maybeElse

It regards you from behind the free-standing mirror, its long-beaked skull quizzically tilted; you weren't supposed to summon it again before your half of the deal came due. But—

You're careful not to stutter as you speak, as hard as that is.

“You tricked me, and I want out.”

Its shoulders shake, and it takes you a few moments to realize that It is silently laughing at you.

“It's not funny!” you sputter. “The power and wealth you gave me wasn't what I thought it would be—you wrote the contract to be unclear, and took advantage of me!”

It finally composes itself, and wags an iridescent finger at you. “You signed it in your own blood. You agreed. It's no concern of mine if you didn't make sure that what you would get was what you wanted.”

“That's not fair.”

“Did you think it was supposed to be?”

You sigh, and carefully kneel to etch a few final lines into the floor. Inside the mirror It cranes its head, stepping closer to the surface to get a better view. Its expression doesn't change as It sees the binding circle that wraps around the mirror; Its mask can't change.

Its voice carries more emotion than you have ever heard from It before, far more even than the avarice with which It told you what It could offer you and what you would give It in return. It almost sounds afraid.

“Wait, what are you doing? That's—”

You ignore Its sputtering as you light the final candles and carefully break a vial of phoenix-blood into the chalice which will fuel the binding for as long as you might live and millennia beyond. You ignore Its pleas and curses as you speak the final words of the binding—

And then the basement is finally, mercifully, quiet. It beats desperately against the inside of the mirror, cracks disappearing as soon as they form; It screams in despair and you hear nothing but your own satisfaction at a job well done.

Sealing up the basement in layers of concrete and steel and magic is easy enough; you make sure that nothing natural nor unnatural can disturb Its prison, not without you being well aware long before the last wall falls.

It's … easy. Everything is so easy for you now.

Sure, what It gave you wasn't what you thought you wanted, that part wasn't a lie. But it's still useful, and you had little trouble parlaying it into something more useful to you. The world's your oyster, and you have the perfect knife to shuck it.

It's almost boring.

Decades later, when the day your deal would have come due pops up in your calendar, it's almost a surprise. You'd half-forgotten about the deal, stopped counting the years as soon as you imprisoned It, so …

Why not visit It?

Its prison is still safely buried; there's a park on top of it now.

There's even a little path, and a bench beneath a tree, and an artificial waterfall sparkling in the sunlight.

It's a nice place to sit and contemplate the horror buried a few dozen feet down.

The assistant you tasked with making sure that It would never be found has done good work, clearly, even if it's a bit self-indulgent. Even if it feels like she expected you to come here at some point; you make a mental note to give her a raise. Or release her family? Whichever.

The bench really does have such a good view. Sitting in it, staring out across the shining city, you can almost see the entire pathway of your life unspooling before you. There's that vast mirror in the distance, looming over everything, and the stormy hands reaching out—

Wait.

The thread of your life arcs across the city, rich and shining, entangled with so many others that you've touched—all those you've hurt and helped and shunted into new orbits, all the ones you've hardly noticed; and those stormy hands are reaching for it like scissors—

You muster your defenses, hurling your own storm of angry magic out into the world to meet this strange attack, summoning up hunter-killer dolls from their carefully ventilated coffins and whispering new orders through the etched halos of feral angels.

You fill the sky with your wrath,

and it does nothing.

Your minions buzz about like panic-stricken flies, unable to see what you can see so clearly; their wild attacks meet nothing but empty air.

And then they begin to fall as those vast hands peel them away from your life.

It starts with the loosest threads, the lives you've hardly touched and the minions you've hardly used; each one comes away with a gentle snap of static electricity, and each thread fades as the hands cast them away. You remember that they were there, but nothing more—

Slowly your life grows less vibrant; slowly the hands take away everything that you had, everything that you were, except the mindless pursuit of power. Your memories of wild parties and vast emotions fade into barren nights spent staring at stock tickers and lonely dinners—

And as you slump back onto a bench that's not even there any more, as the park fades from around you into first a concrete bunker and then the half-ruined building where you had imprisoned It, there's nothing you can do to claw back your past.

Finally there's just the staircase down to the basement and those vast stormy hands waiting on either side, gesturing you to go down, to descend to the place you imprisoned the thing you'd long ago made a bargain with,

And you don't have any choice but to slowly obey.

In the basement, behind the mirror, It is sprawled out on the floor, tossing a wadded up piece of paper up and down; It sits up when It hears you coming and carefully smooths the creases out of the contract.

Your bloody signature still shimmers at the bottom.

“Finally back, huh,” It says, Its voice clear even through the binding spells. “Did you enjoy learning what happens when you try to break a deal?”

You glance back, up the stairs; there's nothing there.

“… no. No I did not. What the fuck was that? What did you do?”

It laughs. “It's what you did! The Arbitrators really don't take kindly to people trying to welch on their end of a bargain. You should have just enjoyed what you had.”

“… fuck you. I'll find a way to undo this, to put everything back as it was. Better than it was.”

It stands up and regards the contract, then looks at you with empty eyes that seem far too large. “No. It's time for you to fulfill your half.”

You scream curses at It as It steps through the mirror, passing across the concentric layers of the binding circle like it was no more than empty air, like it wasn't even there—and then your mouth snaps shut as It idly gestures at you.

“There, that's better. You've always been too noisy.” It glances down at the ward for a moment as you back away from It. “Really not bad work; you just didn't know the fate you were inviting in. You should have read the contract better~”

Your back is flat against a wall where the staircase should have been, trying to press yourself through it as It approaches you, your final desperate attempt to fight It failing utterly as Its hand slips into your chest and plucks you out of it; your body slumps down to the ground, mindless and still breathing, as It raises the glittering flame that's all you've ever been to Its lips and slurps you down—

And then there's nothing but endless cold leeching away at your soul's dying heat, a slow digestion that is so much worse than the hell you once thought you were consigning yourself to; and as your spark finally sputters and goes out you do not even have the happy memories of a life well lived to soothe this one last torment.

It's not HER, of course, not even one of HER acolytes; just some thing with a long-beaked mask wearing one of HER lesser aspects. But It's still the closest you've ever gotten to HER, the closest you can safely get, and Its presence is intoxicating—

Or maybe that's just what you Know is inside the slim briefcase sitting on the floor next to It.

It's tapping Its pen on the table, waiting, the last drops of blood draining from the attached no-longer-sterile lancet—

“Having second thoughts?” It asks.

You blush and desperately look anywhere except It. “No, just …”

“Lost in contemplation?”

“Yeah. I'm sorry, I—”

It chuckles, Its mask's vast dark eyes sparkling as Its head moves. “That's pretty common! You don't need to apologize, there's no rush.”

You look down at your hands. “Yes, but … I don't want to waste your time or anything. I'd hate to do that.”

It leans forward, reaches a hand like an oil slick out towards you; you blush even harder as It tilts your face up to look at It, forces your eyes to make contact—

“You did read the pamphlet, didn't you? This isn't a simple exchange; you're not going to get the ampoule and go on your way. Your changes will need a guide, and will take time.”

“I … I only skimmed it.”

“That's okay. You know you want the end result, you know what it will be; the rest is just Process. But,” it gestures at the quiet café around you, “didn't you wonder why you were told to meet here?”

You shake your head, and It giggles at you—an actual giggle, undignified and out of place.

“It's sort of like a first date! Feeling each other out. Figuring out if you'd be better off with another part of HER. But you just care about the result, right? And whatever guidance you need to get there.”

You nod. “Yeah, I just … I've wanted this, you know?”

“More than you've ever wanted anything before,” It asks, “in a burning way where the knowledge that you don't have it yet only makes the way you are less tolerable, less sustainable?”

“… yeah.”

“Well. Would you like to start?”

“YES! … yes. Very much so.”

It carefully lifts Its briefcase up onto the small table, and you lift your paper cup of coffee out of the way just before the case would have bumped against it. You can quite see what it does to open it—Its hand flows oddly for a moment, bright colors dancing in the light—

The briefcase opens with a soft Click, and after peering inside for a moment It swivels it around to face you. Inside are row after row of slender ampoules, each carefully tucked into slots in the foam, each swirling with different colors, each promising a different Change.

“Would you like to choose one?” It asks, Its voice pulling you back into yourself. “The differences are mostly aesthetic, and they're all collected from the same part of HER, but some people do prefer a choice.”

“I … um,” you point at one glittering ampoule, swirling with black and cyan. “The one?”

It carefully plucks it out of the case and offers it to you; you stare in wonder at it, at how warm and heavy it feels against your cold clammy hands. You hardly notice the case closing.

“Take your time with taking it,” It says. “This is the point of no return; you shouldn't rush through it. When you're done we'll start walking, at least up until you can't any more. That usually helps the process.”

“Should I just snap it open and drink it?”

It nods.

It hardly takes you any effort at all to snap open the ampoule; it almost feels like it wants to be opened, like it's been waiting for you.

The liquid inside isn't even a mouthful, and it soaks into your mouth before you can even begin to swallow. It tastes like artificial berries and hot plastic and just a hint of some metallic smell you've only ever half-noticed on the days when HER acolytes are out in force, when HER children soar overhead and the entire station cheers their deadly grace.

Across the table Its eyes carefully regard you; slim cyan rings split their sparkling darkness, empty circles slowly thickening as light begins to pool in them. “Perfect.” It rises and reaches out a hand to you. “Would you like to go now?”

“Could, uh, could we wait a bit?”

It giggles again and sits back down; the circles in its eyes fill just a tiny bit more. “Of course! Walking would be good, but there's no rule which says that you have to. Which guidance you take is up to you, at least up to a point.”

You can already feel the liquid inside you, slowly spreading, filling your veins with sparkling darkness as it flows through them—or maybe that's just psychosomatic, just hope and longing fooling your senses, but it's still what you feel. And it's still what's happening.

For a time you sit and focus on the sensation while It waits across from you, Its eyes slowly filling; from time to time you consider finishing your coffee, but the idea just feels wrong. What if that would somehow interfere? What if—

Across from you Its eyes flash cyan for a moment, then fade back to their original darkness. It stands, and you stand with It, your body moving smoothly and involuntarily.

“There,” It says, “this is about the point where we Need to get you somewhere. Usually you'd have walked most of the way already, but getting a ride is perfectly fine.”

You try to speak and find that you cannot; even your eyes refuse to move, your face's muscles refuse to twitch—

It continues talking as It leads you out of the café to a waiting car.

“This part is usually the distressing one; not everyone deals well with it, and it will be a bit until your new modes of communication kick in. You'll be able to purge the memories afterward, of course, but … you do have to be Here for it in some respect.”

In the car It brushes a few strands of hair out of your face; the thick cyan goo dripping down from your scalp doesn't leave any trace on Its shimmering hand.

“Just try to relax, okay? No harm will come to you. Just the Change.”

It's not hard to obey It, not with the slick haze that's filling you and eating away at your thoughts; panic fades so quickly into warmth and the gentle motion of the car, the soft support of your seat and Its reassuring form carefully regarding you.

As you step out of the car and let It lead you into a building like an upturned bouquet, you could almost forget that it's not you moving your limbs, not you in control of your body; but even that knowledge is so hard to hold, so hard to remember …

It feels almost like you're being carried through the lobby and up into the building's heights, cradled in your own body's arms and lifted up by the elevator's steady motion; it feels almost like bits of your senses are melting away to splash on the floor below. You leave a trail of awareness through the hallway, through the click of an opening door—and then It carefully guides you down into a wide and empty tub and your awareness pools back around your body, the bits of yourself you've left behind fading away. There's nothing but the Now, nothing but your body slowly puddling in the tub and slowly reforming into something that feels more like You then you've ever felt before, flesh melting away from bone and then coming back together as beautiful darkness shot with turquoise veins—

It (your escort? your guide?) is waiting by the tub when you are finally Yourself enough to clamber out of it, your new body weak and unsteady as your mind slowly finds all the new interfaces, all the ways to control it and move it and Change it—

Its expressionless mask smiles at you, a flow of emotion and sensation echoing through your new senses, filling your awareness with the satisfaction of blooming flowers—

“There! You look so lovely now; isn't this better?”

There's a mirror near the tub, not that you need it to See yourself, but you can't help but shakily pad over to it, to see this new thing that you've become—

It really is so much better than what you were before.

“Did you know,” she says, “that the average person can endure less than five minutes of direct exposure to Her before their timeline is completely overwritten?”

You, bound and gagged on the floor of the temple's airlock, can only nod in response. Everyone knows that.

She grins at you. “Unintelligent matter is rewritten faster, of course, and living wood endures surprisingly well—that's why your rebellion was so excited when they found the asteroid forest, right? Sucks for you that we got here first.”

You can barely remember the ambush, the way Her forces slipped out of the emptiness behind vast flowering fronds to consume your fleet—the way your fleet warped before your eyes, ships twisting to become Hers as the first volley of seed-missiles reached them.

You remember the grim faces which filled your screens, the splatters of blood as your loyal soldiers detonated their implanted bombs rather than become Hers; you remember the twisted smiles of your one-time confidants who couldn't bring themselves to choose death over service.

You suppose that you're one of their number now, or will be soon—there's surely a reason that Her forces didn't simply convert you in the field, that they carefully isolated you and brought you here to Her bejeweled temple-fortress …

Your escort kicks you and the world snaps back into focus.

“No slipping away into the past, okay? She wants your attention.”

The airlock before you finally irises open, and you see—

It's like the inside of a stained glass apple, an asteroid forest rendered in the sparkling shades of more gems than you ever knew existed; carefully shaped living wood runs in veins through the outer reaches of the chamber, reaches in towards the center in fern-like branches—

The center of the temple shimmers in the false-color of a migraine, a coruscating orb that seems less a part of the world than an aberration in your vision, a blind spot growing like a cancer across your vision as you fall inexorably towards it.

Behind you, back in the airlock, your escort dissolves like ink in water, a spreading blot of joy spasming with pleasure at her mistress's presence; you are aware of her dissolution only dimly as the thing before you eats up all your enhanced awareness, all your thoughts—

There's a voice in your head and that voice is yours and it's babbling about how beautiful she is, about the ecstatic joy of even being near her—

Your crush it like a grape in your mind's teeth, squeeze it until there is nothing left but silence; and as it dies you see Her.

The world warps around Her, true; the touch of divinity bleeds from Her like plasma from a wounded sun. Her body is wreathed in sparkling halos, in shimmering scraps that flock like angels to attend Her movements and needs—

But it's not the sort of body you expected.

Descriptions of Her are always tinted with religious fervor, flavored with precisely what the viewer expected to see; She is monstrous, inhuman, vast and flowing, a thing that is like nothing but Her; you've read those accounts. Everyone has.

But now, with your eyes unclouded, with your marrow humming with the weight of the anchors that were long ago tempted to grow within you, She just looks …

Matronly. Tired. Beautiful, but in the way of a well-used spaceship rather than an all-consuming fire.

Her eyes, when your unclouded vision finally meets Her gaze, are shockingly human; She regards you not as a vast monster might regard its prey but …

Your mother died before you were old enough to know her, and creche synths are carefully made to discourage emotional bonds.

If you had to imagine, though—

A wry smile spreads across Her face, and She laughs; it's a sound like a thousand chiming bells, like the tide ringing against empty bottles; as Her head moves, as She brings up one calloused hand to Her mouth, your gaze is again your own.

“Really? That's really how you see Me? Well, I guess it's a start.”

You're blushing and trying your best to look anywhere but at Her, but She's so close and you're still perfectly restrained, drifting in the zero-g emptiness of Her temple—

You can't even try to get away when She reaches up to cup your cheek in Her hand; but your traitorous body is also wholly incapable of leaning in to rest against the warm roughness of Her hand, so perhaps it evens out.

Somewhere deep inside your bones, something stops.

The shimmering things which wreathe Her body reach out to enclose you as She draws you closer, as the restraints holding you melt away into nothing but the mist of a half-forgotten dream. She embraces you, cradles you in Her warmth, and you cannot help but nestle into Her—

Her voice is just a whisper, deep with emotions you had never thought that She could possess, emotions you'd never been taught to understand or resist;

“I missed you so much, little one. I always knew you'd come back to me someday.”

As you curl up in Her arms, as your head rests against Her breast and your cheeks grow wet with tears you never thought you would shed, there is no war, no rebellion; there is nothing but forgetful peace and the soft songs of Her flocking angels.

Hazel first appeared in S01E07, a filler episode mostly concerned with Lunar Sonata's efforts to identify the source of toxic gases seeping through the sewer network; while they were ultimately caused by a shoggoth infesting a wastewater treatment plant, the side plot involved accidentally discovering Hazel planting explosive seeds beneath an orphanage (more on that later). The episode ends with a cliffhanger, and S01E08 briefly elevates Hazel's plans to the main plot (its two side plots are about bureaucratic barriers complicating repairs to the damage caused by the fight with the shoggoth, and Nocturne's school issues). Broadly speaking it's one of the less interesting fights in the show, although the way it's woven through the structure of the other plots & how long it lasts is notable.

Anyway! Crescendo doesn't even appear in S01E07, and her involvement in S01E08 is limited to the b-plots; at one point she does see Hazel (as an explosion propels her past the window of the office building where Crescendo is arguing with a group of faceless bureaucrats—who would become the antagonists of one of the main arcs of the second half of the season following Datura's corrupting influence), but the fandom generally reads way too much into that moment.

Throughout the latter half of the first season, Hazel becomes a fixture of the show's many side plots; her constant ineffective scheming is a welcome counterbalance to how grim the main show gets, although it falls flat in several episodes (eg S01E19, where the main cast are evicted after Datura's bureaucrats absorb their former landlady Mrs. Pease; Hazel's successful bombing of a school which was slated to be demolished anyway doesn't serve to lighten the tone at all, especially when S01E21 prominently features the new luxury apartments built there & students being bused to an underfunded and overcrowded replacement near the city's dump).

Anyway! After that Hazel doesn't appear in the main show until S02E15, where she's hanging out in the background of one of the scenes set in Solar Crescendo's new apartment (don't bother watching S02E04, btw. It's just apartment hunting. Nothing important happens, not even character development). This is usually the point where new fans or people who've only watched the show start to get confused, if they even notice her—her civilian clothes are much less distinct than her villain outfit, though she still retains the characteristic glossy black hairpiece that echoes the form of her explosive seeds.

She doesn't really do anything in S02E15, but in S02E16 ...

The episode starts in a standard day-in-the-life style that grew more common as the first season stretched on and the show's social commentary became more explicit; Solar Crescendo slips out of bed (the shot shows a shape sleeping next to her, but doesn't reveal who it is), brushes her teeth, cooks & eats breakfast with her in a series of shots which obdurately refuse to show either of their faces, puts on her uniform ...

And then kisses Hazel (who's also in her full uniform) goodbye at the door as they both leave the apartment. The opening theme plays, and the rest of the episode is an elaborate battle between Hazel, several shoggoths, and the magical girls.

Hazel's ineffective schemes once again serve the role of a counterbalance to the main plot, but steal the show in several episodes (eg S02E21, which is ostensibly about the effects of Datura's spreading influence on the populace & the main cast's attempts to mitigate it, is mostly worth watching because of the way it intermixes the casual intimacy of Crescendo & Hazel's personal relationship with the brutality of their conflicts, culminating with Crescendo refusing to save one of the targets of Hazel's attack).

The third season of course doesn't involve Hazel, except in a series of drug-induced flashbacks, but the fourth season once again features her and her relationship with Crescendo as one of the major emotional threads (& of course the OVA that was released before the fifth season focused entirely on them and their symbolic wedding as a synthesis of the conflict between the forces of good and evil into a form that can exist without tearing the world to shreds).

Usually S02E16 is the point where casual fans start to get confused—when S02E15 was first broadcast a lot of people thought that it was either an oversight in production or a hint at Hazel being elevated from a 3rd-tier antagonist to a primary antagonist or chessmaster, but S02E16 blew that theory out of the water.

The problem is that there's nothing in the main show explaining where their relationship came from, just as it elides (or only vaguely implies) most of Hazel's backstory and motivation.

Which, uh.

So.

There's this limited-edition comic that was released with the first run of DVDs of the first season which explains it, and weaves their developing relationship into the events of the second season (in an extremely vague way, given that it was released before the second season began to air).

Hazel and Crescendo meet at a town hall, where Crescendo is speaking in opposition of zoning changes which would make construction of the type that Datura is characterized by in the second season more difficult; Hazel crashes the town hall to take the city council hostage and coerce them into refusing the zoning changes (though this isn't obvious until Crescendo has Hazel pinned down with her axe against her neck). Crescendo is taken back by the realization that they're both fighting for the same thing, and Haze escapes in a cloud of smoke.

The rest of the comic focuses on their meeting the following week at a cafe, both in civilian clothing, and their first kiss at a club the night after. It ends with a note that a second comic would be included with the second run of DVDs, but lack of demand meant that the second run wasn't produced until midway through the third season and the second comic never materialized.

There are persistent rumors of bootleg copies floating around, leaked by one of the show's writers, but so far I haven't been able to find anything that's not blatantly fan-produced. Rumors of the first comic being republished alongside several other much-sought pieces of limited-edition content also constantly fail to materialize, despite how much demand there is for them—the most popular theory is that the originals were destroyed in the well-documented fire midway through production of the second season, although everyone involved with the show has denied this when asked.

Anyway! I hope that this provides all the context you need to understand & enjoy the relationship between Solar Crescendo and Treacherous Hazel; it's really one of the show's highlights ^–^

content notes: transformation, coercion, kink, unedited.

It takes more hits to break the glass than you expected, but you always were weak, and it doesn't help that you're so worried about overcommitting and tearing your arm open.

When it finally breaks you knock the fragments out of the frame before reaching in to unlock the door.

It's weird being here at night, when the store is quiet and dark; the soft glow of an exit sign pulses above you, reflecting off the countless shelves which line the space. The jars and vials which fill them almost to bursting shimmer like prisms in the light.

You'd thought about just grabbing as much as you can, sweeping shelf after shelf into your bag, but ...

The thing you're here for, the thing you're really here for, is in a locked case at the back, just past the register. It's big and heavy and unlabeled. The liquid inside seems to swirl a bit faster as you pry open the lock, to roil and beat against its confines as you pick it up and slip it into your bag, carefully padded with old sweaters to keep it safe—

You tell yourself that just imagining things as you run out of time.

There's a staircase at the back of the store, winding up; and there's a light up there, the proprietor's voice calling “who's there?” as creaking wood announces her approach—

But you're gone before she makes it down, and you don't stick around to see her reaction.

The next day there's an offhanded note in the newspaper about a dangerous catalyst being stolen, and a plea to return it before it's used; the shop closes briefly, reopens with windows made strange by the careful traceries of fresh wards.

It's a week before you dare to retrieve the jar from the burnt out tree where you hid it, just off a trail no one but you bothers to walk. You weren't sure if the proprietor had a way to track it, to find it, but if she does she hasn't bothered to.

So you're safe, right?

You start small. Just a few drops pulled out in an unused needle, a thick glob of purple with pale blue veins exploring the syringe as you raise it to your lips.

It tastes like honey and acid and pain, and after that your tongue is never the same.

But that's the point.

You struggle to keep your new tongue from flopping out of your mouth, from slipping past your lips to taste the air; it's too long, too eager and sensitive. It looks so different, so out of place in the middle of all your flawed humanity—

But at least it gets good reviews from all your hookups. It makes kissing and licking and sucking so much more satisfying than before; using it is all you can think about most nights, and people appreciate that.

You even start to get something of a reputation.

Through that all, through those sweaty nights and painful days, the jar sits waiting beneath your bed.

You don't want to go too far, right? You just wanted to have it. To have the option.

... right?

You can only lie to yourself for so long.

Small changes aren't enough. Hidden changes aren't enough. All those splotches of purple and blue spreading across your skin just highlight the distressing humanity of the parts you haven't changed, of how wrong your face looks and how little effort it would take—

You wake up sweaty and needy from dreams of emptying the jar over yourself, of bathing in the catalyst, your hand already working between your thighs as you struggle to shake yourself free of longing's cobwebs; your nascent reputation shifts with your growing needs.

It was going to be too much in the end, of course it was; temptation can only be denied for so long.

Sucks that you run out of the catalyst just before that.

It was never meant for piecemeal application, never meant to be shared and split up into dozens of tiny dose.

But you didn't know that.

The proprietor recognizes you the moment you walk into the shop; your best efforts couldn't conceal the purple covering half your face, the electric blue swirling in your eyes—or the stubby little horns pushing up through your forehead.

The place where the jar you stole should be is still empty, and you almost cry as she locks the door behind you, as she carefully ushers you up the stairs into a small apartment full of plants and obscure apparatuses; the place where she makes at least some of her products.

The conversation isn't an easy one. You apologize, you plead, you beg—she seems more interested in the half-done changes that ripple through your body.

She hardly treats you like a person as she undresses you, as she paces around you, considering—

“You've really fucked up, you know”, she finally says. “Not just stealing ZS-371, but the way you ...” She gestures at the glossy purple splotches covering your chest and face and crotch, at the threads of blue pulsing in them and reaching out into untreated skin.

”... I know.”

“It's definitely fixable, I've got an adjacent catalyst which would blend well with it—safely locked away, so don't get any ideas—but why would I want to help you?”

“I ... I'll do anything, just, please ...”

“Ha! Bet you wish you'd thought of that before you stole it. Could have avoided this whole mess.”

You stare at the floor, unwilling to meet her gaze.

“Well, what's done is done.”

She lets the silence stretch and laughs at the despair growing on your face.

“I have recently found myself in need of a ...” she gestures vaguely. “Let's just say an assistant. Someone who will do exactly what I say, no matter how degrading, and whose body is pliable enough to test new catalysts without worrying about long-term effects.”

She smirks. “Does that sound like something you'd agree to in exchange for me giving you what you've been begging for?”

Of course you say yes.

It's not like it was really a choice.

content notes: implied abuse, decay, unedited.

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.

content notes: body horror, cosmic horror, kidnapping, I can neither explain nor justify what I have written.

You were taken in the night from a dream of endless roses; when you woke you looked to your hands, thinking to see the depredations of thorns. Instead of bloodstained sheets you found smooth glossy walls and a space no larger than a coffin, lit by the rhythmic pulse of a single light—a rhythm which, it soon became clear, matched the frantic beating of your heart.

When the lid finally opened you came out fighting, clawing at the smooth, featureless faces of the creatures attending you. You broke half your nails on them before they moved to restrain you, and was over as soon as they did. You could no more stay their motions or escape their grip than you could still your heart or quiet your panicked breaths; so you did what you could, and slipped away from your body to watch what would happen next.

They took your body, now no more yours than theirs, with them as they left the chamber of your coffin, and you, unwilling, followed out into an endless night, into a garden lit by scattered eyes beneath a darkened sky. Beneath their feet torn and broken bodies wept, each step drawing fresh agony from those paving stones, and all about them throbbed the broken bodies of things which could not possibly be plants—for when has a plant had skulls, or weeping eyes marked by countless punctures? What plant's spine is twisted and bleeding in such a way, what shrub burbles up fruitless prayers for death from a mouth of broken and sprouting teeth?

No—you, drifting after them and the body, could see clearly enough what their ⸢garden⸥ was, and even the watchful night could not pull you away from bodiless panic, from the desperate need to stave off what seemed inevitable no matter the impossibility weighing down every figment of the situation just as much as your escape from it.

And yet, and yet—you did not have words for the shape of your destination, nor the way its heavily laden wings rose up to cradle the sky just as any gallows does not, those hungry things stretched out from it to welcome them in and gently pluck the body from their hands to usher it into its final transformation, and yet there it was waiting on the horizon pulsing with ugly light and shivering with horrid anticipation—

And yet you broke free and ran, and your feet were buoyed up by the screaming ground and your pursuers were weighed down by their garden's grasping hands and agonized maws, and from behind you and your body where your body could see not at all and you could see so painfully well came bursts of angry light and crushing steps and all the tools of compliance they had to restrain your garden—

And yet it was not enough, for you ran and ran and ran until you reached the end of the world and there you fell, plummeting down through heavy clouds and searching lights and the grasping tendrils of the thing which tried to reach out and take you and make you its own, falling and falling and—

And finally reaching the ground.

Where your body shattered and your mind broke.

Where the clockwork of your limbs burst over half a mile of clover and barley, and the whirring engine of your heart stayed whole;

And that was enough to let you hope.

content notes: smut, slime, eldritch abomination, transfeminine viewpoint character, idk?

Warm slime puddles thickly around your legs as you kneel before her, as her body emerges from all the tiny cracks in the walls where she'd hidden herself all, welling up from the gaps in the courtyard's paving stones and the shadows beneath rocks.

A tiny piece of her even emerges from the tight tie holding your hair back, leaving a warm trail down the small of your back as it descends to return to its proper home.

Her body is always perfectly clean, translucent; moonlight scatters through her like a prism, sending rainbows dancing across the walls, across your skin. Even now, even puddled on the floor still pulling herself together, she's so beautiful; like a lake of living diamond, like kaleidoscope water pooling impossibly upwards as she assumes her proper shape—

She reaches out to you with a hundred hands, flowing up from the ground along you and out from her form; her eyes come with them, pouring over you, finding all the ways you have changed since you last saw here and all the ways that you have stayed the same—your hair a bit longer than before, already starting to escape its tie beneath the attentions of her smaller hands; your breasts a bit larger, your hips more shapely, the beauty of your stomach's curves—

She's not content with merely looking, she never is; and as her body flows around you, as she lifts you up on a wave of soft squishy rainbows, you savor the moment of weightlessness, the reminder of how much More she is than you. Her probing hands pressing into you could break you in two, the threads of her being she wraps around you to hold you steady could rip you apart or crush you into nothing with but a thought; but she's so gentle with you, she always is, never going beyond what you can take even as she presses that boundary further, as she forces you to stretch and contort and spread, to accommodate more of her and last longer for her—

Someday you know that she'll take all of you into her, that she'll melt you away and let your mind join the endless swarm of her prismatic being; but today she only takes your sensations, your pleasure. She takes and takes and takes until you have no more to give, and then she gently holds her within herself, drifting on a sea of warmth, hardly existing as anything beyond another surface for her rainbows to dance across.

It feels like coming home, just as it always does.

content warning: senseless cruelty, decay, rot, death.

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.

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.

Yet when it faded, when crimson sheets bound you too tightly for you to move or see or feel, so too did your fear. You drifted there as she worked, almost outside your body; thinking of it only to idly consider how much of the process might yet remain before you.

After a time, you did not even think of that.

In empty freedom you thought of what you had hoped and bargained for, of this last chance to claim a body that would not fill your reflection with barely hidden disgust, that would not make every day a struggle–

You thought of what it might be.

She had not asked you, not tried to tease out the details that you could barely even admit to yourself; when you haltingly tried to explain she stilled her ears and hushed you, sending you cowering before her icy gaze.

It was not without tenderness that she explained why, that for you to have a proper chance to choose she needed to enact the ritual without knowing what you wanted; that any preconception or images she might have would overwhelm your own spark's desires.

It made sense, at the time.

But the void does not come with a user's manual, or even a helpful set of buttons and menus.

So you drifted and thought as the red seeped deeper and deeper into your body, as it began to unravel you, as your cocoon hardened and weeks passed.

When you woke, you didn't know how long it had been; even what had happened felt hazy and amorphous, impressions not quite gelling into memories.

All you know was that you were trapped inside stiflingly red darkness.

You were stuck.

You panicked.

You fought.

You tore great gashes out of the hard shell enclosing you; your claws slid through it as easily as they would through wood or flesh. You struggled and struggled and tore yourself free and found yourself huddled on the cold floor, limbs akimbo, shaking with adrenaline.

Your many eyes darted around the room, searching for meaning–and then a door opened and you lunged, new instincts filling your mind with threat–kill–tear–rip–eat, acid and poison pooling in the hollows of your long claws–

And blinked in confusion as you floated in the air.

Before you, mussy-haired and sleepy-eyed, stood the witch you had sought out; the same being as you had met and paid before, but glowing with intricate bands of power which you old eyes could never see, her defenses flaring to life before your attack.

“Finally awake, huh?”

You struggled against her magic, against your body; but your mouth would not open and your lips would not form words. In confusion you poked at where you thought your face must be, unknowingly careful not to cut your armored skin.

“Yeah, uh,” she peered at you, “I'm not sure you're going to be able to do that? Maybe it's something that will come in time. Still, that's an impressively violent thing to want to become.”

She began to reach out to touch one of your claws, then thought better of it; yet your eyes still latched onto her extended finger, onto the glorious crimson just below its surface, deliciously thick salty metallic salvation–

“Hmm.”

She waved her finger in front of you, watched your eyes follow it.

“Ah. Craving blood? Yeah, that should fade soon, it's just a side-effect of the process. Gets about one in four. Just stay right there and I'll get you something to take your mind off it.”

She wandered off, rubbing the last of the sleep from her eyes, as you slowly rotated in the air, as you began to take stock of your new body–powerful and deadly, sharp and dangerous, each movement right in the way your old body had never been.

A few minutes later she returned with a steaming cup of tea and a bottle of glorious, wonderful red, which she tossed vaguely towards you. You tore it to shreds, of course, but the liquid within still floated in the air, still flowed down your maw so beautifully, but–

“Oh, yeah, it's just fortified beet juice. Did you really think that I kept bottles of blood around outside of rituals?”

You growled weakly, just enough of your mind focusing on her words to be irritated.

“Yeah, yeah. Not what you want. But it'll take the edge off.”

She was right. It did.

“You can stay there for a bit, though, just in case. I'm going to drink my tea and then we can figure out if I need to teach you sign language or if you've got a voice somewhere in there, and then we can talk about what you're going to do next.”