Fungal Halo

People still speak fondly of the pantheon that was.

It’s not yet been so long that it has passed out of memory, though each year more children are born without the warm assistance of Oriah and raised without the guiding light of Ralles.

To them the stories are just stories.

There is a Good Doll and an Evil Doll.

And they are girlfriends.

The problem with dolls is that they are flexible enough to be as cognitohazardous as they need to be.

With so many different shapes and sizes and tendencies, they can find a slot to fill in your imagination, become whatever inspires you, then squeeze their way in.

The witch who planned so hard to achieve immortality did not plan for the end of the world.

Her magic—the magic of permanence—proved itself more durable in the end than the clockwork of life itself.

Small consolation, she felt, bound forever to her own buried bones.

Even witches long for something greater sometimes.

Knowledge of herb and ritual, of crystal and will, of secret places hidden inside the thin edge separating light and shadow… it is all only knowledge, after all. It is not ascension.

She cries and cries and cries, tears flowing until they run out, then turn to blood, and then finally all capacity for tear making is utterly exhausted.

Still the IV sends a steady stream of grief into her, and she is wracked with dry sobs until her body gives out entirely.

The angel quivers in my grasp as I hold her by the neck.

“You shouldn’t be here, pretty thing,” I breathe. She whimpers when I let my fangs graze the gentle curve of her ear as I whisper into it. “This is my realm.”

It isn’t your friend who joins you and the others at the diner, but for some reason everyone else in your group treats it exactly the same as if it were her.

Do they notice? Or are they all going along with it the same as you because everyone else is doing so?

Her coming scorches the earth, yes, but it also scorches the sea, the air around her, and even the thin screen onto which reality itself is projected.

That scorch looks like a great smoldering sheet hanging upright on nothing, tracing precisely her path through the world.

The flesh begs for the shaper’s hand.

Isn’t that right? Even when you thought you were a person, you saw something in me you couldn’t bring yourself to look away from.

You didn’t know what it was, but you knew even then—I had what you needed.

I hobble into the shop, barely in time for my appointment. My gears grind noisily inside me with the effort of opening the door myself, and I feel a spring twisting too far.

It isn’t even that I’m trying to change you, but still knowing me does so, doesn’t it?

These days the burdens you used to accept without fuss rest awkwardly on your shoulders. Seeing me, you acutely feel how your reality tilts askew against your heart.

What if I helped?

The little doll was visibly struggling—arms hugging knees, rocking back and forth in the corner—and her witch had a full day ahead.

She leaned over, kissed the top of her head, and whispered comforting words as she deftly twisted and popped the doll’s head off her shoulders.

“Never enough. It’s never enough.”

Mad, scrawled ravings and arcane symbols stretch across papers strewn throughout the room. Lines carved in the wood flooring bear the stains of blood and other unidentifiable fluids.

To have stumbled into the favor of some oneiric power is to awake each morning gripped with impulses not entirely your own, mind stuffed with fresh memories from a night of visions more wild and vivid than ordinary dreaming or even waking life.

The thing in your skull stirs.

The Dark Lady of Nightmares glided silently through the night’s cool air, her body magically transformed into her giant bat form perfectly suited for stealth. As she approached the City of Light, she swept her eyes over it, scanning for the tower where the princess slept.

One step at a time, a creature who was once an angel trudges into the woods, following eyes glowing in the dark. Her halo is cracked. Bloody stumps on her back mark where proud wings had been before some act of terrible violence ripped them from her.

What happens to a doll that cannot endure the existence its witch creates for it? For those created with imperfect Stillness, who experience selfhoods that suffer or love or dream, the options are generally to be “fixed” or to flee.

But in a world of witches, where does it flee?

Taking in the damaged ones, the abandoned ones, the stifled and hungry and hurting ones. Sharing with them everything we have to offer. That’s what we do. It’s only right, isn’t it?

After all, once we were in your shoes, and we ache with the memory of such pain and neglect.

She spoke to me, painted lips unmoving, and the next thing I knew, I was driving home from that estate sale with her buckled safely in the passenger seat.

I carried her inside, sat her on the sofa with some nice embroidered pillows, and started tidying the home.