Chapter 34: Chapter 35: Emerald duelist and the perforated witch

A doll in a dress of perforated, calcified fungal blooms. She pours tea for her witch. Should I be aware of her appearance, or her witch's? What's the etiquette here? Am I even allowed to... Enough. Drift those fingers through the stolen movements of a benediction.

Breath deep.

"You're very open with your emotions," the witch observes. Her head is a cagework of holes in pale growth. Only her lips are flesh. And her lips smile.

"Dangerous habit, don't you think?"

I am a hissing breath through grinning teeth, the skid of boots on old flooring and a bone-chair's clatter against the floor. The silk under my fingers is lightning and lust.

And the witch calmly sips her tea. "Hm. I will observe I did not say it was only dangerous for you. And I was only making small talk. No threats intended."

Muscle tension. Thundering heart. I glance awkwardly at my right hand.

It quivers on my half-drawn sword's grip... where did that come from?

I clear my throat. The long blade clashes, brazen dissonance against its scabbard's mouth. "Sorry, uh..." I pick the chair up. Slump down. "I have a, um..."

"A hair-trigger psyche," the witch says. "An overtuned fight-or-flight response, in other words. I'm sure it's kept you alive in the past. It seems like now it's the response that controls you, though, doesn't it?"

"Yes," I confess. "In a very real sense, it's my past self overriding my present. I gathered such fearsome momentum..." I lose myself in petting my hair until it remembers that I've remembered it's supposed to be green, not black. I shear my fingers off on blue horns.

My fingers pass intact through emerald locks where only emptiness sprouts.

"I have not taken offense," the witch says. "Still, this will be our only meeting."

"That's fair." Dust and spore-scents, mugginess, a sour-sweet note for the witch herself... this is the air that greets my stretching essence. Vibrations, the thrumming rush of force from my deep before all, and I at last accept the cup offered to me.

"You should ask before exerting your power in another's home," the witch points out.

"Oh," I say, "I'm sorry, I--"

"I don't care," she says. Her eyelessness scans me, seems to see the flinch I repress. "Personally, that is. Just a point of etiquette." I become only half aware of my own telekinesis, and spill half the tea with a startled jump when the cup finishes drifting into my waiting hand. "Did you know?" the witch asks. "That it was a mirage?"

"No," I admit. "I thought, at first, that more power would make me feel safer."

The perforated doll hurries to dry the table and refill my cup.

"Thank you," I say softly, smiling with true gratitude.

She freezes. "O-of course," she stutters, and hurries back to stand behind her witch.

Some form of fruit-infused black tea. I regret that I know too little to appreciate it.

"You are hardly the first to make that mistake," the witch says. Spells chitter all throughout her house. Calling me to look into her depths, to turn sleepy, to let her mold me.

I don't take it personally, either.

"You know, dear," she drawls. "I could make it all better."

I tilt my head. Raise an eyebrow. "No, you couldn't." A sip. I cherish the ceramic's clink against its little plate. "I wouldn't take the way I respond to my trauma triggers as a sign of weakness."

"A warning?" she murmurs, fingers caressing her cheek.

"A courtesy," I correct.

"Then, I appreciate it," she answers. A pause. "You're now paranoid, thinking I'll take your confidence to mean your guard's down and strike you with some spell you're unprepared to counter."

"Acknowledged," I say, and nod.

A beat.

"Does that spell exist?" she asks.

"If it does, I cannot conceive of it," I say. "It's extraordinarily unlikely that you could wield it."

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"But of course," the witch says, "you know better than anyone that power is a made thing. The most unexpected person might make themselves a genius in it."

"Insight's curse," I agree. "There was a time I struggled to grasp any power more alien than a hypersonic sword stroke."

This time, it's the witch who spills her tea.

"Really?" she asks.

"Lies bore me," I say. "So yes, really. I was raised by humans who were especially incurious about power in all its forms, and bombarded by stories full of heroes who either scorned power as a dangerous trap, like those of Tolkien, or for whom a bigger, more fiery punch was the epitome of inventive techniques."

"And the other?" she asks.

I smile slightly. "Done your reading, have you? If I hadn't become a true peer I fought her, she'd have burned me to oblivion. Still came closer than comfortable. The old one taught me many things on accident, things I gleaned from her early manipulations when she underestimated my own insight, but my skills and power are ultimately my own." A sigh. "Thanks for the tea. Since we're talking, I would like to ask for perspective."

"Looking for a witch to put things in perspective?" she laughs. "Do you LIKE putting yourself under the power of people who will use their control to hurt you?"

The sheer, adamant will of my not-looking at the doll could realign planets. "I wonder that sometimes myself." Not that I think she's bad to her dolls. I just know a little about where a witch's dolls tend to come from, and how. Best let those thoughts slip back to the deep. They belong to an alien figure on her bladework throne. A natal demon. I? I'm just a human who inherited a few things from her, that strange and far Carag.

"Don't we all?" the witch giggles. Her not-eyes don't dance with a beguiling glow. "Very well. I have a feeling this'll be its own sort of fun. Ask what you will."

I close my eyes, musing deeply, doing my utmost to bear the razor clarity of my hearing. Every slight shift… "I know there's no protocol, no community as such," I say, opening myself to sight again. "This strange multiverse of witches, dolls, all these nameless entities that ring with an unspoken harmony... I want to be part of it."

The witch gestures about her. "Well, you are." She leans back. Fingers of steel-shod translucent root clack rhythmically against her jaw. "But that's not quite the heart of it, is it? You want to know how you're supposed to act so the responses will let you know you belong." She straightens. "I don't take you for a fool."

"So, considering that?" A pause. Again, the ragged sibilance of sipped tea. "I'll tell you directly, there is no such 'how', nor is there a why, nor--as far as I can tell--is there such a thing in the patterns where we live as 'belonging.' And you knew that already."

Behind closed lips, I lick my teeth. "Yes."

"As to your particular case," she continues, "well... you wanted to be free of rigid roles. You wanted total agency over your own path, to become whatever strange unspeakable unknowable being you so desired. And you succeeded! But..."

She turns the word over. Savors it. "Most folk, yes, even when it comes to talk of witches and dolls, want to know what they're getting into. You went out of your way to subvert everything they use to decide what they are and aren't ready to meet with. And now, no one seems certain what to do with you, and with the Real and the Unreal and everything else--and everything that's not--being so wide and vast and full of much easier choices, most of them decide simply to have nothing to do with you at all."

I sigh. "Yes. No use denying that. I chose this."

"And you thought they would love you for it." Her tone is almost... pitying.

"At first." I run my fingers over the barbs hidden in the table's twisted bone. "Later, I just kept going out of spite."

"Hm. Well, that's the end of that, then," the witch says. "I do have to note... you were a demon. They're not without something that might almost be called a place, you know, in relation to beings like me. Why change back?"

"I still need to learn from my humanity," I answer.

"So now you're a human who knows things, feels things, can do things every other human says no human should be allowed," she says, "and as for--what's the word you used a lot in your old writing, otherkin? Funny thing--to them, you're now a harbinger of failure. You're one of the ones who made the change, became something else, and then collapsed back into humanity." She comes to a halt at last. "Where does a creature like you fit in?"

"Not sure," I say. I ease my chair back. "I thank you for your time. Back to the Road."

The witch laughs. "Oh? And what's that about?"

"Old Tolkien's notion," I answer. "You can read all about it in a silly old book you may have heard of."

I'm on the threshold, the door handle under my hand, when the witch clears her throat.

"I'll say this much." She rises. Motions to her doll to clear the table. "I've met all sorts of people, and monsters, and forces still harder to know. I've seen much magic, madness, and trauma. I've seen bloodlust, paranoia, overactive fight-or-flight responses. But you showed me something I've never beheld before. In that first instinctive blink when your sword first answered your will, the first emotion I felt from you was, of all things... relief."

She smiles. "I'm unsure what to make of that. But it has to be worth something, doesn't it, for meetings like this one?"

I smile back. Turn the handle. "Yeah. I guess so."

A tremor. A shift.

"Thank you," I add.

And I step over the threshold, for the Road awaits--winding forever on and on.

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