Else

By the time you find the secret door you're almost ready to give up and call it a day (well, a night. Can't rob the necropolis during the day!). Maybe this tomb was never finished, this mausoleum never occupied.

Maybe it's just a dead end! A trick. It's been known to happen.

Besides, your lantern's starting to sputter, the last refill of oil on your belt hanging with the weight of finality. If you waste it on a dead end then it'll be weeks until you can scrounge up enough for another attempt, maybe months before you can sneak in again.

She only went to the witch as a last resort, after years of being shuffled between doctors, of mortifying exams and racks upon racks of bloody vials. And, of course, pain. Always pain, always the ebb and flow of agony filling her and fading away with no rhythm she could hear.

She wasn't stupid, no matter how her mind was fogged; she knew that witches were a last resort, dangerous and mercurial. That's what she had always been taught, what she'd always heard in breathless news reports about children plucked from their beds and remade into new forms.

(Always "children" for some reason, even though they were invariably legal adults with their own lives and minds, always treated as if they were dead even though they had simply become something different. Always interviewing the parents, not the transformed. How very odd.)

Feral angel girl sitting in the basement, far from her flock's nests, filthy light splintered by broken windows falling all around her.

It reminds her of her halo, in a way.

Letting it fill her senses feels the same as the Thing used to feel in her mind.

Years ago someone dragged a whole-ass payphone into the basement, just pulled it right out of the ground and tossed it down. It still sparks form time to time.

Angel doesn't know why, for all the time she spends looking at it, but it's convenient that it's already here.

"Why!" (slam) "won't!" (slam) "you!" (slam) "die!"

She brings the window down on your neck again and again, each impact sending fresh cracks shooting through your body's smooth glass, reopening the old ones you had so laboriously sealed earlier in the day.

A passerby glances at you, curious about the noise; you do your best to smile back, to ward off his attention. It's easy enough not to wince, to play this off as just some game.

It's not like you have proper nerves anymore, after all!

After a few moments he keeps on walking.

A ⸤garden⸣ was once a place with plants and paths, ordered according to forgotten aesthetic principles. It was generally understood to be undesirable for the garden's ⸤components⸣ to retain their eyes, so as not to unsettle visitors and to provide them with drinks.

The drinks offered by paths were typically rich and metallic, sometimes fortified with ⸤powdered calcium⸣.

Each morning you wake to new holes in your vision, new sharp-edged gaps; each morning you wonder what they will take from you.

At first it was only ever small things, easily unnoticed, spare chargers and half-forgotten souvenirs, the remains of a meal. Nothing that mattered.

Slipping into the club, music pounding at your ears, in your bones, the thrum of life and song and dance; friends with you for a moment then gone in the kaleidoscope whirl, torn apart, joining the crowd–

And you go with them, lost in light and sound and movement.

The noise is inside you, it is you, filling your motions with beautiful Purpose; twirling through the crowd, intersecting and diverging, no partner lasting more than a few moments–that's not what tonight wants of you.

Your friends' faces flash by you, laughing, screaming–

Through the fringes of the world She weaves her charms, smooth silver threads laid across rooftops and knotted umber sewn through sidewalk cracks.

Each day brings with it a different color, a different place, all unremarked by the sightless things who think the world theirs.

Her web weaves loosely through forgotten places and tightly through those much attended but hardly seen, enmeshed in the set dressing of lives lived without pain. So much remains unseen, unremarked, in those places; so much detail lost beneath comforting security.

When you first met her, running to catch the bus on a crisp autumn day, you hardly thought to notice her. Just another artsy witchling walking to the park to sketch the sigils falling leaves trace and listen to the world's voice.

Good fashion sense.

Way out of your league.

Heavens know that the city is full of witchlings just like her.

Each layer went on easier than the last, cloying red salvation closing over your bare skin, burying you deeper and deeper. At first the brush's rough hairs hurt, tore your skin and sent your own red welling up, but by the third coat you could hardly feel a thing.

The pain brought to mind her warnings, that she would not be gentle and that this would hurt–that your claustrophobia might make this process unpalpable, that if you broke the cocoon she would not be able to wrap it around you a second time. Hurt filled you with fear.

Yet when it faded, when crimson sheets bound you too tightly for you to move or see or feel, so too did your fear. You drifted there as she worked, almost outside your body; thinking of it only to idly consider how much of the process might yet remain before you.

After a time, you did not even think of that.