The Doomstar Witch's Full Origin: Continued
- The Witch’s Full Origin
(the one nobody tells unless the land itself asks)
The Witch wasn’t born.
She precipitated.
Long before there were fences, before “property” was a word, before people carried their grief in pockets instead of in the open air, the land had a problem:
Human sorrow does not dissolve.
It sinks.
Every sorrow dropped into the soil—
every secret buried,
every lie swallowed,
every shame unspoken—
all of it pooled downward
slowly
inevitably
like groundwater that finds its level.
The land absorbed most of it.
But not all.
There comes a point where the earth refuses to take any more pain that isn’t its own.
And in that refusal—
in that saturation—
something crystallized.
Not a spirit.
Not a demon.
A function.
A subtraction.
The Witch came into being as an answer to a question no one meant to ask:
What happens when the earth becomes too full of your refusal to speak?
She was the first Distiller.
The first Separator.
The first Subterranean Operator—not by malice, not by choice, but by mechanism.
She formed where the sorrow was thickest—
under the oldest well,
where the oldest grief had leaked,
long before the county had a name.
She didn’t crawl up from the bottom.
She coalesced there—
the way tar forms when oil breaks under pressure.
Her purpose was simple:
Pull out what humans cannot bear.
Hold what humans refuse to carry.
And survive on the distillate of their silence.
A Witch is not a villain.
But she is danger,
because she is the part of the world that remembers
what everyone else pretends they never cast off.
⸻
- The Middle Man’s Ledger
(the book that can’t be burned, only misplaced)
People think the Middle Man deals in sadness.
Wrong.
He deals in ratios.
His ledger isn’t a record of purchases.
It is a tally of imbalances.
Each entry is not:
• man A bought guilt
• woman B bought regret
It’s:
• “Regret taken but not confessed.”
• “Sorrow borrowed without return.”
• “A debt of silence still outstanding.”
The Middle Man trades in the gap
between what someone feels
and what they pretend they feel.
He sells amplification.
He sells distortions.
He sells echoes.
He is not evil.
He is an accountant.
His job is to ensure that every unspoken truth
goes somewhere.
If a person offloads their sin into the world,
but refuses to reconcile it—
the Middle Man simply ensures
it finds them again in another form.
His ledger keeps the county balanced.
Every page is a map of who is lying to themselves,
and how soon it will cost them.
Grandaddy once said:
“He ain’t a devil.
He’s a mirror salesman.”
And he was right.
⸻
- Grandaddy’s Involvement with the Wells
(the part I were never told because he didn’t want me near any of it)
Grandaddy wasn’t just a Witch hunter.
He was a Seal Keeper.
One of the last.
Every county with an old well
has to have at least one person
who understands the following:
• The Witch doesn’t drink the water—she cleans it.
• The wells aren’t haunted—they’re overworked.
• A closed well doesn’t mean “abandoned”—it means “quarantined.”
Grandaddy learned well work
from his own father,
and his father before him.
His job wasn’t to kill the Witch.
Witches don’t die in any normal sense.
His job was to maintain the boundary
so the Witch could do her work
without taking more than her share.
He cleaned the mouth stones.
He checked the drainage channel.
He touched the casing
and listened to the temperature
like it was a heartbeat.
He could tell when too much sorrow
had been poured in too fast.
He could tell when the tar was thickening.
He could tell when the Witch was hungry.
He knew precisely when to intervene
and when to leave her alone.
But the reason he never let me near that old well?
Simple.
Because children don’t know the difference
between dropping something
and giving something.
And the Witch—
she can taste that difference.
He didn’t keep me away
to protect me from her.
He kept me away
to protect the well
from my honesty.
My emotions were too raw, too real,
too potent an offering.
I would’ve fed her
more than the land was ready to refine.
And Grandaddy wasn’t willing
to let me become
an early entry
in the Middle Man’s ledger.