Agatha Cain was having a wonderful day.
Actually, all of her days had been wonderful since Archon’s ritual. Everything came easier to her, thanks to that spectacular spell. No more anxiously agonizing over what to do and how to act, because now there was a warm glow in her chest cutting through all that useless noise. The glow would get warmer when she was doing the right thing and colder when she was doing the wrong thing, so all she had to do was chase the warmth and enjoy herself.
In her head, she’d started to think of that guiding light as Better Agatha. The Agatha she wished she could be, that she wanted to become, that she was working to become with the ritual’s help.
Normal Agatha would have snoozed her morning alarm at least twice before getting up, but Better Agatha had places to be and a day to seize, so up she went at the first ringing tone. Normal Agatha took long showers—depression showers, to call them what they were—that ate into time Better Agatha would rather spend doing her makeup and going for a run to keep in shape. Normal Agatha ate whatever she had around and often skipped breakfast, but Better Agatha insisted on healthy, filling meals. Stable, consistent nutrition would let her function better if she needed to skip eating while out on a mission.
The glow helped with her career, too. For all that it was her only income stream, discomfort had kept Agatha from really engaging with her position in Visage and her relationship with her fans. Better Agatha nudged her to post more on socials, do research before streams, and actually take some initiative about networking with other magical girls. More pep to that message, don’t end that one with a period or you’ll look like a psychopath, and would it kill you to check your damn emails?
Her schedule was busier than it had been since her first week with Visage, but she could handle that. She’d been spending so much of her time on leisure activities to destress from work that just weren’t necessary with Better Agatha propping up her mood and keeping her focused.
That gave her more time to pursue the task she’d been given by Lady Striga and the conspiracy to save the world. Time to investigate her peers in Visage, aided by her new drive for networking, and determine which of them were traitors to humanity that would need to be put down. Better Agatha relished it.
Yes, Agatha’s life had been much improved since performing that ritual with Archon. The best part of it all was the way she could finally play her role in their mock fights and actually enjoy herself.
“You won’t escape my clutches again!” Archon cackled. The witch lashed out with long trails of ribbon that Agatha cut through with fire and ice. “Blast, stop escaping my clutches!”
“You’ll have to do better than that,” Agatha jeered. “At this rate, I’ll start thinking you don’t even want to catch me!”
The witch and the magical girl soared through a false sky within a giant domed film set. The land below them was a simulacrum of Forks, rendered to evoke its geography and architecture without perfectly replicating any one neighborhood of the city. The people, likewise, were as generic as they could be.
The dome acted like a holodeck, amplifying and absorbing Radiance’s magic to project an artificial world. It wasn’t perfect, but it didn’t need to be; verisimilitude was the name of the game for Visage.
So when Archon set off a string of explosions that brought down a building, no property was actually being damaged. When Agatha fired back with shards of ice that shattered windows, same story. Any illusory people would be conveniently out of the way before debris struck them.
“You’ll regret that when I get my hands on you,” Archon called gleefully. “You’ll be my prize conquest.”
Agatha burned aside another volley of ribbons. “You don’t have what it takes to conquer me, Archon. Give up and maybe I’ll be gentle when it’s your turn to be tied up.”
She wouldn’t have had the confidence to say something like that before the ritual, but why not? Weakness. Cowardice. Valkyrie Cain wouldn’t have hesitated to tease a cute girl. Of course, Valkyrie Cain was bisexual and a fictional character, but those were just details.
Archon grinned. “Well, now I almost want to see you try. Too bad you’ve flown right into my trap.”
At her command, dozens more ribbons burst from dolls hidden in the nearby buildings. It wasn’t, in fact, so many that Agatha couldn’t carve through them and escape, but she knew the script. Carefully, to make it look good, she threw icicles around to cut through only about a third of her assailants.
The remaining ribbons wrapped her up and pulled her tight against nondescript brickwork, looping around shattered windows so any attempts to escape would be struggling against the weight of the building. The way she was bound and restrained wasn’t excessively lewd in presentation, but Agatha knew that it would still excite a certain portion of the watching audience. Normal Agatha was self-conscious about that fact; Better Agatha understood that presentation was just another weapon to be used.
She pulsed fire from her hands to escape, just like she had the first time Archon had caught her, but these ribbons didn’t catch fire. Her eyes widened, though it wasn’t really a surprise; this, too, was part of the script.
Archon swooped in, black wings beating steadily, and raked her gaze across her victim. “I don’t make the same mistake twice, darling Agatha. Now I have all the time in the world to take you in and make you mine.”
She trailed her fingers through Agatha’s hair and down the side of her face, grinning with malevolent glee. Agatha’s breath caught and she turned away, but only partly, her eyes staying locked on Archon’s. Shying away, but not too discomforted, not disgusted. Her emotions needed to be read as complicated, so each viewer could interpret what they wanted to see.
And it was easy. Every change in expression was buoyed by encouragement from the warm glow of Better Agatha. Now gasp—is it just surprise, or something more? Let it flow.
Really, playing the role should have always been that easy. It’s not like Archon was unattractive. Sure, Agatha wasn’t gay, but was that such a hard line? Plenty of straight girls pretended to like each other for male attention, getting drunk and kissing each other at parties. Plenty of straight girls wished they could feel it for real and find love with another woman, wished they were gay so they wouldn’t have to date men. Agatha was playing along for a better reason. For the mission. To defeat Venus. For a purpose that grand, what was the harm in leaning in? What was the harm in flirting back?
What was the harm in enjoying it, just a little, when Archon’s thumb brushed her lip?
A sunburst interrupted their private moment.
“Hands off the girl, creep,” said Dawn, first of the Twilight Sisters, as she nocked another gleaming arrow to her bow.
“If you’re going to hunt one of ours, be prepared to be hunted in turn,” said Dusk, the other Twilight Sister, her hands wreathed in starry darkness.
Archon hissed at the new arrivals, turning from Agatha and conjuring a bow of her own. “Stay out of this! You—how dare you!”
The rest of the scene flew by. Archon put up a good fight against the sisters, but once Agatha was freed from her bindings the outcome was obvious. With a few more cries of rage at being foiled, Archon flew away.
The Twilight Sisters teased Agatha for getting caught, Agatha insisted she had it handled with her best tsundere “hmph,” and that was that. And if she felt a little genuinely disappointed at being saved, she didn’t express that.
As soon as the cameras stopped rolling, Archon zipped out of hiding and threw herself at the Twilight Sisters with glee. “Oh my gosh, I am so excited to meet you! I’ve watched so many of your vlogs, you have no idea. I’m a huge fan, I adore the two of you. Fantastic dynamic, really fun to follow along. Dusk’s rivalry with Memento? Stellar! Celestial! Dawn, I love your bunny, I would kill for it, seriously just give the word.”
“I kinda got that vibe from your roundup,” Dusk said dryly. “But damn, you’re really like that, huh?”
“Don’t tease her,” Dawn said as she pulled her phone out of storage and started scrolling. “We need more people with genuine enthusiasm for the job. Can you imagine if every new hire was another Kira?”
Agatha didn’t get involved. There was value in networking, but right now that was Archon’s game; Agatha’s job was to gather information. Under the guise of needing to rub her eyes—and staying to the side of everyone, not hiding but not in clear vision—she took off her glasses and looked with Ariadne.
Under Agatha’s second sight, the world was a mess of connections. Her mantle’s interpretation of the myth of Ariadne was alloyed in some strange sense with the memetic image of the conspiracy corkboard. Every clue was tied in string, and every color of string carried a different meaning that Agatha had pieced together through relentless trial and error.
The particular shade of orange that implied a familial connection was completely absent between Dusk and Dawn, confirming that they were not, in fact, real sisters. There was another shade that meant found family, but that wasn’t present either. A green string told Agatha that the Twilight Sisters at least considered each other friends, but it was a pale, lackluster green.
Coworkers. Minor antipathy toward each other. Minor antipathy from Dusk toward Archon. Minor interest in becoming more familiar from Dawn toward Archon. Blood family somewhere to the north for Dawn, weaker blood family to the south for Dusk. A web of friendships, rivalries, and romantic entanglements. Desire for material possessions. Wariness toward someone in a position of authority. Envy. Discomfort. Attraction.
When Agatha had first been given her powers, she wanted to be a magical detective. She ran around her city—Seattle, not Forks, before she joined up with Visage—spying on everyone and asking questions to those who would answer in search of clues to understand her magic. Family, friends, and coworkers were all easy, but the more emotional threads took work to puzzle out.
The first time she met Memento, Radiance, and Pearl Princess, she didn’t know what the thread for greed meant, but she did recognize the thread that represented a desire for attention. Those three were connected to a dizzying number of people.
They were also, Agatha had learned after returning from the World of Glass, connected to the other side.
Memento, Radiance, Sweet Tooth, Sonata, and Narcissa all had one kind of connection, marked by impossibly-colored glass thread. Pearl Princess, Maenad, and Glamour had a different kind of otherworldly connection, though Agatha didn’t understand the difference and wouldn’t have been able to describe the visual marker. Strix Striga had a third variety, likely marking her connection to the egregore Minerva as a direct champion. That clue made Agatha suspect that the group of three were more closely tied to Venus, while the group of five were at a remove. She’d checked everyone else in Visage, and none of them had threads like those.
Well, except for Archon.
The witch who had gifted Agatha with confidence was bound up in the most interesting tangle of threads that Agatha had ever seen. A strand of green fire connected Archon to Agatha, but there was also a second thread of the same material leading somewhere else in the city. Her family threads were so frayed as to be nonexistent, and her friend threads were touched with that online-only pallor. Her desires and grudges were all atrophied and frail, except for one and the shadow of a second.
A thread of glass—a fourth variety, though again she couldn’t tell how she knew—led away to the Visage Spire, same as those connecting all the other Visage marked. Something that hadn’t been there before the ritual.
And, lastly, the brightest and most vibrant of all Archon’s threads: the red string of fate, wrapped around her finger and binding her to Strix Striga. Love, pure and consuming. Destiny, if such a thing could be said to exist. To Ariadne’s eye, Archon and Strix Striga were meant to be together. Agatha had only ever seen this red thread rarely, on couples that had been together for a very, very long time, and once on a young couple so perfect for each other it was like their love had been written in the stars.
For some reason, since the day of the ritual, that thread, more than any other, had started to bother Agatha.
[commentary]
Y’all ever read Worm? There was this character I really liked in it, can’t quite recall the name. I think it was… Amy?
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 8th of February.
[/commentary]