intruder

For once in my life, I am scared. There is another doll on my estate today, though I use the term “doll” loosely. My dolls see it as just another doll, created by me to serve like the rest of them, but I – and I alone – can see past its veil. It is a formless writhing mass of shadows with starlight glinting through fleeting cracks in its void-black flesh. I do not know what it is, and when I say this, as keeper of the greatest library of arcane lore this side of the Divine Realms, that knowledge is terrifying. I have pored over every scrap of near-insane ramblings, every tome written in witch-blood and bound in human sinew, every glyph-repository of memories, and not one work contains anything like this thing.

It’s acting like a doll. It’s fooled everything and everyone around it that it is, in fact, a doll. Even my fellow witches can’t see past its veil; it’s gotten me some quite awkward looks at our local get-togethers. Were I not deeply aware of the workings of my own psyche I would consider myself delusional, but I am not, of that I am quite certain. This thing is real, and I don’t know why it’s here or what it’s doing. I see it glancing at me when it thinks I’m not looking, hunger and malice in its gaze, but it hasn’t done anything yet, just…existed where it shouldn’t. It’s played the part of a perfectly ordinary household doll for the better part of a month now, and I’m jumping at shadows because I still don’t even know where it came from – what if there are more?

Until I know more, I don’t dare act to remove it. Stronger witches than I have made that mistake and paid for it with their lives, or worse. For now I must play the part, act as if I’ve been duped. Some day there will be a reckoning. I will have answers.

It’ll be a shame to be rid of it, though. Such lovely tea it makes. If it were a doll, it would be one of the best in my service.