Fungal Halo

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.

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!

I plan for only a brief visit at your house. I have places to go, but somehow you’ve talked me into staying for dinner. For drinks. For drugs. And now it’s so late, and I’m in an unfamiliar place…

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.

A bar isn’t home. It doesn’t feel like home; it can’t be home. That’s obvious, though, isn’t it? Hardly an observation worth stating at all except to call attention to just how far from home it feels.

Sure, ICDMs seemed like a great idea at first. Dollistic missiles guided by a poor lonely thing seeking out high population targets to hug? Worked like a charm!

Then the arms race started with anti-dollistic missile systems built to intercept ICDMs with even lonelier dolls.

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.

It’s a house party for witches, and you thought you’d just be able to enjoy a calm and relaxing evening with a couple friends, something of a break from the chaos of managing the affairs of your own house. The host, however, seems to have something more in mind for you.

In the dream, the Queen of Spiders sneaks up from behind you and sinks her fangs into your neck.

Your Gem is missing. Your power does not answer your call. But the venom in her bite fills you with indescribable heat and desire, and you don’t care.

Your angel is so sweet, so pliant, with her collar around her neck. Such a wonderfully docile creature since you learned how to leash her more firmly than even her halo.

The defiant warrior swinging her flaming sword is long, long gone now.

She wraps her arms around me just like always, tilting her head to one side, offering me her delicate neck.

We’ve done this countless times, but she still gives a tiny shiver of anticipation as my lips touch my favorite place and my fangs pierce deep into my thrall.

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.

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.

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.

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?