The first thing a young witch often dealt with was the raw fluidity of the world. Events could be transcribed, practices honed, concepts charted and solved, but nothing ever stayed the same for long.

Elder witches fell to this as well, in their own way. Complaints abounded of how things were once done a different way, in their time. How the modern day had made a mess of magic and witchkind as a whole. It was a common complaint through the ages, chaffing against the changes in how magic itself operated. An older witch would never lose their own ability to practice, but they often found themselves unable to properly teach the next generation.

Stories, then, became the most important part of a young witch’s training. The most common were the origins of witches and their dolls; that the first bond between witch and doll was between Eve and the toys she crafted for her daughters. A residual spark of creation, passed on. Those first dolls kept them safe in an untamed world, guarded them against powers far beyond human comprehension. Even this story changed through time: sometimes, it was a toy, other times it was a companion. Some witches even taught it was a stilled angel who had fled its post.

It was the burden of a new witch to understand that the finality and truth of a story mattered little. Some witches would go to their graves, insisting on telling all others how they had discovered the true story of what had happened. They were rarely welcome at coven meetings.

A witch would have to learn that as it dealt with dolls and demons and angels and fae, that they all had their own understandings of their origins and their histories. That the mere belief of those histories impacted them more than material reality.

To tell a fae that it was originally a human who yearned for more meant little if it could tell you its forefathers. Telling a demon that it was the product of human ambition meant nothing if it could tell you the thrones that it had claimed in its life.

A witch had to understand that even her own life was not set, that as she bargained with and fought other witches and creatures, their own perceptions and histories would meld with her own. Their powers would infect her own, until she either accepted the differences or succame to contradiction.