dolls

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.

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.”