Cedric barricaded the nursery doors with a dozen soup, his usually impeccable uniform splattered with temporally unstable pea soup.
"Right. New rule: No dolls allowed."
Whiskerton paced the room, tail thrashing.
"Too late. Look."
The stuffed animals had begun unstuffing themselves, cotton retreating into seams, button eyes clicking as they rolled backward into the fabric.
Evangeline watched, fascinated, as her favorite plush duck unquacked itself into nonexistence.
Then the first porcelain hand punched through the wardrobe door.
Cedric grabbed a serving ladle.
"Why is it always dolls?!"
….
The prophet knelt in the shattered clocktower, oil-slick fingers reassembling gears with desperate precision.
"We need an anchor. Something the Empress can't unmake."
Selphina kicked aside a broken doll torso.
"Got any unbreakable ideas, cog-boy?"
"One." His brass eye focused on the distant nursery window where Evangeline's golden mark thump like a heartbeat.
"But it requires stealing from time itself."
Seraphina's cutlass flashed.
"Do it."
Gears screamed as the prophet rewind his own left arm, revealing hollow bones filled with swirling hourglass sand.
"This will hurt the child."
The Duchess' fan snapped shut.
"How much?"
"Either a little now... or everything later."
….
The dolls came in waves.
First wave.
Porcelain aristocrats with needle teeth.
Second wave.
Ragdolls stitched from forgotten memories.
Third wave.
Something that looked suspiciously like a possessed teddy bear.
Cedric fought with a soup ladle in one hand and a flaming pudding in the other.
"Sir Loin! Flank the left!"
The meatball knight staggered valiantly forward, only to be unfried back into raw mince.
"Damn." Cedric retreated up the staircase, now unwinding itself step by step. "New plan! Theoretical siege tactics!"
…..
"FASCINATING," Lucien's notes read as Dante's hair phased in and out of existence. "SENTIENT CARBOHYDRATES EXIST IN ALL TIMELINES SIMULTANEOUSLY."
The hair currently occupied.
Present.
Braiding itself into a temporal paradox.
Yesterday.
Stealing the Duke's favorite clothes.
Tomorrow.
Already negotiating better working conditions.
"WE DEMAND TIME-AND-A-HALF FOR PARADOX LABOR," it spelled across three centuries.
Lucien, now with four eyebrows of varying ages, nodded frantically.
…..
The Clockwork Prophet's arm deteriorated as golden sand swirled around Evangeline, forming a hourglass taller than the castle towers.
"Hold her!"
The Duchess pinned the screaming child's left arm. Seraphina the right. Selphina, in a moment of shocking tenderness cradled Evangeline's head.
The prophet spoke the first law of time.
"What is given... must first be taken."
Evangeline's mark shattered,
—and the Laughing Empress screamed across eternity.