Elise To Koukotsu No Marionette -rj01284416- -

They were not glass. They were liquid mercury, reflecting the world in perfect, terrifying clarity.

Elise tilted her head. The gears in her neck made a sound like a lullaby. "You are not hollow, Father. You are full of a thing you refuse to name."

Can perfection feel?

That night, she dismantled his prized hunting rifle and re-assembled it as a music box. She wound the crank, and instead of a tune, it played the sound of her own opal heart—that low, thrumming hum of want. Aldric listened, entranced. The hum burrowed into his ears, bypassed his mind, and nested in his sternum. Elise to Koukotsu no Marionette -RJ01284416-

And Lord Aldric smiled, empty and blissful, as he became her first puppet.

The moment his skin met the gem, the "Koukotsu" flooded into him like a tidal wave. He saw the universe's birth and its heat death in a single second. He felt every tear Elise had ever catalogued. He felt every imagined grief of every unfinished doll in the workshop.

The workshop of Master Geppetto Velas was a cathedral of silence. Dust motes danced in the slivers of moonlight that bled through the grime-caked windows, illuminating rows of unfinished dolls. Their glass eyes stared into nothing. But on the central workbench, bathed in a pool of violet candlelight, lay her . They were not glass

But he couldn't. So he began to break her rules. He pried open her chest panel while she slept. He touched the opal heart with his bare hands.

She tied it to the ring on her finger.

But Aldric had made a mistake. He had wanted a companion. He had created a mirror. The gears in her neck made a sound like a lullaby

One evening, he confessed his loneliness to her. "I have everything, Elise. Money, art, this house. But I feel nothing. I am hollow."

"No, Father. You must feel it on your own."