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Raymond Fielding, the Recluse, loyal servant of the Mother of Puppets, assessed the man in front of him: one Eugene Vanderstock, devotee of the Scoured Earth. He wasn’t particularly impressed.
Mr. Vanderstock didn’t seem very impressed by him either. “So, you’re the spider?” the man asked with a sneer.
Ray smiled at him. “Just Mr. Fielding will do nicely, Mr. Vanderstock. Now, I believe you have a child you would like placed into my care? Something about concern surrounding a lack of socialization with children her own age?”
“Yeah. That and her tendency to summon an inferno of hellfire at the slightest inconvenience. N-not that we can’t handle her! She’s even quite helpful at dispensing of the unfaithful. It’s just a bit annoying for her minor inconveniences to become our major ones. And the socialization thing.”
It was a poor cover up—he was terrified of her. Ray took note of it. The fact that Vanderstock had been criticizing his messiah of flame, showed weakness, and to a spider of all people…that could be very useful.
Outwardly, Ray just nodded. “Of course. Anything we can do to help. You mean to release custody of her until she comes of age, and fully into her power, correct?”
“…Sure. But we can take her back anytime we please, if we think you’re doing a shitty job with her. She’s ours.”
“I would never separate a child from loving and capable guardians who wish to care for her, Mr. Vanderstock. Your rights are set in stone, right here in the contract.” Ray awkwardly pulled the file folder of documents from the briefcase at his side and held them out. He wished they could do this in his office instead of a barren parking lot in mid-winter, the cold burning his fingertips. “Now, I’m not allowed to return her if the guardian in question has been deemed unsuitable for custody by the courts, but I doubt that will be an issue in this particular…” He trailed off as Vanderstock just stared at him instead of taking the papers. “Mr. Vanderstock?”
“She was born on a pyre in the middle of the woods, not a fucking hospital. She doesn’t legally exist.”
Ah. “Ah. Then we’ll forget the paperwork for now. I would recommend getting her legal situation sorted out in the future, though. It tends to help avoid a lot of bothersome trouble with… the law.” Vanderstock flinched at that, and Ray took quiet pleasure. Good to know that his intelligence about the two cultists they’d lost to police Hunters last month was accurate. “In fact, I have a contact who—”
“We can handle it ourselves, Spider! You need to remember who you’re fucking dealing with here. We don’t have to hand her over, we’re taking pity on you!”
“Pity?” Ray questioned.
The man gave that ugly sneer again. “Our group has burned thousands of your kind. All your pretty little webs…nothing but ashes. You might hold power over the other fears, but not us. We’re offering you a possible alliance here, and you’re more foolish than I thought if you didn’t realize that. If she’s not happy with how you treat her, she’ll incinerate everything you’ve ever worked for all by herself and do it easily.”
“Then I would support her efforts whole heartedly. I have no desire for her to be miserable and to do so would be a fundamental failure on my part as her guardian.” And the incineration of everything he’d ever worked for was the whole reason he was interested in having her in the first place. The Mother wouldn’t get a better chance to open the Rift for centuries.
Vanderstock ground his teeth at the utter lack of fear in Ray’s calm response. Ray continued smiling at him, and said, “Now, about her rather unique dietary restrictions…”
…
The trouble with living a life of constant underestimation is that you typically end up with either crippling insecurity or hubristic overconfidence.
Ray realized, as he looked upon Agnes Montague for the first time, that he may have fallen into the trap of the latter, just a little.
To most people, she would have appeared like a more or less normal eleven year old girl. Thin and gangly, with a sharp elfish face, freckles, curious hazel eyes, and two chestnut braids. She even looked passably like Raymond himself, which could be interesting to play with.
But Ray was not limited to human forms of perception. There was a cosmic heat lurking behind those eyes, ready to spill over at the slightest provocation. She was keeping it in, but just barely and Ray still felt uncomfortably warm standing a meter away from her. The edges of her feet where they met the floor seemed to waver slightly like a desert mirage. The metaphysical strings connecting her to everyone she knew were few, and what’s more, charred and brittle, ready to snap at the slightest touch. The Desolation adored the destruction of relationships, Ray knew, but he couldn’t imagine living with only such damaged strings.
How the hell was he to do his work with such damaged strings?
He bent down to her level and did not extend his hand for her to shake. “Miss Montague, its wonderful to meet you. I’m Raymond Fielding, but you can just call me Ray. I’m going to be taking care of you now, alright?”
She glanced back at her cult members, hesitant, like a real human girl nervous at the prospect of a new caretaker. Ray wondered how much she knew, what her cultists had deemed important or unimportant for her to be aware of. It would have been ridiculously fool-hearty to send her into enemy territory without warning her, but then again, Ray was pretty sure none of the people in charge of her keeping were anything more than brainless fools.
Then she lifted her chin and, still not speaking a word, lifted a hand towards him.
The power plays were already beginning then. Ray didn’t know why he’d expected anything different. There was only one way forward.
He took it and shook it, briefly, but firmly. Unafraid. Outwardly unafraid, that is. Internally, he was swearing, profusely, at the searing heat burning through his palm. But it didn't kill him. They must have told her to hold back.
He let go, tucking his blistered hand behind his back, and she scowled at him. The resemblance to Vanderstock was quite disappointing. He swept his other arm towards his waiting car. “Say your goodbyes, Miss Montague. I’ll bring you over to the house whenever you’re ready.”
Said goodbyes were brief and unemotional, as expected. The cultists whispered harsh-sounding instructions and warnings to their young messiah, who seemed vaguely uninterested. Ray opened the front door for Agnes to take her seat, then crossed to the drivers side and they were off. The girl had nothing to say to him and Ray found himself unusually at a loss for words as well. This was big, the biggest task he had ever been assigned. It wasn’t all that uncommon for the children who found their way to him to be Marked, their fear a beacon to his mandibles, but child avatars? Even with his considerable age, he’d never met one. Let alone whatever Agnes counted as.
And if he fucked this up...
This would have to be managed carefully, not too fast, not too slow. Better to keep her away from the other children, he thought, ensure a firm separation between what was his food and what was hers. A separate binding ritual too. If she managed to get loose from it too early, he didn’t want the flames spreading onto the others’ strings as well. He filled the journey with musings and plans.
At last they pulled up on Hilltop Road. He felt it as soon as she stepped fully into his domain, a sensation like a wildfire running over his grave—or perhaps the graves of his previous identities. This name still had a good decade or two left in it. Still, he didn’t like it. He felt unsteady on his foundations. He was suddenly worried she would be able to feel the Rift, that she would tell someone.
He escorted her up to her new room, set up her first boxes of candles for her to drink from as she pleased. He wasn’t looking forward to part of his lair permanently stinking of burning human flesh and hair, but at least he wouldn’t have to pay for food!
He’d planned the pickup for a time when the human children were away for school—or perhaps loitering around somewhere, Raymond couldn’t keep that tight of a leash on them—so Agnes was free to settle in without any nosy eyes. With her less-than-sociable behavior so far, they might not even realize the house had a new resident for several days.
And he was pretty sure they didn’t. Reasonably sure, he wasn’t a Watcher; he just controlled their minds, not read them. When they did notice, there were a few odd looks or opened mouths, but he had them well trained against asking questions. They didn’t go through with it. Besides, the most likely time for questions was when he and Agnes were in the same room together with the other children, which was rarely. He avoided her.
More than he’d like to admit.
She quietly slid into life in his halfway house with little more sign of her existence than that awful smell and the constant, painful awareness in the back of his mind that there was a threat living here, in what was meant to be his sanctuary. That feeling, he mitigated as soon as possible with the binding ritual.
He’d had one of the older children causally hand her one of the apples, following Ray’s suggestion to give out snacks to everyone, about three days after the girl arrived. Leaving her unbound longer than that was too risky. She’d been biding her time so far, but he could feel the growing restlessness in her firey aura. Agnes looked curiously at the fruit, unfamiliar with human food, and cautiously, curiously, gave it a try. She had no way of knowing what apple seeds were meant to look and feel like. She didn’t eat much of it, apparently preferring her candles, but it was enough. Perhaps she would have been more reluctant if Ray had forced her to attend church with the others the day before. He couldn’t imagine her minders teaching her the story of Eve and the apple, not when they needed her so devoted to their own god. The spiders crawled through her veins while she slept that night, webbing up her heart as her inferno slumbered, and they made their way back out to their master. Some went back into an apple, back into the box—he didn’t plan to eat her from the inside out like some normal human, but it was a good failsafe to have ready just in case something unexpected happened—and he let a trio of them nibble their way into the flesh of his hand and nest among his fingerbones. He could feel the tight, thick thread now, tying her to them, ready to be yanked if necessary.
Normally he didn’t bother putting his spiders actually inside them until it was time to drain them. The table was usually enough to bridge the connection between them and his conduit in the center. But this strand of webbing needed to be close at hand and very hard to burn.
He felt safer, once she was bound, at least slightly. He could try to get back to work. There was lingering paperwork to take care of to cover up Miss Hardy’s disappearance, though not that much, and Mister Sinclair would be aging out of the house in a few short months. He needed to get one of his puppets ready for the faux pick up. There were always finances to secure to keep all this running, though his system was set up to produce money mostly automatically. Various other schemes had to be kept away from any agents of the Lightless Flame, so that they thought that Agnes’ placement was actually doing anything to dissuade the Mother and her skittering children.
And of course Agnes’ arrival meant that, at some point, sooner or later, Raymond’s time running the halfway house would come to an end.
Now that he’d gotten a good look at Agnes’ power, he had a better idea of the time scale he was working on. It would take years for her power to sink into the Rift, so that when she finally erupted, the force would rip the crack wide open. He still had some time left.
That didn’t mean there weren’t preparations better started now rather than later.
His impending, inevitable delivery to Terminus aside, he slowly got his confidence back. He could do this. He didn’t talk to Agnes, and Agnes didn’t talk to him. He didn’t bother to make her brush her teeth like the others; she wasn’t eating meat and vegetables, just smoke and pain. He didn’t make her go to church, and obviously she was exempt from the Sunday night bonding sessions with the table. She didn’t go to school. She had weekly check-in calls with her former keepers, which of course echoed down the curling line to the phone in his office, where he listened silently. She wasn’t happy about being stuck with Raymond, but she couldn’t say that he was mistreating her at all, and her so-called worshipers were much less afraid to imply that she was whiny brat they were happy to be rid of when not face to face. Didn’t stop there from being a yelp of pain from the other end of the call at one especially egregious comment, and Ray couldn’t help but smile at that. Similar stunts and he might actually start to like her. He didn’t know what she did with the rest of her days, and he didn’t bother to find out.
She figured out her binding soon enough, when she made a pitiful attempt at running away—didn’t even bring her candles. Raymond felt her approaching the edge of the property, and her feet locked in place until she angrily returned to the house, leaving charred and smoking footprints behind.
“You can’t trap me like this,” she told him, and he didn’t need their string to feel her quiet rage as a physical sensation on his skin. “Keeping me here, against my will—it’s not allowed. My people won’t let you.”
Raymond could have laughed, but he just gestured to the phone on the wall with a sympathetic smile. “I’m so sorry you’re not happy here, my dear. Go ahead and call them then. Would you like me to go and pack your things? I’m sure they will hurry over to pick you up as soon as possible.”
She hesitated.
They probably would come for her, is the thing. If they heard she had been bound to Ray’s command such that even she couldn’t free herself. Their messiah, ensnared by another? The Web having such a powerful foothold against the entity that had always been its greatest weakness? Blasphemy. Terrifying. The greatest offense and the greatest threat imaginable. They’d have to besiege the house, massacre its helpless residents as fuel and to rob him of his weapons, and with the terror of the Desolation that Agnes’ mere presence had burned into him over these two short weeks, they’d almost certainly even succeed at killing him. The strings would be easy to brush away from her after that.
The Rift… might be opened by the assault. Might. Not enough of a chance that Ray wanted to take it.
But Agnes was never going to tell them. If she had trusted them, she wouldn’t have tried to run away.
Only eleven years old and she knew deep in whatever she had for bones that everyone had ulterior motives. That nobody cared what she thought about it. That her feelings, her choices, didn’t matter. Maybe she was feeding off of his fear of her, but, Mother of Puppets, if she wasn’t a hell of a meal for him as well.
He would have loved to invoke the fact that her former keepers still hadn’t gotten him the paperwork proving her legal existence and thus she had no legal rights or protections to keep her safe from him, too, but he supposed it made sense that legality was not something she had any concept of.
She spent more time with the other children after that. Not seeking solace in their company, but exercising what little control she had. Very few of Ray’s charges forged real friendships with one another through the wall of numb, uncharacteristic politeness he forced upon them, but those that did rapidly found them ripped to shreds by Agnes’ stinging words. She was clumsy and unpracticed, but Ray caught her watching him and she started getting better. More subtle. It was almost cute. Was this what fatherly pride felt like?
Then she stole his meal.
The latent ember she’d planted in Mister Sinclair exploded out of his cheek, the threads woven about his mind and body over the course of three long years instantly evaporated into dust and ashes. Ray lost his composure and lunged for his prey, true nature spilling out from within his human skin, but Sinclair’s will had returned to him and he was already halfway up the stairs. He was long gone before Raymond could scrape up a plan to recover him.
Agnes spent the next week unable to leave her room. Apparently subsisting as she did removed the need to defecate, though even if it hadn’t, he still wouldn’t have let her out. He considered leaving her in there for good, but each sharp tug of their bond against her flaming soul increased the likelihood of it being damaged, breaking off. He limped his way to his next scheduled feeding off of her rage-flavored fear of further punishment, then poured a significant portion of his restored power into strengthening her strings as soon as possible.
The chess match began in earnest then.
How and who could he arrange the disappearance of before she noticed and tried to sabotage it? How far could she stretch her trouble-making abilities before he would risk yanking her back on course? The relationships of the other unfortunates in the house were proxy wars, him arranging the formation of new bonds as fast as she burned them for kindling.
His hastily erected back up plans ensured that she never again swiped a victim right out from under his fangs, but with his neat schedule of devouring the aged-out thrown out the window for being entirely too predicable, he found himself burning through his supply faster than anticipated as he tried to keep up with an adolescent demi-goddess. In the chaos, one or two of the other children managed to shake their strings and flee the house, not understand any of the invisible cosmic battle taking place but wanting no part of it. The population of the halfway house dwindled as years passed, and Ray’s ability to keep himself fed with it.
Meanwhile Agnes reacted to his confiscation of the torment candle shipments from her cult by beginning to eat local neighborhood pets instead, and apparently the grief of mysteriously losing a cat was damn good food indeed. Ray didn’t understand why, he didn’t like cats and they were always getting hit by cars when left to roam around anyways. He had no idea what she was telling her cult about why she was still here. They were surely impatient for her to come back and fulfill her purpose in the grand ritual by now.
His very own destiny was coming for him, and it was the End. There was no fighting it. He’d known his fate since the very beginning, since he’d sold himself to the Mother to get just a little more time. Nearly a century wasn’t much really, compared to the big names like Magnus or Fairchild, not even more than a normal human lifespan. But it was a whole lot more than he’d expected to get once upon a time, and getting to live most of it at an eternal 30-something wasn’t a bad deal. He’d say that he didn’t regret his choices, but the beauty of his patron was knowing that he’d never had any, so regret was not something he had to worry about. He’d done his work, and he’d done it well. Each year he clung on was another dose of her power seeped into the crack in the basement.
One morning in ‘71, after almost eight years of living with this hellish girl in his house, he took the apple with the spiders from her binding still inside it, put it in the box from the table, and buried the whole package underneath the cobwebbed tree in the back garden. He had no more humans to hypnotize with the table, so he called up the Stranger’s Couriers and had them take it, incomplete without the central box, away somewhere. He didn’t know why he did this, but he had faith that the Mother had a plan for the artifact. Probably a million. So the box was left behind, buried beneath the tree, and the spiders two layers deep inside, who had died and multiplied and passed down Agnes’ blood in their arteries, anchored her binding to the land so that she’d still be trapped after he’d gone. The soil here still held a trace of the Buried about it, from a round of Rift-opening work three centuries ago, and wouldn’t let anything go easily.
She’d spent so long, her power tied up in silver. Practically half her life. He wondered if she’d even survive without it now, or if, in the rush of exhilarating cosmic fire finally unleashed, she’d forget she was supposed to be human-shaped and simply—explode. Poof. Would probably wipe out the whole country. Still wouldn’t be her cult’s precious global transfiguration.
The next morning she trapped him in the basement, and while the commands he tried to give were registered, they were shrugged off with a stubborn shake and a roll of her eyes. She didn’t even need fire to do it; he could barely stand up for more than a few minutes at a time. “You’ve grown up into quite the capable young woman, Miss Montague. I’m proud,” he told her, honestly, as he obediently wrote out the will leaving the house and everything in it to her. Then she took a kitchen knife, white hot with no cause at all, and smoothly cut off his right hand where the rest of her spiders lived. His connection to her dimmed considerably, and for the first time in eight years he could barely feel the weight of her rage at all. He felt lighter. Just like the morning when they’d first met, she didn’t have anything to say to him.
That was the last time he saw her, as she climbed back up the stairs and locked the door behind her.
He wasted away there in the dark for a period of time he couldn’t begin to count, kept alive by the thread of fear from Agnes about whether she’d ever be able to leave this place, or if he’d permanently chained her away from her great holy destiny. She’d found the line to the tree, then. And he was a dry husk, exactly like all those humans he’d drained of their organs. He’d laugh if he had water enough in his throat to do so.
And finally, it snapped. The key part of their bond that his younger, foolish self, only a few years ago, had reinforced over and over again, so many times. The one preventing her from truly harming him or the house with her abilities.
Even in his state, he felt the immolation tear through his domain, damage to physical walls immaterial compared to that done to centuries of ward and web and, most importantly, to the Rift. He was incinerated in an instant, reduced to a charred echo, but the last few eight-legged neurons of his mind felt whatever passed for happiness, to them, as they clung on a little longer, for he knew he had succeeded.
Whatever it was, whatever the Mother wanted with it, it was open.
…
A few short years later, while Agnes was in the midst of ritual preparations with her cult, she felt the loose snare around her heart, whose weight had slowed their work so much, unexpectedly pull tight. Her eyes burned with boiling tears that did not block her Sight and the back of her mind screamed that something terrible was Watching her. A new string shot out across the country, binding her to another young woman with a destiny, who had no idea what she’d just done as the Desolation’s fire spilled across the line and into the Archivist's blood.
Agnes should have known the Web would never have allowed her success.
And a tiny, tiny part of her that would only grow over the next decades, the seed of innocent human curiosity that had made her eat that apple so many years ago, was a little bit grateful that she would not be the Ending of this world.