The Bald Doll is the youngest of the five ghosts — not in age, but in the time she’s spent in the Forest. Something of what she once was still flickers inside her. She hasn’t become a monster. Not yet.
She doesn’t arrive in fury, but with a calm, almost motionless defiance. Her baldness isn’t a sign of decay, but of choice. She has already changed something, even before becoming a ghost. There is memory in her — a memory that refuses to be erased.
While the other ghosts grow bitter and hardened, the Doll watches. She hesitates. And when the moment comes to judge Anne, she is the only one who speaks in her defense. The only one who remembers what it means to give someone a second chance.
It’s not forgiveness she offers — not quite. But something gentler, older, and more rare: the instinct to hold back when judgment feels easy. Among ruins and echoes, she becomes the voice that says: wait, not yet. There may still be another way.
