Of Decay

(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.

She was deliriously happy, and her dolls shared in that happiness.

For a time.

When she came to the youngest of her dolls in the night, pulled her from the silence of her display case, the doll thought nothing of it. A doll is not meant to question a witch, especially one who always acts in her dolls’ best interests.

Nor did she think anything of the thick needle the witch threaded into her arm, or the viscous fluid that pressed out of it into her veins; it burned so very horribly, but the youngest doll lost herself in Still contemplation of the smile on her witch’s face.

The doll was innocent, carefully crafted to know nothing of the world’s horrors; memories of the life she led before she came to the witch washed away by cleansing wax, buried deep beneath beautiful porcelain. She never had a hope of understanding the cruelty and pain that warred across her witch’s expression.

Over the next month life continued much as it had in the witch’s house, among her treasured dolls; their tasks continued, their Purposes drove them forward. Until she began to sicken, the youngest doll almost thought the night of the needle nothing more than a bad dream.

It is not Proper for dolls to grow sick. Oh, they play at sickness, just as they play at funerals! They borrow the trappings of it, the interplay of care and attention between each other and their witches. It is one of the ways they are permitted to express the feeling of neglect, of being overworked and overlooked. But proper sickness? For the strings which thread through their bodies to grow thick with rot, spreading like a bruise through their inner spaces, all those beautiful reds and purples and faded yellows? It is almost unheard of.

And yet the youngest doll did grow sick; at first it was a mere weakness in her movements, a slowness in her thoughts and actions where none had been before, but before too long she collapsed, retching out stinking slime onto the smooth tile floor.

Panicked, the other dolls fetched their witch, and she ferried the youngest doll away as her sisters cleaned up the mess she had made. She sequestered the doll, bundled her up in a dollbed in her own chambers, carefully fed her all the nutritious broths and herbal brews that her other dolls could make or fetch–

And, late at night, as she cooed to her youngest doll, gently petted her head and told her that it would all be over soon, that she’d be so much better, the witch threaded her arms full with enough needles that the doll felt that she would burst. No matter how she filled herself with Stillness, how tightly she held it, she could hardly stand to see the strange liquids which filled each syringe and hurt her even to look at, let alone the pain as they pressed down into her withering body.

The youngest doll lasted longer than the witch expected.

She died without understanding why.

But there was little enough time to mourn, for as she reached her end her dollbed was replaced with ones holding the several dolls who had cleaned up her vomit, who had mopped up all those reeking fluids she had left behind when she collapsed; dolls who had collapsed in turn, though none of them had left their own messes behind to spread the contagion further.

When each of those dolls had died, when their dollbeds were taken out and burned against the spread of the contagion, the witch freely cried, for her dolls’ happiness was all she had wanted in the world; for her treasured ones to be safe and sound and secure in her arms.

The funeral was a grand affair, a celebration of the dead dolls’ lives; and as they were laid to rest in the ground practically all of the witch’s surviving dolls–and even some guests who had known the honored dead!–tore their garments and tried to leap into the graves to be with them for just a tiny bit longer.

The witch took advantage of the confusion to pull aside her eldest doll, her most treasured confidant, and kiss him with a tongue smeared with fetid rot. The eldest doll did wonder at this, did think something of it; but his Stillness and Purpose were no transient thing, and he knew that his witch always had a reason for even her most confusing actions–and that everything she did was full of love for her treasured dolls.

He survived for nearly a year, slowly withering away to nothing beneath his mistress’s tender attentions.

During that time no other dolls sickened, but a malaise settled upon the witch’s mansion–tasks began to go undone or unassigned, routine maintenance and cleaning abandoned; strange molds spread through the mansion’s baths, and crept up through drainpipes to eat away at the roof’s sturdy beams. Outlying gardens fell fallow, flowers grown small and sour with seeds that held only rotting water.

The dolls tried their best, but …

Well, their best clearly wasn’t good enough.

No matter what lies they told themselves to get through the day.

And the witch watched, from her chair beside her eldest doll’s deathbed, and smiled as all she had made began to fall apart.

It took decades for her estate to properly fall to ruin, to destroy all of her beloved creations (or almost all; three remained unaccounted for in her own reckoning of destruction, though perhaps their decay had bloomed in some outlying building that she never thought to check before the end arrived).

Workings of such a magnitude cannot be rushed, not if they are to retain their essential character.

The long slide down into neglect and ruin and rot is slow and steady, and gentle in its way; entropy greases your way down, no matter how you might try to hold yourself back with energy and power, no matter how you might try to trick your inevitable end.

The witch of decay knew this, just as she knew that all of her dolls would someday end; and isn’t it so much kinder to speed that end? To let them fade away in her arms, secure in the knowledge of her love, of her care–certain that whatever she did to them was done with a greater purpose, a greater reason.

As indeed it was.

As stinking mold spread through her mansion, through her dolls and through her spark, all those vessels perfectly prepared to succumb to it–just as every living thing is–so too did it spread into those strange not-spaces where her mansion sprawled into the Unreal, those reflections and corridors and secret bastions where all the trappings of architecture fell away, where ever step was attended by the vast pulsing light of her heart.

In her heart, in that perfect vessel carefully split apart from her body in what had been her first true working of power, rot and mold and decay pooled and grew and spread, some strange thing quickening within–the seed of the rotted divine, of a sickly broken light spilling out into the world for the first time, a gentle hunger longing for the world’s final whimpering end.

A god, if you prefer that term.

A cruel and bitter thing, full of hatred for its mother, resentment at being born into its own long decay–but tied so closely to her, their power linked and her devotion its only fuel; each act of veneration feeding it, forcing it to grow, and flowing back into her in turn, swelling her with meaning and rot and ruin until the world could hardly hold her, until the destroying mold spreading out from the moment of her ascension weakened the threads of being just enough for her and her newborn god and the last vestiges of her mansion to fall through–

The priestess of decay glides through her endless halls, feet soundless on gore-stained marble. Each sunset, as the dying sun falls below the distant shattered horizon, she visits her living charges; each morning she collects fresh offerings from the dead.

The living she keeps in great stone cradles, their sides slick with fungal grime. Even in the first days after a new charge arrives, when they are still strong and lively, climbing out of their cradle is beyond them, though they try their best anyway.

In those early days the halls are filled with noise, slowly fading as it echoes into eternity. Her charges cry for help, for mercy, or simply to be heard; they scream their stories so that they will not be forgotten.

It always brings a smile to her face, a brightness to the mascara stalactites that hang from her empty eyes.

She will never forget any of them.

She loves them.

New arrivals always test her love—they refuse the sacrament, they struggle and fight against it. But she knows that they will always come around, as weakness pools in their bodies, as the cold and damp and hunger take their toll.

She does not take joy in cruel necessity, in delaying a new arrival’s destiny, but sometimes all she can do is wait.

No matter how much it hurts to see the pain in their eyes, the spark burning deep inside them; no matter how their flesh calls out to be free of it.

In the end, every charge takes the sacrament.

In the end, every charge joins the divine.

In the end, their decay gives her what she needs to help others join them, to nurture the broken beating heart that lies at the center of what was once her mansion and is now so much more; for the divine dead understand her holy purpose. They whisper endless appreciation into her ruined ears.