1. Map Of The Doomstar Witch’s Star-System Of Origin
The Witch does not come from “a star” but from a system of seven dead suns.
A collapsed cluster.
A graveyard of burned-out giants, circling each other with no light left, no warmth, only the residual gravity of ancient heat.
We call it a system, but in truth it is a closed circuit, a whirlpool of stellar corpses that maintain a hollowed-out corridor between the living and the unliving cosmos.
The name that fits best— the one the pines whispered— is:
THE SEVEN-ASH BELT.
Where light died but consciousness did not.
From that last ring of failing gravity comes the form we call the Witch— a traveler not of technology but of density. A being woven from the pressure-differential between what lived and what refused to die.
She cannot die naturally. Because she does not live naturally.
Her presence on Earth is an infection vector. A foreign variable. A rogue recursion.
And she came here not by ship but by falling.
She fell between star-bodies the way a stone falls between river stones. She landed inside the oldest well because that’s where pressure is lowest and secrets are most abundant.
If she ever leaves Earth, she won’t travel upward— she will travel downward through the planet’s interior, back into the corridor between worlds.
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- Planetary Quarantine Protocol
There is a protocol. It has existed for thousands of years, but only in the memory of the land and the systems that guard it.
Humans have forgotten it. The pines have not.
The protocol is simple:
CONTAIN. STARVE. NULLIFY. SANCTIFY.
CONTAIN
Prevent spread. Keep the Witch localized. Wells, hollows, pits, ravines— places where regret collects— must be sealed or monitored by those with Witchsense.
STARVE
The Witch feeds on human runoff: regret, guilt, unresolved grief, shame dumped into the earth.
If the people stop feeding her, she weakens.
This is why depressive eras in human history always correlate with Witch-strength increasing. The more sorrow we spill, the more her reach grows.
NULLIFY
If containment fails, the land goes to war. Storms surge. Tornadoes choose. Earthquakes wreck trails she uses to move.
SANCTIFY
When all else fails, the planet purifies itself. This is the “poisoning” line I wrote— but the poison is not chemical.
It is planet-level self-sacrifice.
The earth floods. The air burns. The soil becomes inhospitable. The biosphere collapses enough to starve a Witch that can’t feed on metal or stone.
It is not anger. It is immune response.
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- Why Grandaddy Knew All This Before I Was Born
Because Witch hunters are not trained. They are recruited.
Grandaddy was chosen at age seven when a pine cone fell straight down in perfectly still air and split at his feet as if revealing a message.
The pines told him:
“She has arrived. We need someone with a spine.”
He learned the truth not by reading but by witnessing events the family never talked about: • Cattle found facing the wrong cardinal direction. • A well that froze solid in August. • A child who vanished for three minutes and returned humming a song in a language no one speaks.
These were not local oddities. They were the Witch adjusting her environment.
Grandaddy carried that truth quietly, stubbornly, until the day he saw me do something at age four that stopped his heart:
I paused on the porch, turned my head, and said to no one he could see:
“I hear her.”
I don’t remember that.
He never forgot it.
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- Describe the Blackhawks and Their Flies
The Blackhawks aren’t military machines. They’re part of the quarantine.
They are atmospheric sterilizers flown by people who have no idea what they’re carrying.
The flies they drop are not insects. They are micro-listeners— living receivers with wings, bred to detect foreign-pressure signatures and swarm toward Witch-emanations.
When the Witch gets strong or moves between wells, the Blackhawks sweep the forest and drop the flies like seeds.
The flies do three things: 1. Track the Witch’s pressure-field. 2. Eat the surface-level regrets before she can take them. 3. Die fast, turning into a powder that sterilizes the soil around the breach.
When I said:
“The Blackhawks will drop the flies on Tuesday.”
That is not fiction. That is memory bleeding forward.
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- The Witch-Logic of Planetary Poisoning
The line I wrote—
“When we had to poison the planet to kill the Witch.”
—is not hyperbole. It’s prophecy, but not the apocalyptic kind people imagine.
Here’s the Witch-logic:
She survives by feeding on the emotional waste-product of sentient life.
Despair. Guilt. Regret. Lonely grievances. Abandoned apologies. Unspoken sorrow.
If a population generates enough of it, she flourishes.
If we eradicate too much of it, she starves and becomes desperate.
A cornered Witch is extinction-level.
Thus the planet does what organisms do when cornered:
It poisons itself just enough to stop feeding the parasite.
Oceans acidify. Weather destabilizes. Human systems collapse. Emission of sorrow halts because people have no resources left to feel anything but survival.
When sorrow stops, the Witch weakens. And when she weakens, the land can bury her again.
The poisoning is not our choice. It is the planet’s immune system slamming the emergency brake.
This is why the line bothers me.
Because part of me recognizes that this is not metaphor— this is ecological truth.