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What is the colour of pain?

In the growing carmine tide that creeps in her heart-mind, Mathilde would swear all that hurts is red, like her scratched hand, her wounded wrists, her slashed ankles. It’s the blood trickling from her fingers and the sun that burns earth and sky as if it wanted to extinguish it. But she’s long found out pain is far more than a colour: it’s a synaesthesia of the heart.

Like all truest experiences of life, pain is oddly rewarding even when it gnarls at the innards and hollows the mind.

It’s its smell, its taste, its softness when hard and cold, it’s all she’d expect.

The blue sky becoming a bleeding purple expanse with neither clouds nor stars.

Facing the faceless wall of her tormentors and all the crowd who have come to the city centre to see her die at the stake, Mathilde is mesmerised, no, fascinated.

She doesn’t recognise her voice any longer. It’s not her who screams. It’s the mortal wrapping of her soul, to which she’s grown as indifferent as a pair of worn shoes. After her lover is dead and her daughter’s gone, nobody is left to care about.

Only the Cathedral bells that will soon ring for her still matter.

It’s the eleventh hour now. Still one hour to go.

One hour to freedom.

But those sixty minutes are packed with the Inquisitors’ questions, and the rack, and the wheel, and hot pincers. Not to make her confess things she’s never done—who gives a damn about the truth of a red-haired misfit with eyes like an angry ferret—but to entertain the violence-hungry crowd with the display of punishment.

She turns into herself to push the pain away, together with all its shades of red.

What is the colour of fear, now she asks. Is it yellow like limestone, blue like the ocean, or black like the plague?

She doesn’t know, she can’t possibly tell, because she’s never felt afraid. Not even now. If all is lost, what remains to be feared?

But there is a colour Mathilde will never forget or mistake for anything else.

Life—in all its viridian flavours, sombre and vibrant like wind on her skin.

Green like the reflection on her hair when the moon shines like a full white disk in the sky, and her body shifts and changes, becoming of the same substance of the trees from which her kind was born. So, so many centuries before the humans ever walked on the earth’s rain-drenched soil.

Green as a leaf or a lizard, green like the deep dark waters of the treacherous moats that surround their high castles.

Green like her eyes that never blink or waver in front of the fire.

“Pray, witch. Kneel and repent.”

“The end is near.”

“The flames are lit. Your stake is ready.”

The end is near, yea, and it will be as blue as retribution, black as anguish, and cruel as all the carmine shades of a condemned city. Melusine is a name they have mistaken for a person, while it was an entire species disguised under its exotic vowels, because myths lie like anything else does.

Tonight, they are going to learn about the truth and its astonishing lack of colour and sound, pity or forgiveness.

Midnight has finally come, and Cathedral’s seven bells start tolling one after another: one bell for the memory of the living, the final one, the lych bell of the dead.

As soon as the bells’ song dies, Mathilde’s eyes turn to the moon, and a howl shakes her body like lightning in a summer storm.

Her hands break the chains with astonishing force, and she raises arms that become robust dragon wings, dark like the darkest night.

Among the terrified screams of the crowd that scatters around, her face now turned into a sea-serpent snout snarling in anger, Mathilde opens her jaws, and a torrent of flames rages on the market stalls and the stakes erected in the square, submerging people and things in its destructive wave.

If red had the taste of never-ending pain, green will be the colour of deliverance and hues of joyous doom, dancing to a death knell that knows no pauses.

After circling a few times over the Cathedral square in fire, green scales gleaming in the flames’ reflection, the dragon rises high in the sky, obscuring for a moment the immaculate moonlight.