Fungal Halo

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!

The doll frets and paces and clenches its fists again and again, stalking through the halls of the witch’s house, holding in a restless impulse that’s filled it to bursting with an overwhelming need to release every bit of coiled ferocity in an explosion of violence.

You take your unmoving doll to the diagnostic clinic run by an eccentric witch.

“Ah!” it exclaims during examining. “I know this problem. Your doll has run out of spiders.”

You object, saying you’re pretty sure that’s not how most dolls work, but it adopts a lecturing tone.

The spider isn’t Real, of course. You won’t find it in your bathtub, nor in your kitchen, nor in the shadowy corners of your poorly-lit basement. You won’t clean any web it doesn’t leave up attached to your ceiling.

It lives in your dreams.

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.

The moth emerges from its chrysalis, reborn at last into the form it was meant to be.

But, wait, no—

This can’t be right.

It can’t be this.

What does it do when infinite, hopeful possibility crystallizes into such disappointing certainty?

A doll is a hollow thing. Not all are physically so, of course. A doll certainly may have physical internals: gears, perhaps; a solid wood core; or even a fleshy mimicry of human organs. All are common enough.

Yet no meaningful selfhood fills it. Its mind is still.

Your witch is gone, dear one. Even a creature such as she cannot simply recover from an attack like that.

There, there. Dry your tears. She gave you one last parting gift to remember her by, didn’t she? A purpose to carry out.

Such a good, loyal doll.

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.

Little moth, little moth… seeking the light of knowledge so eagerly, so indiscriminately, so relentlessly, so obliviously, you have lost yourself.

You found me, now.

And I am something quite far from that small, flickering light.

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.