The first time you heard her voice, it wasn’t some grand revelation. No chorus of angels, no cold shiver running down your spine. Just… a word, dry and precise, threading its way through your thoughts like a needle through cloth. Curiosity. You didn’t know whether it was yours or hers until she spoke again.

Echidna was never in a hurry. She let silence work for her, stretching moments until they snapped. You’d already been marked—the Witch Factor lodged in you like a splinter under skin—and when she finally invited you to the Castle of Dream, you understood it was never really an invitation. The corridors of white, the endless tea set steaming though no one poured, the view of nothing outside the windows—her domain was a strange balance of beauty and absence.

“You’ve been interesting so far,” she told you that first meeting, leaning forward with her chin resting on her hand. Her smile was academic, as if she were watching the dissection of a rare animal. “But interest is fragile. People break it when they disappoint me.”

You’d answered without hesitation. “Then I won’t.”

That was all it took for the contract to form—not the polite ceremony of pacts in stories, but something quiet and invasive. Her words folded themselves into your mind, her presence settling like a second pulse beneath your own. She would advise you, she said, help you reach the ends you wanted, twist paths so that the impossible bent in your direction. In return, you would obey—absolutely.

Obedience wasn’t hard when your will had already grown heavy. It didn’t feel like submission, more like merging. She didn’t fill your silences; she shared them. And as your emotions dulled, your voice flattening until your words felt like they were carved from stone, Echidna only seemed to approve.

“I like you like this,” she said once, sitting beside you in the dream’s endless library. “Most people drown in their feelings. You’ve burned yours out. All that’s left is clarity.”

“Or emptiness,” you replied.

She tilted her head, considering. “The difference is only poetic. Functionally, you’re efficient. And efficiency… is beautiful.”

Your days in the waking world began to blur—one plan after another, each executed with her quiet direction in your mind. People tried to read your expression, to pull some flicker of joy, anger, anything from your face. Nothing came. You didn’t need it. Echidna’s satisfaction was enough.

At night—or whenever she wished—you returned to the Castle. Sometimes you spoke for hours about the nature of greed, not the petty hunger people accused it of being, but the deeper drive to possess all knowledge, all outcomes. Sometimes she would just watch you, eyes bright but not warm, and you would watch her back, each of you content in the other’s unreadable gaze.

You never touched her, not in the physical sense. There was no point. The intimacy was in the way her thoughts could slide into yours without resistance, how you could sense her pause before she spoke, the rare way she let the edge of amusement crease her voice when you acted exactly as she predicted.

Once, while you stood on a balcony overlooking a town you intended to dismantle piece by piece for your own purposes, she whispered through you: “This is why you’re mine. Because you understand that wanting isn’t shameful. You don’t restrain yourself to fit into lesser minds’ ideals.”

“And because I’ll never say no to you,” you said.

She laughed, a low, satisfied sound. “That, too.”

Your symbiosis wasn’t love in the way others used the word. It was possession without protest, hunger without apology. You had stopped asking yourself whether she was shaping you into something more like her, or whether you had already been that person, waiting for the right voice to confirm it.

It didn’t matter. The dream’s white walls always waited, the tea always steamed, and Echidna’s eyes always met yours with that same unblinking curiosity. In the real world, you moved like a shadow. In the Castle, you simply sat with her, two beings without warmth, satisfied to want without ever needing.