smoke's witch

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.

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."

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 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.