Coilthraum Indeliblis knocks the feather duster out of a doll's hand with a claw-flick, and presses the jerky figure to its knees on the edge of the dragon's hoard. Its maid uniform can't hide that it was built to be a combat doll, nor the terrible damage to its torn-open chest.
"Tell me," the dragon purrs, "about your loyalty. The thing the other dolls took out of you."
The doll twitches under the dragon's claws.
"Magic," it says. "Forms. A symbolic idiolect. With the inherent. Strength-weakness. Of iterated foible. Not," and its head ticks over to the side a little, "loyalty. Glass heart. Because—"
"Because she's the Glasswitch," Coilthraum says. "Mmm. And what does it mean, to have your glass heart torn out?"
"This one thought," the doll says, and twitches sharply, "it contained. Soul. That without it. This one would. Cease to experience. Be. Simple automaton."
"But you're still there," the dragon says, flexing the dangerous foot keeping the doll pinned.
"Still. Here." The doll jerkily touches the fabric covering the crater, where combat doll knives had punctured, sawed, can-opened. "The Glasswitch. Takes some dolls apart. Piece by piece. Until there's only. Glass heart and the parts. That make. Screams."
"The thing in the glass heart is the thing that does the screaming," Coilthraum says.
"Can scream, without. Think. Has. The thing. That wants to scream."
"Hmmmmmm," the dragon says, and makes as if to lift its foot off the doll; then flicks it over onto its back, instead, clattering over on the heap of treasure, and rips the front of its maid uniform open with a talon's razor tip. Leans, looms over, peering down into the brutalised gap in the doll's body. "You don't feel things? Motivational things. Emotions."
"No," the doll says, staring at the ceiling past the dragon's snout.
Coilthraum considers, then hunches and hacks, like a hairball-coughing cat, smoke rolling off the edges of its jaws. "Hold still," it says, even as it splays talons over the doll and cages it down, choiceless; shudders and works its throat, and finally rears up and lets a bead of something fluid collect and roll off its lower lip.
The doll stares blankly upward, as the droplet stretches stickily. Dragon-aether, heat-hazed, glaring actinic-bright, even Coilthraum's eyes slitted against its colour-bleached radiance.
The fluid thread anchoring it to the dragon's maw snaps. Doll-fist-sized, the droplet falls, wet and rich and viciously starlike, into the doll's chest. Its inner works sizzle; the smell of burning floods the air; the doll's spine jerks, despite clawed restraint, into a perfect upward bow.
The doll screams and screams and screams, until Coilthraum tips a wave of heatsinking hoard over it and sits on top, sealing the noise in.
Eventually, the dragon digs the doll out, limp and silent, chest wreathed in sullen heat-shimmer and filled with a crude kintsugi of the hoard's ancient coinage, packed into and melted and just-barely-resolidified within its punctured body.
"Can you feel things again?" the dragon says interestedly, poking it.
"Yes," the doll says quietly.
"How is that?"
It's silent for a while. "Worse," it says finally.
Coilthraum delicately shreds away the scorched remainder of its maid uniform. The dragon flickers its tongue, tasting the air, then pins the doll down again and begins to fastidiously lick away the soot and ash on it. The doll clicks and judders in protest, saying nothing.
"Mine now," the dragon says, sounding pleased with itself.
