Lily’s jaw aches, just below the corners of her wide lips. A full sensation, more like a bloated stomach than a sore tooth. It’s been there all day, ever since she woke from a dream of delicious release, but in the last hour it’s grown near intolerable.
“What is true power” is supposed to be one of those deep, philosophical questions with no real answer. It—and the thought experiments which grow on it like clinging weeds—are meant to become a mirror to the speaker’s biases, to reveal how they think about the world. Let that be so. To my mind, the answer is simple: true power is control of the context in which the world is understood. It is the ability to say “this is what the world is”, and be heard. ...
This story was originally posted to Twitter on June 6, 2022. Long-forgotten Fireflies finds her doll huddled outside, its display case’s well-polished glass shining in the little nook between two of the building’s many trash cans. She hums happily and kneels down beside it. “Hey, Lace. What are you doing out here?” It doesn’t meet her gaze. It’s garbage day, but they’re so far into the concrete forest that the truck won’t reach them until the evening; that vast thing rumbling past is just a bus, no matter its grasping arms or Lace’s hopeful gaze as it passes it by. ...
Originally posted to Twitter on July 13, 2022. There’s a doll in the alley behind your apartment building. It’s an old thing, limbs and mask shaped in a style that’s almost old enough to be retro; in another few years it will probably be fashionable again. It’s been there for years and years, just as long as you have. Mostly it spends its days curled up next to the dumpster. You didn’t know it was there for your first few months here, not until one of the other residents mentioned that cutting through the alley shaves a few minutes off the walk to the subway. Now you pass by it every day. ...
Moonstruck toys staring up at pale silver eyes, lost in wonder as the sky’s thin shell cracks and the void rushes in … Dolls can’t drown in the dark places Between, don’t fade away into dusty memories—but their gears seize up, and their screams find no purchase on the void. Worlds crack like dying bubbles and spill their precious cargo out into cruel emptiness. They do exactly what they were made to do, and the things Outside eagerly drink them up. ...
“What is a moth?” a witchling asks; an innocent question, just a glimmer of the voracious hunger that set her along her path. She does not understand the look on her teacher’s mask, the strange reflection in its mother-of-pearl eyes. “Find out for yourself,” it finally answers. She is not yet wise enough to understand what it really means; young and hungry enough to believe in her own immortality with a strength that almost makes it real. And so she does not take her time to prepare: she slips away as soon as she can find a chance to. ...
It’s not HER, of course, not even one of HER acolytes; just some thing with a long-beaked mask wearing one of HER lesser aspects. But It’s still the closest you’ve ever gotten to HER, the closest you can safely get, and Its presence is intoxicating— Or maybe that’s just what you Know is inside the slim briefcase sitting on the floor next to It. It’s tapping Its pen on the table, waiting, the last drops of blood draining from the attached no-longer-sterile lancet— ...