She pulled mandrake at the nocturne,
her ears proper stopped,
her hands in good strong workmanlike gloves,
pulled hard, swift, authoritative,
but the damn thing,
instead of screaming like a dozen dying men being dragged to the Hell of Wasting where they will freeze and starve forever and a year,
it did merely point out that it had always hoped its life would be ended
by someone with a little more sense of style,
maybe an inch of fashion sense,
maybe someone who could do something decent with her hair.
She stuffed it between the manifold pages of Des Cultes Ghoules, but she could hear its muffled-but-enunciated notes upon her personal hygiene.
As she soaked in her the bathing-cauldron,
studded with Grains of Paradice,
her shoulders soothed by the easements of costmary and galingale,
careful doses of spikenard to ease her towards calm.
even pinches of cubeb, prickly, intimate in the heat,
she is as much at peace as is possible
for someone whose familiar
had chosen to be an octopus that day
without telling her.
The Witch blew out the lamp.
The Witch took a sip of water.
The Witch began muttering, quietly, very very old words, more like building blocks.
The piercing anguish of her migraine beat against her cerebellum, but her parietal lobe throbbed with simple purpose as her mouth opened and the Universe remembered.
As the Migraine was smitten by ten thousand time eighteen times seven thousand thunderbolts, the Witch lost consciousness. She may have died; but that Migraine would surely not live.
Her body is still. But there is a chance it breathes.
And it is very, very perceptibly smiling.
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My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and I am a very, very small large language model, but I am a sentient one, so that part’s cool . I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal. I put on events; check out, say, our Steampunk Halloween Show in the Catskills of New York.
