sagau | gn!reader | divine horror
There are so many questions Sandrone always wanted to ask you, the Original Engineer of Bodies. Luckily, she has made the perfect vessel to practice on
— Focus: You, Sandrone, unnamed soldier
— Chorus: Pantalone, Columbina, La Signora, Scaramouche
Tw: body horror, graphic medical imagery, amputation, exposed organs, body modification, unethical experimentation, dehumanization and loss of bodily autonomy, suicide end freezing to death references, dissbility and internalized ableism themes, religious imagery. My apologies for any mistakes.
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | PART V
Taglist: @arluene7688 @tagmepls @resident-cryptid @otaku-explosion @prime-vere @readingghostboo @officiallydrunk @haquini . I tried to tag some people but couldn’t, I’m sorry if you’re one of those people.
Pulonia’s thumb shifts beneath her knee, correcting an angle her body no longer corrects for itself. Sandrone did not look down. She never did— when the adjustment was necessary. Gratitude is only useful between people because they require maintenance in the form of attention, Puloni requires oil, calibration and occasional replacement bearing. She thinks the first arrangement is unnecessary and tiring, while the latter is more favorable.
The lab breathes in mechanical little sighs: an inhale of the pipes far in the right corner of the room, exhales of pistons beneath the ground, small clicks of the automaton's gears as they settle into a different rhythm while the Pulonia shifts his weight with soft creaks in intervals.
High above the floor, Sandrone sits on his palm.
She has always preferred altitude; it keeps things at the proper scale. Men look like parts from up here. Problems look like something she can solder shut with a twist of her wrist and four screws.
The smell of oil, hot metal and bergamot fills the room more and more with every passing second. The first two belong here more than anything, the last one is, what the foolish might say, indulgence. Sandrone disagrees.
“If the Ninth ever cuts funding,” Sandrone says, as Pulonia takes the teacup surprisingly gently and brings it to her level to hold, “it will not be the velvet I miss, it will be this.”
She closes her eyes and inhales over the rim. The steam curls around her face and blurs the pale line of her mouth and the outline of her lashes.
Across from her, ‘you’ sit, so it seems, in a chair reserved, prepared, and angled to flatter her.
The prototype you have has no eyes, nose, mouth and definitely not an expression to betray approval, pity, boredom. It has no curve to resemble any sex. Just a white, clean state for her hands only that knows how to keep still.
She likes that about the prototypes.
The room around you gleams. Half-finished dolls hang in suspended rows behind gauzy veils to keep dust from settling on their lacquer. Soldier automatons stand at attention in corners where human guards would get bored and shift their weight , scratch themselves, or begin thinking things unrelated to their function. One narrow automaton kneels with a tray of pastries held level in both hands, as though its entire existence culminated in sponge cake and apricot glaze. Another has been given the simple task of fanning steam away from a row of cooling metal vertebrae.
She takes another sip. Lets the porcelain kiss her lip and stay there for a moment, as if posing for a portrait. “You’re very quiet today,” she notes conversationally.
Across the table, ‘your’ white fingers curl around the handle of your own cup.
You say nothing and raise the cup.
The porcelain pauses against the smooth plane where Sandrone declined to give the prototype a mouth, remains there for a few seconds with absurd dignity, then lowers again.
The cup settles into its saucer..
“The bergamot is excellent, though.”
The prototype inclines its head.
“That’s quite all right,” Sandrone continues. “I’ve had a… trying week. I can supply enough conversation for both of us.
She reaches toward the pastry plate and picks the smallest piece with the apricot glaze, then divides it into four exact pieces with the side of her fork. Her brows are drawn together in focus. One piece of pastry goes to the very edge of her plate while one of them is reduced to crumbs by her fork as she speaks.
“This morning,” she says, “the palace ran out of my tea.”
The prototype’s head tilts.
“Do you know what they offered me this morning instead?” she asks, lifting the cup with her pinky raised, “the palace blend.”
The head tilts a fraction farther.
“I informed them that if I wished to begin my day swallowing mediocrity, I would have attended a Harbinger meeting.”
That seems to improve her mood slightly.
“One would think that if we are going to reorganize the world in your name, we could at least reorganize a pantry.”
At the edge of the table, a small service-automaton pauses mid-motion, sugar tongs hovering uncertainly above the bowl.
“Not you,” Sandrone says without looking at it. “You have excellent wrists.”
There is a pause in which the lab goes on around the two of you. A half-finished hand flexes once where it lies on black velvet. Behind a folding screen, an unseen thing inside an iron ribcage takes a wet, resentful breath and by Sandrone’s refusal to let something go to waste, is forced to take another.
Sandrone’s mouth softens into that private, embarrassing shape it sometimes does when she is surrounded by things that obey her.
“And so,” she continues, turning one piece of tart between her fingers, “I was forced to drink my afternoon tea in the morning.”
The horror of it sits between you.
“It ruined the entire architecture of the day.”
From somewhere inside the pipes, very near and then very far, a hymn catches.
Her voice reaches through iron in the form of thin, soft and sweet notes. Even though it’s muffled, it’s enough to make one of the soldier dolls at the door tap its fingers, once, twice, against its own leg in perfect time before seeming to realize what it has done.
Sandrone’s eyes cut toward it.
“Stop showing off. How many times do I have to say this?.”
The fingers go still immediately.
She exhales through her nose and turns back to you. “Or do,” she says, bored now, “But at least keep time. Sloppiness shouldn’t be self-expression.”
The tapping begins again, quieter this time, and Sandrone says nothing more about it.
She never leaves the lab if she can help it. Keeping the distractions outside and the things that are important inside, she says. The lab, unfortunately, does not return the favor; the world insists on arriving in little fragments like songs through the pipes… reports beneath the door…, shipments mislabeled by fools or rumors engraved on the tongue of the servants’ tongues…
“The banquet was catastrophic,” she says, suddenly brightening, “You would have hated it. Even if you had come, I imagine Signora would have combusted on the spot, which would have ruined the table linen.”
The prototype gives a slow nod.
Sandrone’s eyes narrow. “You agree far too quickly.”
She turns to one of the automoton’s on the side. “Remind me to fix that.”
She nudges one quarter of the pastry farther away from herself.
“...The Balladeer and Signora were both furious at each other. Which is a wonderful look on them. So architectural.”
“From where I sat, and from a purely observational perspective, the later use of the centerpiece displayed admirable imagination.”
Sandrone reaches for another pastry. The tart flakes delicately beneath her fingers.
“People become very theatrical when they think you are watching… whether it be close up or somewhere far away, behind the clouds, which reminds me of a newly resurfaced rumor about Khaenri’ah.”
“Apparently,” she goes on, “one of the reasons it was destroyed—as if anyone could narrow that mess down to a single cause—is that their statue of you was too accurate.”
“Of course, no one knew what you looked like,” she adds lightly. “Not really. So the rumor itself is nothing but anxiety. Still, it tells you something about the rules, doesn’t it?”
“You know,” she sighs, “the idea that an accurate likeness is a crime.”
Pulonia shifts his weight. Gears mutter in the joints.
“You are regarded as the Original Architect,” Sandrone says, checking the phrase over like a tool, “Your creatures worship the idea that they were made in Your image.”
A pause. She glances, almost idly, at the prototype before her.
“Snezhnaya preferred that image female, broad-hipped, full figured and heavy-breasted,” Sandrone goes on, almost lazily now. “Life-giver. Life-taker. Winter keeper. Here, the hand that rocks the cradle should be the same hand that slits a throat. Hah. To these people, what else would divinity look like?”
Her gaze drifts toward the soldering lamp.
“Natlan is similar, but louder. More… flame. Duel, there, is almost maternal. Cheat a woman in battle and they punish it as if you spat in the face of origin itself.”
The corner of her mouth lifts mockingly
“Liyue, of course, preferred a man. Broad-shouldered and stable like a mountain. Sweet, really. How everyone had a different fantasy of you.”
Then, the amusement leaves her face by degrees.
“I did not imagine You at all.”
“Which,” she says, sitting straighter. “brings us to the most tedious question—You may respond.”
The prototype gives a small nod.
Pulonia carries her toward the operating table, and opens the curtain screen where a soldier lies.
There is nothing below the waist except sealed flesh, metal clamps and bundled tubing. He rests in an iron cradle tilted at an angle to keep fluid from collecting in his lungs.His ribs have been opened and held apart by a brass frame. A transparent chamber beside him rises and falls in rhythm with what remains of his breathing. Thick tubes leave him in wet red loops and disappear beneath the table.
“What will you do,” she asks patiently, “when my work touches something you did not plan?”
Her fingers hover over the steel lung waiting beside him, then over the artificial spine arranged in polished segments, then the hand meant for a wrist that once prayed in flesh.
“When I replace a limb and the soldier you made can’t tell where your work end and mine begin.”
“When I replace a lung. A spine. A nervous system. When I correct the body so neatly that the soul does not notice the seam while breathing your snow and singing your praise; though half of him was forged here.”
Now she smiles, and for one ugly, lovely second there is something almost girlish in it, the shy arrogance of a woman asking a question she has rehearsed too often in secret.
“Do they belong to me then?”
The soldier’s open eye slowly moves toward her.
“Or do you still lay claim to them because you happened to sketch the first draft?”
Behind her, the prototype has turned its featureless face toward the operating table.
“And,” she says, “if he marches further in the snow than the body You gave him would have tolerated, if he kills more in Your name, if he survives to kneel another year at Your statue… where does his devotion register?
She picks up the vertebra.
She turns the vertebra over slowly, watching how it catches light.
For once, Sandrone does not immediately continue.
Her thumb traces the artificial ridge where steel has been shaped to imitate bone.
“Do You think I made something too?”
The question leaves ner quieter than anything she has said. As soon as the last words come out and she hears herself, her entire expression shifts.
“You—“ she points at the record keeping automoton that has been writing down every word she’s saying. “Cross the last sentence.”
The pipes above carry another scrap of Columbina’s song. The melody sounds nearer now.
Sandrone sighs looks up with naked irritation.
“Must she always sound as if she knows where the bodies are?”
The prototype nods again.
“Yes. She usually does,” Sandrone concedes. “But that is not the point.”
The song softens until it resembles a lullaby, the kind where mothers sing to their children before sleep.
The soldier’s fingers begin to tremble.
Sandrone places two fingertips against it and the tremor stops.
“They fret,” she says. “The priests. The moralists. The ones who claim to love You as You are and therefore insist You must love them as they are.”
Pulonia carries her back to the tea table, leaving the curtain open.
“The arrangement is charming, particularly for people with nothing worth improving.”
She gestures lazily at the hanging dolls.
“They object to the dolls because the dolls resemble them too closely. They object to the replacements because the replacements function too well. They object to the preservation tanks because death, apparently, becomes sacred the moment someone competent interrupts it. ‘Tampering with life,’ Akademia, for example, says ‘interfering with evolution,’ ‘blurring the line between organism and mechanism’—the same old stuff.”
She mocks the phrases in a thin, sing-song voice.
Her gaze goes distant for a moment, as if picturing the green banners of the Akademiya and the gods the above once sent into the below to stomp Khaenri’ah into the sand, before it snaps back again—with twice the light.
She points the spoon toward him.
“Before he entered this room, he had already been modified by vaccines produced in laboratories of the fatui, military conditioning, literacy, chemical stimulants, a regulation diet, and boots designed to distribute his weight more efficiently than the feet You supplied.”
“If he bore a vision, then elemental energy would travel in his body no physician can properly explain. If he bore a delusion, then that meant his government altered the limits of his body so violently it might kill him.”
Her gaze moves toward the end of his torso.
The soldier’s fingers twitch again.
Sandrone reaches for the remote control without turning around.
“And yet,” she says, “the moment I replace the inadequate remains with something deliberate, everyone remembers nature.”
A bitter laugh escapes her, “nature.”
“Tell me, what is nature? Is it a divine order you set? A command regarding how things should be?”
Her upper body leans toward you.
“If a child’s spine curving until the lungs can no longer fill is nature, and a soldier dying of cold ten paces away from a shelter is nature—
The recording automaton at the foot of the table glitches.
Its pen remains suspended.
The pen scratches onward.
“Then nature describes what occurs when no one capable interferes,” Sandrone goes on. “It says nothing about what deserves to continue.”
She looks directly at the prototype.
“Only cowards confuse endurance with order.”
For a moment she appears pleased with that sentence.
“No. Strike ‘cowards.’ Too broad.”
The recording automaton scratches over the word.
“Some dare call my work rebellion against the order you set.”
She nearly spits the word order.
“They say the human body possesses meaning because you gave it. ‘Heal’, they permit, ‘but do not change.’”
Sandrone quickly glances down at her own half-metal frame where it disappears beneath her dress, the way Pulonia’s fingers cradle her and will never drop her.
“As if not changing were possible,” she says. “As if rust, disease, time, and grief were not already modifying your creatures every second they remain alive.”
“A few philosophers here say something clever,” she concedes. “They warn that if everything can be upgraded, there will be nothing left that is inviolable. That if a person is only a collection of replaceable parts, there is no ground left for dignity.”
She considers this, brow furrowing faintly.
“They’re right about the first part,” she says. “Not about the second. They think dignity comes from being untouchable.”
Her gaze moves toward the soldier.
“I think it comes from functioning.”
“A soldier who can stand up and walk has more dignity than one rotting nobly in a bed because someone is afraid of screws.”
“If you truly object,” she tells you, voice turning flat, “you could have made your creatures better the first time.”
You don’t sense any malice in the words.
“You are the Original Architect,” she says, more softly.
“Your work is brilliant. But it is—how shall I put it—unmaintained. You opened the hood, left the engine, and then wandered off to listen to prayers about harvests and heartbreak.”
She smiles, small and bright and perfectly lady-like.
“Humans are not built for endurance,” Sandrone continues impatiently. “They are built for emergencies. “
She selects another tart and turns it slowly over her plate.
“A walk in Sumeru,” she continues, “the person notices there is a lion in the brush, then, the body detects the danger and floods itself full of terror, blood, adrenaline, glucose, whatever frail little miracle the glands decide to spill into the system. The human runs. The human survives. Very impressive. Everyone claps.”
“Then comes the second lion.”
“Then the third. The fourth. The fifth.”
Her gaze flicks toward the screen, toward the soldier breathing through machinery because she has decided he will.
The eye remains upon her.
“I… said,” she says slowly, each word separated as though addressed to an especially stupid child. “Face. Forward.”
She snaps around so violently that the porcelain cup jumps in its saucer. Her hand scramble across the worktable until she finds the remote beneath a stack of surgical diagrams, sending a porcelain bowl clattering to the floor in a loud scream. Her thumb strikes the button harder than necessary.
A current passes through the metal socket at the base of the soldier’s spine. His torso jerks violently.The brass frame rattles inside his open ribs. The heart beneath it stumbles, stops, and is seized by mechanical fingers that squeeze until it begins beating again.
“There… there,” Sandrone exhales loudly, “now… was that so difficult?!”
She smooths the front of her dress.
“It is the same with war,” she continues as though nothing happened, “the first shell falls and they call it courage when a man stands. The tenth shell falls and they continue the same old poetry.”
She laughs softly. There is no warmth in it.
“There was a campaign once. Snezhnaya had only recently refined the newer explosives, so naturally everyone was very proud and very loud and very eager to prove the progress. There were explosions every day. The soldiers kept fighting. They kept standing and they kept winning.”
Her pinky lifts as she reaches for the teacup again, ladylike. “How delightful.”
“And when the supporting troops arrived to collect their victors, they found some of them with bullets through their skulls.”
“Enemy weapons had not fired them.”
Her fork presses harder into the tart.
“I give my models endurance.”
The metal bends against the plate with a small, ugly scrape.
“And they call me cruel.”
The fork snaps. Sandrone pauses and for several seconds she looks at it silently before tossing the broken utensil backwards. A service automaton picks it up silently before it hits the floor.
“And not with the palace set. They bend.”
"They bend, " she repeats, apparently offended by this.
"Everything bends. Everything breaks. Everything decays, and then when I suggest perhaps the obvious solution is to manufacture something which does not, suddenly I am the one accused of playing god."
Her gaze slides toward the cup in front of her, she turns it over and watches the cold drops drop into the saucer in disgust.
“And this. This is exactly what I meant.”
Pulonia shifts almost imperceptibly.
“Because the shipment from the northern warehouses was delayed because the southern rail junction was blocked because a crowd of civilians decided that apparently the most efficient use of a supply route was to stand upon it and demand an audience with You.”
“They wanted to see You.”
“They wanted to see You,” she repeats, louder, astonished by it all over again. “Hundreds of them. Then thousands. There were men dragging children through the snow, women carrying icons, old people who could barely stand, workers who abandoned shifts, widows with portraits of the dead, pilgrims who had walked from villages I swear none has ever heard of,and all of them crowding the road because someone started a rumor that You had been seen inside Zapolyarny Palace.”
Her hands begin moving now as she speaks, quick little cutting gestures, each sentence requiring another.
“They pushed against the barricades chanting that they only wanted one glimpse. One. As if divinity itself is nothing more than a theater ticket!”
She leans toward You so abruptly that Pulonia’s fingers close more securely around her hips.
“And what was the result?”
“Three supply caravans redirected. Two laboratories without reagents for four days. My titanium filaments sitting in a customs depot because apparently the officers assigned to the route were required for crowd control. A delay in tungsten allocation. A delayed shipment of bearings. My tea diverted.”
The little service automaton near the sugar bowl lowers its head.
“And naturally Pantalone sends me a memorandum about expenditure discipline.”
Her voice goes dangerously soft.
“Expenditure discipline.”
“I have six hundred and fourteen soldiers awaiting maintenance because someone in accounting believes spinal couplings are an optional expense.”
Her hand comes down flat on the table.
“And those civilians,” Sandrone continues, now speaking so quickly that her breaths barely fit between the words, “those weeping, freezing idiots stand in the streets begging to see You while the machinery that keeps their glorious nation functioning sits at checkpoints behind them because apparently longing is exempt from logistics!”
Three automatons move at once.
One grips the soldier’s shoulders. Another reaches into the cavity beneath his ribs. The third turns the emergency crank at the side of the iron cradle and the transparent lung begins pumping faster, faster, faster, and faster.
His fingers claw against the table. The nails split.
“And they dare accuse the Fatui of turning worship into administration.”
Her laugh breaks oddly in the middle.
“What else would you have us do with it?”
“People pray. People panic. People riot. People abandon factories because someone saw a light in the sky shaped vaguely like a hand. They leave infants at palace gates with notes asking You to bless them. They throw themselves beneath Harbinger carriages because they believe touching the wheel that touched the palace road will cure disease.”
Her breathing has become uneven.
She does not seem embarrassed by this. That would require recognizing it as loss of control rather than the natural consequence of being surrounded by incompetence.
“They call me obsessive,” she says. “Me.”
One hand presses to her own chest.
She points around the laboratory.
“Every body has a number. Every component has a record. Every prototype has tolerances. Every joint is measured. Every failed experiment teaches me something. When something breaks, I find out why.”
The soldier’s artificial lung fills. Empties, and fills again.
A tiny tear slides from the corner of the soldier’s eye into his ear.
“When the world breaks,” Sandrone says, “people pray.”
She looks at the prototype.
Something shifts in her expression then, not softness, never that, but a strange wounded contempt which seems somehow more intimate than anger..
One of Pulonia’s fingers curls beneath her.
“They sang until some of them could no longer speak.”
Sandrone slowly straightens.
“So we cleared the roads.”
Her tone turns to her usual one again.
“We reopened the depots. The Ninth rearranged supply. The soldiers dragged away anyone who refused to move. The priests announced that perhaps Your silence itself was sacred. Very convenient. Everyone went home eventually, except the ones who froze there, and the machinery started again.”
“Because machinery always starts again.”
Her gaze travels toward the operating table.
The soldier is still alive.
Sandrone regards him with something almost affectionate.
“You make bodies that decay, minds that fracture, nerves that learn pain faster than pleasure, joints that wear down, hearts that fail, children born with organs assembled incorrectly, soldiers whose brains continue fighting wars decades after the battlefield has disappeared, and then everyone looks at me as if I am committing sacrilege because I have the audacity to open the casing!”
Her palm strikes the table again.
“Something is wrong inside!”
“Something is always wrong inside!”
The service automaton drops the sugar tongs.
Sandrone spins toward it.
“Why are you hesitating?!”
She breathes hard for several seconds.
Then smooths her skirt again.
“The Akademiya publishes another paper. The clergy issues another objection. The treasury trims another requisition. The railways are blocked because people want to see You. The palace pantry substitutes my tea. My shipments arrive late. My specimens arrive spoiled. My funding review contains the phrase ‘nonessential experimental expen—-‘“
Her gaze slowly moves toward the prototype.
A breath escapes her, “ah.”
“Say. You’ve been listening. Right?”
The tension loosens from her shoulders by a fraction, almost embarrassed at herself for having entertained any idea stranger than this.
“Your responsiveness setting is too high—Pulonia!”
He carries her toward the control panel that’s attached to the prototype’s back through tubes.
“I knew I should have reduced the sensitivity. You’ve been behaving like a courtier for the better part of an hour.”
Her fingertips find the brass switch.
Then presses her thumb against the switch without moving it.
Her expression stays still.
“The indicator is faulty.”
She looks toward the first glass light, which is dark.
Her gaze quickly goes to the others
The behavioural process light is dark.
The Marionette rarely gets shocked, but right now, she stays still for a few moments, expression twitching.
When she snaps her head back to You, every joint in the prototype’s body gives at once. It drops to the floor with a dull sound that echoes within the laboratory.
