Else

She hears the water dripping, deep below, just at the edge of her senses. The rhythmic tapping of something that's not rain, not an unquiet faucet, down where there should only be silence and the low wooden sounds of the house rearranging.

If only she could stay asleep.

The door to the basement sticks, doesn't want to open, wood swollen by damp and grown willful with disuse, but she still makes it open.

Her force sends her stumbling down as it finally admits her, grasping for a railing which is no longer there, toes touching water–

You welcomed it in, eagerly brought it into your body; all that foggy liquid that flowed from nothing into your chalice, hardly contained by the force of your bindings, the strength of your spells.

It shone so brightly in the sputtering candlelight.

You hardly waited for the last of the spell to fade before you brought it to your lips, gulped it down in a single mass; it tasted so right flowing down your throat, thick and rich and savory, the chalice never seeming to empty.

The chittering chaos of countless insects rises from the emptiness before you, the grating noise of chitinous limb against shell, of mandibles gnashing and antenna curling in anticipation–

"No, that's not it at all. Look again."

Nine candles ring the pit, eight pinning the world into place and the last opening it up, each burning with the power of the turning year; inside the circle the hardwood gives way to churning void, to vast things moving beneath, strange crustaceans shifting by candlelight–

"You're so close, witchling. Again."

Each slash of the knife, each thrust of the blade, sends great gouts of sweet red goo splattering across the floor, pouring down to fill the punch bowl below; celebrants clamber up on unsteady chairs, dirty shoes tearing at the paper tablecloth, to reach inside–

Eager hands press inside deeper than seems possible, tear at tender tissue, come out sticky-red and full of treats–individually wrapped candies and plastic toys, squishy organs making such silly noises as they deflate on the ground, the spurting mass of a sugary heart–

A dozen feet away, out of splatter distance, the band strikes up a jaunty tune; little voices rise in happiness, weaving into the music in dissonant unison.

Someone slips a gag into the pinata's mouth; how rude of it to try to disrupt the fun!

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.