Drink Some More Tea

There’s just something about the way it growls—that hungry, needy sound. It almost makes you want to unchain it, to let it feed the need roiling in its belly with your tender flesh.

But the witch wouldn’t want you to.

She put in so much effort to capture this beast, this strange shifting thing; to bind its wings and cuff its many limbs.

So you don’t. No matter how it growls when you blend close—when you clip another flower from its antlers, or bring the shears to its fingers to harvest another bit of the precious sap inside—no matter what that noise stirs inside you.

No matter that what you feel, that palest echo of the beast’s torment, twists your mind and sends you rushing away to lose yourself in your display case’s comforting Stillness—or in that place at the foot of the garden, that little hidden alcove where sometimes dolls go when they cannot forget their bodies.

It’s there you go more often.

But your own clumsy touches do little more than feed the need within, and the other dolls—the ones who might once have comforted you, have slipped their fingers into your body and pressed and kissed until Stillness filled you once more—have seen the changes in your eyes.

It’s not that they’re scared of you! No, of course not, they reassure you. It’s just …

Well …

They like you, so they won’t mention this to the witch. Not unless she asks. Her solutions to problems are so … well … but maybe it would be better if you went to her? If only to ask for a different duty.

For a doll with stronger Purpose, with more resilient Stillness, to tend to the beast.

But it’s not that they think that you’re broken.

You don’t tell the witch.

You don’t ask to be reassigned.

You should be better than this thing. Stronger! It shouldn’t be able to get to you so easily, with a few noises seeping out of its throat, with the look in its eyes—the way it looks at you—

Instead, you start spending more time in its cell. The witch doesn’t mind as long as you bring her the sap and flowers, fuel for some strange project that fills her hours with blood and ink and honey, and the other dolls seem almost relieved.

One of them starts leaving tea outside the beast’s cell. The message is clear: we think this is where you belong. This is your Purpose.

They forget to leave bouquets for you to sup on, though. Dolls always have trouble with that sort of initiative.

But, but! The beast’s flowers are right there! And there are enough of them that the witch couldn’t possibly mind if you took a few!

(And if the beast minds, well, it’s just an object.)

After the first few days of that, after you decide to try flavoring your tea with sap coaxed from the beast’s hollow fingers, things start to get a bit odd.

(In fairness it hadn’t been quite normal for a while—though the dust falling from the beast’s wings had not disturbed your nose, little blooms of strange colors stained your vision everywhere it touched you. You hadn’t minded. Its wings were so much more beautiful with dust in your eyes.)

Something glows in the beast’s eyes, and the same spark glows in your own. That growling hunger, that need to be free—clothes! Why are you wearing so many clothes?

You fix that problem, drink some more tea.

Clean up the cell, drink some more tea.

Drink some more tea, drink some more tea, drink some more—

You’re so thirsty and there’s no more tea.

You need to be touched and there’s no more tea.

The beast is right there and there’s no more tea.

You crack its fingers between your pearly teeth, suck out the sap within. It’s not like tea but it’s gooey and sticky and coats your throat almost as well as tea would—and with each drop the world shivers around you and isn’t that wonderful?

The beast tries to struggle, tries to stop you, so you give it what you can so clearly see it wants. And it keeps on struggling? Even with your hands on it, even with your body opening around it, your tongue teasing out another drop of sap from its broken fingers—

And something pulls you off it, sends you crashing down to the opposite wall—gravity shifting, pinning you in place, bursts of densely patterned pain exploding around you as you feel your body crack under the pressure of the witch’s ire, the fractal snowflakes that carry her power into the world—

You’re chained, half your body inside the wall, just enough above the surface to feel pain. Your ceramic skin cracks beneath the witch’s knives and mallets—she’s hammering spikes in, peeling you open, ripping out chunks of the soft, fragile things within.

Is she eating them or throwing them aside? You can’t tell. It hurts too much to move your eyes.

For a moment the witch moves aside and you stare past her, at the beast hanging chained on the cell’s far wall.

Like you, it is embedded in the wall, its beautiful wings hidden by drab concrete. Its head hangs slack, flowerless antlers hanging down. Bruises cover its body; its hands are shattered ruins.

Suddenly you realize how much sap you drank from it, how much still pools within your belly. Your stomach clenches—if you could move enough to, you’d be on your hands and knees, retching, your body trying too late to reject what you have done.

The witch is at the door, talking to another doll—a better doll—her words flowing through the air in angry red and oranges and purples as dark as pain. It hurts to hear her anger.

Across the cell the beast raises its head, presses its antlers against the wall.

Fractal rings bloom around them as they slip inside, leaving bright turquoise stains behind; the entire wall ripples, welcoming it inside. As its head slips beneath you see it wink at you with one of its many eyes—

And the witch notices a moment too late.

Her fists reduce the wall to dust, the ceiling groaning worryingly above; the doll who’d unknowingly distracted her is a broken pile on the floor, mask smashed and phylactery smoking.

The witch saves you for last. You can feel the fate she has planned, growing behind the fires of her eyes; you can hear the screams of the hell she will consign you to.

But …

You’re inside the wall too, aren’t you? Your belly full of stolen power, your mind whirling with the touch of things far beyond a mere doll.

You can feel something behind you, waiting for you, just past the surface. You’re floating on the boundary like a leaf on water—and, just as easily as a leaf might sink, you turn your head and slip through.