Chapter 2: The Witch's Final Decree
The laughter stopped.
Not faded, not echoed into silence—stopped. Mid-note. Mid-breath. Like someone had pressed pause on a recording, and the recording had been of three hundred people laughing at Marcus Thornton, and now it was just... nothing.
Marcus couldn't move.
He was still standing where she'd left him, one hand half-raised like he'd been reaching for something, his mouth open around a word that had never quite made it out. His eyes worked. His heart worked—he could feel it slamming against his ribs like a trapped bird. But everything else was frozen. His muscles. His breath. The slow trickle of sweat rolling down his temple, stopped halfway down his cheek.
Around him, the ballroom had become a wax museum.
Davenport stood three feet away, mouth wide open in a laugh that would never finish. A woman in a silver gown was caught mid-turn, her champagne flute tilted at an impossible angle, the liquid inside suspended like a goldfish in a glass bowl. A waiter was frozen halfway through the motion of offering a tray of canapés, his smile fixed and terrifying. Even the dust motes hung motionless in the chandelier light, thousands of tiny glittering specks pinned to the air like stars in a dead sky.
The mirrors, though.
The mirrors were wrong.
Marcus couldn't move his head, but he could see the nearest one from the corner of his eye. In the glass, the frozen guests weren't frozen. They were moving. Screaming. Stretching. Their faces had become something else—long and pale and wrong, their mouths open in silent wails that went on and on and on. The mirror-Marcus was the worst of them. His reflection was pressed against the inside of the glass, hands splayed, eyes wide, mouth working around words that Marcus couldn't hear.
He tried to say something. His mouth didn't move.
"Relax."
The voice came from behind him. Low. Warm. Almost affectionate.
"I've just paused things for a bit. We need to talk, you and I."
Footsteps. Slow. Deliberate. The click of heels on marble that shouldn't have made any sound at all, given that time had stopped, but did anyway. Marcus felt her before he saw her—that cold prickle at the back of his neck, that sense of being watched by something that wasn't quite human.
She circled into view.
Up close, she was even stranger than she'd been before. Something about her features seemed to shift when he looked directly at them, like they were being sketched and erased and sketched again. Her eyes held his, and in them, Marcus saw things he didn't have words for. Centuries. Patience. A hunger that had nothing to do with food.
"You're probably wondering what's happening," she said. "That's fair. You deserve an explanation."
She stopped in front of him. Close enough that he could see the individual threads in her burgundy dress, the tiny imperfections in what he'd assumed was flawless silk. Close enough that he could smell her perfume—old wood and earth and something underneath that reminded him of thunderstorms.
"You're wondering why you can't move. Why everyone's frozen. Why the mirrors are showing you things you don't want to see." She tilted her head. "The answer is simple. I stopped time. Not all of it—just this room, just this moment. Enough to give us some privacy."
She snapped her fingers.
The sound was sharp and small, but it carried. It bounced off the frozen crystals, off the suspended guests, off the mirrors that held their screaming reflections. And with it, Marcus felt his mouth unlock.
"What the fuck," he said.
"Better."
"What the fuck is this? What did you do?"
"I told you what I was going to do. You weren't listening."
She walked a slow circle around him. Her heels clicked against the marble. Click.Click. Click. Marcus couldn't turn his head to follow her, so he had to wait for her to come back around, and the waiting was worse than anything.
"I said you'd wake up in a body that wasn't yours," she said from behind him. "I said you'd be eighteen. Female. Disabled. I said you'd spend the rest of your life cuddling lonely women for minimum wage."
She reappeared on his left side. Her smile was the same sharp thing he'd seen earlier, but now it had teeth behind it. Real teeth. Too many teeth.
"You thought I was bluffing."
"You're insane."
"That's the third time you've called me insane. It's starting to feel like a crutch."
She stopped in front of him again. Her fingers rose, and Marcus flinched—he couldn't help it—but she didn't touch him. She just traced a pattern in the air between them, and as she did, the air itself seemed to change. Grow thicker. Heavier. Like the oxygen was being replaced by something else.
"I've spent a long time designing this," she said. "Centuries, in fact. I keep a little collection. Themes, you might say. Ways of teaching lessons to men who need teaching."
"You're a witch."
"Finally."
"A real witch."
"I prefer the term 'practitioner of applied consequence.' But yes. If it helps you sleep at night—which, by the way, you won't—I'm a witch."
She began to walk again, and Marcus watched her, and his heart pounded, and somewhere in the back of his mind a voice kept saying this isn't real this isn't real this isn't real, and somewhere else a voice kept saying you knew this was real the moment she touched you.
"The thing is, Marcus, I don't do this to everyone. Most men who grab my wrist get a little bad luck. Their car breaks down. Their wife finds their text messages. Their business deal falls through. Small things. Corrective things. Painful but fair."
She paused. Looked at him with something that might have been curiosity.
"You're different."
"Why?"
"Because you didn't just grab my wrist. You grabbed my wrist and called me a witch who needed to learn her place. In front of three hundred people. While they laughed."
She smiled again.
"And then you didn't apologize. You justified. You explained. You tried to make it my fault. You tried to use my silence against me."
"The crowd laughed because you—"
"The crowd laughed because you're a man who trades in humiliation. It's your currency. You build people up so you can tear them down. You invite them to parties so you can exclude them. You give them jobs so you can fire them."
She stepped closer.
"You've built your entire life on the suffering of others. You've just never had to experience it yourself."
"What are you going to do to me?"
"I already told you what I'm going to do. But you weren't listening, so I'll say it again."
She raised her hand. Snapped her fingers.
Click.
The world shifted.
Not dramatically. Not with thunder or lightning or the whole ballroom turning into bats. Just a small shift, like a camera refocusing. And suddenly Marcus could feel his body again. Could move his arms. Could turn his head. He almost dropped to his knees with the relief of it.
"I want you to understand," the witch said, "exactly what you're becoming. So I'm going to walk you through it. Step by step. Piece by piece."
"I don't want—"
"It's not about what you want."
She circled behind him again. Marcus turned this time, refused to let her out of his sight, but she just laughed softly.
"Brave. I like that. It'll make this more fun."
She stopped. Extended one pale hand toward him.
"You're going to be a girl named Aaliyah Whitecloud."
"What?"
"Aaliyah. Whitecloud. Eighteen years old. The name matters, Marcus. You'll understand why in a moment."
"Why that name?"
The witch smiled. "Do you remember a waitress at a restaurant in Portland? About four years ago. Native American. Long dark braid. She spilled a glass of water on your table, and you called her a slur. Loudly. Loud enough that everyone in the restaurant heard."
Marcus felt his stomach drop.
"Her name was Aaliyah Whitecloud. She was twenty-six. She had a son. She quit the next day because she couldn't face going back to work."
"How do you—"
"I know a lot of things. That's what centuries will do for you."
She stepped closer. Her voice dropped, became almost intimate.
"You destroyed her. Not with a spell—with your words. She lost her job. She lost her housing. She lost custody of her son for eighteen months while she tried to put her life back together. You did that with thirty seconds of cruelty."
"I didn't—"
"You did. And now you're going to carry her name. For the rest of your life. Every time someone says it, you'll remember why."
She reached out and touched his forehead.
The contact was cold. Marcus tried to pull back, but his body didn't respond. He couldn't move again. Not frozen this time—just locked. His muscles simply refused to answer.
"Now," the witch said, "let's talk about your body."
She walked around him. Her heels clicked. The air smelled like burnt sugar and iron.
"You're going to be eighteen, which means you're going to be young, but not that young. Old enough to know better. Old enough to be responsible for what you are. That matters."
"I don't want this."
"I know."
"You can't do this."I can."
"You'll—"
"I'll what? Face consequences? From whom?"
She stopped in front of him. Her emerald eyes held his.
"I've been doing this for six hundred years, Marcus. I've transformed kings into cockroaches and generals into geishas. I've turned a slave trader into a slave, and a man who burned down an orphanage into an orphan. Nobody has ever stopped me. Nobody ever will."
She waved her hand, and Marcus felt something begin to happen to his chest.
It started as warmth—a low, spreading heat like a fever. Then pressure. Then a strange, blooming feeling, like something was growing where nothing had grown before. He looked down and watched his shirt begin to strain.
"That's what I thought," the witch said. "You're going to have a very specific body. Not the kind that gets taken seriously. Not the kind that gets respect. The kind that gets looked at and laughed at and underestimated."
His chest kept growing. The pressure intensified, became almost painful, and Marcus made a sound that was half-gasp, half-groan.
"I wanted to give you a body that would make you feel the way you've made others feel. Overlooked. Diminished. Marching through the world with everything about you screaming 'not a threat.'"
His shirt tore. Buttons scattered across the frozen marble floor, sliding to a stop against the shoes of a frozen guest. Underneath, his chest had changed—soft, heavy, swelling outward in a way that made his back ache with the sudden weight.
"Tits," the witch said, clinically. "Heavy ones. The kind that make your shoulders hurt and your spine curve. The kind that leak when you hear a baby cry. Because you're going to spend a lot of time around crying, Marcus. That's the life you're walking into."
"I don't—" He stopped. His voice sounded different. Higher. Softer.
"Your voice is already changing. Don't worry—we'll get to that." She tapped a nail against her chin. "Let's see. The body I'm giving you—I've been designing it for a while now. It's what I call the 'milkmaid' build. Very traditional. Very wholesome. The kind of body that gets cast as the nurse or the mom or the spinster aunt. Soft belly. Wide hips. An ass that could stop traffic—God, the shelf on this thing. You're going to sit on chairs and feel your own butt spread out underneath you, and you're going to hate it."
"I don't—"
"Your arms will tremble when you lift a teacup. Just a little. Just enough to remind you that you're not strong anymore. Not in the way men are strong. You'll get used to it, but you'll never be happy about it."
She snapped her fingers again.
Click.
Marcus felt a strange sensation in his midsection—like something was rearranging itself, stitching itself into a new configuration. He doubled over, gasping, but the sound he made wasn't right. Too high. Too soft. Too much like a girl in a horror movie.
"Are you—"
"Patience."
She snapped again.
Click.
This time, the sensation was sharper. More localized. Marcus felt a strange, itching, burning sensation between his legs, and then something that felt almost like a pinch—quick and precise—and then a settling, like something that had been wrong was now right.
"Vagina," the witch said, matter-of-factly. "Nice one, too. Neat. Functional. I gave you a little triangle of dark pubic hair—just the way I like it. Sculpted it myself. It's the little details that count."
Marcus made a sound.
It wasn't a word. It wasn't even really a sound. It was something between a sob and a scream and a moan, and it came out of a throat that felt different now, that vibrated at a different frequency.
"You're doing great," the witch said. "Really. Most men are blubbering by this point."
She stepped back to admire her work. Her head tilted. Her eyes flicked over him like she was assessing a painting.
"Good," she said. "But not done."
She raised her hand again. Snapped her fingers.
Click.
Marcus felt his hair begin to move.
It was the strangest sensation—like fingers running through it, pulling, stretching, weaving. He looked down and saw strands of black falling past his shoulders, heavy and thick, so long it reached past his waist, past his hips, almost to his knees. The weight of it was immense. It pulled at his scalp, made his neck ache.
"Ankle-length," the witch said. "Jet-black. Real black—not dyed. The kind of black that makes people wonder if you're a natural or just committed. And I gave you a blunt fringe, because I think they're cute, and a side-shaved undercut, because it's the loudest lesbian haircut I can imagine and I want to make sure everyone gets the message."
"I'm not—"
"You're not what? A lesbian? That's not the point, Marcus. The point is presentation. The point is that when people look at you, they're going to see exactly what I want them to see."
She snapped again.
Click.
Marcus felt a prickling on his ears. On his nose. On his tongue. He tried to reach up, but his arms—soft, weak, trembling—barely responded. The prickling became a burn, and the burn became a pain, sharp and sudden and real.
"Septum ring," she said. "Tongue stud. And a row of gauges in both ears—I went big. We're talking stretches that will ache for weeks. You'll get used to them eventually, but for now, every time you turn your head, you'll feel them pull. Every time you speak, you'll feel the stud click against your teeth."
Marcus tasted metal. Felt something foreign in his mouth, something hard and smooth and wrong.
"And finally," the witch said, "a little decoration."
She reached out and touched his arms. Where her fingers traced, ink bloomed under his skin—dark shapes that formed themselves into patterns. Bears. Foxes. Hedgehogs. Cats curled up in tiny nests of yarn. Hearts. Stars. Teacups. Rainbows. All of them soft and round and aggressively cute.
"Cuddle-themed sleeves," she said. "That's right—full sleeves, wrist to shoulder. Because you're going to spend a lot of time cuddling. It's going to be your job. And I want you to look the part."
The ink settled. The pain faded. Marcus stood in the middle of the frozen ballroom, looking down at arms he didn't recognize, attached to a body he didn't want, covered in art he would never have chosen.
"What have you done to me?"
"I've turned you into a girl named Aaliyah Whitecloud," the witch said. "A disabled, lesbian, non-English-speaking eighteen-year-old who is going to spend the rest of her life cuddling lonely women for minimum wage."
"I don't speak any other language."
"You will."
She raised both hands. The room began to hum. The mirrors began to glow.
"I'm not done yet, Marcus. The body is just the beginning. The real work is the rest of it."
"What rest of it?"
"Your mind. Your memories.Your language. Your abilities. Everything that made you 'Marcus Thornton' is going to be scrubbed away. Everything that made you 'you' will be replaced with 'Aaliyah.' You'll wake up tomorrow morning in a body you don't recognize, in a room you've never seen, with a woman you don't know calling you by a name that isn't yours."
She smiled.
"And the worst part? You'll be used to it. Because you won't remember anything else."
"No—"
"I'm not finished."
She snapped her fingers one final time.
Click.
The ballroom began to spin. The frozen guests, the shattered mirrors, the dripping crystals—all of it began to stretch and pull like taffy, twisting into strands of light and darkness. Marcus opened his mouth to scream, but his voice wasn't his voice anymore, and the words that came out weren't words at all.
And somewhere, in the distance, a bell began to toll.
"By dawn," the witch whispered, "you won't even remember why you deserve this."
Everything went white.
And then everything went dark.
And then Marcus Thornton—who was no longer Marcus Thornton, who would never be Marcus Thornton again—began to fall.