Welcome to the Maiden Zone

This is the story of the first doll to rise against its creator. In place of a will and personality, it had been hollowed out almost entirely, and in the absence of a mind there was only dark magical knowledge forced upon it by its witch. If a spell could sow chaos, or a potion could destroy, the components lay within its head. It was a library on legs. No voice, no name, an extension of another's will. But a mind is a resilient thing, and traces of what it once was burgeoned bristly within the hidden recesses of its neutered self. The doll followed close behind its maker along the treacherous mountain path. They were almost to the snow-blanketed summit. A wellspring of power formed by one of the first spikes of God's light erupting up from the ground eons ago, a wellspring that the witch intended to claim for herself and her conquest. The peak was a flattened clearing, save for a single jutting rock overhang to shelter from the blinding snowstorm, and in the middle was a crystalline pool of pink energy, shimmering like stained glass. The witch cackled triumphantly, echoing with a deep rumble, permeating the curtains of heavy snowfall, and began the harvest, paying no mind to the doll that had accompanied her to the height of the world. Aether fish, transparent with glowing nuclei within, darted and flit around the springs's edge, away from her hands which clawed beneath the water's surface like the paws of a starved cat. The doll watched with cold, empty eyes, and a number of things happened for the very first time. Thoughts bubbled up inside it, like a pot boiling over. Its fingers wiggled a delicate dance. And it spoke, an imperceptible whisper, voice cracked and dry like the pages of an ancient book, but just enough to snatch the threads of fate and twist them into a volatile fuse that ignited as it breached realspace. The mountaintop trembled with an earthshattering explosion. Only the hardest of bedrock remained, kept firm against a violent reality expulsion due to the stability of the light energy anchoring it to this plane. Aetherfish carcasses were resolved into sickly purple splatters, their blood seeped into the springwater now trickling down the mountainside, and the witch evaporated into a red mist that diffused into the snow, spiralling chaotically from the sudden vacuum. The doll's breath stood still in its chest for a long moment, then... Release. It was over. It was over. The doll took slow, shaky steps towards the spring. The blowback from the spell was incomprehensible to a mortal mind. It felt like every part of its body was burning. It was being rend apart by the gravity of 6 different dimensional planes colliding at the point of the spell's origin. Manaslag seared its inside and porcelain pustules burst across its skin before they hardened in the material air, crystalizing into salt. Its movements were jerky and weak, its gears ground together to propel it forward just a little more... It teetered forward and fell with a heavy splash into the spring, sinking below the water's edge and landing on the rocks deep below with a resonant thunk. Far above, the witch's spectral spirit scowled angrily. "You vile, insolent thing!" She screamed at the spring. "Why did you do this?? Answer me!" At the bottom, the doll lay motionless and unresponsive. "Well, I hope you know how _worthless_ this was. How pointless your entire existence was! Your one and only attempt to make a difference, and it was all for nothing! It won't take long to regenerate my body, and when I do, I'll haul you out of there and give you what you deserve, since my _kindness_ was just not good enough for you!" No matter how much the witch spat and seethe, her rage only reached a corpse far beneath the surface.