{ sweet dreams }
They handed me your head on a silver platter.
Even witches get bored sometimes.
Locked in her labyrinth for the rest of eternity, Charlotte becomes so very restless. After all, she's destined to spend her whole life waiting for some unsuspecting magical girl to wander into her endless maze.
And one by one they come, with lovely dresses and gleaming weapons and oh-so vulnerable Soul Gems, confident sneers drawn across their faces with permanent marker. They come crawling straight into the mouth of the beast and she devours their souls like candy, savoring every second of the almost cloying sweetness.
(She's always amused whenever they try to resist. It makes her meal all the more saccharine, like sugar and icing and rainbow sprinkles with a cherry on top.)
But then the magical girls stop coming, so Charlotte starts dreaming instead.
...
Her dreams are usually motley and colorful, but one of them stands out from all the others.
In it, there's a girl with pretty golden blond hair in curly pigtails. There is a radiant beam on her lips and flowers spiral around her like she's some sort of show, a celebrity in the world of magical girls, even though the title means nothing to a witch like Charlotte. The girl lurks in her dreams and Charlotte tries to catch her, but she is too elusive, darting from place to place, taunting the witch with an infuriating smirk.
And Charlotte becomes furious.
Nobody has evaded her so easily before, and she's not about to let her new prey slip out of her voracious grasp. After all, she hasn't tasted magical girl blood in months. She reaches out and snatches up the puny little girl by the neck so that she's dangling in the air, clutching at her strangled throat and kicking her feet and desperately heaving for breath.
No one ever defies Charlotte.
After some contemplation, she decides to start with the girl's head, and opens her mouth wide, savoring the sound of terrified screaming. Ready or not, here it comes!
The witch tries to savor her meal as much as she can, chomping the girl to itty-bitty parts and chewing slowly. It's as sweet as she expected, and she thinks it may be her favorite flavor of magical girl yet. But the only thing is, it's gone too quickly, and she is left unsatisfied.
She wants more.
Then she wakes up, and realizes it was all a dream.
...
This happens every night for nearly two years.
So Charlotte waits and waits, hidden in her lair, growing more impatient with each day that crawls by agonizingly slowly. The days and nights blur together until she can't tell them apart anymore, but she doesn't know if she ever could in the first place. She's just a witch, after all: nothing more, nothing less.
So when she hears the doors to her labyrinth click open one day and three—not one, not two, but three!—blissfully ignorant girls enter, she almost goes insane with the desire to taste magical girl again.
...
When the magical girl with curly blond hair and a sparkling golden Soul Gem finally appears before Charlotte, just like in her dreams, it's like her head has been delivered on a silver platter. She notices that the other two are not magical girls, merely hiding behind the yellow one for protection, but decides to eat them next anyway. They probably won't be as tasty, though.
But now, there's nothing standing between her and her next meal.
...
good night, sleep tight, and live
happily ever after