The Sun Empress wakes, left cheek scraping on tile, shackled to a blue-bloodied, automatic operating table — crown jewel of the mechanised annex of her Grand Inventor. Alchemical flames lick distant and resplendent at the royal apartments, follies of blue and gold dance on the mirrored masks of its half-clockwork chevaliers, broken on the marble courtyard.
“It would be foolish to hurt me, the XIVth Legion will soon surround this palace. You might still join me, I assure you — the pain is soon forgotten,” she says, with gentle arrogance.
The light is eclipsed by an approaching revolutionary. A red ribbon hair-tie falls limply past shadows that shift without due cause, yet refuse to part from her face; the Empress can see only an uncertain glint in her eyes, of a since-passed storm, and, in her hands, the glass-covered hemisphere of a mechanical mind — the Empress’ own crown jewel.
“No— you can’t mean this,” she says, recoiling, “this— mockery, of enlightenment, of progress: our nation’s destiny. The ruin of a precious mind, to make me the last of them?”
“You wouldn’t be the last,” Red Ribbon says, a disarming mainspring of melancholy.
“Of course— I see. You think you’ll make me a puppet, that I’ll wind-up my legions on words you place on the platter of my tongue.” It would be a mistake, a meek and distant voice says, the legions will never outnumber the uprisings she needs now converts them from. Every mask that slips, each half-recognised face, births another revolutionary.
“I’ll bleed to death on this table,” she retorts, “you’ll never hope to achieve what I’ve done.”
Red Ribbon doesn’t speak; she fractures the silence when the mournfully-clutched hemi-brain slips to the floor, spilling ten-thousand brass wheels, springs, and pinions across the floor. Rune-clad glass shards fall into a drain, fizzling with dying light.
She kneels and takes the Empress’ hands, her own trembling, and even this close, the Empress cannot see her sympathy. Does she mean to surrender? To beg the diplomatic method, that preserves her mind and the subtle features of untouched flesh.
Another revolutionary holds tightly the wrist of a forcefully-invited Duchess, unsure if she is rescued or captured, whom the Grand Inventor intended to work this upon personally.
“What? You wish my blessing, to despoil me? There is no artificer amongst you, I’ll—”
“Your Eminence,” Red Ribbon says. The Empress blinks in shock, and there is an audible ticking in the room. How did such respect purpose itself, from a black-guarded traitress?
“Do you recall who first introduced it to you, the clockwork?”
“Introduced? Invented,” she says breathlessly, “I am their creator!” The Empress was an upset heir, presaged into power upon the sudden Arcane Virulence of 1674; the unblemished royal survivor, then executor of the Imperial Retaliation of 1675 against an accused aggressor who provided bountiful material for the creation of IInd, IIIrd, and IVth Legions.
Red Ribbon gives a painful sigh, and holds a soft, warm hand to the Empress’ right cheek till she stops pulling away. “Okay, so when did you invent it?”
“1673,” the Empress says, curt and suspicious, but indulging in the delaying action. The Empress had been a quiet child, then, and lonely. She was artistic, and not bookish, and shared it with nearly no one — nearly. “One day I knew; I was simply destined for more.”
“Do you remember that day, anyone who might have— witnessed your achievement?” she asks, “Perhaps you woke up to someone — not the handmaid, she was— not there.”
“You had a frequent guest, if you recall; of the mechanists’ guild. Where might he be now?”
The Empress’ gaze flicks from broken clockwork, to Red Ribbon’s skirt — tattered, stained with human blood, alchemised spirit, and clockwork grease — to that only in her mind’s eye; a figure, its face obscured, but a cogwheel sigil-rune at its neck. It was— it was— gone.
“I understand if it’s difficult to remember, your Eminence. It was— a long time ago,” Red Ribbon says, running her other hand through the Empress’ hair. It is barely felt, smooth and unnaturally cold, even though Red Ribbon is sweating in the alchemical heat.
She gestures to someone behind her, and is given a silk tissue with a black mark.
“And this, please— do you remember this?”
The Empress looks, truly intentful. She sees it all around them, in the annex, before she cannot help but blink, heavily, as it disforms. It is— nothing, gunpowder or soot. Some few words gather on her lips, and she tries to speak— tries to speak— tries to— to— to—
Her head is jittering, with a lone eye pinned and screwed to her reflection in a discarded, mirrored mask, elegantly engraved and with red ribbon ties. Whenever it becomes clear she feels her mind whirring slower. And she hears it, the ticking, more wretched each time.
Everyone else can hear it too.
Red Ribbon withdraws, slowly, only letting go when the Empress’ shivering hands are too far away to hold. The clockworks should not understand that anything is different, the little that remains of them subsumed with the dual-power of arcane mechanisms.
Everyone else can see it too.
Where newly bloody and machine-marred glass meets bone and long-scarred flesh, where the left-side of the Empress’ face has been torn, and a half-skull that is gone, replaced with a clicking clockwork mind, a glimmering sigil-rune on its side; the prototypical maker’s mark.
Red Ribbon cannot hear her own sobbing over the ticking, and tries to ask one last question as springs pull and gears lock in a vergingly unbearable tightness.
“And me— do you remember me, Marie?”
The Empress tries to—
