dead for a long time.