Chapter Text
So the ritual hadn’t worked out. It sort of fell apart in the planning stages, or the stars hadn’t been properly aligned, or someone had a cold, or some minor, nonsensical thing that Agnes Montague had neither the interest nor the knowledge to learn about. All she had to do was start fires and look pretty. Her grand destiny. Arson and violence and chanting. Whatever it was, it didn’t work. This was the main topic of conversation at present. Agnes slipped out of the living room in the house on Hill Top Road, where she had lived for the past decade and where, due to a lack of protest on her end, the meetings of the devotees of the Lightless Flame were held. She just wanted to escape from the cramped circle of kitchen chairs, leave the dim candlelight she was so used to. She really meant no ill will toward the cause, as it were. And so she left quietly, as she did all things, and escaped upstairs to the bedroom she had spent half her life in.
She silently shut the door, slowly muffling the voices downstairs ranting about “her glorious rage” and “torturous heat.” Her room was full of a childhood she barely had, books she barely got the chance to read, records she rarely got to listen to. Cobwebs in the corner she could never seem to get rid of. It was like the room was frozen in time, a photograph of someone’s life that was not Agnes’. She did, however, find some comfort in the repeating patterns formed by the webs, in such a way that she’d spend hours as a child and into her teenage years stringing the candle wax that was so easy to come by into webs of her own. These sculptures helped quiet her furious mind, and she found herself spinning one now. She rarely made them anymore, only on days when the devotees came into her space and filled it with unwelcome voices that made the nape of her neck itch.
She sat down at her vanity, a pathetic attempt at normalcy gifted to her by Raymond when she turned twelve. She never had any dates to get ready for, she didn’t really need a desk, as her homeschooling came second to her religious responsibilities, and she had no friends to write letters to. It remained relatively unused, except for moments like now, when she would sit and spin her wax webs. After she finished one, she would press it on the surface of the vanity table, so it all melted into the wood and made one large multicolored web. This is what she did now, adding the newly completed pink sculpture to the mass.
She traced her fingers along the patterns of wax. It was her own webbed table, a child’s replica of the one Raymond kept in the basement and pretended Agnes didn’t know about. She felt the hot rage bubble up inside her, her head getting hot and her muscles tensing. This was her house. And all she wanted was ten minutes without her grand destiny weighing down on her. All she wanted was a childhood that was taken first by the god that ran through her, and second by the man who ruled over this house, who now lay catatonic in the basement. Her boiling blood shot through her veins to her hand. She threw the first thing she could grab through the window with a smash of broken glass, the cool of the tin offering little relief to the burning of her hands. But after all, she was Agnes Montague, Daughter of the Lightless Flame, Avatar of the Desolation. Or whatever. She didn’t mind the heat.
If the devotees heard the smash, they didn’t show it. They were silent only as Agnes entered the room once more, her angry, fiery hands shaking. The cult stared at her, avoiding her eyes. “It’s time for you all to go.” Agnes’ voice was low, spitting the words onto the ground, where they sizzled at the feet of the cult that dared to overstay their welcome.
Arthur Nolan attempted to break the silence, his position as unofficial leader forcing him to speak up. “But Agnes, we-“
“Leave.”
Sparks flew off her teeth. If the fear of—well, god wasn’t burning a hole in Arthur’s stomach, he might have even laughed at how he was reminded of a younger Agnes, such terrifying rage bursting from a four year old girl’s body. But the fear of his god did bubble inside him, and so he nodded and left quickly, the other cultists following suit.
And then Agnes Montague, Daughter of the Lightless Flame and Avatar of the Desolation, stood alone in her living room, where there had never been very much life at all.
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Agnes lay on her bed, occasionally running her long legs in the air, as if riding an imaginary bike, to burn off the remaining energy from her fury. It had to be expelled through her legs, as she had disposed of the worst of it by punching her pillows, which then fell scorched on the floor, her arms exhausted.
She panted there for a while, letting the waves of anger flow through her, breathing deeply to calm the worst of the aftershock. She found herself once again thinking about letting everything go, ignoring the calls of her cult and just stopping, whatever that meant. She had given twenty years of her life to the cause. To various guardians set on controlling her life. A thought she had so often come back to at times like this. Paired, as always, with the urge to burn it all down.
Had she ever properly acted out? Had she ever done something more than throw a tantrum or throw some trinket box out the window? For all her destiny named her some powerful demigod, she never once told Raymond to fuck off. She never even fought with the other kids that lived at Hill Top, no matter how much she wanted to. She never knew what she wanted to do. But, she thought, at last, I know where to start.
Agnes ran from her bedroom into the long hallway, its hardwood floors a constant source of sock-skating and ghost stories. It was always so scary at night, whenever Agnes, or even the older kids and teenagers living there would leave their rooms at night for water or mischief, turning the corner and walking down that hallway was a formidable obstacle. It was as if the house made it that way to keep the kids in bed without complaint. Agnes hated that hallway. But she had to make some arrangements before anything could be done about it.
She quickly went through the once grand house, grabbing the stash of money Raymond kept in a secret compartment in a locked drawer, the key to which he kept around his neck, until recently. Until she was paid what she was owed; a house full of webs and bones and the corpses of the children she had grown up beside, shared dinner with every night until one by one, they disappeared into the pit of the basement.
Except for Ronald. The great anomaly. But that was a long time ago, and she was still trapped in the web and simply burning to get out.
The car was packed, just a small suitcase with Agnes’ clothes, a box filled with candles and small trinkets. She didn’t need much. She had plenty of money, thanks to Raymond. Besides, if anything went horribly wrong, there was a line a mile long of acolytes who would gladly give up their beds if not their homes for her.
Agnes Montague treaded slowly through the house at Hill Top Road. Every floorboard held a memory that did not feel like her own, every room filled with the ghosts of those she could never truly know. Her loneliness, her emptiness, all birthed in this haunted house. The people in the village called her a recluse. Maybe they were right. But they didn’t have the power she had, hadn’t been born gods against their wills. She began to burn.
The vanity was difficult to lift on her own, but she managed to jam it into the car. The fire raged on, but Agnes didn’t know how long the house burned. She didn’t care. She was gone by the time the smoke rose in a thick column over the trees. Smoke that rose up like the steam from the tears that sizzled on her cheeks.