The crack in her chest gets larger every day, skin peeling back like mud drying beneath the hot summer sun; she’s splintering, breaking, the damage opening up parts of her you never knew she had— She doesn’t like when you look inside, when you dangle a webcam down through her cracks, but you can’t help it. Her body is like a cathedral, a sacred grove, a many-chambered fantasy full of strange creatures and beautiful ornaments— ...
The doll, returning to her first witch’s home, finds it barren and empty; the sprawling gardens overgrown, elegant flowers choked out by thorny weeds, junk littering the gate and the path beyond it—the great fountain, once golden with angelblood, now full of stinking trashbags. The doll picks her way up along the path, looking around in wonder at the changes decay has wrought; at the places where she once sat and played, at the broken trees and sculptures—tools of discipline which she once shivered to see, now nothing more than rubble and ash. ...
(this story hurt to write; I cannot say whether it will hurt to read, but please don’t force yourself to.) The witch treasured her dolls more than anything else, more than all her wealth and power. She crafted them from the finest components, beautiful souls carefully freed from failing flesh and woven through with threads of memory and love; each one a testament to her devotion. For a time this love was even reflected in the title the world gave her, that welled up from the strength of her workings and the marks she left around her. ...
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. ...