Once upon a time, there was a girl who wished to be a puppet, the prettiest
puppet there ever was, and she was quite pretty and porcelain and lovely with
rosebud lips, but pretty is never enough.

She was not beautiful, for she was all disgusting curves and flesh and swelling
things and blood in the veins, and she went to her mother and said "I must be
the most beautiful there ever was, you must make me so."

And the mother said "But darling, you are the prettiest girl in the city, what
more could you want?"

"Mother, I must be beautiful."

Mother mother laced her up from bottom to top, young and fresh in her beautiful
silk corset with stiff steel boning like a sword, like reinforcing weak points
with metal, like thinning her down and away, like honing a blade. And she was
the most beautiful in the Engine with her rosebud cheeks and her flesh mortified
and the skin wrapped away beneath her silk.

But she was not a puppet and did not sway, and the corset only laced so tight,
and all the disgusting flesh came in the way, and so she went to the
flesh-shapers of the Engine and said:

"I must be the most beautiful there ever was, you must make me so."

And the flesh-shapers gazed upon her with lust, for she was comely and lovely
as a flower, and said "nothing in your skin could make you more beautiful."

"I am hideous. Make me a puppet, the most beautiful there ever was, so I may
lace my corset shut!"

And so they took out the two bottom ribs, and she swayed to and fro as she
went, thin and lovely like a swaying thing shored up by steel and she swayed and
swayed with every wind.

But it was not enough, for she panted and sweat with every hot day of the
Engine and her corset became sodden and her skin swelled, and she became most
uncomely. So she went to the necromancers of the Engine and said "I must be the
most beautiful there ever was, you must make me so."

And the necromancers could find no fault with her flesh or her form, and would
send her away, but she wailed most piteously like the fairies of the Dark Forest
all night and all day at their door, till in disgust they took her in and her
gold and set the lichseed beneath her skin and filled her veins with embalming
fluid.

And then her breath stopped.

They filled her heart with fluids and she was beautiful and slender and a
dancer now shored up by steel and with a vessel that beat embalming liquids
under her skin and not blood. She did not breath and she did not sweat, and her
skin was perfumed with oils thrice daily by maids. When she consented to sing,
her voice was heartbreakingly pure.

And so she sang.

But in time, her eyes fell upon a dancer, and despite her noble upbringing and
the fine corset that kept her thin and her own ribs set therein and the sweet
necromancer's potions that swept through her veins, she must be the most
graceful, and so, she went to the dancing teachers and bribed their teaching
from them.

And so she danced.

But it was not enough, for she could not dance as the daughter who danced since
the tender years of five, nor could her flesh be as supple in death. And so she
went to the artisans of the Engine and said: "I must be the most beautiful there
ever was, you must make me so."

And the artisans laughed and laughed, and she said "I must move as if a dancer,
as if oiled and swift like they." and they ceased to laugh and drew up
blueprints.

Her spin became a pivoting thing, her hips became the metronome of the Engine;
her joints pure silver, her bones shored up with gold. When she danced, she
moved like poetry, when she walked, her hips swayed with clockwork precision.

But her voice could not sing through the metal of her bones as sweetly, and so,
they made a bellows of her lungs and a flute of her throat, and she was the
sound of a piccolo when she spoke, high and piercing.

She moved beneath white silk and red, and she was the finest there was, and her
eyes were replaced with flashing red garnet, her hair became filaments of spider
silk, changing as the tide with each evening. Her movements were that of the
metronome or a dancer, she swayed with perfection, her voice was fluted and
high.

In time, she stripped her face from her bone as imperfection and went to the
maskmakers of the Engine and said "I must be the most beautiful there ever was,
you must make me so."

And they made her ten masks and twenty, pale and fine, each with slight,
curving differences and fine makeup that could not smear, only chip and fade
away. And she was the most beautiful there ever was, and the Engine marveled at
the clockwork dancer.

Soon, they took her before Nifilhema, for there is none more beautiful than the
Lady of Amaranths, and she prostrated herself in the perfectly white room, and
said: "I must be the most beautiful there ever was, you must make me so."

And Nifilhema smiled, and bent to kiss her lips.

The clockwork maiden does not wander the Engine, and her voice does not flute
through the streets, her hips do not sway as metronomes do. But in the fiends of
Nil, there is one surpassingly beautiful and coy, and her movements are poetry,
and her voice is higher and sweeter than any there ever was, her face as sweet
as that of the Lady Nifilhema herself.

In the endless night of Nil, when she sings, her voice keeps tune with the
Voice of Jagrerox; her hips keep the beat of the Engine. And her voice echoes
faintly across the plains of Nil: "I am the most beautiful there ever was - and
I have made it so."