Fungal Halo

I wake up, and right away I can tell that something is very wrong.

I lurch upright in a panic, scanning a room that should be familiar—that can’t be familiar—but I can barely process what I’m seeing as real.

Somehow I’ve been sent back to the turn of the last century.

The touch of a hand at my waist guides me down the hall. I know the path by heart, but still she keeps me close and uses gentle pressure to lead me in a turn down one corridor or another.

“Whoso pulleth out this sword of this doll, is rightwise witch of this house,” your friend reads aloud.

The blade bearing that inscription has been rammed through the body of a doll lying, limp and tragic, on an otherwise empty altar in front of a dilapidated house.

“Astonishing! Where you come from, they really let humans pilot your own mechs? Just, what, with your hands? Operating buttons and levers like a carnival ride?”

They crowd me, far more curious than I ever expected a bunch of human-shaped machines could be.

Nobody else in the room matters as you drape yourself across your Goddess’s lap, perfectly content to lay your head down on Her while She strokes your hair and the other woman lounges at Her feet.

She likes to keep Her most treasured possessions close at hand.

The water churns with the thrashing bodies of countless swimming parasites. It’s hard to get a good look at them like this. All I can pick out is a handful of individual details—tendrils, rows of tiny teeth, beady eyes. I have to put my arm in there and let one choose me.

She tells me that she needs to watch herself, that she has a bad habit of pushing boundaries, especially when she’s been drinking.

I smile. I tell her how her self-awareness is reassuring, how safe she makes me feel.

I keep topping off her glass.

“We all miss Reisa,” my friend told me. “And we all want to see that bastard pay, believe me, but this is too much.”

The edibles came on stronger than I thought, but it felt nice to just let myself lean on my friend’s shoulder and melt into the couch.

The way it usually goes is this: you take your vitamins, you draw the door on glass, you speak your goodbyes, and then you slip through to the other side.

Then your life is hers to play with for a while, and oh, how her pleasure makes you smile!

A coven must guard itself against the interloper that brings infectious false magic into its midst.

When it adopts a young thing that appears to have the gift, it is a kindness. When it later dumps the same girl into a pit to rot, that is also a mercy.

That the planet was haunted would never deter the executives running the galaxy’s biggest mining corporation, of course. They weren’t the ones who’d have to go near it.

No, they just send their most disposable employees there. Us.