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A marionette was no opponent for a god, but her smiling mask gave the distinct impression that an opponent was exactly what she desired. The Princess, tall and menacing and framed by her marble temple, lifted one divine hand.
"Why do you come to me in my domain, puppet?"
The porcelain mask, cracked though it already was, gave no indication of any emotion or change. A scowl drew across the Princess's own face. Surely a thought behind the mask, at least. An intention behind her hidden face.
But the puppet stayed silent, her only response a frigid smile etched into her mask.
"Speak,"
the Princess commanded, her fingers tensing in the air as she rooted in the void of the marionette's mind. At first it was nothing, nothing but a mass of color and texture. Black, red, gray. Sharp, and static — so much static.
She focused her efforts on the twisted shapes of thought within the void — strings. Something else, something more physical, creaked across the puppet's face. Her voice vibrated against the grasp on her thoughts.
"Are you afraid? Don't worry. It's natural to be afraid."
The mocking lilt of the marionette's voice wasn't lost on the towering Princess. A shot of something frustrated, something disgraced, flicked through her veins.
Her veins. She was not meant to have such physicality. What kind of cruel trickery was this? Her glare flitted to the ever-smiling ghost floating in front of her, boring through its own eyes with an intensity that made its twisting thoughts flinch and freeze.
Something changed in the background static of the towering woman's existence. Something moved, grew. The Princess's own face behind her mask blinked, listening for the telltale buzz of a body and its functions.
It started with the beat of a heart. The towering goddess flinched.
Then the rush of blood, kidneys, a stomach. The draw of breath into lungs. The static of long-dormant nerves with no sensation to deliver. A shame, to leave a body with such potential without the knowledge of how to use it.
The Princess brought her hands — vicariously, at least — to the very end of the web of dead nerves before her. Nothing but a single touch. That would be all they needed to reignite. Her fingers ghosted across the edges of unused fibers, and the body they belonged to went tense with a sharp intake of breath.
"You would dare defile my form with the shape of a body?"
She smiled behind her mask at the woman's words, letting out a buzzing hum with her own doll-like voice. It came out muffled from behind the porcelain mask.
"But you started it! You tried to pull my thoughts out of my head!"
It knew she had felt for its thoughts? Had the puppet felt her divine hands within her mind, sifting between the layers of texture within? How?
The goddess squinted down at her porcelain-faced adversary. A shock of somehow numb and painful feeling bloomed across the apparent existence of her nerves. The shape of a ribcage blossomed within her chest, caging in the expansion of her all-too physical lungs.
"Fine. Make your play. Defile my shape with your static."
She took a step forward, once again extending a hand toward the marionette.
"But you are not the only one here with the power to change things."
Her efforts materialize within the mind of her defiler, grasping at the half-unwound textures of frantic thoughts and ideas and the incessant, buzzing static of a ghost left behind.
Something heavy, something weighted, something veiled in a desperate glove of escape. A cage formed of scrounged-up fabrics holding a laborious something away from the outer shell of the puppet she'd made of herself. A container made to confine something abandoned. As the Princess's divine hand brushed against its surface, the marionette belonging to that center went tense, rigid. A voice, more frantic now than playful, scraped out from behind the mask.
"Don't touch that!"
The Princess's own form went rigid, too, at the new sensation of something tugging at her nerves. Feeling screamed across the lengths of her body, severing nerve after nerve after nerve only to stitch their ends back together and break them apart all over again. The tension created by unfamiliar sensation tore her hand away from the puppet's mind.
Finally, the burning weight pressing against her memories receded. At the very least, the Princess still had tearing at the fibers of the goddess's body to fall back on in the case of an emergency. Texture, left once again untouched by the empty spaces around it, closed around the matter of her center memories, and the thought of the time she had spent alone in her own basement receded once more behind the tide of her greater existence. Her own nerves tied themselves around the invading thought. The goddess didn't seem fond of things like nerves, so perhaps she would leave the mind alone if it filled itself with nerves instead.
"I am what I am,"
the puppet huffed from behind her mask, her voice whining against the sterile air of the temple.
"Stop trying to change it."
"As soon as you stop doing the same to me."
"You started it!"
Again, a divine hand invaded the spaces of her mind.
The Princess, barely holding back the boiling fury behind her eyes, plunged her existence into the mind of the marionette again. This time, though, the surfaces of her skin — since when did her body properly boast skin? — burned against the edges of something else physical. A shock, painfully real, travelled down the space that her divine arm would have been.
Or, perhaps it was? How had the space of her almost metaphorical hand reacted at all to the touch of something physical? But, looking down, she discovered only her actual, physical arm in the space where her divine existence should have only been in thought. When had she moved her actual body? When had she brought forward her hand, instead of her shape?
"You…"
Her gaze, more burning than ever before, turned on the porcelain mask of the puppet. Its surface bore another crack than it had started with.
"You worm! You defiler! What have you done to my divinity?"
At the goddess's words, the puppet herself recoiled. The booming voice rattled against the unwound threads of her own thoughts, her mind pulled away from itself by invading hands in futile pursuit of control. Fabrics slipped away from themselves, tearing and unwinding from around the cage concealing her memory from herself. Behind the mask, teeth gritted and eyes watered and a searing sting spread across the backside of the porcelain.
A crack echoed against every marble wall of the temple one by one.
"What have I done to you? You've stolen my strings and you just won't give them back!"
The puppet brought a hand to her crumbling mask, her gloved fingers digging into its edges. They cut and stung against her hands and she pulled the mask down, and the stagnant air of the temple had no time to meet the surfaces of her face before the static of her mind expanded and enveloped both Princesses.
A deluded mind and a forgotten body. They would both remain here forever.