THERE ARE LITTLE RITUALS, THE NICETIES THAT HOLD EVERYTHING TOGETHER. society doesn’t have rules. it has rituals instead, a replacement for rules. like this: the lighter, the cigarette, the passing of both, the click of it. sam likes to think of things in terms of parameters, in arguments, in handshakes. he just knows that there are things they do regardless of the sense they make or whether or not they fit into anything. they are comforts. they make things function. moreover, the system as a whole hates to engage in them, but sometimes it’s necessary.
the followers of the lightless flame would know something of rituals. their existence is communal, a shared worship of the flame, of the loss of what could be. that’s something he can’t understand. they have been lonely (and are they not lucky, in some ways, that they were not touched by the lonely first? or maybe they were, but it wasn’t enough for a full grasp, a full taking of, and instead they ended up here) for their whole life. they have been fundamentally accompanied by each other and no one else, in times both good and bad.
of course, agnes is different. to them, agnes is everything, and maybe that’s where they get along. they, too, encompass a piece of their entity so vital that they cannot be separated from it. they are both what they are because of their entities; they are bound to them, entirely so. is it a good existence? not by most standards. he thinks they didn’t get a bad end of the deal. after all, what has changed? not much. nothing really worth noting. if anything, certain things have improved. they are a result of an unnatural thing, of the machinations of the last archivist, but that means they have to adapt. and maybe that was why they were chosen, why that door appeared in the server room.
there was already discomfort with the self. they might as well have had one foot in the door from the very beginning.
❝ i’ll give you that. you didn’t start as a mortal. as someone who did, i don’t think you’re fucking missing out on much. ❞ a wryness, a little bit of humor. perhaps an avatar shouldn’t sound quite as amused with the idea of mortality. doesn’t everything hinge on that? doesn’t the survival of the entities depend on mortality? there’s an irony there, after all. no ritual can happen without the work on the ground.
a pause at her question. he shifts his weight from one foot to the other, considering. ❝ … interesting question. i mean, i made a choice. we did. unlike you, it’s not like we were born looking like a reflection caught in a funhouse mirror. ❞ we. i. what’s the difference, in the end? he can switch between them as he pleases at this point. the overlap between them all is more than it was before, a messy venn diagram of he/i/us. ❝ which i think changes the concept of destiny, at least from our end. if we chose something, i don’t think we can deny it forever. you, though… no such luck. it’s been like this for you from day one. so i guess it’s difficult to conceive of something outside of it, then. ❞
for a long moment, he simply inhales hard on the cigarette. nothing to poison now, he thinks. organs still exist but they don’t matter. he is bound to a place, and that place is in him, is him.
❝ there’s a good test. what would you do? let’s say the desolation fucking evaporated tomorrow and somehow didn’t take you with it. what would you do then, agnes? ❞
agnes has not met many others touched by the god-fears this way, outside of her own cult, but she thinks the commonality between most of them is the choice: whether the powers push people into desperation enough to accept a terrible fate or whether they walk into the fire with glee, they’d made a decision. sam had chosen the twisting deceit; jude and diego and arthur had doused themselves in flame and been born anew; gertrude, though she clings stubbornly to humanity, had taken the position of archvist for her own of her free will, though agnes is still unsure how much free will counts for in a world with the mother of puppets pulling strings on them all.
agnes’ mother, though she’d never known the woman, had made a choice. had believed in the cause of the lightless flame so burntheartedly that she had made a birthing pyre and turned to smoke. agnes had not been given a choice in what she was. born in one ritual and destined to die in another, with little room to question anything in the space between.
she thinks, perhaps, that makes her closer to humanity than any other avatar, in a way: for humans did not choose to be what they are, either, did they?
‘ i don’t know. ’ it is impossible to conceptualize a life without the flame. she can look through glass at humanity and yearn for something more than destruction and death and wax-dripping fingers, but she cannot reach out and touch without scorching. isn’t touch the most human thing there is? she’s read about touch-starvation, about children who grew up in the wild without a caring human hand. she’s too far distant to really imagine any of it.
she didn’t start as a mortal, after all. when she closes her eyes and tries to picture a world without the desolation making her oh-so-hungry, her vision is blank. dark. it’s hard sometimes to even remember that she is a person outside of the cult — not simply a messiah, not simply the candlewick upon which their destruction will be lit, but a self in her own right.
‘ i don’t think i would have chosen this, if i could ... but i don’t know who i’d be if i had begun as human, either. maybe something would have made me desperate enough. maybe, in contrast to being cold, the flame would have been welcome. ’ she doesn’t know. a spark of frustration, of anger, at herself and her circumstance and the unchangeability of it all, lights up her ribcage, tinges her voice.
‘ if it all disappeared, i can’t imagine it not taking me with it. ’ who would he be if his doorways all locked him outside? a part of you gone. her hands are tugging on her jacket, her scarf, her dress, anxiety flickering and leaving faint scorch marks in its wake. she’s silent a moment, and then: sure and steady, ‘ i’d hold somebody’s hand. if the desolation disappeared tomorrow and i was left behind, i would want to touch somebody. just once. does that pass your test? ’
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