Fungal Halo

The warrior who kicked down the door looked immediately familiar, though I’d never seen her before. Hers was the face in the mirror, the mold from which I was cast, the one my maker could never let go of.

My tits ache, pressed against the hard wood of the pier I lie on. The irregular splash of salt water leaves my clothes just damp enough to unpleasantly stick to me.

Physical discomfort fades into the background. It’s high tide, and the thing kissing me grips my attention.

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.

“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 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!

I get confused sometimes. I misremember instructions Miss gives me or get lost in the house or see things that aren’t really there.

That’s why right now I’m trying to sit still and enjoy my tea and studiously avoid looking outside the window at the shouting thing below.

I fucking hate breakups.

You put your heart and soul into a relationship with someone, and in the end they betray your trust and leave you with a gaping wound in your chest. Every fucking time.

I’d just be better off giving up on love.

Her grave was not particularly deep, the coffin not particularly sturdy, the stone marker already overgrown. It was a burial in which every expense had been spared.

A mushroom sprouts through a wedding ring pushed to the surface by subterranean life.

Your eyes resolve so few shapes under night’s shroud, but you are content. There, bathing in golden light, is the most radiant creature you’ve ever laid eyes on.

When she dances, no gaze can resist her summons, least of all yours.

The greasy, spindly woman who wormed her way into the king’s court should not, by any reasonable estimation, have been able to get as close to him as she did. She was foul, unsavory, and with a sharp tongue that did her few favors in the great courtly games of diplomacy.

My colleague and partner—the only one who understands me on any meaningful level—ignores my pleas and my thrashing against these restraints to inject me with the same substance that killed all our test subjects.

She is a monster, and it was me who encouraged her to be so.

I’ve been coming to this library increasingly often after I found the twists and turns through the aisles that take me to where they keep their most interesting books.

Not many people visit this isolated wing, which adds to the appeal.

It seemed like a nice date at first. She cooked you an elaborate meal, she shared such interesting stories, and the way she looked at you with those arresting eyes made you squirm in your seat.

Then she told you that the pie had been poisoned and all the doors were locked.

What a lovely afternoon to relax with an old friend and reminisce over tea.

We laugh over stories of our adventures together, and for a moment, it’s like we were never apart.

She reaches across the table and takes my hand, and I smile like I haven’t in years.

I squeeze the trigger, and the thing that was once my best friend drops dead.

I take a moment to kneel beside it. These helmets aren’t made to be removed, so I improvise a hole in the front with the butt of my gun.

Yeah. That’s her face. All plugged in.

They recognized something was wrong. Events were not proceeding according to their meticulous script.

For all their precautions—the drugs, the mental conditioning, the trigger phrases—their weapon was increasingly unpredictable. Erratic, even.

So they took her girlfriend.

“At last, you arrive in my lair,” the Dark Lady of Nightmares drawls with a confident air of menace.

She rises from the Throne of Thorns, her seat of power overgrown with wild vines bearing threatening spikes which somehow never pierce her smooth, perfect skin.

I attack myself more with the exfoliating scrub, putting my whole arm into the effort until fatigue precludes continuing.

It hardly seems to make a difference in the hard, scaly patches developing across my arms and legs.

Slathering the moisturizer on, I finish my routine.

It’s her again. Not just another worshipper, by now all the temple priestesses know her face.

Her schedule is her own, her arrivals dictated by impulses only she knows. She offers social pleasantries to those of us she sees but wastes no time traversing the temple grounds.

You start dating a lovely girl who warns you that her job has her on-call 24/7/365 but assures you that they so rarely ever call her in.

Touching nib to fang, the Spider Witch draws on her own venom for this part of the ritual.

With practiced movements, she inks fine lines onto her canvas. The securely bound creature does an admirable job of not flinching as its skin burns under each stroke.

I kiss her and feel wetness everywhere she touches me.

She grips me firmly, fingers wrapped in my hair, pressing my face into her as if to keep me from looking down and seeing what she is doing to me.

As if I didn’t watch her do it to someone else before.

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.

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.

Slitted eyes lock with mine. One clawed hand at my throat. Another grips my hair. Two more raking my back, breaking the skin. A smile widens, full of needle-sharp teeth, relishing my helplessness in the moments before it opens to devour me.

“Remember me?” The creature hisses.

“We are not so different, you and I,” the Dark Sorceress declares as I confront her at last in her great tower.

I grip my sword and grit my teeth. “You’re a cold-blooded killer who consorts with demons and whose idea of freedom is born of chaos and destruction.”