decay

They say that light hangs timeless in an eternal now.

They say that each glimmer of starlight is a glimpse of grace; that heaven lurks among those twinkling pinpricks and only light will ever be truly saved, in that eternity lingering between emission and absorption.

They lie.

It's obvious if you have the nose to smell it. Few do, and fewer bother.

Fleeting waves of mirage haze sleeting across my eyes like rot's reeking spore, each flexing the world's bounds further still—walls bow against absent pressure and cracks grow into gaping doors, and all the while the shimmering gem of aura's heart eats and eats and eats—

That brightly lit not-mouth, an angel dancing at the center of my vision; it's odd how similar a mouth and a wing and an eye can look, you know, how feathers are just teeth seen by someone who's still waiting to be taught how to be a victim.

Angels eat just the same.

"There! Do you see that?"

An endless twisted thread; a mat writhing beneath the surface. Sprouting bodies receding into the rotting soil; corpses blossoming into ghostly light. Ribs crunch beneath Abigail's feet; a smile lights her face.

Her companion tarries, unwilling to venture in; Rob's mothers told him so many times to stay away from the burial pits, not to risk whatever ordinance might yet be buried among the numinous dead.

Rot, beautiful though it is, is merely one extant form of decay. Deep processes continue beneath the earth's crust in the same way as they do within any corpse, differing only in magnitude and result—

"Almost there, just another good hit—"

A pickaxe crashes against stone; the wall crumbles. Light breaks through for the first time in longer than the emptiness within can remember. It's dazzling, overwhelming—a dim lantern's glow magnified and refracted, burning through the countless crystals that line its walls—

"Holy shit! Hey, come look at this!"

"Hey, do you have anything for stomach aches?"

Doll, sitting behind the counter, doesn't glance up from her sketchbook. She's been doodling in it for hours, painting with the blood that still hasn't stopped dripping from her gums. She's having fun!

"Try aisle 3. Uh, the one with the big light-up skull. Don't listen to it, it's lying."

You are dreaming.

The oddity of recognizing this does not impede your progress forward into the dining hall's elegant vastness. Nor does it permit you to deviate from the path the dreaming part of you—the part that weaves the world—has chosen for you.

"Oh, you're finally here!"

Her lips press against your skin like sun-warmed feathers, soft and gentle, lingering only long enough for the poison to soak in. Each kiss leaves you shivering against the dead field below you, fingers twitching against soil rendered cold and lifeless by winter's harsh grip—

You don't look at her.

"Hey, get ready. Fifteen seconds ..."

"Yeah, yeah, I'm ready."

"... five, four, three, two, inhale—"

The burnt-lemon smoke burns her throat as it goes down, leaves her feeling rough and raw. Spasmodic coughs shake her body.

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.

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.