The Dollmaker / Season 1, Episode 5
Barbora's Broken Gaze
Mira’s fingers hovered over the porcelain cheek of the doll named Barbora, the air in the restoration room thick with the metallic tang of solvent and the faint, cloying sweetness of old wax. The doll’s face, half-repaired, stared up from the workbench, its one intact eye—a startling blue glass orb—catching the dim light of the single bulb overhead. The other eye, still a jagged socket from a crack she hadn’t yet filled, seemed to pull at her, a void that whispered. Her hand trembled, not from the cold seeping through the baroque palace’s ancient walls, but from the memory of last night’s dream—those hands, not hers, shaping wet clay into a face that screamed silently under the pressure of invisible thumbs. “You’re taking too long with her,” Karolína’s voice sliced through the quiet, sharp and frayed at the edges. She stood in the doorway, her coat still dusted with snow from outside, her thin frame swallowed by the heavy wool. Her eyes, bloodshot and sunken, darted to Barbora, then back to Mira. “The exhibition is in ten weeks. Ten. We can’t linger on one face.” Mira didn’t look up. She adjusted the magnifying loupe over her left eye, focusing on a hairline fracture near Barbora’s temple, the porcelain cool under her gloved fingertips but somehow heavier than it should be....