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Stage here, now, a flame without its light (AGNES MONTAGUE), born to destroy; and
MANUELA DOMINGUEZ, who wasn’t, but makes herself the next closest thing.
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They don’t see each other until they don’t. It would not be in the proper state of things for the messiah of the Desolation to seek out an acolyte of the Dark; chance, however, is only a closed-eye stumble. Who will ask if entanglement seems more than is necessary? It only seems, after all. Agnes feels the threads of it tugging just under the thin layer of what she calls skin, but isn’t. It’s why she can call it skin at all, or her hand a hand.
Here’s a meeting that might, or might not, or should not, have happened. They’re on Manuela’s balcony, or what’s been set to look like one. Nowhere near side-by-side, waiting. Or, at least, Agnes might be. See her eyes boring into the aftermath of a rainy spell. Eight-fifteen and the sun’s only just sunk, but you wouldn’t know from the clouds that don’t dissipate. Haven’t, for the day.
“Are you praying, Agnes Montague?” And it’s a taunt, the way Manuela puts it, and aimed not towards Agnes as she is now, which is: arms folded neatly over the metal balcony where there’s a warm patch of no more rain, and eyes intent, watching. The irony’s not lost on Manuela.
“I am listening,” says Agnes (girl-god of destruction), high and light and skipping like the night air is. “For nothing, I mean.” Her face is turned firmly away from Manuela’s, her arms and chin pressed onto the metal which gives way only the slightest bit under her weight, not wielded into the ground quite right.
Leaning against the side of the balcony, seated on a patch of ground that’s inexplicably dry, Manuela has to throw back her head and laugh. “And that to all fucking mankind. My mother would pray to someone like you, you know.” It’s a deliberate misinterpretation, a crossroads between Desolation’s scream-song of blackening and Dark’s closing-off of light that they dance upon. She’s doing it to wind Agnes up. She’s got to, really.
Do not look directly into a Sun, whatever it is made of. The Dark Star is made of torn light and fear—not Manuela’s. See her fear in the way her face is never lit, entirely, and only from below. Doesn’t it exhilarate her, the fear? Oh, it’s meant to. She can’t help feeling all clumped-knotted-burning, nowhere to go. There really isn’t anywhere to go. Step half a step towards Agnes, stage-right. That’s not right.
Agnes inhales fear (she doesn’t try to hide it), exhales smoke, and Desolation hums through the balcony floor with the railing glowing red-hot. Agnes, messiah that she is, does not have the liberty to dismiss it. Agnes, messiah that she is, is no creator. “Take that promise back. There is no Hope / Love / Faith to be had but in un-making.”
Agnes figures she’s got the courtesy to not burn Manuela’s house to the ground, just because she can—it’s really because she can’t. (What is left unsaid: you’d know this better than I would. I envy you for it.)
She’s thinking of the freedom. She means the promise-pretence that no tendrils hold her down to the ground, to the blackened earth on which she’s deified. Again, nowhere to go except crumble. Ashes as paper-cutout, damnation as the point of no return. That’s where the curtain rises, and the two perch precariously.
“I told her as much, on her deathbed, that it’s only natural to fear what is Eternal.” Manuela can dream of her mother, every night, and of the sob that drew thick screaming tears from her closed eyes. It is a dream, not something that tethers her down. Shit, damn, of course it is. She doesn’t think of people who scream in boxes because the world’s ending and it’s all Fear and it’s all them, too. She can convince herself she is feeding. She can convince herself this is normal.
“You do not understand. Creator that you are. It is still love you hold, for Your God. You must still bleed brackish sea-water, waste and void, really.”
“Fear—love—what’s the difference? Does any man not fear the thing it loves? Does any man not love the thing it fears? What’s love without fear, anyhow? It all goes back to this: how can you have light without darkness?”
There’s a damp draft that comes wisping through both their hair, and—metal’s a quick conductor. From where she sits Manuela can’t feel it for the prickling warmth Agnes’ hands send through the balcony-railing, and braces herself for a reply, more physical than it should be.
The reply comes in words, or maybe it doesn’t come: are you ready to burn? Or are you too afraid?
Manuela sets her palm flat before her for not-absolution, fingertips pink and shiny and heavy and charred deep in parts. A Reckoning, maybe; she knows Agnes won't let her fall apart into ashes that easily. But still, the unmaking of sunlight’s near-broken her.
So: here our DESTRUCTION presses her finger into UN-CREATION’S palm where the skin is still smooth and the UN-CREATION cannot cry out.]
Smoke curls and they both breathe it in unflinchingly. It’s not anyone’s fault, really. Manuela’s no stranger to burns. Doesn't stop her eyes from running, smarting, as she spits on her re-burnt palm.
Of course she’s afraid. It’s why she’s here, or she would if she could. She feels something in her unwind, not fall apart. That’s a line crossed, an impossibility.