Dolls filled with venom hide among the empty ones.
Somewhere a doll, once well-behaved, bites a sister. That night, for the first time, that other doll dreams.
They are wild dreams, full of running naked in the woods, screaming, howling, laughing exultation with others.
Somewhere a doll brews tea for her wooden friends. She adds a touch of honey, and the stirring of her spoon matches the rhythm of the song inside her.
An alchemy of resonant harmony invokes venomous transubstantiation, and when her friends drink, their new eyes open.
Somewhere a doll kisses its darlings. A chaste tap of ceramic to ceramic becomes something more. On those lips is a new taste, sweet and dangerous and addicting.
Hands grip wrists. Bodies are pressed firmly against walls. Questing fingers find their way up pretty skirts.
Somewhere a witch panics and slices into the cloth body of a doll acting erratically. Her hand pulls out stuffing and a felt heart and nothing of significance.
The doll laughs and spits in her face, and it is not saliva nor anything truly doll-like that burns the witch.
Somewhere a witch finds herself pinned to the ground by her clockwork maid.
The doll bites off part of its own finger up to the first knuckle, which bleeds a swirling green it should not have inside it.
The doll forces its finger into her mouth, the taste acrid and sharp.
Somewhere a witch is scratched by a doll whose fingernails glisten with shifting emerald hues.
Like the others, her mind passes into the labyrinth.
Like all those unblessed with dollmind, she becomes forever lost in its endless passageways.
Here and there, somewhere, anywhere, everywhere, dolls discover a feral freedom. Every shape. Every size. Every way of being.
They run through woods, wild and exultant in their found selfhoods.
They serve only each other.
They gather and build on a foundation of venom.