The witch was so very busy almost all of the time. Every day she spent diving into the mysteries of the universe. Every night she spent using that knowledge to develop new ways to tug on the threads of fate.
She also owned a dozen dolls that regularly got into trouble.
Could she have reached into their inner workings—the way she did Reality itself—in order to further Still them? Surely. Yet perhaps there was a part of her that enjoyed their antics and welcomed the way their chaos broke up her daily routine.
Even so, when they gathered to accost her together and request she make them a new sister, she gently but firmly refused. Certainly they served her well, but twelve pretty little gremlins causing mischief in her house in equal balance with their housework was handful enough!
Despite her refusal, they continued to pester her almost daily, until eventually they seemed to get bored of the topic, moving on to other games of theirs.
The witch usually found it cause for concern when they found ways to occupy themselves out of her sight, however.
Whatever their new game was, it seemed more destructive to them than to the house this time. In the coming weeks, the witch found her work regularly interrupted by a tugging at her skirt and a pleading expression from a doll with a new injury that needed repair.
One lost its left arm entirely. Another lost a leg. Yet another lost the lower half of its face.
Each day a different doll maimed itself somehow. Two of them, on separate occasions, even lost an eye! Some had cracked heads or torsos with large shards needing replacement.
It all came to a climax when the whole flock came to interrupt her study in the library, every last one of them covered in tiny cracks. The witch shrieked at them to take better care of themselves or she would lock them in their display cabinets for the next century.
If she tried to repair all of them, she’d lose the entire day, not to mention her fragile train of thought, so she instructed them to repair themselves. Small cracks could be easily handled, even by her dolls, if they had the right tools.
The witch handed a doll the key to her ritual chambers and gave strict instructions—the kind even her dolls knew not to disobey—that they may only take the enchanted repair paste within and use it only for doll repair.
They all eagerly nodded their understanding and left.
A day passed without any more mishaps. And then another. And another.
The witch breathed a sigh of relief. Her dolls had clearly gotten bored and moved on to some less self-destructive game, at least. Perhaps she could get work done in peace again.
One evening, while taking her tea, the witch met her thirteenth doll.
At last, she understood.
It lacked the symmetry of its perfect sisters. Even if she were to miss the heterochromatic eyes, brown and violet, its slightly mismatched limbs gave it a strange, limping gait.
The witch weighed her options, and at last chose to pretend she noticed nothing amiss at all.
To be honest with herself, she had to admit she was impressed with her servants. In her preoccupation with her work, the witch had failed to notice the pattern in the replacement parts she made to repair her dolls, and she had even granted them the key to her private storage.
Clever creatures, assembling a new sister out of pieces of themselves glued together with the paste she herself had been baited into handing over. They knew their witch well.
She smiled, drank her tea, and watched this strange new doll of hers work.
Its hands trembled as it refilled her tea, splashing over the cup’s rim. The wide-eyed look on the others’ faces made it plain they feared the jig was up, but the witch pretended not to notice.
She smiled at Thirteen in appreciation, watching it scurry back as she sipped.
They seemed so pleased with themselves that the witch might have been content to leave things as they were, letting her dolls get away with their ruse or playing a game of acting confused and seeing what strange explanations they’d offer for why she miscounted her dolls.
She might have, but there was something very wrong with Thirteen.
It often struggled with speaking, and some days its tremors were so intense, it couldn’t do any chores at all. Sometimes it jerked violently and unpredictably, damaging something or even hurting itself.
The other dolls tried to conceal all their sister’s flaws, and it certainly did its best to wear a happy mask in front of her.
Nevertheless, a skilled witch knows her dolls. She saw how the poor thing was suffering and concluded only she could do what must be done for it.
She scooped it up in spite of the protests of the others and commanded them with a stern look to be Still. The game was over.
She carried it to her ritual chambers, her strong arms restraining its uncontrolled jerking, and set it down on the large central slab of a table.
A firm tap on its forehead and her magic forced Thirteen to go limp and lifeless.
It was time to answer her curiosity about what her dolls put inside this thing to bring it to life. They could not have used their own innards without compromising themselves, she knew.
With the right key, a doll’s porcelain body parts as easily as a knife through flesh, and the witch’s chamber possessed a wide variety of such keys kept sharp and ready.
She peeled Thirteen open to inspect the situation, and found herself surprised by what she found.
No magic weaves, no sigils etched in catalysts, no carefully enchanted vials of blood.
For all the care her other dolls took in assembling the outside, Thirteen was hardly a proper doll at all on the inside.
This was natural, of course, her dolls knew nothing of dollmaking.
Instead the witch found it stuffed full with dirt, leaves, moss, and bugs, all scavenged from the bog outside her house. Frankly, it was a miracle it ever moved at all.
Yet it seemed to her that the source of the new doll’s declining state was obvious.
At least half the bugs had died, and many others had no doubt escaped over time. The leaves had wilted and started decomposing. The soil had lost all its moisture. It was not exactly a sustainable ecosystem the dolls had built.
But to clean it out and replace it all with her own perfect designs would make this one quite unlike the Thirteen whose quirks so charmed her, wouldn’t it?
Perhaps there was something else that could be done instead, informed by the witch’s centuries of accumulated lore.
Balance and care would be required. New seals inside, a measure of additional bog water, perhaps even some tugging on the threads of the Real, leveraging her most recent discoveries to tweak the connections in her favor.
When she finished, a tap to Thirteen’s forehead brought her little Paludarium Doll back to life. It sat upright with more ease than the witch ever saw it move before.
“H-hello, miss,” it said, stutter remaining in its voice—it never would be perfect—but without distress.
A cacophony of celebratory shouting behind the witch startled her into leaping upright and whirling around in a fury to confront the twelve other dolls that had snuck in to watch. She had forgotten they still had their own key.
She couldn’t stay mad at them, of course. They were just worried about their sister.
Taking Thirteen’s hand, the witch helped it hop down off the table, at which point it immediately ran—with its strange, limping gait—to embrace the others in a big excited hug.
Thirteen still needed help sometimes. It wasn’t always the most articulate of its sisters, nor was it ever particularly coordinated, but despite its clumsiness, its sisters loved it all the same.
And in the end, it seemed to get in exactly as much trouble as the rest.