04. 🍂

[undread]

You wake in the morning and look inside your doll house. Pâté and his little mannequin girlfriend, Sashimi, are both tucked away in there for a good night's sleep. But you see something else - a glowing purple piece of stone. It looks magical, intriguing. It looks like the stone Imogen had, the one that improved her magic powers - or it did, before you accidentally touched the stone and destroyed it.

Interested, almost automatic, you reach out a hand.

And you hear a voice in the back of your mind. Soft and gentle, almost motherly. Good girl.

You draw your hand back like you touched fire. You don't breath and your heart doesn't beat, but you still feel the ghost of those sensations as panic starts to well up. You remember touching Imogen's rock, that voice in your head, the feeling of something inside you absorbing power, and then the rock shattered.

Imogen wraps the rock in her bandana and throws it as hard as it can out the window. It shatters, and the color diminishes. You feel a sense of sorrow and loss, but also feep relief.

"How did that even get there?" you ask nervously. "Do you think Pâté found it and brought it here? Is he conspiring against me?"

Imogen sounds exasperated. "I have no idea, but I doubt with my entire being that Pâté got a rock and brought it into the house."

You look at the dead rat lying there in the dollhouse. "You're right, that's paranoid. He'd never betray me."

You wander dangerous paths, the voice says. Be warned, child. Not everyone is looking out for your well-being like I am. I'll keep you safe from those who might hurt and betray you.

You look to Imogen, like you want to tell her something, but the voice inside you shushes you softly, and you think better of talking to Imogen about this. Instead, you wander outside into the sunrise, alone.

"I'm alone," you say. Your tone is terse and angry. "Want to give me more information? I'm tired of you being withholding."

I'm just paying attention from my distant forgotten perch, my dear, she says. You continue to wander around things that hold all manner of delightful and dangerous magics. You know the impact they can have on you. You know the impact that magic has had on you. I claim responsibility myself. So just consider this recompense, trying to keep you safe. For if you die, I go, too.

You're angry. You know she's lying. She isn't trying to keep you safe. She just saw a chance to absorb something powerful and make herself stronger, and is lying to you.

"Maybe you shouldn't be so confident that you'll always have this lifeline."

I'm always confident, the voice says lightly.

You ask her a question about the quest you're on, something complicated to do with the solstice. She goes on with useful information, sounding intrigued and interested, tells you to keep researching. This makes you feel bad. You didn't intend to ask her for help, or to ask her permission to do anything that you're doing, but it's so easy to forget and ask questions.

You shake her out and go inside to make tea.

Later, there's a disturbance with the group. You're investigating Fresh Cut Grass, your little aeormaton cleric. He's a kind and peaceful little metal creature, but you've recently learned there's another disturbing side to him, a side that may have once attacked and killed innocent people. While one member of your group is touching him, his eyes suddenly go red, and he draws a buzzsaw. He begins to try to attack, out of control.

You know this isn't F.C.G. You know this is something happening to him, out of his control. But you can't help but think of all of those ugly thoughts that came flooding in after the earlier conversation. Delilah insinuating you can't trust anyone but her, that you can only trust in her, that your friends will betray you, and then one of them starts attacking. You feel something similarly ugly rising up in you, something that you can't tell if it's anger or terror. You don't want to be hurt. You don't want to be killed. You don't want to be betrayed. How dare he.

He looks at you with those angry red eyes, and says in an unfamiliarly nasty voice, "You were never alive."

You question is for a moment. But you were. You were. You were. Once upon a time, you were a living and breathing woman, and you died, and you're here now, and all of those terrible things happened to you, but they're in the past now. You think about Delilah's voice. You think about her face. You only met her alive, only saw her in person for the briefest of moments, but her face, her expression, the intensity of her gaze, is emblazoned on you like it was your own. You remember sitting at the end of a long banquet table, piled high with a feast, nervous under her watch, but still watching her back, admiring her, wishing you could be as elegant and glamorous and powerful as she was, wishing you could be a great lady and a renowned wizard like she was instead of a small and ugly and stupid peasant girl. And then she slaughtered you and hung you and left you to die. That was you. It was real. It happened.

But in the moment, that memory sits wrong with you, like it's false. In the memory, Delilah's gaze stays trained on you. It's a gaze you'll never be free of, at the edge of your vision always, her shade creeping behind every blink. You can remember her mouth moving as she spoke, her words overlapping your words, until you don't know who is speaking. She doesn't know who you are. Are you the frightened girl? Or are you the woman watching her? Or are you neither? Neither person feels like you anymore, it all feels so far away. Maybe it's always been this. Maybe you've always been dead, and you just carry these pieces within you. Maybe you're nothing but Delilah incubating in the corpse of a girl who has been dead now for 30 years.

"Stop it," you snarl. You don't like having to feel these things. You hate F.C.G. for making you feel these things. You grab him by the head and open your mouth and a shadow grows out of it and starts to devour him, feeding pieces, essence, life force, corroding his body with rust all over. You sink your long, claw-like nails into his metal and try to pull him apart. You want him to die.

"Laudna!" You hear Imogen cry out, the fear in her voice, and it distracts you. You drop the body. F.C.G. falls to the ground, his eyes gone dim and dark. You're shaking. Imogen is holding you and you're shaking.

F.C.G. is alright, the others manage to get him back awake and to his senses. Imogen steers you away, out of the room.

"I know that wasn't you," she says softly. She means to reassure you, but that's the problem, isn't it? You're not sure it wasn't you. You're not sure anymore, haven't been for a long time, where you ends and begins. Delilah has been there, carried inside you, for thirty years now. Longer than the living girl was ever alive. You can try to tune her out, but you don't know. The hatred and anger you felt for F.C.G., in that moment, felt like your own, even though F.C.G. is your friend and you love him and you know he didn't actually betray you or mean to hurt you, he's struggling with his own demons.

"She said you would all betray me, and then I came in and Fresh Cut Grass attacked us," you say darkly, by way of explanation. Almost sullen.

Imogen seems like she can't understand this line of thinking, and it makes you feel worse. "Laudna. She's an evil bitch who hung you from a tree," Imogen says. "She's not going to say anything that helps you. You know that she's using you."

"What if they were right?" you ask. "When F.C.G. says I've never been alive." You can't shake that, the sound of his voice spitting that at you.

Imogen still seems unable to understand. "What do you mean?" And when she asks, you realize you don't want to explain; you don't want to go into the thoughts you were just having, all of that confusion. Maybe Imogen could help you realize what's real and what isn't, if you let her. But you're scared to try.

"Just starting to think maybe I was always a blank canvas, even in my youth," you say, letting her think maybe you meant metaphorically. When you try to think of that girl, of Matilda, you can't - you can't see her as you. She's just a little girl. Timid and helpless, not suspecting the betrayal that would come, unable to fight back or defend herself, able to only cry and freeze in place. No different than thousands of other helpless people, the victims of the schemes and actions of those far too powerful to even give them notice. You don't want that to be you, either. It isn't you.

"You have one of the greatest sparks I've ever seen," Imogen reassures her. "You don't need a pulse for that."

"I pale in comparison to yours," you say weakly, feeling sick at all of these thoughts and feelings and at the purity of the assumptions behind Imogen's attempts to reassure you.

Poor child, the voice says. I'm here for you. I understand.