Eyeless Garden

A ⸤garden⸣ was once a place with plants and paths, ordered according to forgotten aesthetic principles. It was generally understood to be undesirable for the garden’s ⸤components⸣ to retain their eyes, so as not to unsettle visitors and to provide them with drinks.

The drinks offered by paths were typically rich and metallic, sometimes fortified with ⸤powdered calcium⸣.

Those presented by plants were delicate and floral, full of tender salt and spice. They were considered more intimate, and needed to be replanted more frequently.

Motheaten & Drowning

Each morning you wake to new holes in your vision, new sharp-edged gaps; each morning you wonder what they will take from you.

At first it was only ever small things, easily unnoticed, spare chargers and half-forgotten souvenirs, the remains of a meal. Nothing that mattered.

But then you woke to find that one had opened near the center of your vision, a gash of flickering emptiness tearing at the world; and as you turned to hug someone you can’t remember any more you felt it tear her apart, smelled her hot blood spilling out to soak the sheets.

Antivenom & Vampire

Slipping into the club, music pounding at your ears, in your bones, the thrum of life and song and dance; friends with you for a moment then gone in the kaleidoscope whirl, torn apart, joining the crowd–

And you go with them, lost in light and sound and movement.

The noise is inside you, it is you, filling your motions with beautiful Purpose; twirling through the crowd, intersecting and diverging, no partner lasting more than a few moments–that’s not what tonight wants of you.

The Witchling’s Familiar

When you first met her, running to catch the bus on a crisp autumn day, you hardly thought to notice her. Just another artsy witchling walking to the park to sketch the sigils falling leaves trace and listen to the world’s voice.

Good fashion sense.

Way out of your league.

Heavens know that the city is full of witchlings just like her.

(You’ve read that the archetype has power, that conforming to a mold makes some magic easier, but that always seemed silly. Surely divergence is a better way to get attention? Maybe that’s why you’re no witch.)

Cocoon & Bloodbath

Each layer went on easier than the last, cloying red salvation closing over your bare skin, burying you deeper and deeper. At first the brush’s rough hairs hurt, tore your skin and sent your own red welling up, but by the third coat you could hardly feel a thing.

The pain brought to mind her warnings, that she would not be gentle and that this would hurt–that your claustrophobia might make this process unpalpable, that if you broke the cocoon she would not be able to wrap it around you a second time. Hurt filled you with fear.

The Lake In Your Basement

She hears the water dripping, deep below, just at the edge of her senses. The rhythmic tapping of something that’s not rain, not an unquiet faucet, down where there should only be silence and the low wooden sounds of the house rearranging.

If only she could stay asleep.

The door to the basement sticks, doesn’t want to open, wood swollen by damp and grown willful with disuse, but she still makes it open.