Chapter 37: Chapter 38: The Witch-Queen awakens

"I will seek beyond Saingediir. I will seek beyond Saingediir. I will seek beyond Saingediir." I sift vines through my fingers, a rosary of vernal decay.

My angelic companion drifts, twists, shudders beside me. "We're back where we started," she whispers.

"Likely near the exit, then."

She halts. "W-why?"

"It is The Way These Things Go," I answer. "Much as I dislike the implications, Jung touched on a deep truth. Archetypes mark the Self-in-Power. That Self determines our causality. Causality guides our own journeys, and the journeys of others to us."

She grimaces divine fire. "I'm trying my best, but I don't understand what any of that means."

"It means that for a soul too potent in stories, there's no such thing as an authentic journey," I answer. "Everything becomes Narrative." I pause. "Wait... no, that's not right. That only applies to irradiance. If I'm truly abyssal, then I should only warp the threads that others cast into me. I should cast threads of my own only if I mean to, which means..." I frown. "Oh. Of course. If I wanted to explore my relationship to humanity, I could've picked a cozy town and just immersed myself in human creations. I think I should've done that."

One slackening will hurt little, I suppose. I snarl, smashing a nearby stalagmite with a hammering sweep of my fist. "Habits, it's all bad habits at this point. I've moved beyond trauma, this is... this is just who I am. And I want to change myself, so..." I sigh. "I wanted a big, visible journey out of habit, but to choose journeys like that as a default, that's irradiant. Small wonder I felt so dissonant." I have to laugh at my own folly.

"Look, let's put it this way... if I'm spending all my time forcing references to others into my words, whether it's Tolkien or Jung or any other being, you know something's off." I resume walking. "When I'm well, when I'm happy, I want to pull others into the moment with me. I want to share it, too impulsive and joyous to worry about explaining or pointing to inspirations and saying, 'see! I'm building on another's foundation! There's stability here!" I clear my throat. "I'm sorry. I should've asked before babbling like that."

"No, it's fine." The angel girl shrouds herself. "I, um... I like hearing about that stuff more than I like thinking about the monster that's waiting for us."

I open my mouth to say I'll keep talking, then. Only emptiness emerges.

The fungal caves are a constricting throat. Cloying damp, dark undulating tunnels, the accursed traitor light-waves. I feel the monster grinning in the empty air behind me. I glance back. Nothing. The emptiness of the monster's fullness-in-becoming yawns ahead.

Spores drift. Water drips. Steps scuff. Wings spark.

Dim, cold light. An irregular bowl chamber with a desecrated font at its center upon a dais dappled in stained-away mosaics. Past it, silver-glass glows flow from the way out.

"There it is!" the angel-girl screams in delight. She streaks towards it.

I sigh and walk forward, feeling what comes next in my bones.

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And the monster becomes. Unfolding from the crevices in every wall. Polluting the refractions of escapist rays on stone like the ossified guts of a long-dead dragon. It is spiraling un-darkness and cyclical maws carving reality into abyss, tentacular suggestion. It springs into the space between my flesh-sight and my mind's eye. Seen with feeling, felt with my ears.

I've considered a hundred ways to solve this with growth. I've realized every last one is a trap. My growth must be mine alone. I must keep the boundary, so I, too, Become.

The robes of the Witch-Queen are white as her hair is blue, and her skin is alabaster kissed by the rosy hues of a foregone conclusion, and the prismatic chasms in her cheeks and neck roil with displaced migraine whorls. Her eyes are a lattice of rainbow glass.

I also have horrible cyan hands with oversaturated blue claws, green teeth in the orange void of my mouth, and my eyes are yellow with cyan shards for pupils, and really my robe's more like a nightgown-Tshirt combo proudly marked with the words "GET FUCKED" in neon green for the first and pink for the second.

Oh, and I am flat as a goddamn board. This amuses me, and also feels safer somehow.

To be honest, I think I'm just looking for excuses to avoid tackling that whole "succubus with sexual anxiety" problem head on. You know. The one I run into whenever I think about sex where there's even the slightest ambiguity about which partner holds the power?

I've been shouting-out Jung and Tolkien, but really, I ought to be referencing Riria from a pervy visual novel that's localized in English as "The Ditzy Demons Are in Love with Me!" Guess who else is a succubus who constantly fell asleep and drooled all over everything in high school (also college, in my case), got all her advice on romance from fiction, and continues to feel humiliated about her lack of sexual experience relative to her age?

So. I've mentally checked out of this whole spiel. I've gone full weirdcore disaster witch. And I guess we're just going to play this through until I get tired of being a stale meme, and go the fuck home. Maybe I'll stop for some slice-of-life stuff on the way. Uh... I guess I better come up with a way to end this that's not totally humiliating? Like, mocking the monstrous by defeating it in a way that makes it look laughable is a well-worn form of violence perfected by humanity. How do I do this while allowing my foe to remain some shred of dignity?

Oh, right, yes! I'll just be evil instead. Ahem:

And I mark my threshold. It burns on my psyche like snowblindness: the intersection of a thousand spheres around the angel girl and I.

"Choose," I bid the monster. "Your appetite, or a life free from whatever you will receive from me when you cross my lines." A witch's bladed grin. "But not both."

Briefest hesitation. The inevitable lunge.

The monstrosity wretches. Its un-forms harden into finished wood that slows as it streaks closer to me. Segmented nodules arrive, knocking together, caressing me gently.

"YOU CAN'T!" it screams as I transform it. "THIS IS PERVERSE!"

"I despise convention," I answer. "No one gets to tell me my dolls must be humanoid."

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