Ursula could smell the stench of hypocrisy on Lord Lister as he leered over her. Or maybe it was just the standard stink of the lower aristocracy nearing their weekly bathing day.

“Don’t you wash before important occasions?” she asked him, as he pulled the rope tighter, securing her to the stake. He grunted, giving it another tug so it bit painfully into her arm flesh, but she denied him the satisfaction of a gasp or whimper.

“Does that make you feel manly, being the one tying the knots for a change?” she mocked. “If that was all you wanted, we could have changed our little arrangement to accommodate your ego a bit more.”

“Shut your trap, witch-whore!” he growled. “I’m not under your spell now.”

“Under my spell?” Ursula burst out laughing — not the evil cackle they all wanted but the familiar, good-natured laugh that filled the villagers with gnawing guilt. “If I could enchant people into my bed I would choose far better than you. Why are you doing the dirty work, anyway? Last chance to ogle my tits, or does someone else have you by the balls?”

His fist thudded into the post by her head, but she didn’t even blink. Then he shrugged. “I’m going to enjoy hearing you die, Ursula. You were a good fuck, but a total bitch.” With that, he turned and descended the steps from the platform, nodding to the witchfinder, who then signalled for a torch.

“Ursula Redferne, you have been found guilty of practicing witchcraft, consorting with demons, corrupting the young—” Ursula’s eyes darted to the figure of Anna at that accusation. “—and making a pact with Satan against your superiors. For this heresy and treason, combined with your belligerent lack of shame” —he meant her readiness to confess and thereby deny him the excuse to torture her— “you are to be burned to death without the usual mercy of a preliminary hanging.” Thank fuck — I wouldn’t stand a chance otherwise.

Kindling ignited below her feet, making her heart jolt, despite herself. She attempted to send Anna a silent message of comfort, but she was staring resolutely down, unable to witness her lover being executed. Smoke began to billow up from below her feet as more inflammable material caught. Ursula narrowed her eyes, trying to stop them watering as she sought out the witchfinder. At least he could meet her gaze, the hatred therein matched only by that in hers.

“Be gone into hell with Satan, your master, witch!” he called to her.

“Fuck you, Jesus-fucker!” she retorted, thinking, May as well get some good insults in.

The roar of the fire drowned out his response, but she didn’t care. She began to chant in a mixture of Latin, Pig Latin and the Old Cornish of her mother, although the words were irrelevant. In her mind, she pulled herself in and focused. Where are you, Lucy? Her feet were becoming uncomfortably hot as flames licked the plank she stood on, and she shifted, drawing them back to the thick post she was bound to. Where the fuck are you?

“I am here,” a voice crackled in her ear, singeing her hair.

“Typical bloody man, waiting until the last moment,” she admonished, irritation replacing fear.

“I am fire. I have no sex.”

“You had plenty of sex the last five times.”

“I enjoy stimulating you that way. It makes you burn bright like—”

“Ow!” the witch interrupted. “Stop blathering, you stupid daemon, and fix the flames!”

“My apologies.” The heat immediately dropped from near blistering to just bearable, although only Ursula, the witch they were supposed to destroy, would know, for they continued to grow, feeding on the fuel piled beneath her smouldering platform and starting to play along the hem of her skirt.

“That’s better,” she told her.

I should stop teasing Lucy, she thought. She had saved her life five times now, for no real gain of her own she could fathom. The daemon was not male, she knew. Nor was “she” female — “Lucy” was just a name Ursula had bestowed on her for something to anchor her thoughts to, but it had stuck.

“Will you devour me one day?” she asked now, watching the flames dance, unsure whether they really did appear more alive or if her knowledge of the daemon’s presence made her pay attention to particular patterns more than others.

“When your soul asks for it,” came the reply. “Not today. Your soul is offering me others. Many others. This place has caused you much pain.”

“Bunch of ingrates, the lot of them,” she agreed. “Except one. You will spare her?”

“One or a thousand, it is all the same to me.”

Lucy smiled by turning brilliant yellow and leapt onto her skirt. Even with her previous experience, Ursula jumped, jerking against her bonds when her dress caught alight, so the scream she gave was not merely for the benefit of her audience craving her death.

“Gets you every time, doesn’t it?” the fire laughed as she engulfed her body, incinerated clothes collapsing and falling like blossoms at the end of Spring. She winced as a blast of heat like opening an oven hit her full-on, though it left no marks but the ashes of her disintegrating bodice. Her eyes smarted from the smoke and she coughed, but the currents of hot air changed, siphoning the filth away from her lungs so she could breathe. A twitching, fiery curtain rose from the burning logs, giving the bloodthirsty villagers only the occasional flash of her fire-lit tits. With a stamp of her feet, the remnants of her sturdy leather boots fell away into the inferno, and she flicked her sweaty hair off her face.

“The ropes?” she prompted. Flames ran up her arms, strong and tanned from the years of lugging her belongings from town to village and back to peddle her various herbal remedies, but had left her bonds intact.

“Not yet. You look... enticing.”

Ursula raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure you’re not male?”

A whoomph of fiery laughter came in answer.

“I watch you even when you are not being offered to me, you know.”

“I didn’t know. Then you have seen that I like to be the one doing the restraining.”

“Maybe, deep down, you don’t always want to be that one. Let’s try.”

Ursula glared at the flames, but they just parted, exposing her naked, voluptuous curves to the mob’s lascivious stares. She instinctively moved to cover the triangle of curls between her legs, but with hands restrained, she could only cross her legs awkwardly, squishing her pussy lips together and in turn discovering just how aroused being on show for them was making her. Her audience disappeared before she could grin, so she cackled defiantly instead, hoping that would confuse them.

“You are growing larger,” Lucy informed her.

“Er, this area has a lot of dairy farms. I can’t resist the cream.”

“No need to apologise. You are as beautiful as ever.”

Heat brushed her toes and momentarily encircled her body, then receded just as quick. Streams of sweat poured down her chest, tickling her nipples and sides, while a different wetness coated her lower lips, and she planted her feet apart again, abandoning the false modesty. The flames engulfed her again, crawling over her skin and then vanishing to appear in another spot, the heat flashing to the point of pain then receding before it could do damage. So many times, she had tried to get her lovers to approximate this sensation with feathers, switches, and even those nine-lashed whips sailors used at sea, but nothing came close to the delicate caress of sentient fire on her nipples, followed by the sharp sting of the burn, sometimes a pinpoint, sometimes a searing slash from head to foot.

She whimpered, then moaned, and finally begged for release as the delicate torture danced over the length of her body but never touched her sex, no matter how hard she thrust her hips. The being had learned from previous times, drawing this out. Perhaps that is the satisfaction she gets from this, she thought, the stoking of a different kind of fire in a body too wet to burn without being destroyed first.

Sweat began to evaporate from her body. In vain, she searched for something humanoid, a face, a shape, but there was only incandescence, blurring her vision. The planks of the platform gave way and she slid down, landing with a crunch and shower of sparks in the debris at the base of the pole. Lucy wicked the heat from the smouldering timber away from her skin, and flames wrapped around her legs, pulling them apart and then crawling up her thighs.

“Yes!” she cried. “Please, burn the fuck out of me!”

She jerked and writhed as her pussy hair disappeared in a flash. However, the daemon refused to remain there, making her buck her hips in frustration.

“What are you waiting for? Fuck me!”

“No.”

“No?!” A shiver of fear ran through her. Should I have listened to Mother’s lectures about playing with fire after all?

“Patience, insatiable one. I want to meet this mortal that consumes your soul.”

The roar that followed made her think of her grandmother’s dirty laugh, but then a narrow tunnel formed leading directly to the astonished nineteen-year-old peasant with tear-stained cheeks.

Anna had listened in horror as the flames rose around the woman who had helped her avoid the child she was not ready to bear and introduced her to the secret joys of sapphic sensuality. Now, she stared open-mouthed at her older lover, still bound to the stake and slumped in the midst of an inferno, but clearly very much alive, and calling out to her.

Fearfully, she glanced at her parents and her husband behind her but they were gleefully listening for more evidence of the witch’s torment, oblivious to this vision. Their grip on her had relaxed once the torches had been thrown on, believing it was cleansing the sin from their daughter.

A sudden rage filled her. Though she knew the vision could not be real, she vowed to avenge herself on them with her life, and jumped into the fire. They sealed behind her, drowning out the sounds of panic that erupted. Her clothes caught immediately in the intense heat, and she shut her eyes, awaiting searing pain.

It never came.

Anna opened her eyes, expecting heaven or hell, but nothing had changed, other than her disintegrating dress flaking from her untouched skin. Ursula was still seated, legs splayed wantonly, while fire danced impossibly across her homely features, framed by locks dishevelled and singed but miraculously intact. She stepped towards her lover, white-hot coals crumbling like silk-dust under her toes. Savouring the moment of looking down rather than up at her tutor, she drank in the sight, finding that the lines of wisdom and laughter around her usually confident eyes suddenly unveiled a hidden vulnerability when looking up.

“That prick of a witch-pricker caught a genuine witch,” Ursula said, smiling. “I’ll be sure to congratulate him before Lucy sends him to Hell.”

Anna stared at her open-mouthed. A thousand questions raced through her mind, but the first to fall out was, “Who’s Lucy?”

“She means me.” A fierce column formed before her and then melted away.

“Oh. Um, what are you?”

“People call me by many names. In the East, I am ifrit. Here, a daemon.”

“A daemon called Lucy?”

“It is not my real name.”

“What is your real name?” A complex roaring and crackling surrounded her. “Oh. That is hard to pronounce.”

“Your flesh tongues are stupid, yes. She thinks her name for me is funny for some reason.”

“Lucy? Oh, wait, ‘Lucy Fire’? Really, Ursula? What, are you a Satanic version of my dad?”

“Don’t tell me you have daddy issues now,” Ursula said from the embers.

Anna shook her head and dropped to her knees, the last vestiges of her annihilated clothes shaking loose with the jolt. Seizing the older woman’s face with her hands, she kissed her passionately. “This is real!” she exclaimed, pulling back.

“Real,” Ursula confirmed. “Lucy has got me out of some sticky situations before.”

“That’s why you were so blasphemous at the trial! It wasn’t that you didn’t fear death! You knew you would be saved!”

“I hoped,” she corrected. She didn’t want Lucy to think her arrogant, if she had any concept of such a human feature. “I’d have had no chance if they’d just hanged me. Luckily, this Scottish witchfinder is one of those bastards who just can’t get enough of burning women. And I needed to draw attention from you.”

“Maybe you didn’t need to. Lucy could have saved us both.”

“I couldn’t risk you,” she said quietly, reluctant to admit how much she needed Anna. The second kiss was gentler, less desperate.

Anna stroked Ursula’s hair, brushing flames from it like petals. “How is it that this is unburnt?”

“No idea. I complained about the wigs I had to wear after the last time, but it seems she still has a thing for getting rid of it down below.”

“It did look a bit weird,” Anna said, looking down and running her fingers over the smooth skin under the soot left by her obliterated bush. “Feels nice though.”

“The extra sensations are novel for a while, but I hope it never becomes the fashion. Pussies are so much prettier with their fur on.”

Anna hummed in vague agreement, then gave a start when flames ran up her arms. She looked back at her lover. “How do we get out? Can Lucy get us out, or is this just a chance for us to say goodbye before we really go to Hell?”

“Lucy can free us if we give her the strength to do it.”

“How?” The word escaped as a whimper as fire encircled her small, pert breasts and sparked with exquisite pain over her hardened nipples.

“You can’t guess? Untie me.”

“No,” Anna said, after a moment’s thought.

“No?”

“Not yet, anyway,” the girl said, standing up with a mischievous look in her eye. “I might not have you so... helpless again. I quite like it.”

“Oh not you too! It’s bad enough Lucy abusing my situation. I do the tying!”

“Not today, my love.”

The daemon crackled with mirth. “I like this one! Go on, take her as she takes you.”

Hesitantly, Anna caressed her lover’s cheek, and then meshed her fingers in her hair before balling them into fists. Ursula’s eyes widened, wondering if she had misjudged Anna.

“Can I?” she asked. “Just this once, Miss?”

Ursula relaxed. If she was asking like that, then she was only playing, not betraying her. Being at someone’s mercy was not her preferred position, but if it made Anna happy, she would do it. “Just this once, then.”

“I wondered what you got from being so in control when surrendering is so delicious, but I think I see the thrill.” Her fingers tightened and she spread her stance. “Do what you do so well.”

A little stunned by how easily Anna had switched the balance of power, Ursula obeyed, opening her mouth. Bitter hair-ash coated her tongue with the first lick, but with her head held in place, the mouthful of saliva she used to expel it had nowhere to go but over her chin.

Bratty slut is going to pay for this later, she thought, and then looked up at her face. Oh, she knows.

The realisation that her usually submissive lover was humiliating her to give her an excuse to indulge her primal urges later spurred her on. She dived into her succulent folds, a steady flow of her nectar soon washing away the smoky flavours her spit had failed to remove. Around them, the fire roiled, lashing out with every shudder Ursula brought forth from the younger woman.

“Yesss!” the daemon hissed. “Burn for me!”

Soft flames that should be scorching hugged Anna’s body like a hot, dry bath. She began grinding her cunt over her mentor’s face, and with a cry, she came. Blinding light enveloped the couple, receding only when Ursula ceased her lapping and allowed Anna to descend from the heights she’d brought her to.

“She feeds on our pleasure?” the girl asked, relaxing her grip.

“That’s our way out. If we generate enough power for her, she can escape the boundaries of the pyre and take us with her.”

“So, what your saying is…?”

“Come with me, if you want to live.”

Anna smiled. “That’s a good line. Is it from one of those city plays?”

“No, I just made it up. Now hurry up and kiss me.”

Anna sank down, one knee either side of Ursula’s thigh, and locked lips with her. Tasting her own essence as she pushed her tongue forcefully into the older woman's mouth, she remembered their first secretive kiss in the woods months earlier, when she had been the reluctant one. She dropped one hand from her lover’s head to her nipples, fingers first brushing gently and then pinching them, eliciting a moan. Then she kissed down her neck, loving Ursula’s helpless state that allowed her to worship her body as she wanted for once, rather than as directed.

Sinking further until her freshly-smooth crotch pressed into a thick thigh, she lifted the unattended breast and latched her lips to the nipple, sucking hard. Ursula jerked, hard enough to shift forwards so her dripping slit met Anna’s knee. The girl began writhing, rubbing herself against the leg trapped between hers, and the fire closed in, hissing encouragement. It swirled around them when Anna’s fingers slid down over plump flesh and plunged into the hungry hole kissing her knee.

“More!” roared Lucy, now glowing white and dancing over both their bodies, sending jolts of pain that dissipated immediately at just the right moments to augment their ecstasy.

The women wriggled, Anna pulling at her lover’s waist, as they tried instinctively to get closer to each other. They were so engrossed in each other’s bodies that they barely noticed when Lucy consumed the rope, conscious only that Ursula could finally lie back and wrap Anna in her arms. The latter pushed forwards, her slick cunt sliding over skin until at met the netherlips of her lover. Their slits squelched and pressed together, swollen clits kissed in an entirely new way.

As their own heat built in their cores, Lucy’s fire built around them. The flames flicked all over their lips to their engorged nubs, blasting them with an unbearable heat that the daemon transformed into the height of pleasure. She plunged inside the two women where they met, connecting them with a touch lighter than anything solid or liquid but varying constantly in a battle to climb higher against the smothering current of juices they poured forth in response. The spirit suffused their bodies, stimulating nerves neither had ever been aware of, until they reached a climax that, for a moment that stretched to aeons, incinerated the whole of existence.

🔥🔥🔥

“What did you put in there, barrels of tar?” Father Altham asked the witchfinder, as the heat from the witch-pyre forced the crowd to take another step back.

“No, Father, just—”

Exactly what the fuel load had been, the priest would never know, for an eruption in the centre of the blaze cut off the answer. As one, the eyes of the mob followed the fireball arcing over their heads straight into the belfry of the church behind them. The orange glow within grew with unnatural speed before their dumbfounded shock morphed into terror when the stained-glass windows blew out, flames snaking through the graveyard towards them.

Simultaneously, the pyre collapsed inwards with a whoomph, more fiery tendrils racing out, making the onlookers dive hither and thither as they weaved amongst their panicking legs. When the two conflagrations met, the outer edges soared upwards, forming a continuous ring of fire around the villagers. Trapped, they turned back towards the site of the intended execution. Glowing like embers, but still quite clearly alive, Anna and Ursula sat locked in a post-orgasmic embrace of burning love.

“Witch!” screamed the witchfinder, his eyeballs bulging from his skull. The lovers ignored him, continuing their tender kisses. “A real witch!”

That caught Ursula’s attention. Sighing, she gently pushed her partner away and stood, making no effort to hide her bounties on display. “Yes, you finally caught one. I was born for burning. Was it worth the hundreds of innocents you sent to their deaths?”

The crowd shifted uncomfortably as the witchfinder spluttered and fumed, then began yelling, “Begone, Satan!” only to be sent sprawling on his arse by an incendiary eruption to the chest.

“I am not Satan,” the fire informed him, heard by all now. “I am—” Again there was the roaring impossible for a human tongue to replicate.

“What do you want, demon?”

“To burn brighter and hotter. I am the bringer of light into the darkness of your imprisoned souls.”

“I forbid it!”

“I do not ask for permission.”

Flames leapt in on the mob from all sides, plunging down their open throats before screams could be formed. As with Ursula and Anna before them, only their clothes were reduced to ash, all flesh left physically untouched.

But not mentally. A madness seized them.

To Anna’s astonishment, her mother shoved her father aside and climbed onto her son-in-law, her bared cunt gobbling up his cock while the way he sucked on her tits betrayed the fact that his lips had been there before. Her father, far from enraged, shrugged and turned to thrust his own member into the waiting mouth of Mrs Whitehouse, their neighbour, who was already on all fours beside them getting pounded by her husband.

“Come,” murmured Ursula in her Anna’s ear, tugging her hand to pull her from the blacksmith lying in the mud and calling for his apprentice to pound him harder. “We’d better leave now before Lucy gets too distracted and forgets to save us.”

“What did she do to them?” she asked, as they passed the priest and the witchfinder double-teaming Lady Lister while the moans of Lord Lister in the dirt nearby were muffled by a procession of the village women taking turns sitting on his face.

“Burned away their inhibitions. All those desires they’ve been suppressing have gone, releasing years of pent-up lust for her to feed off.” The fire was indeed intensifying. “I’ve never seen her do it to this many people before though. Lucy, let us out!”

After a worrying pause, the flames parted and the couple stepped through before they closed again, muffling the carnal joy in their wake. Free, they hurried to the top of the hill and looked down at the village one final time. The old women, assigned to care for the children during the witch’s execution, gathered on the other side, conflicted between holding the young ones back and their own curiosity.

Higher and higher grew the blaze in the northern sky, the cries of ecstasy carried with it reaching a crescendo and then falling suddenly silent. A moment later, for a few brief seconds, there were screams of terror and agony, and then only the crackling of the fire settling down to a more natural level.

“I suppose I’m an orphan and a widow now,” Anna said, with a twinge of regret.

“Darling, to the world, we’re dead. We have been reborn and can start anew.”

Hand in hand, they turned their backs on the smoking ruins as the first drops of an April shower hit their cooling skin with a hiss, forming sooty rivulets over their bodies. Naked and free, they set off in search of new life, new clothes, and a good pint of ale.