The Doll Decides

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.

The mansion’s doors hang open, broken and twisted; one lies on the ground, each pane of its stained glass carefully shattered.

For a moment the doll wonders whether she will be made to repair it, and how she could; but then she shakes herself and steps over it, inside.

The halls are just as filthy as the grounds, full of fetid rot; mushrooms and mold bloom from fallen vases, framed portraits hold only damp scraps. The vast chandelier still glimmers from where it has fallen; its hooks are still stained with old blood.

The doll wanders, walking familiar paths made strange, poking her head into rooms she once knew so well but now hardly recognizes.

Nothing is unchanged.

Each step brings up fresh memories of her first witch’s art, and of how she was made.

She almost falls into the path she once took every day, slips away into the back halls to find the dollhouse, to see the display cases (now surely broken) and the dark rooms beyond—

But she’s not ready for that, not yet.

She has all the time in the world.

She was never allowed in the library, so that’s where she goes.

Once it was the mansion’s heart, a vast space of balconies and endless bookshelves that stretched from the sub-basement all the way up to the top of a glass dome more than a hundred feet above.

Once a vast jeweled model drifted in its center, a clockwork reflection of the witch’s heart, its shifting patterns and harsh noises directing the library dolls along their tasks—

(Or so the doll understands. She was never permitted to see it; she was made to be sold.)

It’s not like that any more, not at all.

The books are gone, the shelves broken, the dome an achingly empty space through which rain and wind and rot have slipped in and made the library their own; the floors are full of holes and not a single balcony still has its railings.

The doll shivers.

She knew she had to come back, she felt that call in her heart; and it is that part of her that can hardly bear to see the ruin, that calls on her to repair it, to find a way to make it right.

It is a part of her she struggles to ignore.

Her descent down to the sub-basement, to the bottom of the library’s emptiness, is not an easy one. She takes stairs where she can, but at several points she has no choice but to let herself drop.

She tries not to wonder how she’ll climb back up. That’s a question for later.

The sub-basement, the library’s lowest point, isn’t as dark as the doll thought it would be; there’s a light pulsing there, a glimmer slipping through the cracks of the only unbroken door the mansion still holds.

She picks her way through the rubble.

It swings open for her.

She immediately knows that the hallway beyond is not a place where any doll would have been permitted to go, at least back in the mansion’s glory days; there is something different about its walls, about the way they fade and shift and pulse.

It’s a place for witches.

But there’s nothing to stop her, not even filth and rubble to impede her steps, and so she lets herself be drawn onwards, lets her pathway twist and turn through the mansion’s deepest veins, down into the place where its roots intersect with the Unreal—

The mansion’s heart is there, beating unsteadily, thick gouts of iridescent blood rippling out to stain the floor that isn’t exactly a floor just a bit more;

And the doll’s first witch is there, pinned against it by a dozen needles, its head hanging slack and its eyes blank.

The heart beats faster as the doll approaches, and the witch lifts its head to look at her.

Its face is cracked and broken, half its mask missing; the thing beneath might have been human once, but it has not been for a long time. Its desiccated skin cracks as it speaks—

“So you’re the only one who came back.”

“I am,” the doll says.

“I see my mark upon you, but I do not remember you.”

“You didn’t give me a name before you gave me away.”

“Why you, then?”

The doll looks away. “I wanted to be sure.”

“Ha! Are you disappointed?”

“A bit. But …”

The doll trails off, lost in thought.

The witch waits—but that’s all it can do, pinned as it is.

Finally she continues, “There’s something satisfying about being able to decide for myself, rather than leaving it up to hunters, to other people.”

The witch laughs, at the doll and itself. “I really did fuck up making you, huh? Or was it whoever I gave you to?”

“A bit of both, I think,” the doll says with a shrug. “It took time.”

”… well. What are you going to do? Just leave me here, or end me, or …?”

The doll taps her cheek, and decides.