Else

The willows' leaves hang heavy and low, a cascade of crimson tears soaking up the lake's polluted water, planted by some long-ago witch to decorate a pathway through her estate; but she is long gone now, and her gardens have dwindled to be nothing more than a park.

It is a good park, mind, sometimes called one of the city's shining jewels (though only by poets and brochures); on most days it's full of picnickers and joggers, stray students playing games on the lawns and witchlings praying for luck at the tomb hidden on the north bank.

This week the witch is living in a half-destroyed warehouse right on the edge of one of the impact craters, close enough that your phone won't stop interrupting your conversation with alerts about impending exposure. She says it's fine, though, so you just swipe them away.

The city is always a bit too aggressive about geofencing their alerts, so it's not like you're unused to being told to ignore them by people who really should know.

Besides, it's nice here. It feels abandoned. Hardly like part of the city at all. It's just comfortable.

The thing behind the mirror beats against it as you prepare your salvation, strangely colored liquids bubbling through twisted glass and gases shimmering with heat's haze condensing down through concentric silver rings. It took so long to prepare, so many failures!

But now it's ready.

You know it can't make any noise, not here, not from behind the mirror, yet as its face contorts in fear and rage you can hear it screaming. It echoes through your mind, wordless and thought-devouring, making thought all but impossible—

You swallow another pill, choking it down with a mouthful of oily water, and the scream stills.

The doll kneels, moonlight glimmering across her waxy body, glinting off the many winding wires inlaid just below her skin. For a moment all is quiet and serene, the only noise the gentle padding of her witch's feet on the cool tile floor.

Then, the click of a lighter.

The doll does not see her witch approach, her closed eyes buried far too deep beneath waxy godblood to even begin to open, but she hears—the hissing static of the flame, her feet on the ground, the strange little gap as the flame touches her wick, as she begins to burn—

It doesn't hurt.

Her witch promised her that much.

She drifts, unseeing and unfeeling, a speck of strangely dense matter wandering through her prescribed path—an arc countless centuries long, guided by the slow pulls of celestial bodies and solar fire's angry wind.

An interruption is neither appropriate or expected, and yet—

She comes to ground in a storm of displaced momentum, energy ripped away from her and scattered to the eight corners, lensed into more manageable forms—explosions of light and color, bubbles of compressed time sending trees hurting far into their own future deaths.

Stones slipped just beneath the skin, smooth surfaces pressing against dermis, soaking up subcutaneous warmth; opals and moonstones and quartz, agate and topaz and jade all shining in the body's light, chunky beads filling skin with texture beneath your touch.

Once you asked why she went to so much effort, all those tiny cuts and carefully treated scars, all those beautiful things hidden away for no one to see. She always healed so quickly, but she still felt pain, and it always seemed like one or another of her gems was infected.

The city is full of ruins, though few last long—waves of construction, of revitalization, flow through it like water, like the flexing of some unseen beast. The city's blood flows in cranes and trucks and trains, in the brutality of gentrification and the decay that follows.

Trash dolls and harpies run before the wave, and feral angels slide through the cracks; but witches always find a way to protect their places, all those strangely preserved houses scattered through the hills, those otherworldly relics. Even after their deaths, they remain.

Not that witches often die, of course! Or perhaps it's that they're not often known to die—a dollhouse can continue for such a long time in the absence of new instructions, and so often new witches seem to rise from within, rather than slipping in from without.

But that's not this story.

“Hey babe”, said the witch, “mind helping me with this? I think I cracked a bone the other day.”

The doll looked up from her book. “Sure, but isn't that the third this month?”

”... yeah.”

Someone has left a flower in the silence between moments, that secret place where you long ago learned to go to hide from the world. A place which you had always thought only you could access.

Because, well. It's inside your mind. Right?