It was well after sundown when Tosuli returned to the laboratory at her employer’s request, the dark, moonless sky overhead clear and full of stars. The technician knew storm clouds were possible, in a theoretical sense, but the power wielded by generations of thaumaturges based in the capital of Asarahil meant weather rarely got so out of control as to cause something unsightly as clouds to form over one of their pristine cities. Even outside of city limits where carefully maintained fields produced all the food the Asaric population could ever need, rain came only on a carefully plotted schedule to optimize crop growth.

Tonight, though, Tosuli couldn’t help but feel like the mood called for dramatic thunder and lightning to lash at the windows of the long hall she strode down. She was no stranger to late hours when she and her co-workers got absorbed in a new project, but to be summoned back to the lab after leaving for the day was… strange— especially with the Centennial Exchange two days away.

“Ascendant Itisa?” she called and nearly jumped out of her skin when a shadowy figure loomed suddenly into view around a corner.

Tosuli shrieked then clapped a hand over her mouth in a vain attempt to keep the sound in while her heart threatened to leap out of her chest. “Zero-one!” the woman gasped breathlessly and lowered her hand. “How many times do we have to tell you not to sneak about! You’ve scared a year off me, at least!”

“Apologies, Theorician Tosuli, it was not my intention to ‘sneak’. Ascendant Itisa instructed me to wait here for your arrival.”

While Zero-one spoke in a soothing, masculine tenor, it was not actually a man— or, in fact, alive at all. It was a doll, a humanoid construct she’d helped build herself to assist around the lab.

“Very well, lead on,” Tosuli replied and waved the doll off as her heart-rate finally began to slow after her scare. She wanted to be irritated, but knew it had only been following orders— a doll couldn’t act with malice.

Head bowed in acknowledgment of its new order, the doll turned and forged a path deeper into the laboratory.

Zero-one had been the first project she’d been assigned to after being hired on at the capital’s own doll development facility so Tosuli harbored a certain fondness for it, as well as pride in its elegant design. Standing at nearly seven feet in height, the doll towered over its creator by a good eighteen inches— though that was a fairly standard for flexible, mixed-use dolls like Zero-one that would need to interact both with laity such as herself as well as Asaric Ascendants like her employer. Being a technical prototype developed as a base for a line of dolls released to the public a few years before, Zero-one’s design was far more minimalist than the final product had been. While humanoid in its general construction, the doll’s white cermet casing had not been modeled to directly replicate its creator’s form. Its shoulders were very wide while its waist was extremely narrow, giving its torso a triangular shape, atop which sat a smooth head, featureless but for the eye-lens in the center of its ‘face’.

Tosuli was quite proud of Zero-one’s hands in particular, which had been a passion project of hers during the doll’s development. They sported five fingers and a thumb, giving the doll greater dexterity than a living person, though she was glad they had decided to shorten the arms and legs on the final product. Zero-one’s limbs were so long they gave the doll a gangly sort of look that undercut the grace exuded by its smooth, hyper-precise movements— too smooth to ever be mistaken for a living thing.

They reached the rear of the lab and entered a discreet doorway that was normally kept locked by both mechanical and thaumaturgical means. Now, however, it swung open easily under Zero-one’s hand to reveal the tidy and expansive private laboratory within. “Theorician Tosuli has arrived, Ascendant,” Zero-one announced to the woman waiting for them within.

As per usual, Tosuli couldn’t help the spark of awe that lit in her when she laid eyes on her superior, Ascendant Itisa. Like all Ascendant, she was tall, taller than even Zero-one by nearly a foot, and over a thousand years old without looking a day over thirty. Hypothetically speaking, anyone, even someone like Tosuli, could become Ascendant if they were chosen to be elevated from mortal life and into pristine agelessness if they achieved something great enough in their career— or were sponsored by someone within the Ascendant class. Itisa, however, hailed from the Litari family— a long line of Asaric Ascendants that could trace their genealogy back to the right hand of Divine Asarahil.

She had been guaranteed ascendance the moment she’d been born.

Ever careful of her manners around her superior, Tosuli folded her hands over her stomach and bowed low. “Ascendant Itisa; how may I be of assistance?” While curious, she did not dare ask outright why she had been summoned after working hours directly.

Itisa possessed a cold, stark sort of beauty that contrasted sharply with her warm, golden-brown skin and fair hair, but suited her pale blue eyes perfectly. It was impossible to hold the woman’s gaze long, so the theorician dropped her eyes from the Ascendant’s beautiful face as soon as was polite and focused on a point just past the long, delicate point of her left ear instead.

“I require use of the relic— you will assist me,” Itisa instructed her subordinate in a tone that knew no argument would be offered in response. The thought that someone might disobey any command of hers didn’t even cross the Ascendant’s mind as she rose from where she had been lounging elegantly against the nearest table.

Strictly conditioned from birth, it didn’t occur to Tosuli either, in the same way she knew better than to ask why she had been summoned so late. On receiving her instructions, though, she understood the late hour— the relic hidden in this office was a secret only a handful of people, herself included, knew about. Its continued secrecy, she had been told when she had first been entrusted with the knowledge, was of utmost importance.

“Of course,” Tosuli answered immediately and moved towards the bookcase on the far wall. On either side was a discreet slot in which the necklace pendant each woman wore fit perfectly.

Well, almost perfectly.

The mechanism caught uncharacteristically when Tosuli tried to turn it and she frowned. “Come on,” she muttered and jiggled the pendant key a little to try and get it to work. The secret door wasn’t one she used often, but this was the first time she’d ever struggled to open it before.

“What is the matter?” Itisa asked, slender brows furrowed as she threatened to frown in Tosuli’s direction.

On the verge of breaking out in a sweat at the prospect of irritating the Ascendant, Tosuli tried again. “I’m sorry, the mechanism is— ah! There it goes,” she finished, relieved as the key finally turned and the bookcase slid smoothly out of the way. “Perhaps the door requires some maintenance,” she suggested breathlessly.

Rather than agree, Itisa actually did frown now, though in the direction of the secret chamber rather than Tosuli herself, fortunately. The Ascendant entered first and her assistant followed right on her heels, eager to behold the relic within for the first time in two years.

The relic in question was, in actuality, a doll.

A doll so advanced but so old that the priesthood theorized it had been crafted by Divine Asarahil himself before the Great Schism that had seen the entire world divided into eight spheres of divine influence— one for each Divine and bearing their name in turn. Ascendant Itisa had spent centuries studying her god’s craft and it was largely thanks to her hard work that modern dolls had come so far.

Tosuli had never received the honor of seeing the relic active, but having sufficiently proved her skills to Itisa the Ascendant had allowed her to study its divinely crafted inner workings in order to advance her own craft. All the theorician’s excitement chilled to horror, however, when she entered the room and realized the table on which the relic normally lay was bare.

“Divinity spare me, where is it?” Tosuli gasped, hands shaking as she clutched them tightly before her, eyes darting from the table to the Ascendant before her.

Itisa was deathly still for a long moment, then said, “Fetch Inquisitor Artur immediately.”

“I—”

“Go!”

“So what, precisely, is it I’m looking for?” Artur asked some time later as he stood in the middle of a doll laboratory facing down a clearly displeased Asaric Ascendant. The inquisitor was more than a little displeased himself, having been dragged from his bed in the middle of the night by a pair of fantastical dolls and the young woman standing at the Ascendant’s side.

Dolls came in all shapes and sizes in Asarahil, but the matching set before him were eye-catching even by the standards of those owned by the Ascendants. Even an uneducated observer would never mistake them for the living, despite being modeled after the Ascendant themselves— everything about them was impossibly smooth. Their hair, their delicately painted skin, their movements…watching the way they moved in perfect synchronicity to pour a drink for their mistress where she sat behind an imposing desk only amplified the impression.

One of Itisa’s thin brows twitched subtly and Artur knew he’d allowed too much of his own irritation show in his question. Normally he knew better, but lack of sleep had made him unwary.

“Apologies, Ascendant. I only wish to be of assistance.” The words practically dragged across Artur’s teeth when he spoke them— he’d never been good at dealing with Asarahil’s chosen people. They had so much time on their hands they never felt rushed to do anything at all which could make them grating to deal with if you were someone with a job to do.

Not that he would ever say as much aloud.

Still, while Ascendant rarely showed any concern for the convenience of their inferiors, it was unusual to have one drag an inquisitor out of bed in the middle of the night. Fortunately enough for his ever-fraying patience, Artur didn’t actually have to deal with people like Itisa very often. Whatever crimes they committed went punished (or not) among their own kind with little mind paid to mortal inquisitors.

“Something has gone missing from this laboratory,” Itisa finally explained, folding her long-fingered hands before her, pride apparently assuaged by the inquisitor’s obeisance. “A doll. You will find it and you will bring it back to me before I depart for the Centennial Exchange.”

Artur started. “With all due respect, Ascendant, that’s in two days.”

“I am aware. You will do this anyways, and you will speak to no one of this mission or the existence of the doll you are to retrieve.”

The inquisitor forced himself to take a breath. He could feel a headache coming on and he pressed his thumb to the furrow between his brows in a vain attempt to stave it off. “When did it go missing?” Artur asked, realizing to argue further would not only be futile, but potentially hazardous to his health.

“I do not know.”

“It’s not a doll we work with every day,” the young woman (what had she said her name was when she fetched him? Tosuli?) rushed to add, seeming to have some sympathy for the position he was in. “It’s mostly kept in storage.”

Well, that was something. “Show me where it was stored, then,” he told Tosuli. “I’ll start there.”

“No,” Ascendant Itisa said, tone forbidding as she stared Artur down with cold, dark eyes. “After previous incidents I have begun keeping one of its key components outside of this laboratory. It will not have gotten far. I have summoned you in particular less for your investigative capabilities and more for your other… assets.”

The Ascendant’s eyes left Artur’s face and settled on the large, silvery wings that protruded from his back. The inquisitor was used to holding them close to his shoulders while indoors but even then they were hard to miss.

The man tensed a little as she drew attention to the difference between them, but he wasn’t given a chance to reply before Itisa continued, “Besides your ability to cover more ground, there is a chance he might be somewhere difficult to reach.” She gestured, then, and Tosuli quickly produced a sheet of fine paper, on which was a detailed diagram of a doll built in a man’s likeness… with special notes about the black wings attached to its back.

“You made a doll that looks like an outlander?” Artur asked, mouth dry as he took the drawing and examined it closely. The inner workings of the doll were well beyond his comprehension— even the carefully penned notes in the margins read like gibberish to the man. He’d seen dolls that could fly before— drones that carried messages back and forth across the city, but none of those used an outlander’s feathered wings.

This doll had been designed to pass as a living, breathing member of his own species and Artur had no idea why.

“Go,” Itisa commanded without bothering to answer his question and took back the diagram, clearly not intending to let it leave the laboratory. “Find it before things become inconvenient.”

Mind reeling, Artur bowed and left.