What The Middle Man Really Trades In / How To Shut The Doomstar Witch's Well

I. What the Middle Man Really Trades In

People think the Middle Man deals in sorrow.

They think he sells grief by the ounce, regret by the spoonful, old heartbreak in little folded packets you keep tucked in your pocket to rub when you want to feel something burn.

But that’s not what he sells.

He trades in return.

The Middle Man doesn’t sell sadness—
he sells the desire to revisit it.

That’s the trick.
That’s the product.

A man will kill himself drinking sorrow straight, but he’ll live for decades returning again and again to the wound he swears he wants healed.

The Middle Man traffics in the ache to feel again the thing you pretend you’re done with.

He sells the tether.
The hook.
The quiet compulsion to reopen the old room and look around.

His trade is nostalgia for pain.
A profitable business, because humans are loyal to the hurts that shaped them.

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II. How to Shut a Witch’s Well

A Witch’s well is not a hole in the ground.
It is a permission.

The well exists because people keep sending their private poisons downward--regret, shame, swallowed words, guilt they never confessed, the long quiet disappointments they don’t speak aloud.

Every well stays open because the community keeps contributing.

To shut a Witch’s well, one must do something almost no town ever does:

Stop feeding it.

A Witch’s well is powered by the downpour of human sorrow that goes unchecked.

Here is the difficult truth — the part Grandaddy only spoke once:

“You don’t shut a Witch’s well with fire. You shut it with honesty.”

Confession—real confession—dries a well faster than stone.
Forgiveness—real forgiveness—keeps it sealed.

The ritual is simple, but the people are not.

You close a Witch’s well when a community refuses to bury its grief in the dark and instead brings it to the light—names it, tells it, cleans it.

No tar goes down, so no Witch rises.

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III. What Happens When the Tar Goes Uncollected

This is the catastrophe no one talks about.

Every Witch knows how to refine the water, but not all of them can keep up with the raw volume of sorrow people drop.

If the tar sits too long—weeks, months, a season—it begins to congeal.

Then it begins to learn.

Tar that goes uncollected becomes aware of the emotions it contains.
Not the memories—those dissolve after refining—but the shape of the emotions:

• the contour of guilt,
• the sharp edge of betrayal,
• the heavy pull of unspoken apology.

Eventually the tar begins to mimic the emotional posture of whoever fed it most.

Then it begins to climb.

Slowly.
Molecule by molecule.
Up the stones.
Up the shaft.
Up toward the surface like a grief trying to reincarnate.

When tar spills from the well-mouth, it does not run downhill like liquid.
It goes uphill.

Toward the house
of the one who fed it deepest.

This is why Grandaddy said:

“A well left unworked is a grave that gets restless.”

A Witch collects tar not because she wants to—but because if she doesn’t, the tar becomes something with a will of its own.

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IV. The Price the Witch Pays For Her Work

People think the Witch gains power by handling the tar.

But she pays for it.

Every time she refines sorrow, a portion of it adheres to her—not as emotion, but as weight.

The Witch grows heavier each season.
Not metaphorically.
Physically.

That’s why they live deep in the earth—their bodies cannot endure long above ground.

Every bucket of refined anguish adds a layer to her bones. A thickness to her joints. A slight stoop to her spine that she does not show until she is back at the bottom of the well.

When she emerges you are not seeing a creature of malice—you are seeing a creature carrying everyone else’s unfinished business.

The price she pays is this:

• She cannot leave her territory.
• She cannot forget what she has refined.
• She cannot grow lighter unless the people grow honest.

A Witch is a compressor, a refinery, a dark saint of unprocessed human sorrow.

She takes what people refuse to carry, and in doing so she becomes too heavy to rest.

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V. What the Middle Man Really Trades In (second rendering, deeper layer)

The Middle Man doesn’t buy the tar for money.
He buys it for leverage.

Each vial, each pellet, each smear—it contains a signature. Not a memory, but the outline of a soul’s weak spot.

He sells these weaknesses back to the townsfolk as “injuries that feel like identity.”

He trades in:

• Permanent resentment
• Cyclical shame
• Habitual self-sabotage
• The inability to forgive oneself
• The irresistible urge to revisit the wound

He trades in hooks.

He trades in open loops.

He trades in unfinished grief.

His product is simple: the inability to get over oneself.

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VI. How to Shut a Witch’s Well (second rendering, operational)

There is also a physical method.
Rare.
Dangerous.
Grandaddy did it once.

To shut a well by force,
you must:

1. Name the sorrow people keep sending down.
Not metaphorically—aloud, with witnesses.

2. Pour clean water through the shaft until the stones hum.
3. Bind the well-mouth with three materials:
• wood from the oldest pine
• iron from a tool that has drawn blood
• linen that belonged to someone who forgave easily

4. Do not speak while binding. Speech invites the Witch to negotiate, and she is a better negotiator than any man.

If done properly, the well sleeps.

If done improperly, the Witch wakes.

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VII. What Happens When the Tar Goes Uncollected (second rendering, structural)

When tar goes unrefined long enough, it becomes thick-time.

It slows everything it touches—animals, machines, memory, luck.

Thick-time is why some families repeat the same mistake generation after generation. The tar seeps upward in thin invisible threads, wrapping around the rafters, around the bedposts, around the dinner table, creating a loop.

People think they’re cursed.

They’re not cursed.

They’re drinking water that passed too close to tar that no Witch processed.

Tar accumulates where honesty fails.

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VIII. The Price the Witch Pays For Her Work (second rendering, eternal)

The Witch’s final price is this:

She becomes the sum of everything people hide.

The older she is, the more sorrow her bones have memorized. The heavier her steps. The slower her breathing. The younger her face—
paradoxically—because sorrow preserves her like salt.

Her final cost:

She cannot die until the land is balanced.
And the land cannot balance as long as people keep feeding her.

She is trapped by the very people who fear her.

Her burden is our refusal to carry our own.