Meanwhile: The Doll Maker

What is more potent than a Word is what is unsaid. True secrets rest in silence and blindness, not in the crude matter of word and writing. This was the root of Anthargha's obsession with the void, the yearning in her to reach into the Darkness untouched by light and discover what in her it was. Sitting beneath the vast crystal lens of her observatory, she studied the spaces between stars, looking for those unseen vortices where emptiness sucked in everything around it. As constellations were the ley lines of the sky, she reasoned, then the wells of utter nothing between were another network that influenced the world.

Her origins as Angtaru made others believe her to be cruel, cold and without regard entirely for others, but in truth it was her empathy that eventually drove her away from her home city of Yngoska. It was unusual in her people, who were taught from birth that non-Angtaru were only animals, no better than sheep or cows. She was quite conscious that her work often caused fear and pain in others, and sometimes it bothered her. Neither malicious or hateful, she did not have her people's ironclad disregard for other races. but she was driven beyond compassion by her need to reach out, to understand, to immerse herself in the Between. The suffering it caused became incidental, and the irony was not lost on Anthargha, who realized that her heedless machine rush towards enlightenment was originally spurred by emotion.

When she was only a girl, wide-eyed and careful in her studies, her crèche leaders had taken her to the House of the Doll. It was customary at that age to view the most significant monument in Yngoska; it would be the first time a young Angtaru girl would see her culture acknowledge a thing of importance outside of her own people. In ancient days, the doll-titan Calacbrool had stopped at Yngoska, and the histories tell how it taught Anthargha's predecessors the Cult of Self-Transcendence, taught them the power of science and the weaknesses of the flesh. Then it departed again, and her people eventually created the House of the Doll to commemorate their first and most terrible teacher.

The image of Calacbrool was fifty feet tall, a magnificent and foreboding thing made of polished, gleaming struts of metal, pistons, gears, wheels, and cables. It seemed to hang from nothing, suspended by marionette-like black metal strings as thick as a man's leg, and its face, lolling on the pivot of its metal neck, was covered over by a vast pale mask. The whole of it shifted, twitched and writhed under the demands of its own gears and wheels, and as she'd watched it in wonder, the wide eye holes of its pale mask had aimed themselves down at her, and she'd seen the eyes themselves roll out of the darkness, fixing her for a moment with flat, cold and empty black mirrors.

Anthargha remembered feeling as if her heart was caught between the effigy's tremendous steel fingers. She'd known, rationally, that the idol was just a machine, a facsimile without any driving force but the mechanism that moved it, but she could not escape the feeling that the staring eyes had seen her somehow. Desire was still a new and strange thing beyond the plain satisfaction of ownership, and the Angtaru do not have a word for 'love' in their language. But she would find herself wondering how the expressionless mask would feel under her hands, find herself strangely aching at the geometry of the effigy, find herself hoping, wishing for a single word from it.

There were no dreams for Anthargha. The stone and metal arches of her bedchamber were marked with long, sinuous sigils that bound up the room in silence, and the door would seal when shut, isolating her slumber from the tatters of dreams that floated in the metaphysical air. When she slept, it was a taste of oblivion; black, empty, stillness. But her last thought before she fell into slumber was always the same thing. Whenever she fell asleep, ever after, she would always remember the moment of standing before Calacbrool, caught under the weight of a lifeless gaze and pining for the impossible empty silence there.