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One day, the world would be cleansed. It would not be the gentle cleansing of soap and water, not the slow, inexorable progress of entropy that lead to the heat death of the universe. Agnes would not live to see the heat death of the universe (she hoped she would not; such a thing would mean her failure), and the people who thought that sanctification could be achieved by any means short of devastation were so limited in their perspectives that she could not help but pity them. They were part of the problem, little blindly trusting lambs, but she pitied them.
She was the harbinger of the great reckoning that was to come, the means by which it would be brought about. In the meantime, Agnes Montague gave certain sections of the world little tastes of their futures. Creeping spiders and their sticky, filmy webs had burned in her presence ever since she was little (ever since she was human; at the beginning of it all was a web, and the desire to make it burn that flared so brightly within her that when her heart called, there was something calling back), and she sought them out with an inquisitor’s zeal once she had a grasp of what she was capable of.
Ray’s fear and agitated confusion every time she subverted his will, that was sweet to remember. Every time she shook off the influence of all that pulled his strings, that was sweet to remember. His face at the end, that was even sweeter.
She was the harbinger. She wasn’t supposed to want anything more than that.
“Your face won’t look very different. It never does, after being reshaped.”
“Oh, I know that, Agnes; I’m counting on that. I just want to see if that little twerp will notice anything off when I go to meet him. I want to watch the confusion turn into fear as he realizes there’s something different.” A little giggle of anticipation. “I want to see if he’s got enough brain cells between his ears to start to put things together.”
Agnes hummed pleasantly in the back of her throat. “You’ll have to tell me how it went after you’re done. I’d like to know that, too; your new ‘friend’ didn’t seem especially bright when I met him.”
Jude’s new ‘friend’ had stared at Agnes with something she’d long since learned to recognize as naked lust (She’d always been such a pretty girl; everyone said so. She’d had more than long enough to recognize that look). It wouldn’t have mattered how he’d looked at her, in the end—Jude had selected him, and thus there was nothing that would have stayed his destruction—but she suspected the devastation to follow might be a little more complete than it otherwise would have been. Jude had always been rather jealous.
Not that Agnes was complaining. She had no complaints, not about Jude. The feelings that drove her to scour and cauterize were different, but it amounted to the same thing. They served faithfully, and Agnes could not complain.
She sank her fingers into the yielding flesh of Jude’s face, sculpting and reshaping something Jude and the others had always described as wax, but had never felt quite the same as candlewax to Agnes. It was somewhat more oily, somewhat less sticky, and conformed so much more obediently to the shapes she wished for it. There was perhaps a danger to doing this too much, and indeed, Agnes only ever reshaped herself in event of injury—the danger, she suspected, was in weakening adhesion too much, making things a little too pliant and not as strong as it needed to be.
(She didn’t sleep, but she did daydream, and sometimes her mind carried her along paths to an image of a an oozing wax blob sluggishly pushing itself down a sidewalk, asking passersby for a hand in putting itself back together while onlookers pointed and screamed.)
Jude tried to say something utterly incoherent, and Agnes tsked and frowned at her. “Don’t try to talk while I’m doing this; you know I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”
A short, sharp growl that made the flesh around the rudimentary mouth bubble.
“And I have no idea what the context for that is, either, so you might as well be quiet until I’m done.”
You couldn’t rush this, you really couldn’t. You rush it, and even if your face still looks close to what it looked like originally, you’re going to look more like one of the Circus’s mannequins than an actual person. That wasn’t what Jude was going for, here. She wasn’t going for that particular brand of terror; the mannequins were too antiseptic for what she wanted.
It would have been nice, Agnes supposed, if she could feel more about it than a vague satisfaction at the idea of destruction. Agnes didn’t go after normal people the way Jude did; there was no satisfaction in it for her, to reel in and burn someone who couldn’t put up an appreciable fight. She needed… She wasn’t sure what she needed, maybe the idea that this was real, that the stakes were higher than some random person simply running away screaming. A real risk, maybe. Something that, if she still had a heart to pump blood through her, would make her pulse race—almost.
She wasn’t entirely certain Jude would even care, but Agnes was grateful in this moment that she didn’t have a pulse anymore, so that Jude couldn’t feel the way it didn’t race. Destroying only to create something slightly different, sinking her fingers into Jude’s flesh, it did something for her, but it didn’t do that. She’d never found anything that did that.
It was all coming together now—really, the transformed flesh always seemed to want to come back to its original shape (or something close to it), so that if Agnes wanted to draw it out, she had to fight against it to make the moment last as long as she could. But that was the nature of destruction. You could only hold it back for so long, and it would have been useless to try to prevent it. She knew better than that.
“And…” Agnes drew her hands away. “Done.”
Sure enough, Jude’s face was somewhat different than it had been before Agnes started her work; not so different that her mark would have had any difficult recognizing her, but different enough that there would be a maybe-subliminal, maybe-fully-conscious sense of wrongness for the mark to pick up on. Just a little spice to the lead-up to destruction.
Antithetical to her cause, perhaps, but this particular act of creation was one Agnes had special fondness for.
Her face reassembled, Jude’s eyes were glazed over with something close to bliss, foggy and soft with something that, were either of them of a slightly different temperament, Agnes might have called love. The softness was close enough to suit, a balm for many things. The sharpness with which Jude grabbed her shoulders and pulled her in close was something else entirely.
“Oh, what I could do with you,” Jude breathed, words coming out in little puffs on Agnes’s neck—hot, Agnes was sure, though she was long past the ability to tell the difference. She threaded her fingers through Agnes’s long hair. “Just imagine it, oh.”
Agnes hummed in the back of her throat and said nothing. Jude was nothing if not hands-on, more so than she would have expected considering her former profession, though perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise. She had a special fondness for wax seals, the ones you could drive deep, the ones that would leave deep grooves, and her fingers would trace the patterns they left in Agnes’s arms and her chest with a tenderness they never showed for anyone else. Agnes had a feeling that if her flesh could still burn the way a normal person could, it would have been cigarettes instead (And there was something in her that trembled at the idea of the delicious stinging of smoldering flesh).
But there was something in her that balked at the idea of any further manipulation or handling or anything that went deeper than the surface of her skin. Agnes had never been terribly concerned about whether Jude respected her wishes out of genuine respect, or if it was because they both knew who the stronger one was; the end result was the same. She’d never asked questions but the once, though sometimes the silence seemed a touch… loud.
The loud silence would remain silent, and Jude Perry would just have to accept the presence of unanswered questions in her life. What could have filled it was Agnes Montague’s to know, and no one else’s.
The greatest devotees of the Lightless Flame were filled with fire, kindled with an eternal flame. It kept you warm, kept you safe, kept you whole, kept you purposeful. It filled up every part of you, and sometimes Agnes wondered if that didn’t mean it just wasn’t there at all. She knew she still affected the world around her as was proper; scorch marks on the walls of her flat and super-heated coffee told her that much. But she didn’t feel fire burning within her. She didn’t feel anything inside of her at all.
Better the emptiness, she thought, than the prospect of someone cracking her open and filling her with their ideals, their ideas, their plots and plans. People had tried to make a puppet of her before, tried to make her dance to a song she couldn’t hear, move only by the will of invisible wires affixed to her body. They had tried to crack her open, tried to scoop out everything that was her and fill her up with them. Sooner an empty vessel than a beast of burden laboring under the weight of other people’s thoughts, but held like this, the emptiness wasn’t so yawning, so remote and ineffable. It was both alleviated and made perverse, and held like this, Agnes had to take great care, sometimes, to remind herself that whatever she was, she was not something to be filled with other people’s desires.