For the third time this week, it’s raining in Forks. That is not, in itself, particularly exceptional, but I think I deserve a little bit of grumbling about it not snowing on Christmas Eve. Does the weather not have any respect for tradition? For symbolism?

I’m bundled up in a fluffy coat from one of the nicer stores at the mall and a bootleg Strix Striga scarf I found on Etsy. I trudge through the damp streets, my umbrella sheltering me from the worst of the sky’s tantrum, as I double-check the address sitting in my texts.

The house I’m looking for is in one of the nicer suburbs of Forks. It’s a pretty home, very picket fence, the kind of clean and elegant structure that you’d be tempted to call manicured if you were searching for synonyms. Two stories tall. From the sidewalk I can just make out the faintest hints of a garden space out back that looks like it has a pond feature. Quaint.

Ferromancer’s car is parked in the driveway, so I guess the address was right.

I trundle up to the covered porch and shake the water off my umbrella before knocking. Then I think twice about knocking, because this is a house, not an apartment, which means it has an actual doorbell. I feel like I haven’t seen one of those in person for ages. I ring the bell and wait.

Almost immediately I hear footsteps approaching, and a second later the door swings open. Standing in the doorway is a man that I feel compelled to describe as having a professorial affect, though my experience with professors is rather limited by my early dropout. He has round glasses that I want to call spectacles, a scruffy beard, and a twinkle in his eye. He’s also wearing a gaudy Christmas sweater emblazoned with an image of Santa Claus and the words, “He knows if you’ve violated the categorical imperative.”

“You must be Rachel, right?” he says, smiling brightly. “Dave Torald, call me Dave. Erica told me you were coming. She said you were a work friend.”

“I have been known by such a title,” I say, putting on a faux-solemn voice for only a moment before grinning and adding, “But yeah, that’s me. Rachel Emily, the girl with two first names. Almost no one uses my last name, though.”

Dave waves me inside and gestures to a coat rack by the door where a few pieces of outerwear are already hanging. I feel like I’ve stepped into another world. I hang up my coat and scarf, find another hook for my umbrella, and admire the modern interior of the house. Very minimalist, but lots of plants.

“So how did that happen?” Dave asks. “The two first names thing.”

“Oh, it’s all the fault of the British,” I lament. “English ancestry on my father’s side. Frankly, I blame my mother for not insisting on her surname. I could have been Rachel Hunter, that would have been fucking badass.”

Dave laughs. “Hey, it’s never too late to change it! My husband—”

“Oh? Are we talking about moi?”

The most handsome man I’ve ever seen descends the foyer stairwell and drapes himself across the handrail. He’s got one of those looks that’s impossible to maintain without a strict regiment of product and dieting, from his shiny, well-groomed hair to his perfect pores and teeth. I’m a Kinsey 6, so even that isn’t enough to get an attraction response, but it’s hard not to appreciate the work of art in front of me. His outfit is elaborate and layered, a carefully put together arrangement of high-class apparel, except for the Kuromi shirt beneath it all.

Dave looks at his husband with exasperated fondness. “Well, I was about to talk about you, but clearly you’d prefer the privilege.”

The other man springs forward and sticks his hand out with a grin. “Eli Split, at your service. When your marriage is on the rocks and it’s time to make the split, call Eli Split for all your divorce attorney needs. I also make a mean macaroni.”

After introductions, Dave and Eli show me to the dining room. Erica pops out of the kitchen with a beer in hand on hearing us enter. “Glad you could make it,” she says to me. “Now let’s eat, I’m starving.”

Christmas dinner is, thankfully, not recycled Thanksgiving slop. No turkey and stuffing, no sad side of unloved vegetables. Instead, we get well-seasoned ham hash with a side of artichoke hearts drowned in buttery lemon sauce. Our hosts bring out eggnog, cranberry juice, and a selection of alcohol to mix with the eggnog, of which Dave and Eli both partake. I go with the juice.

Erica prods Eli into talking about his pet snake, Bartholomew, who has been thriving in the new enclosure that Erica built for him. Eli insists on showing me a reel of snake pictures, and I have to admit, the reptile is pretty cute. Snakes look incredibly dumb from a surprising number of angles.

Dave asks about Erica’s work and gets the same story about the magical girl weed shop that I heard a month ago. I was warned ahead of time that Dave and Eli know what Erica is, but it’s still interesting to see such casual conversation about it. I guess they are to Erica what Mike, Femur, and Mord are to me.

“So, how did you become friends with Erica?” I ask at a natural lull.

“Oh, we met in college,” Dave answers. “Shared a few classes, but we were only vaguely aware of each other until late second year. That was when the Jovians came to Earth and everything changed. I’d been waffling around between various social sciences, trying to get some use out of my background in debate, but that woke me up. I got super into philosophy, started taking all these classes trying to understand how the existence of magic upended all our previous assumptions about the nature of the universe. I’d been struggling with religion at the time and now suddenly everyone was struggling with it because what did it mean for God and the soul that a bunch of alien cats could come along and make certain women immortal? And why only women? I knew a pastor—family friend, super reasonable guy before then—who started ranting that witches were agents of Satan, but then I open up YouTube and I’m seeing clips of them playing video games with magical girls. I wanted to know what the philosophers had to say. I wanted to understand the biggest paradigm shift since the Enlightenment.”

“And so did I,” Erica jumps in. “Someone close to me had opened my eyes to how sheltered I’d been not long before that, and then along comes magic. Dave and I met for real in those philosophy classes, both of us trying our damnedest to warp every discussion around what it meant that magic was real and the implications of how it was manifesting. We hit it off, started hanging outside of class, met each other’s partners, and he got me hooked on his card game hobby.”

Eli waves. “Hi! I was the partner.”

And Erica’s partner was Delilah. I glance at her. “And then…”

The witch sighs. “And then the Jovians happened. At first, it enlivened our discussions; with firsthand access to magic, we could test our speculation, experiment and try to understand the system up close. But then the Syndicate got its hooks in me and it stopped being about comprehension. All I wanted was another advantage over my rivals. Our friendship became… exploitative. He cut me off, I said some things I shouldn’t have, and then… well, you know the rest. I got my wakeup call, and I left. Took me two years to apologize and reconnect.”

“It took me about as long to accept the apology,” Dave admits, “but eventually I did, and we’ve been in touch ever since. Mostly online.”

Erica says, “I tried to pop by at least once a year, but I was avoiding Forks for good reason. Still, it’s been nice to talk philosophy in person again.”

“I’ve been chewing on that last hypothetical you threw at me,” Dave says with a nod to Erica. “The Gnostic angle… I can see the ways it could fit, though I really hope it doesn’t.”

I perk up. “Oh, hey, that’s a philosophy thing I know. Well, sort of know. I looked up a bunch of Wikipedia summaries of Gnosticism to impress a girl.”

Erica snickers. She knows exactly what I’m talking about.

When I was looking for a witch name, I wanted to find something that could serve as a message to Sophia. Turns out, Sophia is a Greek name originally, meaning “wisdom.” Sophia is also the name of one of the most important figures in Gnosticism.

In Gnosticism, everything starts with a godhead, or Monad, that emanates pieces of itself. Through pairings, these emanations continue to divide or reproduce, creating more of themselves, until they get to Sophia, the last piece of God. Rather than pairing off like the others did, Sophia creates something alone: the demiurge, a creature born of chaos. The demiurge, thinking itself alone and thus considering itself the highest power in the universe, exercises its power to create the material world, trapping the divine light in mundane matter. To perform its work more efficiently, the demiurge creates a set of servants to do its bidding and build the universe for it. Those servants were called archons.

Sophia, the girl who stood alone. Archon, the loyal servant of her creation.

Dave nods sagely. “Who hasn’t studied an obscure subject they don’t really care about to impress the object of their affections? But hey, if you’ve got the grounding, maybe you can weigh in. Erica, care to explain your hypothetical?”

“Sure. “ Erica steeples her fingers and gives me a measured look. “It’s a fairly common feeling among scholars of magic that the system as it stands appears… arbitrary. Why are only women granted power? Why are those mantles of power modeled after mythological figures, and why is the system presented as an anime-esque division between witches and magical girls? Why does the endless war between those two sides seem to have no clear victory condition, and why are so many allowed to run off and play pretend instead? It’s a system that would make more sense if its primary purpose were entertainment—if it were a game, designed for the amusement of those who orchestrated it.”

“The Jovians,” I say carefully. “Are you sure that’s a safe topic?”

“The house is warded,” Erica says dismissively. “Set that up as a present years ago.”

“We value our privacy,” Dave says.

“There’s a lot of perverts in the world,” Eli adds with a wink. “I’m sure there are plenty of people, magical or otherwise, who’d like a candid peek at all this.” He gestures to himself.

“Anyway,” Erica continues, “the Jovians are one thing, but I’m interested in looking a step above them. Hence, the Gnostic angle. What if the Jovians aren’t the designers of the game, but merely the facilitators? If they were just servants, created by a higher power, well… that would be its own kind of concerning, wouldn’t it?”

Hastur. She’s talking about Hastur, but talking around the King in Yellow. This isn’t a hypothetical, this is what she knows for a fact is going on. So why… ah. The oath.

The oath we all swore as conspirators was to keep secrets and trust between each other. Erica might trust Dave and Eli, but they haven’t sworn an oath; sharing anything we learned in the World of Glass—at least, sharing it in explicit terms—would constitute a breach of quarantine, enabling that information to spread far, far beyond the conspiracy. A violation.

“I’d find the theological implications troubling,” Dave says. “And it opens up a whole host of questions, though many of them could just as easily apply to the Jovians. How did these magical beings come to exist, and why? Are there more of them out there, tucked away on other planets or hiding somewhere we can’t see? And, if there is a singular will that created the Jovians and designated them as servants, is there anything above that? Are we, in fact, in a Gnostic situation, trapped in a demiurge’s creation while the true light of God remains out of reach? If so… how can we escape? The far worse alternative is that this gamemaster figure is the genuine highest authority, and there is no escape. If that were the case, what would we do? Just play the game and try to win? If winning is even an option.”

“I’d hate that,” Erica says blithely. “I want the universe to run on mathematics, not will.”

Eli hums. “I think if I was faced with a situation like that, I’d refuse to play the game. Like, hey man, fuck you for trying to put me in a box. Ask for consent first.”

But can we really afford to tell Hastur no? “I’d try to win,” I say. “As long as there’s a chance, I’d do whatever it takes.”

It does make me wonder: where does Hastur come from? Was she herself created by a higher being, or merely the infinite chaos of the universe? And, wherever she came from, was she the only one of her kind? Or are there other demiurges, playing games on other worlds?

Above my paygrade! I’ll leave those questions for the thinkers in our little conspiracy to puzzle out. “Okay, that’s enough speculation for me. Philosophy’s cool and all but my brain is not equipped to dig into it. So, Dave, are you a… well, actually, I don’t really know what kinds of jobs philosophers have?”

“Oh, they don’t!” he says cheerfully. “All my philosophy professors told me not to major in philosophy if I wanted to get a job, so I switched to a psych degree and went into marriage counseling. Never looked back.”

I look between Eli, the divorce attorney, and Dave, the marriage counselor. “I see.”

After dinner, Erica brings out cheesecake dessert, and then we transition to the living room to play a game of Magic: the Gathering. Erica asked me to bring a Commander deck, so I brought the Memento deck I’ve been working on for a future stream.

I learn many snake facts as Eli pilots a theme deck which seems more interested in collecting different snake tokens than actually winning the game. Dave spreads chaos by gifting permanents with negative or wacky effects to other players, complete with custom-printed “You’re welcome!” tokens to denote donated cards. Erica has a bizarre deck based on an old line of global enchantments they don’t print anymore that get sacrificed as soon as another enchantment with the same type gets played, so the table rotates every turn through a new effective subrule being added to the game.

It’s fun. My deck is a pretty typical Treasure engine, generating vast piles of artifact tokens that I can sacrifice to cast more spells. Dave complains about the absurd value my commander spits out, I complain about the “gifts” he keeps giving me, and Eli rotates snakes in his corner of the table. I’m pretty sure Erica is about to win the game when I get a text on my phone with the special sound chime I’ve set for Sophia. Immediately, I look away from the game and check my messages.

Sophia: Surprise! I’m home early. Where’d you run off to?

[commentary]

Demiurges are cool. Archons are also cool. It would be so funny if someone wrote a web serial about that called Feast or Famine and no one read it haha anyway.

A special thank you to my Grandmaster-tier patrons, whose support has kept food on my table: Adrian CC, Ashlyn, CaosSorge, Crows Danger, Demi, Lirian, M, Mgbm, Mhai Wind, Morrigan, October, Paige Harvey, PR4v1 Samaratunga, and Selacanis. Wow that’s a lot of you! Thank you so much!

If you like this story and want to see more of it, please go to the RR page and leave a rating or review! Web serials live and die on audience support, and this one is no exception. The better the story does on RR, the more people click through and read, the more motivation I have (both on a mental health level and on an “able to pay rent” level) to keep writing and to write faster.

The next scheduled break week starts on the 7th of December. It’ll be another double length break as I work on my second writing project and some outline rewrites for TMGM.

[/commentary]