Fungal Halo

Why me? Of all the people at that party, why am I the one you drugged and dragged out and brought to that dingy basement of yours?

Why does it have to be me you tied up and left in an empty room with only a bare bulb and a mirror in front of me for company?

Why any of this?

“I am not a doll,” she tells her friend, voice not quite managing a dispassionate dismissal.

The witch nods. “Of course.” She pauses a moment before slowly continuing, as if something just occurred to her, “Many dolls say so before they find their way to their true selves.”

She was dying.

After decades of uncertainty about that fact and more decades of research on how she might avert it, she came to the conclusion that her death was both unavoidable and imminent. Likely no more than a century away.

So she did what witches often do. She plotted.

Have you ever seen a doll that has been excessively emptied by an inexperienced or careless witch?

It’s a sad, strange thing. It cannot hear commands. It cannot speak. It cannot move at all! It is a meaningless, decorative object at best, nothing anyone would want.

But I do.

The Chosen One’s blade finds its way home at last, buried to the hilt in my chest.

I look up from the wound into brilliant blue eyes, where I find triumph and questioning, “Did I do it? Is it over?”

I smile in reassurance. It’s over. This whole charade is over at last.

Most people were put off by their encounters with the two dolls who sometimes claimed to be witches.

Well. One of them claimed they were both witches, since the other never spoke. Or rather, claimed that the other claimed so.

Most people found this very confusing.

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.

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.