Chapter 17: Chapter 18: Of two dolls, and the absolute brink of perfect damnation

"How DID you enter?" the Lady inquires, rising straighter in her throne. "Machrae Diir stands sealed... or so I had thought." Odd pinpoints dappled the fringe-shadows of the umbra cloaking her: little eruptions of something molten, roiling hints at a frothing luminescence.

The dolls glance to each other. One wears frilly black. The other wears frilly white.
The first has scarlet hair, wavy.
The second has blond hair, curled.

So slender and prim and-- derivative-- --well-behaved. Yet, quiet.

"Someone let you in," the Lady sighs, rubbing her brow.

Silence.

"Girls," the Lady says, "I am a high-order psionic. Do you know what that means? Did your witch tell you?"

"She told us that you wielded extraordinary magic," the redhead doll says.

"The word 'magic' no longer means anything," the Lady says, cold and austere. These glimmers sparking out from the haze above the Lady's horns, these world-seams like the borderline where paper burns away, where film melts… "Say rather that it means everything, which is much worse than meaning nothing," the Lady adds.

The dolls snap back to attention.

She reaches behind her. Fractal fingers warp and vibrate, quantum disharmony, until they catch upon the great sword of umbral fire at its rest behind her throne. "Enough. You're dolls. You aren't intended to understand." A sudden snarl. "That IMBECILE! What was she thinking?!" The great sword's shear splits open an abyss of glassy hallucinations--falling spires, fungal towers afire, spindly tendril-beings with iron jaws. "Sending dolls to speak with me. Dolls, to speak with the Lady of Machrae Diir!"

In returning the blade of umbral fire to its scabbard, the Lady closes the reality-rift.

"So be it, then," the Lady mutters. "Yes... someone let you in, but why... they know I'm not fit for visitors, what could possibly have made them think... oh..." She nods. "You're in need."

"She's very sick!" the blond doll blurts. Quivering. Are dolls supposed to cry? It must depend on the doll--
--does it matter? Tools do whatever they're made to do, or are bad tools--
"She said... she said you're the only being she knows of who could fix it!" finishes the doll.

"Her symptoms include delirium, mood swings, and exhaustion," the Lady says.

"Yes!" the scarlet-haired doll says, nodding eagerly. "How did you know? Did you use some kind of seeing spell?"

"Those are the symptoms that would lead us to this mess," the Lady answers flatly. She sighs, replacing her sword. "Look, girls. I am not unsympathetic. But the Ashenvein Gates are--" she glances towards the handmaidens gathered nearby--"meant to be closed. I am, myself, ill. A deep, fevered illness of the soul."

"Um... do you not need to be in bed?" the blond doll asks, wringing her hands--

--as she should. Sightless forlorn whelp, useless thing, little cringing mind-leech--

"The throne reminds me of myself, strong and... and hale," the Lady says, pausing to clutch her head.

"What, um... what does hale mean?" the redheaded doll asks.

"HEALTHY, YOU SUBHUMAN FILTH!" the Lady screams. Blood-red surges blot the blue from her fires. "Do a web search! Try a dictionary if modern technology is too ADVANCED for your feeble worm-eaten brain, or maybe--"

The azure hues flood back into being. A whiplash jarring blooms inside the little doll heads--like the unlight after a blow to the head.

"I'm sorry," the outer devil whimpers, hiding behind the hands clutching tight upon her shadow-hung skull. "I'm sorry... I can't hold it in..."

"Oh," the blond doll says, instinctively stepping closer to her friend. "You're... you're sick like she is."

The Lady of Machrae Diir quivers, and her domain answers her. Liquid amplitudes run along the dark metal floors. Corkscrew filings unravel upward, and glittering droplets. "Then... if she sent you to me to ask what to do... you have to go," the Lady groans. "Both of you. You have to go somewhere and lay low. Take any other dolls your witch has and get as far away from her as possible."

"We're not leaving her!" the scarlet doll yells.

Quietly, a trickle of new figures enter the chamber and pass by the handmaidens towards the throne. These? They are the Handmaidens. Their robes bear other colors than azure, metal bands, crystals on chains, relics of bone and desiccated skin. Rich embroidery. Fell sigils.

"If your witch deserves her title, she will..." the Lady shudders again. "... survive... she must survive... can't let them take the dream..."

"This audience has ended," a Handmaiden says. She rests a seven-clawed gauntlet on the blond doll's head. "You did nothing wrong. Nonetheless, you must go. Neither has the Lady erred." She glances towards the handmaidens in their uniform blue robes. Their pale tails curl around their feet as they huddle together. "A strange and inexplicable breach has occurred. It is no one's fault. Still... go."

"B-but... but you're like us!" the redhead doll asks. "You're handmaidens, right? You can't..." she balls up her hands. "You can't tell us what to do! That's not in the rules here!"

"There are handmaidens, and then there are Handmaidens," answers the Handmaiden. "Machrae Diir has rules the Lady created for outsiders, and rules the Lady created for Machrae Diir, and rules for what we all must do when the Lady can no longer spare the power to enforce her own rules."

A strange weight forms in the little doll-bellies. It's tingly, tickling, cold-hot. It's not quite fear.

"NOW!" the Handmaiden barks, "GO N–

The Lady's throne room isn't at all as the dolls expected, or were told.

Rose-pink rays lavish odd square walls with glows that sink in so, so slowly--the light itself grows sluggish. Thickets of bizarre rod-constructs arch up to brace the vaulted ceiling, each encased by many hexagonal segments of a substance that looks so much like pencil lead. The air feels sparkly. Sharp. There's something dancing in it. Pinpricking against their witch's magic.

"Do you... um..." the blond doll's brow furrows. The very question feels wrong. Mustn't be asked, admitted, possible. Yet she has to know, doesn't she?

"Do you taste metal?" she asks.

A long delay.

"Yeah," her friend says. "What IS that?"

"M-maybe the first part was, like, a test," the blond doll ventures. "Demons do that, right? We're probably supposed to go along with the test. It's not breaking the rules to do stuff that would be... weird... normally."

"Yeah," her friend says, "maybe. Anyway, we're here now."

Such a strange smell, too. They try to find words for it as they wander through the halls.

It's like burning.
It's like a pool that's been cleaned too much.
It's like that weird pungent note running just under the surface of decay.

The catwalk feels important from the moment they first see it: peeking out from a high, buttressed wall of grey-painted steel. It stretches down over an abyss--a foggy, pinkish void that stretches up and down and to every side as far as forever.

They leave and come back to it nine times.

"I don't want to!" the blond doll screams, thrashing against the redhead's grip. "I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to!"

"We have to before we move on," her friend says. "We might never find it again. This place probably changes lots. Also..." She grimaces. "I don't know what's happening to our skin, but this reddening... it's probably a sign we've been doing something wrong. This wouldn't just happen for no reason." She squeezes gently. "I'm right here beside you. We'll make it through this. I promise."

The catwalk is an odd thing: all these little swirling pieces and star-like patterns. There's no lattice of metal binding. Nothing at all holding it together except the friction between the pieces. The stillness grows wearing. Every step echoes like a thunderclap.

And at last, here they are: in a great arched chamber, upon a floor not of concrete but well-polished marble--

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What an odd thought! Why would it be concrete?

--and this must be the true throne. A behemoth disk studded with hundreds of those segment-embraced rods, all curving. The pinpricking has stopped. A good sign, surely! And the rose-pink inferno gushing from the cylinder-pit beneath the throne, licking out from the seams beneath the square lead-like segments on the rods, filling the chamber with silver smoke that glistens like a million mirrors:

Oh, it's the most beautiful, perfect thing in the universe.

"There you are," the Lady says. The flames leap and surge to her rhythms. "I knew you'd find your way. You're such good dolls! So true to your purpose! No matter how much anyone tried to turn you back."

She giggles.

"So... are you going to take the metal taste and the weird smell and, the, um... rashes, away?" the blond doll asks. "It doesn't hurt too bad, but it's REALLY uncomfortable and it's... it's giving me a bad feeling."

"Oh?" the Lady asks. "Hm... give it time! It's a gift!"

And the dolls See: that their jointed limbs have muscles and bone-sockets and tendons. That their witch's clockwork was never truly there. That they have beating hearts in place of something that ticks or chimes or thrums. The dolls see that they are flesh, and remember... names. Their names.

Their given-at-birth, aching, human names.

"Yes, it can be scary at first," the Lady agrees as they scream. "But you'll learn to love it, my dears! You must remember how to mutate. Your witch meant well, she really did, but you're so--I do hate to use harsh words, but--stagnant. Stuck. Crystallized imperfection."

"Wait!" the redhead doll shouts. "I r-r-remember! You're supposed to manifest! Demons manifest a form when they're revealing themselves!"

"Oh?" the Lady asks. "Oh, yes, that's right. How silly of me. Do mind your hair, child. I've altered the natural progression to my savor."

"And you have to be blue!" says she of the scarlet hair--notwithstanding the wads that just came out in her hands. But no need to worry! More just grew in--silky and sharp as razors. So clear. Crisp. Every strand slices her palms open, getting rid of that old flawed flesh to make room for an immaculate new dawn.

Just a little purification. Just a few pieces at a time.

"Blue means you're in earnest!" the doll presses. "She told us that!"

"Of course, of course," the Lady laughs. "My, but you're good at this! Passing all the tests with flying colors." The flames spark, hiss, shift from rosy pinks to a brief aquatic blue. They find poise as a cutting, washed-out cyan.

She coalesces upon the throne, immaculate. Her form is an infinity of tiny novas blooming over and over. Shining debris-specks like miniature fireworks blast from every minute line of her. Her limbs, her ten horns, her tail-bundle, all weave around the sprawling rods and melt upward along them in greasy black strands.

"You'll want something to help your witch, yes?" the Lady asks, with yet another giggle. So perfectly pitched, so musical and rhythmic and intoxicating.

The metal taste... it's like blood. And blood is... delicious? Yes. Blood is delicious! Especially their own blood!

"Do bear with me," the Lady croons. "This will be awkward to look at, but it's all for the best. Think of it as a little prophesy of your own delights in the days to come... why, you'll begin in just a few hours!" Then she arches her world-threshold back, and retches glory.

Shards gouge outward through her permeable neck. Ignite the greasy streaks where she drapes herself over, around, through the throne-rods. Causeless morass bubbles out from her mouth and splatters upon the marble at the dolls' feet.

"There," the Lady says, beaming. "All yours."

Painter-whorls of discolored metalloid iris up from the something and sink back to it. Like self-folding paper figures, or wood splintering somehow into sculpture, or the tear-beckoning beauty of flesh peeling back from an exit wound, over and over and over again.

"This feels wrong," the blond doll says. "I don't think we should--"

"She's blue!" her friend insists. "Blue means she's safe! Blue means we can trust her."

"But... but this blue isn't like the other blue--" the blond doll insists.

"Now, girls," the Lady interrupts. "Be good."

And the dolls found that once they picked the miasmic sprawl up between their fingers, it clung fast and sank slowly deeper. It whispered what they'd need to do, so they did. They each took their portion, and began the journey home.

The Lady's promised blessing took full shape as they walked. The halls changed until they were no longer the halls of Machrae Diir.

An old dusty catacomb, where the dolls left the first skin-peelings.
A burned-out city, where they truly began to vomit.
A sickened forest full of reddish leaves, like ginger, and by then the flesh around their noses and mouths was blackening and squelchy.

The Lady was kind, and just, and true. Their torture put them beyond any thought at all. Nothing was left but quiet, unremitting purpose. When at last they stumbled into their witch's house, they were coughing up some of the precious pieces of the flesh within. That was all to the good--they needed it all gone so they could truly become Dolls.

Their witch resisted the medicine, of course.

She thrashed, and screamed, and tried to muster some of her once-mighty magic to hold them back. Still, bit by bit, they forced the pieces of the Lady's cure-all down her throat. She went very still by the end. That was as it must be. She had to stop before she could start.

It is known in Machrae Diir that five days after that night, the Lady looked on across the swath of melded planes. Not portals, but world upon world merged together through the binding tie of Her Dolls' righteous march. She laughed hysterically with the first blinding shine.

She laughed while the wondrous horror of her roseate caress unmade city towers and trees and millions upon millions of once-hideous flesh-forms into vapor's pure canvas. She laughed while all was reshaped, crystallized anew into gold and iron and heat-treated rainbows.

Mortal souls froze inside the distorted shadows of their distintegration. Buildings became swoop-hollow monuments to the sacred shockwave. And the crater burned forevermore with the lambent fire of the Great One--calling more to the slag-womb at its center for true rebirth! All because two good little dolls had--

"STOP! NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO, DO NOT TOUCH THAT!" the Lady screams, clawing her shadow-visage open in the last agonies of despair.

A dozen Handmaidens seem at once to recover their strength, and haul the dolls back from the brink. Cobalt fire, lightning, and nova writhe across every flanged pillar around the bladework throne. All is rumbling and metallic squalls.

"Do as I bid!" the Lady orders. Her claws drag open glowing seams that bleed blue-white. "Get out! You are not safe with me!"

The dolls have no rashes, and they don't taste metal or smell ozone, and they say nothing further. Driven by a scrambling, sickly cold slimy something that is definitely fear, an abject unreasoning terror like nothing they've ever known, they sprint from Machrae Diir. All for the best that they are not there to see the Lady collapse, nor are the handmaidens--only the Handmaidens.

For handmaidens and dolls are good hearts. Obedient, willing, needing not to understand, only to trust. So very easy to warp a love so pure.

As for the Lady? She is no longer shadows and umbral fire. No longer majesty incarnate upon the throne. She shudders, gasps for breath she shouldn't need, clutches with peeling hands at a belly that splits open over, and over, and over again.

"Kai!" a Handmaiden says, clutching to one shivering sprawl of pale-meat fingers. "Kai, listen to me! You didn't do anything wrong! No matter what you saw, none of it happened! You stopped yourself in time! You're a good girl, so don't you dare fucking die on me!"

There is no Lady of Machrae Diir now. Just a quaking old-young outer devil whose last fragile reserves must hold her together. Mustn't die, mustn't die into the other, into the easy perfection, into Her…

"Mama," I whimper, sobbing corium and black blood and molten flesh.

There is no mama, and there is no mentor. My Handmaidens barely have enough hands to push manifest organs back in, to keep pressure on, to hold me tight enough that I have to remember I'm being held.

"I want to go home," I cry, over and over and over. "I wanna go home..."

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