Work Text:
CALL OF THE VOID
"There will come a time when the world is ready for me, when nation will battle nation, when race will devour race, when brother... will kill brother, until not a soul is left."
(Magda, to Tiago Vega)
A breath.
She is an old woman.
Her wrinkles are the trenches to come, the furrows where the war will be dug, the chasms between men, these small and stupid and wild things who do not understand, who will never understand, because they do not wish to. One cannot teach an animal that refuses to learn.
Behind the veil of Alex Malone's glasses, she watches them shouting, getting angry at nothing.
Their wrath is (MAGDA).
Charlton Townsend is a pig whose fat oozes violence: fry him in a pan, and you'll get a pure concentrate of hate. He is an ignorant, bawling toddler who only knows how to thump the table and say more than he can do: he whines like a calf being slaughtered, a worthy representative of his bellowing species, wonderfully caricatural and raw in his own stupidity. While he sinks into it, she holds back the rope that would help him get out, cutting it off portion by portion (a little here, a little there). Only one knot will remain at the end.
(she will give it to him so that he can hangs himself)
He will obey. Townsend is one of those people who is deeply incapable of considering that he might not own the power: as a result, he has none at all. He is a good sheep, a good dog who listens to what is whispered in his ear, if one knows the right tune.
Since the dawn of time, Magda has been playing her scores. They are much better now, more refined, more elaborate. Alex guides him, holds his hands as if he were a child shaking his chubby legs to take his first steps. You have to show them, at the beginning, how to hate, how to make war, how to make death and apocalypse and fire. There always comes a time when they can manage on their own, autonomous in their destructive abilities, but Magda is a perfectionist, and she wants to keep her system as harmonious as possible. Order exists in chaos, or rather precedes it. Everything has to be well arranged for the storm to come.
Slowly, Magda gathers her clouds, feeds them with lightning and gravel rain, fire and hurricanes. There is not much that makes her shiver at her age, but from this, oh, from this she gets drunk, she revels in it, she wraps herself as in a vast canopy of satin and screams, and she says (more more more more).
This is how she is.
This is how it is.
A breath.
She is blonde.
Peter Craft is looking at her with puppy-dog eyes, and she tears out of her belly a sham of a child who terrorizes the others and looks at everything with the eye of a raptor. The man is stupid enough for her to cry, so much so that sometimes she would rip her hair out. He is panting on top of Elsa Branson, behind her, inside her.
Magda builds up the massacre in her moans.
He sees her blue eyes and she sees fire, tanks, famine, plague, death. He sees her on the beach and does not notice the distorted shape of the shadow she casts, how even the sand seems to recede before her. He doesn't know he is moving in the void, sinking into a cataclysm, in the heart of a sun so dark he will soon see nothing. It must be said that she sells it well to him, in her modest pastel dress and shy smiles, which cleverly hide her teeth and her laugh. He is convinced that he owns her, that he is saving her from a minotaur from which he does not realize that she has secretly adopted the skin.
She rules over him from a throne of corpses and ashes, so monumental he could never dream of reaching it one day (see my kingdom my world my horror). You're ridiculously tiny, she wants to shout to him occasionally, when he tests her nerves and wants to try to wear the pants, come here so I can crush you. The ant shakes in front of her. When Elsa climaxes, Magda imagines flattening him under her foot.
Let me feel your bones crack let me feel your blood let me feel your fear.
She captures his house, his soul, his ideas and his will, plants them in a field she ignites.
(she loves her men like she loves her coffee)
(burned)
There will come another, a bigger one, a splendid and thunderous explosion she knows she will feel all the way to the depths of her entrails, her antique essence, and which will shake the foundations of everything the ants cling to when acid is poured into the underground tunnels of their lair.
Her sister remains motionless, as bland as a cow watching the trains go by. Magda loves her, though. But you see, I need to be busy, she says to her, when Santa Muerte gives her a disapproving look under her golden crown and her white garment of laces. She never moves, never acts. She is not made for this kind of things. Death is inert by principle. It observes and collects, that's all.
Conversely, decay and devastation are always in motion. Magda walks, murmurs, moves, smiles. Out of the corner of her eye, she looks at her sister, and deplores her obstinate stagnation, when the playground is so big and there is plenty of room for two.
What we could do together, dear sister, she sings in front of her icy eyes, those eyes which are also hers, because death and carnage go hand in hand, like the little girls they never were, look, admire the chessboard, choose your pawns.
(Play with me)
Their games are cosmic, their hide-and-seek unearths monsters and bombs shaped like mushrooms. Magda loves her sister. In all the things she does, in all the plans she elaborates, in all the labyrinths she builds to make her toys get lost, she thinks of Santa Muerte. She has a strong sense of family, as well as entertainment. One of them must do something, one of them must shape souls and expose them to the secret appetite of the other, hate them and treat them as they deserve.
Slowly, like a violin that weakens, she perceives from time to time the cracks in her sister's resolve, those abysses where time has eroded the marble of which she is made, where a poisonous compassion has settled. And so she raises her eyes to the sky, to the ceiling of the houses and buildings where she evolves, and whispers "don't worry".
It was never a question of confronting Santa Muerte: all Magda wants is to give her back her initial form.
A breath.
Her hair has the color of glowing embers.
She goes by the name of Rio and holds the Pachucos in the palm of her hand. She wears pants and suspenders, makes men and women dance, exhausts them in a hellish tango. All of them get burned. She makes the sun die while they swirl and clap their hands, adjust to her rhythm, follow her mindlessly. They do not see her black dress, do not see the nothingness in her eye, do not hear the venom in her voice.
If she wants it, they don't notice her. And when she chooses to, they see only her.
Rio must be the ruler, where Alex is the minister, and Elsa the diplomat. Behind them, Magda is an eclipse: only those with sharp eyes can notice her, but the vast majority are resolutely blind. See not. Hear not. Speak not. And if they distinguish a slight rustle in the air, the flutter of a cloth on the floor, heels clicking in the night and windows breaking, they do nothing.
Not until Magda comes along and impregnates them with embryos worthy of populating Bosch's Hell.
(carry my children of horror my children of terror)
They give birth to a tidal wave of ruin and chaos. Rio crowns Mateo, and when she gives him the knife, she seeds him with a hideous foetus, whose eyes are two cannon mouths, two enormous black and opaque craters.
Soon he turns against his brother, takes part in the uprisings, drenches himself in blood. He is Townsend. He is Craft. He believes he has power: his monarchy is a chimera, his knife a mirage.
Rio teaches him the right steps and he moves for her. She never says "go and get your revenge, take back what is yours, fight those who want your territory, your family". In bed, she just takes off his shirt and kisses him where needed. He's a good dancer, she admits that. Better than the other two. To handle him, Rio has to make some adjustments, deal with his love for his brother and twist it enough to draw out some pus, but nothing dramatic.
These are the choreographies she is used to.
Little pigs, little pigs. Thus Magda walks through the doors and into your houses, puts her hands on the walls, her footprints on the floor, plants her teeth in the furnitures. No need for a mallet, no need for an axe, no need to announce (here's Joooooohnny). She is always welcomed, even when you don't like her.
She bats her eyelashes and smiles and people drown in her like in a swamp. When the boys' mother, the old Maria, unmasks her, she takes no offense. Come closer, child, she calls to her playfully, standing in the cemetery where she knows that soon there will be other graves, other dead, come and see me if you dare, look if you can, admire my work, stand up to what I am, give it a try.
(come and see)
(watch me walk and watch the fire)
The old woman bends down, prays to Santa Muerte. Her sister won't do anything about it, Magda knows that. She is not here to give, only to receive. Magda is the one who gives.
Magda is the one who suggests, who offers, who advises. How old she is, how she has seen cities and beliefs, hopes, kings, emperors and myths, countries and ages of the world decline. Everything comes back to her in the end. Everything is destined to become (MAGDA), to crumble in her path. Her sister will stand there, passive and quietly powerful, but she will take just as much. Magda is the predator, Santa Muerte the scavenger.
Things have always been this way.
They will always be.
Another chessboard, other pawns. The game is the same.
Between them burns the fire, the men, the civilizations. With her come the nothingness, the debacle, the icebergs that cause shipwrecks and the guillotines that accompany revolutions, the desire to jump into the void.
She walks.
A breath.
She is (MAGDA).