Don't Touch Me

Adiantum capillus-veneris magic

One of my favorite plants. Useful in so many ways, most of which come down to it rather hating to be touched. Its leaves are quite repellent and it is, although most don’t realize it, quite an aloof fern.

We’ll begin with the head. The seat of reason, the seat of insanity, the seat of your hair. While it isn’t the most pressing of concerns, baldness is a thing the insecure will come to see a witch about. Mash leaves, stems, and honey in a mortal and pestle to make a paste for the pate. Spread thickly, cover with a shower cap, and wear over night for a week. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a way to control the color of the hair that grows. People with blonde brows grow black hair, or brown brows grow red hair. I think there must be an internal quality that the fern uses to determine hair color. I haven’t worked with it enough to judge what that might be, however.

Now, be careful not to overdose. More than one week of pasting the scalp and any hair that grows will be sentient, with each individual hair forming part of a hive whose collective goal is to control the body. To that end they grow inward as deeply as they grow long on the top of the scalp. Each hair root will wend its way through the body until it is, rather like fungal hyphae, intractably woven through you and controlling everything you do. The hair hive will then find a warm place to build a nest where it can capture food and reproduce. You’ll be along for the ride as it will need to keep you, its host, alive to do the masticating and digesting of whatever the external mass of hair catches. It will then harvest the nutrients from your blood.

So only one week.