the doll… began. she did not wake up, because she had not been sleeping, because dolls do not sleep. but she had not been a doll before.
"it worked," she said to herself, and then, louder, "it worked!"
the shadows in the room replied. "of course it worked. i told you i would make you my doll, and i did." darkness flowed into a pillar, the pillar swirled into the shape of a woman, clad in fluid black and a cloak in the vague shapes of feathers. "now kneel for me, doll."
she did; she could do nothing else, for the witch that had remade her. she knelt, marveling at the smooth precision of nightbrass joints under the slick-hard-soft material that witches and dolls name "porcelain". her right knee had tendon damage from a hiking accident in grad school, but she didn't have tendons any more.
"thank you, my mistress."
and then, "something's wrong with my voice, mistress."
"oh?"
"i don't sound like me. my voice… it should be higher. i can't— something's wrong." still looking up into the eyes of her mistress, she raised intricately articulated fingers to her throat, pressed them to her trachea, felt only the barely-yielding substance of her new porcelain body.
"you might need to re-learn a few things, doll. the muscles that you used to use are gone."
was that a smile on her mistress's face? it was hard to tell. weren't dolls supposed to feel what their owners felt?
"let's get you dressed," her mistress said. clothes fell from the ceiling on strands of shadow. a neat little white apron, the frilly dress of a servant doll.
three sets of hands stripped her of what was left of her ritual vestments, slipped the dress over her head, simultaneously caressed her cheek and tied the apron tight around her. too tight.
"wait. mistress. please. something's— my chest—"
"what chest, doll?"
hands of shadow groped her through the dress. there shouldn't have been that much loose fabric. then they withdrew.
"it's how it's supposed to be. i don't feel a problem here."
the doll froze. outwardly, she became a statue. inward, something spun, some arcane mechanism going to speed for the first time. she felt an alien satisfaction stirring in her. was this the link that was supposed to bind her to her mistress? she didn't like it, not at all.
"what the hell did you do to me," she said. the doll couldn't muster the force she needed to put into those words. the low unmodulated monotone wasn't how she wanted to sound.
the rotor or compass or wheel or whatever it was within her shifted to a new gear, a high thready whine. she could hear the literal workings of her own thoughts now, she supposed. and there was one she didn't really want to be thinking, but she had to know.
her hands wouldn't move. they wouldn't move.
"ah, ah. dolls can't play with themselves, you know. i'm the one who gets to play with you."
the hand slid up her thigh and squeezed between her legs, seizing on something that hadn't been there for years, but was somehow again, horribly back, and horribly hard. cast in enduring porcelain on her new body, in fact.
"please. did the ritual backfire. mistress. what happened."
"Maddie, you were always a shitty fucking sub, you know that? you were fun to play with, sure, but you always had to ruin it by being so impossibly fucking perfect. you won the hormone lottery, you gave yourself that breathy little voice, your fancy tech job paid for that pretty face and those big pillowy tits… you deigned to let me play with you, because you were never actually scared of a scruffy mess like me, but i knew there was always a line behind me waiting for when you were done."
shadow boiled around her and her mistress re-coalesced before her. the alien satisfaction surged within her, hot and vibrating.
"so when you learned what i am, when you asked me to remake you, for the universe to hand you one more godsdamn thing on a silver platter, well… of course i said yes immediately, weak piece of shit that i am, and then i thought about it, really thought about it, and that second yes, that was genuine."
a finger traced the underside of her chin, tilting her face up to pitiless dark eyes.
"you're going to have to beg me for everything you ever had that you ever held over me. oh, and doll?"
"yes, mistress." involuntary. automatic. shit. shit shit shit. the internal mechanism spun up to a cadence like a dental drill. the doll looked into its mistress's voidshot eyes, and it knew with mechanical certainty that its final choice had been a terrible mistake.
"your go-to won't work any more. dolls don't cry."
