sagau | gn!reader | divine horror
Exposure to the Creator decays ego into hysteria. The Harbingers are unraveling—each according to their sin.
— Focus: You, Signora, Dottore, Pantalone, Columbina.
— Chorus: Scaramouche, Pierro, Ei, Childe, Arlecchino.
tw: stalking, unstable devotion, cult-ish stuff
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV
It’s the first time she’s been seen in four days. Four days since the banquet.
There are bruises that betray her stride; not because they hurt, no, pain is a petty language, and La Signora outgrew it centuries ago. For her, the bruises are little bells. Each sting is a toll that rings in the back of her teeth, little litanies reminding her what it cost her.
There is one on her arm where pride should have kept the flesh sacred. She does not cradle it. She does not glance down. To look would be to admit that something reached her. And admitting would give the bells the permission to echo—dignity’s sound, when she let it hit the floor.
She holds herself through it, immaculate, until the lace of her headpiece snags the corner of her vision, the place where Scaramouche’s nails tore it. It was re-stitched in haste. A crude work done by a servant’s fear. That tiny error chimes louder, thinner than any bruise could sting.
Still—posture perfect. Spine set straight like doctrine.
At the altar she stops. Your statue looms: mouth closed, hands open. Judgment carved gentle enough to be mistaken, by optimists, for mercy. You do not hold a weapon. Because none are needed.
The stone’s serenity is grace itself: look, look how little effort divinity requires to be terrifying.
She does not offer you relics or such. Instead, she offers you white things the way people offer proof and promises. Cecilias, a silence scrubbed so clean it almost squeaks…
Because grace, to her, is not warmth. It is not being carried out of calamity; it is being shown, once, where the ladder is and then left to climb it on bleeding hands. It is a hand on her lower back reminding her she still has a spine; a finger under her chin forcing her to look up—not down, not ahead—so she can stand upright even when the world would rather see her crawl.
The motion isn’t smooth, one knee cracks softly. Her fingers press into the polished marble like she’s bracing herself against wind. Still, she makes it look effortless. For fifteen minutes, she does not move, even her eyes stay trained on your statue as if it might blink, breathe, tilt its head or correct her posture.
Somewhere between minute seven and eight, an old name surfaces from the marrow and knocks once, twice, insistently. She does not let it in. Names are how the dead win. Names make you kneel at the wrong altar. She keeps stillness like a leash around her grief’s throat.
You step into the chapel like you have always been here and she is merely catching up to the fact. There are no footsteps. No herald. No trumpet of heaven. The air tightens, very slightly, the way it does before glass breaks.
She looks near you, never quite at you, like how one looks at lightning. When she does speak, her voice is quiet, deliberate, and rehearsed too many times.
“Perfection is not a virtue,” she says. “It is a debt.”
She lets the words hang. Her breath remains even because she forces it to.
“I was correct,” she continues. “They come to you with hands full of blood and call it devotion. They mistake their wounds for wisdom. They confuse your silence for love.”
That was meant to be the whole thing. But something interior slips—the bright, red thread she wound around her fury begins to unravel.
“This is… not my habit,” she informs you and herself. “I do not live like this. I do not scratch and slap and shout and let boys goad me into a spectacle.”
“The banquet,” she says. Steady, making it steady. “That doll had the gall to laugh—” her hand lifts, then clamps back down against her skirt “—the doll who thinks he knows what divinity feels like because he was abandoned by what he mistook for it. He smiled. At me. Me.”
Her voice goes a fraction hoarse on the word me. She hears it. Hates it. Calm frays.
“I learned what humiliation looks like under crystal chandeliers,” she says. “It is this: a room of cowards pretending the sound of glass shattering is theatre. He clawed. He cut. I took his hair, his balance, his dignity with the centerpiece. Neither of us reached for weapons or Delusions, only for throats.”
She pauses. Forces herself to be precise.
“It was childish. It was humiliating. It was…beneath me.” Breath. “I am furious.”
She does not apologize for the fury. Only for the inelegant misstep it took.
“Pierro dismissed us,” she adds. “He did not raise his voice. That was worse.” She exhales. “The others will say I am ‘not myself’ since your arrival. That I am strained. That the presence of The One—” a tiny pause, like swallowing something hard— “has distressed me.”
“I am not distressed by you,” she says, clearly. “I am unsettled by them. You are already here, and they behave like children at a shrine—treating you as spectacle, as prize, as mirror. It is insulting.”
Her nails bite her palms, leaving crescents.
“They think I threw a tantrum.”
“I do not throw tantrums,” she says. Her eyes flick up, finally, to where your face would be. “I uphold standards. If I am not exact, then what right do I have to stand in front of you at all?”
There is a small silence that she feels like it’s judgment. She fills it before it can become so.
“That doll,” Signora continues, voice slipping into that cool, contemptuous register she uses to prevent herself from shaking. She doesn’t waste her breath on his name. “He puts the Doctor in the place of an idol. You can hear it in his steps. In his speech. To such an extent that, in his earliest years here, his Inazuman tongue learned to carry a Sumeru accent. He built himself out of someone else’s shadow. That alone is blasphemy enough.”
Her voice sweetens, blade-thin.
“And now the Doctor himself—” She pauses like savoring dessert. “—is failing in the most humiliating way.”
Now she allows herself cruelty. It feels like reclaiming the ground humiliation stole.
“This morning one of the segments stood in the corridor calling a scalpel a ‘little knife’ for twenty minutes. Charming. But only because he is too grown for it to be cute. The original—he mislaid his own name. I accused him of theatre. No.”
That—that is the part she finds funny. Not because it is clever. Because it is beneath him. Because it is happening to him. Because even the man who thought he could dissect the divine is discovering he can still be made small.
“How generous,” she murmurs, soft. “He studied you, studied and studied you. I told him not to. I kept telling all of them. And now, he learns how proximity to divinity does such wonders to… anyone at all.”
“May every syllable he reaches for turn to salt on his tongue.”
In the chapel, something moves: the far door unlatches without sound and relatches again. The footsteps that follow are neat, measured, dipped in arithmetic, antiseptic and arrogance.
She does not turn. She lets him be an example first, a person maybe.
“I was in the vicinity,” Dottore says coolly, stepping into the chapel’s hush. “Monitoring environmental effects. I noticed a sudden… drop in pattern behavior.”
His breath slows. Pupils dilate. He does not blink.
His mouth stops. Not dramatic. Not cinematic. It fails abruptly, stupidly, with the insult of making him look human.
“As the one who studies—“ he tries again, and the second attempt is worse because now, there’s effort.
A gloved hand closes and opens once, an ugly twitch.
Yet, Dottore keeps holding his expression. Too similar to the way the sick hold clarity: white-knuckled, reluctant, and too proud to admit he’s suffering. He forces a laugh so dry it could cut. “Names are vulgar anyway.”
“My condolences to your vocabulary,” Signora says, idly, not even looking his way. “It appears to have frostbite.“
There is no venom in her voice. No hatred. What slips through is only that thin, startling flicker of relief. What it says is: If even the Doctor can be pared down into something nameless for reaching too close, then the universe still runs on rules she recognizes. Ones with teeth. And: Then, the universe is not chaos, only slow, and she has not been clutching at ghosts.
A smile ghosts over his mouth—soft palate, surgical, almost sincere. Not amusement. Not. irony. A tic, maybe. He opens his lips—and then his attention drifts.
“The Eleventh,” he murmurs, “is still outside.”
Silence again, but this one is different. As if he is watching a shadow shift on the other side. As if the world is counting heartbeats now, not syllables.
There is a sound—outside, not in—a breath taken back.
“He hasn’t knocked. Isn’t that interesting?”
You glance toward the door.
Signora does not. “I told him. I told him not to seek you out.” She says. “But he’s a dog with no collar. And now, he’s drooling on sacred thresholds.”
Maybe she’s right. Maybe he’s just worried about her. Maybe she’s right.
She rises. The bruises chime themselves known again; Signora does not flinch. She smooths her skirt with practiced elegance of a woman who’s had to clean up the mess of men. Again. And again. She walks toward the door but doesn’t open it. Simply places her hand on the wood. That’s all. Outside, there is a small, poor scrape of boots pulling back, the tiny retreat of a man who wants to cross, but only wants.
Signora smiles, finally. It is cold. Familiar. “Seems the dog knows the threshold.”
Dottore shrugs. “Does he?”
The air tastes like something unsaid.
He turns back to the candles, watching how still the flames have become. “Bribing guards. Bribing janitors. Bribing children—The House,” he goes on. “He doesn’t even bother to be discreet. Sweet words and sweeter offerings. He’s been trying coins lately. The younger ones like them. They clink.”
“That is the flaw within the boy,” Dottore continues, almost indulgent. “They may be weaker than him, physically, yes. But here—” he taps his temple, lightly, “no. Children are wonderfully adaptive beings. Smarter than men like the Eleventh prefer to assume. Lie once, get a story. Lie twice, gain a lollipop. Lie thrice, and you learn how fast a Harbinger will run across three wings in ten minutes just to catch the echo of a shadow. A clever system. Unsustainable, of course. But clever.”
His fingers twitch faintly, like he’s counting imaginary sugar cubes and headpats.
“Give it a few more weeks and we might have to rely on them for funding.”
“Embarrassing,” Signora murmurs. She doesn't specify if it's for him, the nation, or her.
“Arlecchino, predictably, intervened,” he adds, tone turning drier. “Not because she didn’t find it funny. Because she found it blasphemous. Her words, not mine: Even liars must remember to bow before the divine. It doesn’t mean it stopped, though.”
Your mouth does something minute—too small to be called a smile, large enough to be noticed by two people whose entire lives orbit your reactions.
For a heartbeat, Dottore’s tongue falters again. He blinks once, slowly, hauls the language back into line from wherever it drifted, and stands very, very still.
Signora turns back to you.
“Perfection is not a virtue,” she repeats. “It is the debt for the grace of not being left in the fire. I would rather be turned to ash than make your intervention through Her Majesty look… inefficient.”
“They are not owed you,” Her voice is reverent and low even when she is seething underneath “Not your voice, not your gaze, not even the air that remembers you were here. They were never promised salvation or softness. If you never speak a single word to them, it will still be more than they deserve.”
The composure ruptures, but only in her eyes. The posture never falters. You know what she’s thinking anyway: Damn them.
“I will not pretend I have been at my most… composed these past days,” she allows, carefully. The others will call it strain. I call it clarity. Your presence has made their inadequacy louder. I might have stumbled. But I returned. I returned barefoot. I returned bruised. That is more than most of them can say.”
“You do not owe them a word,” she repeats. Slower, firmer. “And if your silence burns them, then let it.”
“Let them learn to be right.”
And because she cannot bear the rawness of the moment with someone else present, she armors herself with cruelty again.
“Doctor,” she says smoothly, “if your nouns are going to keep drowning, at least have the responsibility to do it where the Sisters can mop. They already have enough to polish.”
He bows his head an insulting millimeter, eyes still on you.
“I’ll drown quietly.” He says.
(Signora will leave after you. Later, in an unused corridor on another floor, she will find him again. He will be standing before a plaque mounted on the wall. IL DO— His palm will be flat against it. His eyes still. She will say, flat and final, “Recover.”)
The chapel inhales what you were and holds its breath.
In the palace corridor, snowlight spills gold across polished stone; the man beneath it is standing precisely at where it can look accidental.
Pantalone glances up just once—no, twice—no, four times—at the sky, then arrests the taboo with a smile and adjusts his cuff as if that’s what he meant to do.
“Your Eminence,” he says, bowing with careful economy. “Exposure remains favorable.” The pocket astrolabe glints; he doesn’t check it in front of you. The restraint costs him more than the motion.
When your shadow passes his shoes, he inhales like a forgiven debtor. Behind you, he allows himself a fifth look at the light, then a sixth, seventh and eighth. The guards behind him pass glances that mean the same thing as betting for the ninth.
The air of Scaramouche’s wing is thick with rules and the quiet of punishments that don’t require witnesses. His door is locked tight and proud of it.
Columbina is there, folded against Scaramouche’s door.
Her shoes are somewhere else. She has been singing the way she always does when she wants walls to listen—long, wordless notes that teach empty space how to hum with her. When you stop, she doesn’t startle; she just tilts her head.
She greets your shadow first, bows her head to it, almost, before daring to lift her face toward you. Deference or shyness; with her, the two drink from the same well.
“Hello,” she says, timid. Then, to you: “I waited. I still am.”
She turns her sadness in her hands like it’s a bird and decides to keep it a little more. She leans toward your leg, “Don’t be mad at him. Some only know how to sing when they're biting.”
“I sang for him. I still am.” She whispers, “but I think he doesn’t want me here.”
She exhales, long and husky. Her spine is crooked against the door, her legs folded in a way that must ache, but her head finds your shoulder and nuzzles there, slow and small, as if polishing you (or herself) to a brighter shine. That’s how you know she doesn’t mind.
“Why didn’t you come? To the banquet. We invited you.” she asks eventually, not accusing, just a mild confusion. “Maybe they wouldn’t have fought.”
A beat. “Perhaps… you were wise.”
She thinks for a moment, then a little spark brightens her voice. “But it was funny when he actually bit her.”
The spark goes out as soon as it arrives; her fingers fold over themselves in her lap, like she's trying to trap her amusement between the folds of her dress. “I don’t want them to fight,” Columbina adds. “Even when it’s silly. Even when it makes the room laugh.”
Inside the locked room, something steps back.
Further down the hall, another set of boots does too.
