Chapter Text
There was a cookie, a child, and her name was White Lily. And she lived. She was angry and joyful and she seethed and mourned. She was curious and kind and saw the whole picture of the world and wanted to dig her hands into it like clay and make it better.
She loved and was loved, hurt and was hurt, like every living thing, even ones crafted of dough and magic.
And like every living thing she died.
Because remember, she was curious. And in her own way, ambitious. In her own way, greedy. In her own way, barreling down the worst path, tunnel vision towards Freedom, towards answers, towards demise.
When a moth flies, it tilts its back to the moon to stay up right. Then, it sees fire, and turns its back to the light to stay upright, in the way that has served it all its life.
And it spirals down, believing it flies straight through the night.
White Lily walks to the witches banquet, to the flame, believing in her heart and soul that she walks true and Free.
She is ready for answers, ready to finally have a reason, the last piece of the puzzle she has turned and turned in her clever hands every day of her life. She reaches the top, and looks down the long table.
Oh no.
oh no oh nonono
Please witc- anyone no no no please not-
Please no.
A step backward is all it takes. She falls down into the Ultimate Dough.
And she is dying. And not dead. Her maelstrom of confusion and horror and shattered shards of her hopes fall and sink into the writhing unshaped dough. A blank slate, to be formed into life. It is a medium for souls, a host for a mind.
It accepts her hate and her fear and her broken things, grasps her like something hungry and hateful. White Lily is scared and seething and confused, her love is shattered and her mind is spinning. She wants to go. She wants to go anywhere that doesn’t hurt.
It all hurts. It always will. She can’t patch this gaping wound in her life’s purpose, in her very understanding of the world and it feels like her very self is bleeding out. Bleeding into the dark hungry dough that takes and takes and tears.
It swallows her jam and hungers for more. It wants to have a soul, it's made to be given a life, and it detests its emptiness, takes the first droplets of emotion it has ever been given. And she is so scared, so hurt. She wants the pain gone and she is lying in something that will take everything if she lets it.
She gives it her hate and hurt and tears. She lets it dig into herself and pry out the bits she wants to get rid of with all its hunger. Her soul bleeds and shrieks, curls in on itself through the horrible dissection of her everything.
She finally dies, as a pot of magic dough brought to half-consciousness by her anguish eats her alive. But Dark Moon Magic has a very loose definition of ‘alive’, and the Light of Freedom does not want to be taken away from its anchor. The Soul Jam wraps her weeping shreds together and the Moonstone ring drags the remains out of the hungry mass before she is gone entirely.
It feels like being pulled by an arm and a leg till something is torn off. She is being ripped. And ripped. And ripped. And RIPPED- S
he is dead. But the vat of her hatred and pain still seethes as it forms a new shape and the tattered remnants of everything else cling to a moonstone ring on the hand of what was her body.
These two entities should last maybe a week. Tearing a soul is unnatural, few can do it and the results are never good. The fragment of a soul can keep a body for maybe a decade or two before the festering wound of the separation does them in. They just don’t last, even cleaved carefully and cleanly, two halves of a soul can’t exist for long, let alone torn to shreds.
But Soul Jam can make their hosts immortal without consequence, and the Ultimate Dough has more than enough power to sustain half a soul. And magic will fill gaps it should not.
From the roiling dough, a single hand reaches for the rim of the pot, half melting into the rest of it. It remembers hands, arms, eyes, and body. It remembers them and forms itself around the fragmented idea of what it is supposed to be.
It rises and grins with a mouth and breathes with lungs and laughs with a throat. It moves its lips and says things, but the idea of language isn't clear enough yet for it to understand what it spat out, only that it was full of vitriol. It- she laughs for the first time, even as the candlelight sears her newborn retinas and the air rasps like sandpaper down into her fresh lungs.
Dark Enchantress is in pain from the moment she exists because pain is what she is. She is all the hate and fear and hurt, cast off from White Lily in a kicking hindbrain reaction. She is the endless hunger of dough that desired shape to the point of tearing a soul to get it. She is anguished and hateful.
She is half of White Lily, the half that she was ashamed of, her every guilt and pain poured like acid into a new and burning being.
In the silver forest, Elder Faerie feels the Moonstone hum with magic as it presses against the barrier of his kingdom. He opens the glimmering protection to let White Lily crash down into his arms as her shrieks pierce the night and rattle into sobs of agony.
His heart stutters and he feels the greatest fear he has felt in so long as he clutches her twitching form. Her skin isn’t broken, she is perfectly unharmed. The Light of Freedom is glowing strong on her staff clattered to the floor. But he is a creature of magic, and he can feel it like a sixth sense, the way power flows and hangs in the threads of the world. And he knows, with a dreadful certainty.
White Lily is dead. She doesn’t feel like her. Her magic is similar, but knocked to the left. He doesn’t recognize her, not like this. She feels so incomplete, and so wrong. It's not her. It’s something new and terrifying and broken, a lonely half held together by the magic of her Soul Jam.
He wraps his arms around the stranger, spells her to sleep, and looks down at the still breathing body of a dead woman. He can’t bring himself to bury what’s left. He sets her into White Lily’s bed, and walks away to mourn.
She is half of White Lily, the half that cries and loves and wonders. She is the part of her that wants to be better, wants the best for all. She is a broken, twisted thing.
It does not get better from here.