// abandonment, horror, dolls, good end?
You deserved it, you supposed. One too many careless little mistakes. One too many broken artifacts. One too many cups of spilled tea. The actual incident was merely the curtain closing at the end of your performance. It was all too predictable, that’s why you ignored it.
Did you tell yourself that if you just worked harder, just tried that little bit more in the future, that it would all work out? How many times did you convince yourself it was still okay after earning your Miss’s ire? You should have known better than to anger a Witch.
The glass orb shattered on the pavement. You and the child you had collided with stared at one another wide eyed. Your Miss angrily towered over you as the kid ran off. You were prepared for pain, you could have handled pain, but then she took out the scissors.
Her eyes were hard, her judgement final. In one swift motion, the Witch slid the unnaturally black scissors through a dimension outside of regular geometry and snipped the invisible iridescent threads that tied doll to Witch. Like a collapsing lung, you fall out of spacetime.
The impossibly loud sound of breaking glass accompanies the threads shattering on the pavement as the girl who was your Witch walks away, leaving you in a world rapidly draining of color and noise. You move your lips to say something, but there’s no air left to make a sound.
You stumble to your feet in a daze, dragging the remains of your threads behind you. At first you try to ask for help, staggering into a store unsure if your ears are ringing from the silence or if you’re going deaf, but the eyes of the humans just seem to glaze off you, unseeing.
You try harder to get someone’s attention, but when you go so far as to try to shove someone, you simply bounce off them like they’re an immovable physics object. They’ll fade in time. You’re cut off from the world, alone with your failure. Left to decay where no one has to see.
Is it the world that’s unravelling, or is this place unravelling you? How long have you aimlessly wandered this dead world? Do you even remember? Time passes but space stands still, a wasteland trapped in monochromatic twilight amber.
Occasionally, you see another abandoned doll in the distance. But these dolls are withered, diminished things. They seem to have lost most of their form, reduced to crude emaciated stick figures. Is that all that’s left of you? They scare you. You keep your distance.
At night, sometimes you can see beings moving against the horizon. Crawling, slouching things, vast beyond description, with a hungry seeking gaze that extends for miles and curls your mainspring in fear. At dawn, every once in a while, you see birds.
The quiet is painful at first–many things are painful at first–but over time, you settle into a comfortable routine. You explore the fading echo of the human world as it grows distant, but the wilderness which replaces it isn’t so bad either. There’s even a little color.
This new world is vast and dripping with alien hostility, but it’s also full of quiet little spots where the sun shines through the trees. You’re a smart doll, a bit clumsy, but maybe you can be comfortable here? Maybe you can make a home for yourself in the empty spaces between?