Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Isaiah 6:9-10: “‘No matter how closely you listen, you’ll never understand. No matter how closely you look, you’ll never see.’ Make these people close-minded. Plug their ears. Shut their eyes.”

The chandeliers above glistened like a thousand crystalline secrets, each one catching the light just enough to suggest they might whisper truths if one stood beneath them long enough. The room was a vast ballroom in a Georgian manor: oak paneled, gilded in flourishes too ancient to be fully tasteful, filled with the hum of expensive cologne and ambitious laughter. The room seemed a temple to wealth and decadence was its god.

Elias Bouchard stood near a gold-veined marble column, one hand resting on the rim of his crystal glass. He watched the room with the careful ease of a man used to being watched, and more importantly, being obeyed. A symphony quartet swelled in the corner, strings and keys harmonising over the din of conversation. Elias wasn’t listening to the music. His attention was selective, discerning, cutting toward something hidden.

His Sight moved through the room with trained, surgical precision. Every breath, every whispered admission between wine-drenched lips, peeled away to come to light. Secrets bloomed around each person he glanced at. The woman in green by the sculpture? Embezzler. The man laughing too loudly near the fountain? Addicted to guilt. The list continued. And he, ever the dutiful watcher, soaked them all in.

His gaze flitted to a tall figure, laughing in the middle of the room. Quentin Reid. Wealthy, smirking, and impossible to ignore in a black velvet dinner jacket. A silver-tongued liaison between the Prime Minister’s darker offices and the esoteric world Elias called home. He knew him from years past: donor galas, academic fundraisers. They’d danced before, information traded, money transferred. But it wasn’t Quentin who made Elias pause. His gaze had snagged on the person by his side.

You were dressed simply, but elegantly; black and silver, a shadow stitched in moonlight. You stood with a quiet poise, a calmness that made you seem separate from the glittering decay around you, expression calm, chin slightly lifted, a quiet defiance in your eyes that Elias didn’t quite understand. He tried to reach for your secrets, as he did with everyone, just a glance. The Sight should have unraveled you like it did everyone else, but instead…nothing. A flat, infuriating void.

Elias blinked. He turned his body slightly, adjusting the angle, the light, the glass in his hand, certain that some external detail was distorting his vision. But the effect remained the same.

You were blank. Not obscured. Not protected. Absent. That was impossible.

He realised he was staring. Quentin caught his gaze and grinned. “Elias Bouchard,” he called out, his voice the kind of warm that only comes from money and just the right amount of champagne. “Still haunting museums and intimidating donors?”

Elias offered a polite incline of his head and moved toward them. “Quentin. It’s been a while. Still bankrupting hedge funds with your charm?”

The man laughed. “You know me.”

Elias noticed how your fingers tensed slightly where they rested in the crook of Quentin’s elbow, but your expression remained neutral. You regarded Elias as one might regard a disconcerting painting: a curiosity, but not necessarily welcome in your personal space.

“I see you’ve brought company,” Elias pointed out, eyes flicking to you, and – he hoped – back again quickly enough not to betray too much.

Quentin turned to you with fondness that Elias noted, tucked, and catalogued. “Yes, well. One does get tired of predictable conversation. May I introduce you to someone rather...different? This is my guest tonight. A very private person, which I know you’ll find refreshing, Elias. They have this incredible ability to not fall under anyone’s spell.”

You turned toward him with polite disinterest, offered a nod, not a smile.

“Charmed.” Elias extended a hand.

You glanced at it, then after a moment shook it briefly with cool fingers. The feeling of your skin offered nothing of who you were. Not even the faintest echo. Elias felt like he was touching glass that didn’t reflect.

He tilted his head, scrutinising you. “I don’t believe we’ve met. You must be quite remarkable to keep Quentin so invested.”

You didn’t flinch at the bait, didn’t preen or protest. Your mouth drew into a practiced smile, a small, contained thing that did not reach your eyes. “I’m sure he has his reasons.”

Elias pressed on. “May I ask your name?”

You met his gaze, calm but distant. “You may.”

A pause. He waited. You didn’t answer. Quentin laughed, amused. “I did say they were private, Elias.”

The Head of the Magnus Institute, normally unshakable, adjusted his cuff. “Indeed. It is...refreshing.” And unnerving.

Quentin chuckled, oblivious of the tension building between you and Elias. His hand brushed your back with more fondness than ownership. “They’re clever aren’t they? And sharp. Not easily impressed by tricks or titles.”

“That much is obvious,” Elias said, finally turning his attention to the other man, if only to hide his growing frustration. “Where did you find them?”

“They found me, I think,” Quentin answered with fond bemusement. “I’ve no idea what they want from me. Perhaps nothing at all.”

At this, you glanced sideways, amusement flickering briefly across your features, just enough to suggest a private joke.

Elias saw it. And hated that he did not understand it. He studied you, your jaw, your shoulders, the stillness behind your gaze. He was trained to catch micro-expressions, fear responses, the flicker of truth beneath the mask. But you gave him nothing. No tells. No scent of hidden guilt or tangled memory. You were a closed room without doors.

So many things danced behind his eyes: calculations, questions, curiosities. Who were you? Why couldn’t he see you? Was it an Entity’s protection? A ward? A relic? It seemed too complete. It didn’t seem like you were being shielded. More like you were immune.

And you knew. That was the most maddening thing. You held his gaze with the sort of recognition that others never had. Not even his Archivists, at least not in the early days. You weren’t afraid, but you weren’t entirely dismissive either. Guarded, yes. Observing.

You tilted your head slightly, as if listening to something behind his words.

Elias tried a softer tone. “You seem familiar with...my work.”

You nodded once. “I’ve read things.”

Quentin raised his glass. “They’ve got one of those minds, you know? Devour old texts for fun. I’m sure your Institute’s little horrors don’t scare them.”

Elias’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Is that so?”

You looked at him. A long moment passed. “They don’t,” you confirmed. “Most of them just read like someone trying very hard to be something they’re not.”

Elias froze. It was subtle, just a half-second where his lips stopped moving, where the wine in his glass seemed heavier. The implication weighed him down: You are not the only one who watches. You are not the only one who knows.

He laughed softly. “Well. We all perform, don’t we?”

You didn’t answer.

The string quartet changed songs. Something slower. Minor key. Elias felt his skin crawl in a way it hadn’t in years. Not in fear but rather its cousin, confusion. He could not get a foothold in you.

Quentin was pulled into conversation by another guest. It might have been a senator or tech magnate, Elias didn’t care. The man apologised and stepped away briefly, leaving the two of you together. You watched him go, then slowly turned your face back toward Elias. You didn’t move to follow. The light from a nearby candelabra painted golden lines along your cheekbones.

You regarded him. He regarded you. The silence grew.

“You’re not like the others here,” he deduced. “You don’t want power. Influence.”

You glanced around the room, your mouth tightening slightly. “I want people like you to leave the world better than you found it. That rarely happens.”

“And you think I’ve made it worse.”

“I think that you’ve made it smaller.”

“Fascinating,” he murmured. “You speak as though you know me.”

“I know enough,” you replied, tone still polite. The lack of emotion struck him harder than any insult.

His voice lowered further. “Then you know I could tear you apart from the inside.”

You arched a brow. “That sounds rather invasive.”

“Only if one has secrets to hide.”

“And yet,” you said, “it seems you can’t touch mine.”

Elias inhaled through his nose, slow. “How?” He tried to keep his voice calm, but the word came out tinged with more frustration than he intended.

Your eyes softened slightly, almost in pity. “Not everything is about you.”

Elias’s jaw flexed. In anger and a kind of hunger that gnawed when something just beyond reach refused to be named, defined, known. He leaned closer. “Tell me your name.”

“No.”

He blinked. “No?”

Your voice was cool. “You don’t get to know that. You don’t get to have that.”

Elias tried to mask his unease and indignation by giving you the smallest, most enigmatic of smiles.

Quentin returned, two glasses in hand. “Hope I didn’t miss anything interesting.”

“Not at all. We were just engaging in the ancient art of saying absolutely nothing with the greatest importance,” you said, reaching for your drink with a slight nod and a neutral smile. It was unclear if it was fondness or tolerance that shaped your expression. “Mr. Bouchard was trying to divine my soul, and I was declining the séance.”

Quentin smiled wide, amused. “Well, darling, if I ever run for Prime Minister, I’m sure you’ll make an excellent speechwriter.”

Elias turned to him. “They are clearly fascinating, Quentin. You do have good taste.”

“I do try,” he said, grinning.

“Perhaps we could continue our talk in private,” Elias offered suddenly. The words surprised even him.

You met his stare and said nothing.

Quentin laughed. “They don’t do private meetings with strangers, Elias. I’ve tried to get them to meet half the Inner Circle. Even some of the higher sanctums. They just watch, remember, and walk away.”

Elias felt a splinter lodge behind his ribs. “Well,” he said, stepping back with the smile of a gracious host denied, “perhaps some other time.”

You nodded. “Perhaps.” Your tone was just polite enough to pass, yet held an unmistakable reluctance. You both knew you didn’t mean it.

And with that, you turned. You didn’t wait for Quentin, who gave Elias a short nod and hurried after you as you disappeared into the crowd, without ceremony or sound.

Elias stood alone, for once unsure of what he had just encountered. He had spent centuries staring down monsters, shepherding the Archives toward their apotheosis, molding fear into structure and worship. He had never once met a human immune to it all. He needed to know who you were. And he couldn’t.

Chapter Text

Ezekiel 3:17-19: “Human one, I’ve made you a lookout for the house of Israel. When you hear a word from me, deliver my warning. If I declare that the wicked will die but you don’t warn them, if you say nothing to warn them from their wicked ways so that they might live, they will die because of their guilt, but I will hold you accountable for their deaths. If you do warn the wicked and they don’t turn from their wickedness or their wicked ways, they will die because of their guilt, but you will save your life.”

You hadn’t meant to come to this part of the city. Usually, you avoided it like the plague. You kept tabs, sure. Of the places, the people connected with it. You know what happened in places like these, had seen Jane Prentiss coming from a mile away and had stayed quiet. Stayed away. But your feet had led you here and now. The Institute loomed on the other side of the street, rain slick on its stone steps. The sky was the colour of cooled iron, low clouds scattering, but the light felt distant. People passed quickly on the street. Some cast anxious glances at the old building’s façade. None lingered. You continued walking, one hand tucked into your coat pocket, thumb brushing the cool edge of something small and silver.

You weren’t planning to stop. You had had no intention to intervene in this matter. But then you saw her.

Walking outside the entrance. Coat neatly buttoned. A reusable coffee cup in one hand, Institute lanyard around her neck. Hair pinned back with care.

It wasn’t her. It was just wearing one of the assistant’s faces.

You watched as it descended the steps, rummaging in its coat pocket for a moment. It didn’t notice you at first, or pretended not to, as it was making its way in your direction, paying you no mind. When it was only a few steps away, the bile in your mouth and disgust in your stomach were strong enough that they forced you to speak. “It’d be best if you leave while you still can.”

It stopped abruptly, eyes flicking to you as if only now realizing you were standing there. “Sorry, can I help you?” The delivery was polite and confused and flawlessly ordinary.

You studied it. The curve of the jaw. The eyes just a fraction too steady. You should have kept walking. Shouldn’t have said anything. It wasn’t worth it. But you did it anyway.

“You should leave them alone.” Your voice came colder than you expected. Your gaze moved to the Institute.

“I’m…sorry?”  The creature’s head tilted, the exact degree of concern and curiosity. “I work here,” it added, almost casually.

You didn’t move closer. “No, you don’t.”

The smile stayed. But the blink, slow and mechanical, spoke volumes. “I think you’ve got me confused with someone else.” She took a small step forward, as if this were a simple misunderstanding between colleagues. “I’m part of the Archives.” It extended its hand to you. “Sasha James.”

“You’re wearing her name. That’s all.”

For a heartbeat, the smile froze. It recovered quickly, wrapping its arms around itself in a practiced gesture of human self-protection.

Before it could open its mouth again, you continued: “I know exactly what I’m looking at. You don’t belong here. And you don’t fool me.”

The thing wearing Sasha’s skin watched you. Flat eyes. Empty curiosity. “I don’t understand,” it said. Its voice lost the practiced Sasha-tone, flattened toward neutrality. “How can you see me? You don’t belong to the Eye.” Finally, honesty behind the performance.

You offered no reply. Instead, you reached into your coat pocket and pulled out the small thing you’d been carrying since this morning. You hadn’t known why you brought it. Now it was clear.

It was a mirror the size of your palm, an antique pocket piece, round and smooth, cracked down the centre. You held it between thumb and forefinger, glinting in the light. The creature recoiled ever so slightly. The crack in the mirror split its reflection cleanly in two.

“This is all you are,” you said softly. “A reflection with nothing behind it. Just angles and mimicry.” 

The thing stared at the mirror. Then at you. The silver edge was cold against your palm. You didn’t know if it was from the rain, or from the being that had just looked at it and seen itself. You spoke again: “Whatever your game is, end it now.”

Its gaze sharpened. The smile twisted. “You think you can threaten me?” it asked, stepping closer.

You didn’t flinch. “I’m not threatening you. I’m warning you. If you stay, they’ll find you. Eventually.”

“I want them to,” it hissed, and for a flicker, something else passed across its face. No longer the  mask, but instead the thing beneath, a glimpse of the truth, reflected in the mirror you were holding. A hollow echo, an unperson wrapped in borrowed skin.

“The Unknowing will happen, you know,” it whispered, almost gently, reverently. “You can’t change that.”

“It will fail,” you replied simply.

“Will it?” the thing whispered and lifted its chin in arrogance, the movement mathematically perfect. “Maybe we’ll take your face then too. I guess we’ll see.”

“We’ll see,” you confirmed, nodding once.

It didn’t take the mirror, but it did glance at it once more with contempt. Then it turned and walked away without looking back. You watched it go, not trusting its back until it was halfway down the block, until the shadows swallowed the silhouette.

Then instinct flared up in the pit of your stomach. You looked up.

The large, front-facing window was dark. You knew he was there. You couldn’t see him, but your skin prickled all the same. 

You grimaced, turned away. “Of course,” you muttered. 

You didn’t give him the satisfaction of looking longer. You tucked the cracked mirror back into your coat and turned the other direction.

Chapter Text

Ecclesiastes 1:18: “For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.”

The library was old, buried between alleyways, a holdover from another century. Small too, without bold signs or university branding. It didn’t have an online catalogue or grand events. But if you knew what to look for – or what was looking for you – you might find it.

Jon wasn’t sure what brought him there. He’d been holed up in his office for hours, trying to connect the dots of the mysteries he was tangled in.

He’d meant to go home, intent on finally, finally, allowing his body to rest. But his feet had kept walking, dragging him through streets he barely registered; whether on instinct or exhaustion he didn’t know.

The door opened with the sound of a small bell ringing, startling the quiet. Inside, the air of old paper and quiet focus wrapped around him. Morning light filtered through dust in golden shafts, casting drowsy patches across worn rugs and green-shaded reading lamps. Books climbed the walls, some shelves looked older than the floor beneath them. Time seemed to slow here, though his watch continued to tick steadily on his wrist.

He wandered for a while, not really looking for anything in particular. His fingers trailed along spines without reading the titles, while his thoughts chewed at him from the inside: the tunnels, Gertrude, Sasha, how his own voice caught on the tapes seemed so unrecognisable to him now. Even here, even now, he could feel it, the paranoia and the fear. And beneath it, a feeling he had grown accustomed to: a gnawing hunger for truth, an itch he couldn’t scratch, no matter how many statements he collected or how meticulously he kept watch over his colleagues. Every step between the shelves seemed too loud and every breath too shallow. He imagined the whole building listening.

Then, without meaning to, he noticed you.

You were at the far end of the reading room, deep in thought, at a corner table to yourself. A pool of golden light washed across ink-stained fingers and a notebook that looked older than most marriages. Books were stacked before you, though they didn’t match up: Welsh folklore, psychology, medieval theology, a book simply entitled “Die Wilde Jagd”. You didn’t draw attention to yourself; people simply gave you space, without realising they had, passing you, eyes never drifting in your direction.

He felt it then before he could even name it, a pull, curiosity.

You didn’t look up when he stopped near a bookshelf in the local history section, not too far away from you. For a moment he pretended to browse, thumbing the cover of a paperback, though probably not very convincingly. His gaze returned to you too often, flickering between book spines and your silhouette. Something about your posture, your stillness, was measured. Calm in a way Jon hadn’t felt in months. He couldn’t explain why it unsettled him. Or why he couldn’t walk away.

He cleared his throat. You looked up and stilled. You met his gaze with quiet interest.

He stared, stunned for a beat too long, before he flinched and looked away, stumbling to speak. “Sorry,” he murmured, throat dry. “I wasn’t–”

“Yes, you were,” you said, voice calm. “It’s alright. You wouldn’t be the first to stare.” There was no bite in it, almost like you’d just said hello.

Jon swallowed, hesitated, then stepped closer, hand tightening on the back of the chair across from you. “May I sit?”

A nod. He sat. The chair groaned, as if reluctant to hold the weight of what he carried.

You closed your notebook gently. Jon sat close enough to feel the warmth from your legs. He was silent for a while, taking you in. You were calm, but not necessarily detached. You weren’t particularly imposing, either. And yet he felt like a student sitting before an unsolvable equation. His fingers trembled slightly as they touched the corner of the table. You let the moment stretch.

“Do I know you?” he asked quietly, genuinely confused.

You studied him for a moment. There was something kind behind your eyes, something achingly human, and it struck him as more startling than anything else had in weeks.

“Not yet,” you answered. “You’re…Jonathan Sims.”

The use of his full name hit him. He stiffened, and tried again. “I, um...I don’t think we’ve met.”

“We haven’t.”

“But you were...looking for me?”

“Not in particular,” you admitted, and your smile dimmed, gentler now. “Though I have to confess that I was looking forward to meeting you.”

The way you said it without motive, without bait, stopped him.

Jon looked down, suddenly unsure where to place his hands. “Well, you have met me now.”

“I have.” And then, softer, without mocking him: “You look tired.”

He startled and looked at you sharply. His defenses went up, the quiet sort, the folding in of the shoulders, the glance toward the exit. He didn’t leave but he did turn away slightly, avoiding your gaze, trying to focus on something tangible. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not very good at being unreadable yet…though you’re trying at least,” you retorted, your voice warm, grounded. “Still…you’re unraveling. You’ve been carrying more weight than you should. You’re tired. You’re hunted. And you’re not sure if what’s changing in you is a curse or a calling.”

He could barely breathe. His fingers twitched against the table, aching to reach for a recorder that wasn’t there.

“How do you know that?” he whispered.

“Because I’ve seen the shape of it before,” you said. “You’re not the first. You won’t be the last. But you might be the one who sees it through.”

Jon stared. You met it calmly.

 “Have you met others like me?” he asked quietly.

Your eyes flicked to the side. “Yes.”

He waited. “Are you…are you something like Jane Prentiss…like these creatures?” His eyes narrowed at the thought.

You smiled faintly, and something about the curve of your mouth reminded him of old cathedrals: full of beauty and deliberately built to keep out the wind. “No. I am not.”

“But you do know about the Institute,” he surmised warily. “About what we do.”

“I know enough.” You tilted your head. “I don’t work for Elias, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Jon tensed at the name, his paranoia flaring up on instinct. 

You caught the shift in his shoulders and added: “I’d say I work against him, I suppose. Though I don’t really work at all. I just…nudge. Where I can.”

Jon chewed on his lip. “Then it might be best if he doesn’t know we are talking.”

You hesitated for a moment, looking at him. “…I’d wager to guess that he probably wouldn’t approve of it.”

“Why are you talking to me?”

You glanced out the window. A pale bird flew past, too fast to see properly. Finally, you shrugged slightly, brushing a thumb along the gilded edge of your notebook. “Because you’re still choosing what kind of story you’re in. And what kind of man you want to be.”

Jon’s breath caught. His fingers curled tightly at his side. “I don’t know what that means.”

“Hmm. No,” you agreed. “Not yet.”

Silence fell again. 

Jon forced himself to look up. “Do you…ah…want to give a statement? A proper one?” He sounded almost hopeful.

The corner of your lip tugged upwards, amusement flickering across your face. “Do you want one?”

Jon paused. The hunger moved again, coiling in his chest. “I– I don’t know. I think so.”

You nodded, satisfied with his answer. “I understand. Let me give you a warning instead.”

Jon’s blood ran cold.

“I’ve read your story before. In different names. Different ink. You think knowledge will save you,” you cautioned. “You’re wrong.”

“I have to know what’s happening,” he snapped, more defensive than he intended. “If I don’t learn more, people will die.” 

You studied him. Then leaned back a little, and gently, quietly, offered a strange reply.

 “You know, there’s an old tale. A man who wanted to know everything. He trusted the wrong guide. Opened the door to knowledge because he thought it made him powerful. It undid him all the same.”

Jon raised an eyebrow, incredulous. “A fairy tale?”

“Tragedy,” you corrected. “He asked for knowledge and was given too much. He thought truth could save him, that he could contain it, master it. But the man who led him, Mephisto, he didn’t give knowledge. He gave damnation dressed in cleverness.”

Jon shifted, uncomfortable. “That sounds familiar.”

“It should.” You leaned toward him, just a little. “There’s danger in the pursuit. You know that. You feel it already, don't you?”

“It’s not like I can stop now,” Jon muttered. “I’ve already pulled the thread. It won’t go back.”

You nodded, smiling almost wistfully, sympathy threading your voice. “Just be sure you’re pulling the right thread. Don’t make the mistake of believing you can tame it. That if you just understand enough, it won’t consume you. And make sure the voice whispering in your ear isn’t calling itself a friend when it’s only ever been a leash.”

That landed on him, hard. He observed you and for a moment, you looked tired, too. Someone who had seen the edge of something and escaped.

Jon’s voice was hoarse now. “Who are you?”

You looked at him for a long moment. “Someone who remembers what it’s like to want answers more than air. And someone who knows what it costs.”

He lowered his gaze. “Can I at least know your name?” he asked finally.

You considered it. “My first name only. That’s all I’m willing to give. Knowing who’s watching.”

He looked up sharply at that, gaze flicking through the room instinctively. There was nobody in earshot.

You laughed then, quietly. “You can call me Y/N.”

Jon looked at you again. A thousand questions rattled in his brain. “Why help me?” he asked finally.

“Because you haven’t fallen yet,” you assured him, then gathered your things. “And because the world doesn’t need another Faust.”

You stepped past him. Your fingers brushed his arm lightly. A small gesture of reassurance.

“I won’t stop you from searching,” you said. “But be careful, Jon.” You began to walk away.

Jon stood abruptly. “Wait! Will I see you again?”

You paused at the shelves, looked over your shoulder. “Only if you need to. Or if things get worse.”

Then you disappeared.

Chapter Text

Isaiah 59:3-5: “Your hands are stained with blood, and your fingers with guilt. Your lips speak lies; your tongues mutter malice. No one sues honestly; no one pleads truthfully. By trusting in emptiness and speaking deceit, they conceive harm and give birth to malice. They hatch adders’ eggs, and weave spiderwebs.”

The kettle clicked off behind you, steam coiling into the stillness of the room. You didn’t get up to pour it. Instead, you leaned further over your desk, elbow resting on it, your hands hovering over a yellowed sheet of vellum, ink barely legible beneath its varnish of time. The handwriting was sharp, deliberate.

Johann von Württemberg.

You hadn’t expected the name to surface. Initially, you had researched Albrecht von Closen, a military attaché from Stuttgart, officially. Unremarkable in his lifetime, though he had died mysteriously. But you had found a connection to a certain researcher of the occult. The trail had led you here.

You laid the paper beside the coat of arms of the Württemberg family: a reference point scribbled into your notes by hand long ago. Gold, on it three black stag’s antlers. Beneath it, the motto: Furchtlos und treu. Fearless and loyal.

The words kept appearing. Carved into a ruined chapel wall. In the corner of a faded woodcut. Now under the crest. It made you pause. You tapped the motto with your pencil, eyes narrowing. Loyalty demanded, fear discarded? What if they were never afraid...because they already belonged to something worse?

You flipped another page, tracing the ink of the lineage of Ulrich II von Württemberg with a gloved finger. Military, political entanglements, marriages, bloodlines. And there, faintly, a small note written in different ink: a mention of an illegitimate son. Supposedly sent away for illness of the mind.

Illness. Of course they’d called it that.

You rose, finally, and walked to your cabinet. The drawer you opened groaned in protest but you took out the rest of the documents you had requested. You slit the envelope open with a knife.

The first page was an apology from the German archival assistant about how he had barely found any sources for your particular field of interest. How most of the original documents had disappeared sometime in the 19^th century. But also the assurance that he had found some copies and transcriptions. See attached.

You picked up the first source. A letter from Johann himself, ink faded and shaky. Found in the false binding of a monastic ledger in the sixteenth century. The original was gone but a grainy photograph of a copy yet existed:

“Brudr Benedicht,

I hab wieder net gschlofa. Des Licht in meim Kämmerle isch nimme vo de Kerza. Es hockt ebbes hinter mir, au wenn i mi dreha. Des Glotza hört net uff. I frog mi scho, ob i wirklich no i selber bin. I hab d'Auga gsehn, und i glaub, s‘het mi oigschluckt. Des Biachle, wo dr Scheffler mir bracht hot, redet in meim Kopf, au wenn i‘s zuma mach. I woiß jetz. I woiß z’viel.

Johann”

(“Brother Benedict,

I haven’t slept again. The light in my little room no longer comes from candles. Something sits behind me, even when I turn around. The staring won’t stop. I wonder if I’m even still myself. I’ve seen the Eye, and I think it has swallowed me. The little book Scheffler gave me speaks in my head, even when I close it. I know now. I know too much.

Johann”)

You exhaled shakily. You tried not to jump to conclusions; the Swabian dialect was archaic and difficult to understand after all, but it was telling enough. The boy had clearly been a part of something. A witness, maybe. A helper. Or a sacrifice. The Württemberg family might have hidden it, or helped spread it. It didn’t matter.

Still, you set the letter aside and pulled out the other two pages. The first were the personal notes by Prior Matthias Seckel from the Monastery of Denkendorf, found encoded in marginalia:

“Der Jüngling Johann, von dem man flüstert, er sei des Grafens Sünd‘ und nicht rechtlich geboren, saß nächtelang in der alten Bibliothek. Wissen hat er gefressen wie Brot. Er hat ein Buch geöffnet, das versiegelt war. Es war ohne Titel. Nur ein Auge darin, golden und starr. Mir ist ganz schlecht geworden. Ich hab gesündigt, indem ich hinsah. Als man ihn warnte, sprach er: ‘Ich muß sehen, was mich ansieht.’ Es war als spräche er nicht mit dem Mund. Er hat nimmer geblinzelt. Nimmer. Ich schwöre, das war ein Bote des alten Gottes, der der alles sehen will.“

  (“The youth Johann, whom they whisper is the Count’s sin and not lawfully born, spent nights in the old library. He devoured knowledge like bread. He opened a book that had been sealed. It bore no title; only an eye, golden and staring. I felt sick. I have sinned by looking at it. When warned, he said: ‘I must see what sees me.’ It was as though he spoke not with his mouth. He never blinked. Not once. I swear, this was a messenger of the old god, the one who wants to see all.”)

The next a document recovered from the attic of Castle Urach. Signed Reinhard von Heidenheim:

“Gott sei uns gnädig. Der Knabe ist uns entglitten. Die Augen in der Halle folgen uns. Er verweigert das Abendmahl, sagt, Brot sei Lüge, Wein nur Farbe. ‘Ich kenne die wahre Speisung,’ sagt er, ‘die aus dem Blick kommt.’. Sein Antlitz ward bleich wie Kalk und er schrieb Symbole an die Wände, daß der Prior sich bekreuzigte. Ich fürchte, es ist zu spät. Mein Herr, wenn Ihr noch Macht habt, ruft ihn zurück. Oder verbrennt den Turm.”

(“God have mercy on us. The boy has slipped away from us. The eyes in the hall follow us. He refuses the Eucharist, says bread is a lie, wine only colour. ‘I know the true feeding,’ he says, ‘that comes from the gaze.’ His face grew pale as chalk and he wrote symbols on the walls that made the prior cross himself. I fear it is too late. My lord, if you still hold power, call him back. Or burn the tower down.”)

So it was true. Ulrich had disavowed Johann, once he grew obsessed with forbidden knowledge and lost his mind. Or ascended. It seemed the Eye had claimed him, centuries ago.

Your eyes flickered back to the motto. Fearless. And utterly doomed. It rang too clean to be coincidence. You jotted in your notes: Antithetical to the Fears? Servant of the Eye? If the latter was true, then Johann von Württemberg had been way more dangerous than any of his contemporaries or any of the researchers since had realised. Well, all but…

You reached over your desk to look at the documents from last week. An excerpt by Madame Clémence Delacroix to her sister:

“Il est passé ici en mai. Il m’a parlé de l’Allemagne, et d’un certain ‘enfant oublié d’un comte’. Il m’a demandé si la peur pouvait être un acte d’amour. J’ai rêvé cette nuit-là d’un œil sans paupières, suspendu dans une bibliothèque sans fin. Louise, je suis terriblement effrayée.” 

(“He passed through here in May. He spoke to me of Germany and of a certain ‘forgotten child of a count.’ He asked me if fear could be an act of love. That night I dreamt of an eye without eyelids, floating in an endless library. Louise, I’m terribly frightened.”)

The next, a private letter from Anna G. van Auster, lady occultist, to the spiritualist Wilhelm Reuss, discovered in the Reuss estate, stamped “Nicht zur Veröffentlichung.” Not for publication. It had been a pain in the proverbial to get a hold of this one.

Liebster Wilhelm,

Es war ein Engländer bei unserem Salon letzte Woche, ein Herr J. Magnus, so nannte er sich jedenfalls. Er war leise, beinahe demütig, doch seine Fragen...Wilhelm, ich habe mich selten so durchbohrt gefühlt. Er sprach kein einziges Wort zu viel, aber was er sagte, erinnerte mich an Dinge, die ich längst vergessen hatte. Oder vergessen wollte.

Er fragte nach Informationen über ‚das Auge‘ und bestimmte obskure Schriften, die sich in Deinem Besitz befinden. Ich warne Dich: Er sucht nicht nach Wissen, um Erleuchtung zu erlangen, sondern um in den Abgrund zu blicken. Ich schlage Dir vor, ihn bei seiner Rückkehr in Ludwigsburg nicht erneut einzuladen.

In Sorge,
Anna

(Dearest Wilhelm,

There was an Englishman at our salon last week, a Mr. J. Magnus or so he called himself. He was quiet, almost humble, but his questions…Wilhelm, I have rarely felt so thoroughly examined. He didn’t speak a single word too many, but what he did say reminded me of things I had long forgotten. Or wished to.

He was seeking information about ‘the Eye’ and certain obscure writings I know to be in your possession. I warn you: he does not seek knowledge for illumination, but for the abyss. I would suggest not inviting him again upon his return to Ludwigsburg.

Concerned,
Anna)

A third: an excerpt from the unpublished diary of Professor Dr. Friedrich Anselm, hidden deep in the Archives of the University of Heidelberg:

“Der Engländer Magnus kam im März an, schweigsam und mit einem zu höflichen Lächeln. Er fragte nach Johann von Württemberg, einem Bastard, den kaum einer kennt. Warum ein Londoner Archivdirektor solch eine Gestalt sucht, will mir beim besten Willen nicht einleuchten.  Besonders interessierte er sich für einen Brief, der angeblich von einem Mönch versteckt wurde. Er sprach leise, aber mit einem Blick, der mir eine Gänsehaut jagte. Ich hatte das Gefühl, er wusste mehr über mich, als ich selbst.”

  (“The Englishman Magnus arrived in March, quiet and with too polite a smile. He asked about Johann of Württemberg, a bastard scarcely anyone knows. Why an archival director from London seeks such a figure is entirely beyond me. He was particularly interested in a letter said to have been hidden by a monk. He spoke softly, but with a gaze that gave me goosebumps. I had the feeling he knew more about me than I did.”)

Jonah Magnus. The name was a constant in your research. Archivist, founder, collector of truths.

A tightness pressed at your ribs. You pulled a stack of papers from beneath the desk, cloth-wrapped, locked with a brass clasp. The one on top was half-rotted, yellowed. Gertrude had given it to you when she couldn’t make sense of it, hoping you could find the connection. A name was inked at the bottom of the page in a tight hand. It was a letter from Jonah Magnus to Philipp Cartwright, Edinburgh 1819. Your pulse tightened.

“Cartwright,
Iter in Suebiam fructuosum fuit. Tractus mentis illius Johannis mirabilius est quam exspectavi. Closen quidem non mentitus est, hic puer vidit. Non intellexit, sed vidit. Pergam in Württemberg ut manum meam ponam super reliquias eius. Oculus satis esurit.”

(“Cartwright,
The journey to Swabia was fruitful. The pathways of that Johann’s mind are more astonishing than I expected. Closen did not lie, this boy saw. He did not understand, but he saw. I will go deeper into Württemberg to lay my hand upon his remnants. The Eye hungers enough.”)

You took a deep breath. A slow, sick certainty uncoiled in your stomach. So that was what he had wanted in Swabia. Johann’s secrets, his powers, his inheritance, his access to the Eye. But without the cost. And he had wrought havoc along the way, just like he always did.

You leaned back in your chair and looked up toward the dark ceiling of your flat, before rubbing your aching eyes. It was late. Or early. Almost three in the morning. You had spent the last four hours translating, cross-referencing, checking timelines, and publication dates. Names that had no business being grouped together and that were suddenly echoing off each other. Your mind was spinning.

Your desk before you was a warzone of scattered letters, digital printouts, handwritten notes, and books in cracked leather bindings. You took the letter and laid it beside the others.

You closed the last book with care as the binding crackled. Your fingertips lingered on the cover. The smell of it clung to your skin. The words of the past hours still whispered at the edges of your consciousness, still rattled behind your eyes.

You exhaled and turned off the lamp. The room was plunged into half-darkness, bathed in the cool blue of the city’s sleeping glow beyond the window. The silence deepened. You were halfway to your bed when something moved. It was barely a flicker. A motion in the corner of your vision. Most would have missed it. You did not.

You paused, eyes adjusting, and there it was. A spider. Small. Black. Slow-moving. Purposeful.

It crept down from the bookshelf, legs twitching in mechanical precision. It moved in that jerking, too-smooth way that spiders do when they’re not entirely honest about what they are. It moved like it knew where it was going.

And all of a sudden you realised with aching clarity that it was going toward the papers on your desk.

Your breath stilled and you tensed instinctively before sighing. “Not tonight.”

You rose in silence, walked over to it in three slow, measured steps, movements fluid as you leaned down toward it.

The spider continued its path along the wall, angling downward. You tilted your head slowly, studying its movement.

Then, with the grace of someone who had done things like this before, you brought your hand up beneath it and let it crawl directly into your palm. The spider didn’t scurry away. You felt the barest whisper of weight. Eight tiny pinpricks of sensation. You rose, looked down at the spider in your palm. You did not crush it.

You raised it to eye level, and said softly, as though to a child: “I know who sent you. You don’t belong in this world on your own. Not without threads to guide you.”

The spider shifted. Almost seemed to twitch in thought. For the barest instant, something passed through the room, a shift in pressure, a flicker in the lamp’s glow.

A tug, almost like an invisible thread tied to your wrist had been pulled gently, curiously.

Your eyes narrowed. You closed your hand a bit tighter around the spider, though careful not to hurt it, and shook the feeling off your wrist. It vanished immediately.

Your voice lowered into something colder, something unmistakably firm. “Crawl back to your mistress. Tell her I see her threads. Tell her I cut what I do not consent to wear.”

The spider froze. A tiny heartbeat pulsed in your hand, not your own.

You relaxed your hand again, stepped to the window and opened it. The spider turned, crawled to your fingertips, and lowered itself by an invisible thread to the window sill. It paused once it landed, looked back.

“Go. Before I forget how gentle I can be.”

And then it leapt. Out the open window and back into the Web.

You stood still. The silence was no longer calm. There was something alert in it now.

The Web’s attention was not like the Eye’s. The Eye was scrutiny. The Web was curiosity and patience. You knew what that meant.

You closed the window and walked to the bedroom, bare feet quiet on old wood. Sleep wouldn’t come quickly.

The Web had noticed you now. You were being watched. By more than one god.

Chapter Text

Psalm 23:4: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.”

It had taken a while to find Jon. Unlike the Eye’s chosen, you weren’t blessed with omnividence. You had no network of gazes stretching across London, no certainty in the way shadows bent to reveal their secrets. You had to do it the old way: waiting and piecing the fragments together until they formed a mosaic.

But once you had caught the trail, once you had realised what Elias was doing – parceling out his poison in neat little doses of statements – it wasn’t too difficult. The errand boy was nondescript and forgettable; he trudged down streets with a letter clutched too carefully in his hands but he didn’t know what he was carrying. 

You followed at a distance, your steps absorbed by the crowd. The city helped you vanish in a tide of bodies, umbrellas jostling, the endless rhythm of footsteps and engines surrounding you. You became part of it, a silhouette among silhouettes. The boy never turned his head.

When he stopped, it was at an old terraced house. Paint was peeling from its walls and the windows were smeared with grime. He knocked once and eventually slid the envelope through the letter box. The errand boy left, whistling tunelessly, unaware of the weight that had passed from his hand. You let him go. He was not important. The door, however, was. When a young woman, dark-haired, with a face pinched by worry, returned to the house a while later, she picked up the letter and closed the door firmly behind her.

You lingered on the opposite pavement, where lamplight blurred. Your eyes drifted upward. One window, half obscured by a curtain, caught your attention.

For a second, a man passed by the window, gaunt and hollow-eyed, shoulders hunched. The impression of him remained in your vision. You exhaled slowly. Found you.

For a long moment you did not move. You simply watched the closed window, the pale glimmer of light seeping around its edges. You imagined him inside, rifling through statements, voice fraying on tape as the Eye drew tighter around him.

Not yet, you thought. Not tonight. You turned away, vanishing back into the London dusk.

Georgie’s flat was quiet, the padded hush of sanctuary which clung to the hallways, heavy with the scent of cedarwood and beeswax candles. Jon had been staying here since Leitner’s death. He moved like a ghost most days, slipping between rooms and avoiding his reflection. 

Today, he sat alone on the couch, the faint hum of the refrigerator and the creak of pipes his only company. His hands shook faintly as he rubbed at his temples. He ought to have felt grateful for the quiet, for the reprieve from tape recorders. But instead, the silence only sharpened the ache gnawing at his insides.

The last statement had left him raw, depleted and filled in the same breath. The hunger was worse somehow. It wasn’t food he needed though he realised with a grimace that he had barely eaten since yesterday. His tongue almost itched for new statements, for knowledge, the words replaying in his mind. He craved the sense of clarity and revelation slipping through his fingers even as he clutched at it. Each answer only carved out a larger absence inside him, a vacuum that pulled at everything it touched. 

He tried to resist it. Tried to distract himself with books and staring too long out the window as the sun faded, watching nothing in particular. But it burned now.

The knock startled him so badly he nearly tipped his drink onto the carpet. His heart thudded in his throat. Georgie was out with friends. She’d told him she’d come home late, maybe even tomorrow. No one knew he was here. No one should be here.

He froze, pulse thudding, then rose carefully while straining to hear. His fingertips brushed the wall to anchor himself. His feet carried him down the hallway, socks slipping against polished wooden floors. Another knock. Jon stared at the door, every nerve screaming not to open it. 

Was it the police? Another intrusion? He was already unraveling.

“Jon.”

The voice was muffled by wood but familiar. His chest tightened. For a second he thought he was imagining it, that his exhaustion had conjured you up. Jon moved over with stiff legs and after long hesitation turned the latch. The door opened.

You stood framed by the hallway light, and for a moment he forgot how to breathe. You were dressed far too finely for a casual visit: tailored lines and sharp edges, dark fabric catching the light, a ring or two glinting at your hand. It was undeniably impressive, without being too ostentatious. Overdressed for Georgie’s doorstep, that was for sure, as though you’d stepped out of a world that had no business brushing against his. It made the flat around you look even shabbier, the cheerful clutter paling against the severity of your presence.

Jon swallowed, half-aware his mouth had gone dry.

“Thank you,” you said simply as you stepped inside, brushing past him. The faintest scent of something fragrant hung in the air with you.

Jon shut the door automatically, mind racing to catch up. “Why are you here?” His voice cracked with more suspicion than he had expected to have strength to muster. Confusion tightened every line of his face.

You glanced at him, calm, unhurried, and lowered the bag you carried. “Because you’re starving.”

Jon blinked. “I– what?”

Instead of answering, you let your gaze drift to the table where the statements lay scattered. His throat clenched.

Jon stiffened, hands curling at his sides. “Wait. Are you...are you the one who’s been sending me the statements?”

The line of your lips hardened, the closest thing to disapproval he’d seen from you. “No. That’s Elias. You should know that by now.” 

Jon stared at you. “Then what are you doing here?”

“There are other ways to feed than statements.”

He blinked, unsettled. “Feed?”

You ignored the question. Instead, you reached into your bag and with a smooth motion, you shook out a neatly folded suit and held it toward him. The dark fabric gleamed faintly under Georgie’s lamp. Jon’s eyes widened

“Put this on,” you said simply and pressed it into his hands.

He stared down at it with a bewildered look, then back up at you. “What? Why? Where are we going?”

Your mouth curved faintly, withholding. “You'll find out. But you needn’t worry. I’m not handing you over to the police.” 

Jon stiffened. “So you know. About Leitner.”

“I do,” you confirmed, eyes steady on his.

Jon’s throat tightened. Fear and relief tangled in his chest until neither could be untangled. “You’re…not afraid of me?” His voice came out smaller and more cautious than he intended. He sounded almost ashamed.

You tilted your head, the faintest smile tugging at your mouth. “Should I be?”

Jon’s mouth opened and closed. He shook his head awkwardly. “…No.”

“Good,” you said with finality. “Then get ready. The car is coming in half an hour.”

Jon looked back at the suit in his hands. His pulse beat hard and uncertain. He wanted to protest, to demand more answers but the steadiness in your gaze left him silent. Something in him whispered that he should refuse, that this was one more step down a road he couldn’t turn back from. Another hungrier, more desperate part ached to follow. He disappeared without another word.

The car purred softly as it moved through the city, headlights carving pale tunnels through the night. Chauffeured, of course. The windows were tinted so dark he could almost only see his own reflection staring back. He shifted uncomfortably in the suit; it fit him, too well, in fact, but the stiff fabric and crisp lines felt alien against his skin. He was used to neat academia – though lately less so – not black ties and tuxedos. He was used to being overlooked, overlooked until someone needed a signature or a statement.

Across from him, you looked perfectly at ease. Dressed to capture the room you were leading him into, wherever that was. Precise tailoring as well as an elegance that suggested control rather than ornament. You leaned back against the sleek leather seat, one arm draped lazily along the edge, every inch the picture of composure. Your hand rested lightly on the armrest, like the car was yours and always had been.

Jon cleared his throat. “You didn’t say where we were going.”

Your eyes flicked to him, and your mouth curved slightly. “I thought I did. You cleaned up nicely, Jonathan.”

He bristled, half-embarrassed, half-annoyed. “I feel ridiculous.”

“Good ridiculous,” you corrected. “Trust me, tonight you’ll be grateful for it.”

Jon glanced sideways at you, suspicion brimming under his exhaustion. “That’s still not an answer, by the way.”

“No,” you admitted, watching the blur of passing streetlamps, “it isn’t.”

For a moment, silence filled the car, broken only by the hum of the engine. Jon’s fingers twitched against his knees. He hated being left in the dark, hated it now more than ever. Finally, he had enough. “Will you tell me, then? Please?” It came out sharp, annoyed.

You looked at him out of the corner of your eyes, studying him. At last, you relented: “We’re going to a gathering. A private auction, of sorts. Paranormal artifacts, testimonies, a few other curiosities. Some dangerous, some inert, all of them valuable to the right people. There will be no press or pretense, just monsters and high society, dressed up as a masquerade.”

He gaped at you for a second. “You’re serious.”

“Painfully so, I’m afraid.”

“That exists?”

“Of course it does.” You said it lightly, as though the thought were obvious. “Where there is horror, where there is power, there is someone ready to polish it, package it, and sell it to the highest bidder. The wealthy love to convince themselves they can buy control and fear is the most intoxicating currency of all. So they sit there and sip champagne, recount their horrors like small, little anecdotes, and then bid obscene amounts of money on the evidence. Trauma as entertainment. That’s what you’ll see tonight.”

Jon’s eyebrows rose. “And people just…meet like this? Out in the open?”

“Yes,” you replied. “It’s neutral ground. Everyone obeys the rules, no one steps out of line. You’ll be safe enough if you don’t wander.”

“You make it sound like some kind of–”

“Pact, yes. A truce, of sorts. No powers, no violence. Everyone agrees to keep it civil. That’s the only way a night like this can happen. Otherwise, the whole thing collapses.”

Jon’s fingers curled slightly around the collar of his shirt, loosening it. He hesitated for a moment. “Will Elias be there?”

A shadow of distaste passed over your expression, gone almost before he could name it. Then you looked him in the eyes with an intensity that made his breath catch. “Not unless he wants to start a war. There will be people there who really can’t stand him. It wouldn’t be wise.” 

That didn’t exactly reassure him, though the thought of Elias being unwelcome anywhere was a rare comfort. But it did make Jon curious. And that was always his undoing.

He folded his arms and leaned back, exhaling shakily. “So what am I supposed to do? Just…stand there and gawk?”

“You’ll do what you always do.” Your voice sounded almost conspiratorial. “You’ll listen. And if you’re careful, you’ll feed.”

Jon shivered. He hated how the word made something inside him spark with hot want.

The car slowed. Outside, iron gates parted silently to admit them, and the building rose ahead. It was a grand estate with sweeping steps and tall windows glowing with golden light, hidden in plain sight, somewhere in the financial district. Shadows moved inside, silhouettes of figures in masks and gowns, glasses glinting in hand. Music wafted faintly into the night. An unspoken feeling in his chest made his teeth clench.

The chauffeur opened the door. You stepped out first, your presence commanding even before your shoes touched the gravel. Jon followed more hesitantly, tugging at his sleeves, eyes darting up to the gilded façade. It was overwhelming. The sharp laughter that carried over, the opulence soaked through with something darker, it seemed as though every stone of the building knew exactly what horrors it contained and was laughing with its guests.

Jon whispered, almost to himself: “God…they really do treat it like a party.”

You looked at him sidelong and stated matter-of-factly: “This is what they’ve made of fear, Jon. A commodity. Trauma poured into crystal glasses and toasted like champagne.”

“That’s horrible.” His face twisted in displeasure.

“It is,” you sighed. “Come on then, Archivist. Time to meet the real elite.” And with that, you led him inside.

A valet took your coats without question. Another handed each of you a mask. It was plain and white and covered the top half of the face. “They’re more gimmick than real modesty,” you noted. Unease settled in his stomach but Jon followed your suit and slipped it on.

He fell into step beside you as the marble foyer opened into a wide, glittering hallway. For a moment, he thought of the Institute’s archive rooms and the way they swallowed sound, the sense of being watched at every moment. 

“Will there be others here?” he asked quietly as you passed a pair of ushers in immaculate suits, their porcelain masks blank as blank could be. “These…Avatars, I mean.”

“Possibly,” you admitted, your tone even. “Though I hope not. I can’t stand most of them. Too busy bowing to their patrons, too eager to play the monster at every turn. You’ll know if they’re here. They have a way of…leeching the air.”

Jon swallowed, apprehension tightening his chest. He wasn’t sure if he was relieved by your honesty or unnerved by it.

The main room opened before you, high ceilings dripping with chandeliers, their crystals catching and fracturing the golden light. Velvet drapes muffled the walls, the air thick with perfume and expensive wine. Guests mingled in little constellations, their smiles too sharp, faces obscured behind half-masks or delicate filigree veils, laughter ringing shrill and brittle. The atmosphere had the shimmer of wealth but the undercurrent was raw hunger as if everyone in the room were starving for something they couldn’t name.

Jon lingered by your shoulder, trying not to look too long at anyone.

“Stay close to me,” you murmured without glancing his way. “This may be neutral ground, but that doesn’t mean everyone here is harmless. Remember that.”

He nodded mutely, clutching the fabric of his sleeves as you ushered him past clusters of masked guests who whispered over champagne flutes, dangerous words slipping into otherwise polite conversation as though they were nothing scandalous.

A server passed by with a tray of red-gold cocktails that shimmered under the lights. Jon stared at it warily. He leaned toward you, voice low. “What is that?”

You didn’t slow your stride, guiding him smoothly through the room, but your voice dropped to match his. “Who knows. Ambrosia. Drugs. Maybe just pomegranate vodka. They never label the glasses. It’s safer not to drink it.”

At last, you led him toward a side of the room where objects gleamed under glass domes and heavy velvet cloths. Jon felt the pull before he’d even seen them properly, the faintest vibration under his skin, the way his breath caught as though they were calling to him by name.

A staff member approached, bowing slightly. The man’s voice was low and cultured, the cadence unmistakably rehearsed. A curator guiding visitors through an exhibit.

“This piece,” he drawled, gesturing to a locket on a pedestal of black satin, “was retrieved from the grave of a young girl buried alive in 1912. When found, her fingernails had carved the inside of her coffin to splinters. Some say, if you wear it long enough, you can still hear her scratching, that you can feel her choking for breath.”

Jon’s throat tightened. He hadn’t even touched the locket and yet the words wrapped around him and suddenly he knew, felt the dark air of the grave, the ragged screams, the silence pressing down on him. It poured into him like water. He staggered, sucking in a sharp breath.

Behind him, you had not moved. You watched him closely, eyes narrowed, every inch the guardian at his back.

The staff member continued, unruffled. “This book – Leitner provenance, of course – circulated briefly among a group of occultists in New Orleans before their mass disappearance. The pages contain no words now, only static, but those who read it reported hearing a voice reciting in a strange language, a prayer no one else could hear.”

Jon swayed forward almost involuntarily. His fingers twitched against the glass as though he might break it just to get closer. The static buzzed faintly in his ears, a taste of what lay inside.

He shut his eyes, breathing hard. He could feel your presence steady and still behind him though you hadn’t touched him. It was grounding somehow. You were making sure he didn’t drown.

One by one, the staff led them along the line of artifacts: a black and white spinning top that kept drawing his gaze in; a taxidermied fox that was said to have bitten several fingers off of previous owners; an antique meat grinder that made people want to grind their own flesh; a knife with a blackened handle that dripped blood no matter how often it was wiped off.

Jon listened, drank it all in with wide eyes, every breath trembling on the edge of a laugh or a gasp. He felt like a moth in a room full of candles, overwhelmed, fluttering toward every glow. Every story unfurled inside him, every fragment of terror seeped into the gnawing hollow that was never full.

Eventually, he could hardly steady himself. Each object was another door flung open, and though his body remained in that glittering room, his mind was carried away again and again, to flames, to darkness, to destruction, to the cold touch of stone. It surged through him until his mind was singing. He felt almost dizzy, light-headed, as if he had been standing too close to a fire. His pupils must have been blown wide.

You waited until he swayed against the display case, his hand white-knuckled against the glass, before touching his elbow lightly. The smallest pressure, firm enough to draw him back into the world. You steered him aside to a quieter corner where the air wasn’t so thick with dread. “Breathe,” you murmured. “You’ll collapse if you gorge yourself.”

Jon nodded faintly but he couldn’t stop the trembling. For a moment, he thought he might start laughing at the absurdity of the ravenous joy clawing up through his exhaustion. His chest heaved. He looked dazed, like a man who had drunk too much and wasn’t ready to admit it. 

He whispered: “I can feel them. All of them.”

“I know.” You steadied him. “Don’t let them pull you under.”

Jon shut his eyes and obeyed, dragging air into his lungs. It terrified him, how much he wanted it, had craved this feeling. He hadn’t felt this alive in weeks. You gave him a few minutes and once he gave you a nod, you guided him back into the swell of the crowd, away from the artifacts. For a second his gaze flickered to an older man with a cane, speaking animatedly, though too far away for Jon to hear. Before he could pay closer attention though, you had already steered him in a different direction. 

You joined a small circle of guests that had formed near the fireplace, their masks glinting in the flickering light. Their voices carried sharp against the hum of conversation. A woman with a pinched waist and high-pitched laugh raised her glass. “My maid,” she announced brightly, “you’ve never heard such a scream. She was dust before I knew it. Left nothing behind but her shoes. It was so pure. I thought to myself, how perfect, to be so utterly aware, in that last moment.”

The others chuckled knowingly, adding their own asides: servants who disappeared, children who screamed in the night, neighbours who never came back from the dark and on and on. Each horror slipped into the conversation as casually as gossip at a luncheon. Jon’s hands curled into fists. His face had gone pale, his shoulders rigid. But he didn’t speak. It was as if every guest was a walking statement, terrifying and mesmerising at the same time.

One of the men, masked in black, remarked idly: “I heard Salesa once procured a lantern that had quite a similar effect. Shame we don’t see him anymore.”

Another raised his glass in a mocking toast. “Gone to ground, perhaps. Or swallowed whole.” Their laughter rang hollow.

Jon froze. The name rang familiar in his ears. He looked to you, but your face gave nothing away. You merely stood beside him, absorbing it all with that same unflinching calm. 

Then, at the far end of the hall, a bell was struck. The lights dimmed slightly; a hush fell over the crowd. From the far end, the auctioneer stepped forward, immaculate in a white mask and dark gloves as staff members began ushering guests toward rows of seats arranged before a raised platform. They began drawing velvet cloths from the glass cases, revealing the objects in their terrible splendor.

Jon leaned closer to you, voice low, nervous. “It’s starting.”

“Yes,” you acknowledged. Then, firmly, “We’re leaving.”

He stared at you. “What?” You were already steering him toward the door, your hand light on his arm. He stumbled after you, confused. “But…those things, someone will buy them. They’ll go into the wrong hands. Don’t you care?”

You stopped in the shadow of the grand archway, turning just enough to look him in the eye. The lamplight caught against the line of your jaw and sharpened your expression into something resolute. “Of course I care,” you hissed as murmurs of anticipation swelled behind you. “But unless you have a secret trust fund stashed away that you’ve neglected to mention, we don’t stand a chance of stopping it. These people buy and sell terror the way others buy jewels. We can’t win that game.”

Jon stared at you, horrified, torn between the urge to run back into the room and the paralysing weight of your words. He glanced back over his shoulder. The glittering room was alive with hunger, masks leaning forward as the first object was lifted to applause. It felt obscene, like watching carrion birds preen around a corpse.

You reached out, brushing a hand against his sleeve in a gesture that was almost kind. “You’ve seen enough for tonight.” You caught his eye, steady and unyielding. “You can’t save everything by yourself. Don’t gorge yourself on despair you can’t change.”

With that, you drew him into the night outside. The cold air was sharp against Jon’s face as the two of you stepped back to the waiting car. The door closed behind you with a muffled thud, sealing off the laughter and the bidding for horrors neither of you stayed to see.

For a while, the only noise was the soft hum of the engine and the faint hiss of the tires against wet streets. Jon sat with his hands clasped tightly together, staring down at the crease in his dress shirt. His breath came unevenly, and he couldn’t seem to find the words that were buzzing around in his head. His hands still trembled faintly in his lap.

Finally, you broke the silence. Your voice was calm but it cut clean through the weight in the air. “Did you sate your curiosity?”

He flinched, as if the words had been sharper than you intended. Then, slowly, he raised his eyes to meet yours. “It was…” He faltered, searching for the right word, then gave a bitter laugh. “A lot.”

You didn’t speak, letting him fumble through his own admission. His throat worked as he forced the rest out. “It was...intoxicating.” His voice dropped, almost ashamed. “It felt like I couldn’t stop myself. Like I didn’t want to.”

You nodded in acknowledgement, then studied him for a moment. There was no judgment in your silence, only patience. “You look better. Less worn. The hunger has softened its grip on you.”

Jon scoffed faintly, but there was no real force behind it. His shoulders slumped. “That’s…not something I’m proud of.”

“Maybe,” you agreed, “but you don’t have to starve yourself. And you don’t need to go crawling to Elias Bouchard, either.”

That name drew a shadow across his face. Jon looked away quickly, staring out the window as the blurred lights of the city streaked past. “You make it sound so simple.”

“It isn’t simple,” you reiterated. “It’s survival. But you can survive your own way, Jon. You don’t have to let him own you. You don’t have to play his game”

Jon’s hands tightened in his lap. He didn’t answer at first, and the silence stretched again. When he finally spoke, his voice was low and unsteady. “I don’t know if I can.”

You leaned back into the seat, turning your head to the side. The car turned onto a quieter street, the glow of the city receding behind you. Jon pressed his forehead briefly against the cool glass of the window, trying to steady the churning feelings in his chest. By the time the car drew up in front of Georgie’s building, the silence between you seemed heavy. He hesitated with his hand on the door, then glanced back at you. For a moment, he was unwilling to step back into the ordinary world after the night’s grotesque spectacle. There were too many questions, too much he wanted to demand. But the words stuck in his throat.

You spoke up: “Do you think you’ll have to feed again soon?”

Jon cringed but contemplated for a moment. “No, not for a while, I think.”

“That’s good.”

Jon hesitated. He knew that you wouldn’t offer him all the answers that he so desperately needed but there was one question that he couldn’t shake. His voice lowered into something more serious, something that felt right and powerful, that made the blood pulse hot in his veins. “Why did you take me to the auction?”

You looked at him, confused. “We’ve talked about this. You were–”

“No, why did you help me?”

You hesitated, then answered, your voice small and heavy at the same time. “I don’t want you to die.”

Jon froze.

“I might not favour your involvement in all of this but I understand that it has become your reality now.” You leaned forward, the shadows drawing your expression into something he couldn’t quite place. “Don’t let shame blind you. Knowledge always has a price. But at least now, it’s you who decides how to pay it.”

He didn’t know what to say to that.

You offered him the faintest of smiles, unreadable in its softness. “Goodnight, Jon.”

And though he wanted to protest, wanted to ask what any of this meant, he only nodded mutely and opened the door. Cold night air rushed in. He climbed out slowly, still shaken. When he glanced back, you were still watching him from the car. For the briefest moment, he thought you might vanish into the night and he’d wake to find this all a dream. But you inclined your head, deliberate, as though to remind him you were real. 

The door shut, and the car slid away into the dark. Jon stood on the pavement, his reflection warped in Georgie’s windows, and wondered whether he had just been given salvation or a death sentence in its most elegant form.

Chapter Text

Isaiah 54:17: “No weapon that is formed against you shall prosper, and every tongue that shall rise against you in judgment, you shall condemn.”

You took a seat beneath the dome of the British Library’s Reading Room, where every sound was muffled and sacred. The ceilings stretched impossibly high, ribbed with Victorian arches and softened by the hush of collective reverence. The air tasted faintly of parchment and dust, of quiet things that had outlived generations of noise. You had always liked this place. There was something holy in its silence, something devout in the hush between pages turning. When you arrived, the afternoon light was long, filtering through the oculus and the arched windows in great beams that painted your hands as you read. Hours later, you were still there. The light had shifted. It slanted at an angle now, more golden. The room was a sanctuary of stillness, fortified by the weight of history and human thought.

Your seat was your usual one, nestled in a corner of the humanities section under the soft bronze lamplight, far from the frothing buzz of undergrads and far enough from the circulation desk that no one bothered you. You hadn’t come here to converse. You’d come to work. Or maybe to think. Or maybe because, like the building itself, you were ancient in your own way.

You flipped another page of the heavy tome in front of you. Leather-bound, obscure, spine warped, gold-leaf fading. The author’s name was only partially legible; time or purpose had made it difficult to trace. The words beneath your fingers were in Latin, the script Gothic, tight and angry-looking, the pages the colour of browned apple peel. It was the kind of tome that people pretended to read when they wanted to seem smart, not when they were actually interested. But you were interested. You were always interested. Especially when you suspected the book didn’t want you to read it. The low murmuring from the table behind you didn’t bother you. Neither did the crinkling of hidden snacks or the aggressive tapping of a spacebar from someone frantically editing their dissertation.

You didn’t notice the moment the last rays of sunlight faded and the overhead lights flickered on. Nor that most of the visitors had left. The world had narrowed to the pages beneath your fingers, the dense Latin calligraphy rolling through your mind as water would, pulling you into its secret depths.

What you did notice, abruptly, unexpectedly, was that you were being watched.

You hadn’t heard anything, no footsteps or breathing, but you felt it, like something icy sliding down your spine. A gravity that hooked behind your ribs, refusing to be ignored. That static pressure of being observed.

You didn’t look up immediately. You knew who it was.

You stared down at the page, feigning interest, eyes skimming over words you had already absorbed, as your awareness slowly unfurled upward. There, behind the iron-wrought balustrade of the mezzanine that overlooked the room, someone was standing, unmoving and calculating. It was the same expression he had worn at the gala, hands clasped loosely behind his back, as if your very existence was a puzzle that offended him by not solving itself. He didn’t blink, didn’t pretend not to be doing exactly what he was doing. It was so blatant it was rude.

You suppressed a sigh. Instead, you made a show of turning a page. You really didn’t need this tonight.

Five minutes passed. Maybe seven. Then you saw his silhouette slide down the marble steps at the far end of the room. No urgency, no hesitation. He had the gall to stroll toward you like it was a reunion instead of a breach. The sound of footsteps reached you, expensive shoes on old, carpeted wood, muffled and measured. It was clear that he believed he was entitled to your attention.

You didn’t want to give it to him. You got through maybe three lines before you felt the space next to you shift. He came to a stop at the edge of your table, standing entirely too close in your opinion. You turned towards him.

Elias was smiling as if his interest in you was entirely casual, as if you didn’t already know it was obsession.

“I had a feeling I’d find you here.”

“Elias Bouchard,” you drawled before he could reopen that polite predator’s mouth, voice low but perfectly audible in the thick hush of the room. “Always watching. Don’t you get tired of being a cliché?” The words were silk-wrapped steel. Mockery laced through them like a knife’s edge.

“I’m flattered you remember.” He ignored the second part. “Someone like you makes it difficult not to watch.”

You let out the sigh that had been coiling in your throat, not bothering to hide your irritation now. “Well, if you’ve come to stare at me some more, I recommend returning to the balcony. It has better angles. Less chance of drooling onto a priceless folio.”

His gaze slid to the book under your hands, and the corner of his mouth quirked.

“An interesting choice of late night reading,” he replied, eyes gleaming in the overhead light. “Most people nowadays would have to struggle to get through it.”

Your fingers twitched involuntarily. You had to forcibly relax your grip to avoid tearing the aged vellum in half.

“I have practice,” you remarked flatly.

“A historian then?” he mused, folding himself into the chair across from you without asking and crossing his legs.

“Something like that.”

His smile widened, smug and slow. That infuriating mask of superiority that made your teeth grind. That unshakable belief that he would figure you out eventually. That he always did. You wanted to smack that expression off his face – violently, preferably – but instead, you took a breath.

He leaned forward slightly, trying to close the gap without moving too far, eyes fixed on you with that frustrating curiosity that felt like peeling. Trying to pull strings that weren’t there. But still – still – he couldn’t get in. Couldn’t read you, couldn’t see what he so desperately wanted to. It was a small, delicious victory every time.

“You’ve been busy,” he remarked, deceptively light.

You raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

“Taking Jon to that meeting,” he continued, almost conversational, “wasn’t sanctioned. I’m curious about what you were hoping to achieve.” The chair creaked slightly beneath him as he moved, like the library itself objected to his presence too.

Your lips twitched. “I imagine you’re always curious.”

“Especially when it involves people who belong to me.”

You leaned back in your chair then, folding your arms. “You don’t own Jon. You don’t own me either.”

He was still watching you, but there was something taut behind his expression now. Not anger yet, but the start of something burning. You could see it coiled in his throat.

“You’re awfully far from your cathedral of dusty interns and paranoia. Do you usually stalk people through libraries?” you asked, turning a page with exaggerated delicacy and ignoring the weight of his attention. “Or is this just a special occasion?”

“I would hardly call it stalking,” Elias replied smoothly. “I simply happened to be in the area.”

You snorted. “Sure. And the Pope ‘happens’ to wear white.” A smile flickered across your lips, sharp and satisfied.

He studied you again, with that awful, unblinking patience. “I suppose I misjudged your temperament at the gala.”

“You did,” you said. “I was tolerating you back then. That won’t happen again.”

Silence fell like a stone between you. His fingers drummed lightly on the tabletop. You could tell he wasn’t nervous, just pretending to be idle. It was calculated. Everything he did was.

The reading room hummed quietly around you. No one was watching. No one cared. The space was half-deserted now, just a handful of desperate students clutching energy drinks and hammering at keyboards, trying to outrun deadlines. Others were buried in thick texts they didn’t understand, half-reading, half-praying. One of them, two tables down, had forgotten their headphones and was playing quiet lo-fi hip hop through tinny laptop speakers, hoping perhaps that it was a spell that would summon academic brilliance. An old man adjusted his oversized hearing aid with trembling fingers and resumed his grumbling examination of old rail schedules. A professor emeritus clinging to his dwindling relevance. The late hour bred a kind of communal disinterest. People were buried in their own worlds, while yours was being invaded.

When you finally spoke, your voice was low but clear. The dying hour of the library permitted it, a murmur that carried without needing to rise. “I’m sure you still have something clever to say,” you murmured, not looking at him. “You always do. Go on then. I’ll pretend to be impressed.”

“You are an anomaly,” he remarked finally. “You know what I am. You know who I serve. You know that most people in your position, most people who’ve even read about the Eye, don’t walk away intact.”

“Yet here I am,” you answered, voice low and level.

He tilted his head, his gaze lingering on you too long. It made your skin crawl. “Sometimes I wonder if you’re even human at all.”

The words struck harder than you wanted them to. A breath caught in your throat before you could stop it. His eyes caught the motion immediately, and his expression brightened, his eyes sparkling with triumph at the crack in your faҫade. Damn it.

He was riling you up. And it was working. You both knew that. You needed to calm down. You made a show of rolling your eyes and focusing back on the book in front of you.

“Interesting. I could order you to speak.” His voice dropped lower to an almost conspiratorial hum.

You took a breath. “No,” you said simply. “You couldn’t.” You looked back up. “Not unless you want this entire room to hear you asking for someone’s secrets and getting told to shove it.” The words came out sharper than intended, but they tasted sweet on your tongue.

It earned you a pause. A crack in the smooth performance. You turned the page in front of you with a satisfying scrape of parchment.

“You don’t like that, do you?” you pointed out after a moment. “Not being able to peek under the curtain. You’re so used to everyone being open to you. Like books waiting to be dog-eared and discarded.”

Elias’s eyes darkened at that. “I don’t just discard.”

“No, sorry, of course you don’t. You hoard. You wound. You get fat off the bleeding, like a worm in a wound.”

He let the insult land without blinking. That was his trick, pretend nothing touched him, like glass or oil. Still, he didn’t leave. You met his stare and felt nothing. No ripple, no probe, and no tendril of the Eye trying to dig beneath your skin. It burned him. You could see it in the way his jaw shifted just a little.

 “I wonder,” you mused thoughtfully, closing the book with a soft thump, “is that what bothers you most? That I’m not afraid? Or that you don’t get to know why?”

He leaned forward. “Let’s speak plainly then. I’m offering you a deal. You could be a great deal more, if you chose to be. There’s a certain...potential in you.”

You blinked once, slowly. Mephistopheles. “No.”

“You haven’t heard it yet.”

“I don’t need to.”

 “Serve me willingly and I will not look too deep,” he insisted.

Your fingers tightened over the edge of the book. Your pulse quickened out of irritation at his display of absolute audacity. You forced your hands to remain still, to rest against the table as if you didn’t want to throttle him just then and there.

“That’s not a deal,” you said, voice flat. “That’s a cage. And I’m not interested in that.”

He shrugged nonchalantly. “You’re not immune,” he warned. “You’re just off-limits. For now.”

“That must be maddening for you,” you countered.

Elias leaned forward slightly. “It is.”

You allowed a faint smile. “Good.”

He adjusted the cuffs of his sleeves, slow and deliberate. You watched him, eyes tracing the faint lines on his face, the cold confidence etched into every angle. Then after a moment, he spoke up again: “You don’t have to pretend to be hostile you know. I’m not your enemy.”

You gaped at him then, incredulous. “No? Then what are you, exactly? A curious academic? A benevolent mentor?”

 “I believe you misjudge my interest. I only wish to understand you.”

“That’s the problem.” You smiled thinly. “You think understanding is something you’re entitled to.”

His gaze sharpened. There was hunger in it now, frustration under the surface.

The student two tables down raised the volume on his laptop. Elias glanced toward him in annoyance, then back to you. He opened his mouth to speak. You cut him off. “Let me save you the trouble.”

You stood slowly, smoothing your coat. “You’ll only find out,” you hissed, “what I allow you to. And you can sit here every night, Elias, and watch me breathe, but you’ll leave knowing nothing more than you did when you arrived.”

You let the words hang there. You saw it hit him. A barely-there shift in posture, the faintest twitch at his jawline. You had scored a point, and you both knew it.

Then he straightened, collecting whatever stray emotion had slipped through. “I enjoy a challenge.”

“Then get a crossword,” you spat. “I think we’re done here.”

He stood as well. The scrape of the chair sounded far too loud. “We’ll speak again.”

“Unfortunately,” you replied.

You gathered the ancient tome with careful reverence, tucking it under your arm. Your fingertips lingered against the ancient leather for a second, grounding yourself.

And then you walked away, the hush of the library parting around you, leaving Elias Bouchard staring after you, frustrated. And still absolutely nowhere closer to the truth.

Chapter Text

Psalm 140:1-2: “Deliver me, O Lord, from the evil man; preserve me from the violent man, who imagine mischiefs in their heart;”

You were too tired to notice the streets. London blurred when you were exhausted, one row of brick indistinguishable from the next, one buzzing neon sign bleeding into another. The night air was cold and damp, rain threatening but not yet falling, and your shoulders hunched heavy under the fatigue of the day. You had been following someone, probably no one important, only a thread of suspicion, a shape you thought you recognised from another night. It had been more tired, casual curiosity than burning intention. But your focus was dulled, your attention fraying. You let yourself drift. They slipped into an alleyway and you hesitated barely a second before following, distracted, exhausted enough not to think twice.

The door you stepped through was the wrong one. You knew it the instant your body crossed the threshold but by the time the realisation had set in, the handle was already gone from under your hand.

The corridor before you stretched on and on, carpeted in a threadbare red. Doors lined either side, each a little crooked, hinges leaning away from frames, handles placed slightly off-center. The air smelled wrong somehow. You stopped dead, confused and disoriented for just a second.

You knew the place for what it was: the Distortion, the twisting unreality that took shape when one strayed too close to the Spiral.

You turned sharply, reaching for the door you had entered through. It was gone, replaced by more hallway. The angles made no sense.

You froze, heartbeat thudding against your ribs, chest tightening. For a single instant panic licked at you. Then you stilled yourself, deliberately drew in a breath, and let it out. This was no cage for you. You knew of the Spiral, its tricks, its mazes, its endless doors. It could bend, distort, confuse, maybe even hurt you, but it could not break you. It could not bind you here, not fully. You straightened your shoulders, adjusted the strap of your bag, and started forward with calm, conscious steps.

One of your hands brushed the wall, feeling the subtle pulse beneath the peeling wallpaper. The corridor wound and stretched, lines and patterns crawling into one another until you could not tell where one ended and another began. The floor creaked strangely beneath your feet, sometimes solid, sometimes almost hollow. The lights hummed faintly overhead, though you could not tell if it was electric or candle flame. Time unspooled strangely here. You refused to rush, stayed alert but calm. If you walked long enough, the Spiral would spit you out. You knew that. So you let yourself idle, gaze wandering over the crooked doorways, the walls that seemed to bend away when you looked too hard at them. The Spiral fed on disorientation, on the desperate, panicked certainty that there was no way out. You, however, had patience and no fear to waste.

Suddenly, the sound of a giggle filled your ears, high-pitched and breathless, echoing from everywhere and nowhere. It rolled down the warped corridor, bouncing off the walls. Your steps slowed. It came again, closer now, curling around you like smoke. A shape flickered at the corner of your vision. The giggle became a laugh, then words, carried down the slanted hall. The hairs at the nape of your neck prickled.

“well well. look who has wandered in,” the voice crooned, lilting, drawn out. “oh, how deliciously clumsy. wrong door, wrong step, and here you are. a little moth with no flame.”

When your head turned, a shape peeled itself from the wall a few paces away, a figure half-formed from shadows and stretched geometry. A smear of limbs and grin stretched far too wide, flickering in and out of the edges of your vision. His body bent at angles that weren’t quite angles, eyes dark with cruel joy. He tilted his head as he regarded you with hungry amusement.

You stiffened, caught off guard. It…couldn’t be. That face. It was distorted, literally, but that was...You swallowed. Your neutral expression faltered for the briefest second.

His giggle burst out again, high and delighted. “what’s the matter? no breadcrumbs? no thread? did you think you could just stroll in here and the hallways would lead you?”

You steeled your face into familiar, carefully crafted detachment again, refusing the bait. You began to walk again, past him, unhurried.

The giggling grew louder. The air trembled. “ohhh, don’t leave. it’s rude to walk away when someone is talking to you. rude rude rude. we don’t like that here. we don’t like it at all,” he tittered, the sound sharp as glass. “i’ve been seeing you, you know. seeing you a lot lately. always in the corners. meeting with the archivist. what are you looking for, hmm?”

Your jaw tightened. You did not answer. The Spiral could not hold you, but still, its pressure pressed faintly at your skull, the pull of its unreality brushing against you. You breathed, consciously trying to keep steady, and kept walking.

A flicker and then he was there in front of you, impossibly close, tall frame leaning down into your space, his face inches from yours. His grin stretched wide enough to tear his face in two, laughter spilling hot and sharp against your cheek. The corridor bent around him, walls bowing, carpet undulating.

“ah-ah-ah,” he sing-songed, amused. “talk to me. just a little talk. just a little spin.”

You stopped dead in your tracks. And then, suddenly, the grin faltered and his body stilled. For a second, the face shifted and twisted, and beneath the Distortion’s surface, something else blinked awake, just for an instant, staring back at you.

His lips parted. “…you.” The word came quieter as his voice cracked with recognition. The echo wasn’t quite right, the word lingering in the air.

 “you. you,” he said again, and this time it wasn’t the Distortion’s voice at all.

The grin faltered further, warping into something more human. For a heartbeat, the figure in front of you wasn’t just the Spiral’s impossibility. It was Michael, or at least the fragment of him that still lingered in the impossible geometry of this place. A sliver of the man who had once held stacks of tapes and followed Gertrude into the darkness of hidden knowledge before she had left him behind to be unmade. The one she sacrificed. His expression lost its mockery and instead twisted into grief and fury.

“you let her do it.” His voice cracked open. “you stood there and you let her–”

The hallway shuddered with his anger. Light fixtures burst into sparks and carpet peeled up into ribbons. The air itself seemed to ripple with his pain. “she sacrificed me. and you, you knew.”

You lifted your hands, voice low and laced with something like regret. “I didn’t, not fully. She told me little. She told everyone little. You know how she was. She made her choices and I won’t defend them. I didn’t know how it would end. Or that it would be you.”

The Distortion laughed, sharp and brittle, cutting across Michael’s bitterness. “don’t lie.” His expression flickered between a grin and a mask of hurt, teeth gleaming and the shimmer of impossible shapes swimming in his pupils. “you let me go with her. and now you walk free. you breathe, you live. and i–  i am stretched and broken in this cursed body. you left me here and i became this.”

The hallway lurched violently, rumbling, twisting ninety degrees without warning. For a second, gravity shifted, pulling you toward the wall to your left before righting itself. You stumbled, nearly thrown off your feet. Your stomach lurched. The light above swung on its chain like a pendulum.

Your chest tightened. Despite yourself, guilt cracked through the armour you wore. You had known Gertrude, had known what she was capable of. And you hadn’t stopped her.

“I am sorry for what was done to you.” The words came raw and unguarded. “What Gertrude did was necessary but it was unkind. It should not have fallen on you.”

For a flicker of a moment, Michael stilled and the chaos with it. There was recognition there, a fracture of almost-understanding. The echo of Gertrude’s pragmatism hung in the air and the human part of him – the confused, hurt ghost of a young man – tilted his head, as though straining to hear, as though the words reached something real. For a breath, his warped frame sagged and the angles steadied.

And then it broke. “unkind,” The Distortion screamed, high and cruel. “unkind? she ripped me open and made me this. unkind!” His expression twitched. “no. no no no no. too late. too late too late too late.” His limbs twisted again, stretching impossibly out of shape, as he grew into an unhinged, murderous thing. Fingers elongated, thinned into razors. The jagged, feral smile snapped back into place. “you think an apology unravels this? you think regret sews skin back together??”

The air around you fractured. He lunged, faster than you expected. Stronger, too. You threw yourself sideways, your elbow hitting the wall hard, as the claws raked through the air where you had stood. They sank into the carpet with a sickening rip and shredded the fabric.

Alarm licked sharp in your veins, breaking through your practiced calm. For the first time in a long while, your pulse kicked hard. You had underestimated his force, his fury.

You ducked under another strike, rolling across the floor as claws gouged a long scar down the wallpaper where your head had been a second ago. You started running but the hallway rippled, wallpaper bled sideways, the floor bulged under your feet, almost causing you to slip.

Knife-sharp fingers slashed through the air again, glinting blades of geometry and malice. One caught the edge of your temple as you twisted away and nicked the skin. The pain seared sharp as hot blood bloomed and started rolling down in thick drops. It burned.

You hissed through your teeth, clutching your head and stumbling back, but didn’t stop moving. You darted down the corridor, weaving around impossible angles, dodging clawed swipes. Your breath came ragged now, cracked with adrenaline. The laughter followed you, merciless, and then warped into a guttural snarl.

“there’s no way out. only me. you don’t belong here, and i will cut you into belonging,” he cackled and snapped at once. “run, run, little mouse in the maze. let’s see how far you make it.”

He struck again. You ducked under the arc of his hand as the walls beside you heaved and bent inwards. Doors flickered in and out of existence along the hall. Most vanished as you reached for them, handles melting into the wallpaper as your fingers slid over it. One was slower than the rest. You grabbed the handle, yanked it with all your strength and shoved against the door and, impossibly, it gave. It screamed on its hinges, then tore open completely, the wood groaning while it swung into the cold, familiar night air.

Behind you, the Distortion howled, a shrill sound made of twisting geometry and aching grief. He chased you to the threshold, clawed fingers slicing the air inches from your back.

You hurled yourself out, heart hammering, the door slamming shut behind you as the sound of traffic, ordinary and blessedly real, filled your ears. On the other side, muffled but furious, the roar echoed loud enough to rattle the glass in the windows above: “Ý̸̧̫̠̀̇O̵̙̣̫͂̊U̷̺̒̈́́̀͝ ̸̨̦͓̫̬̋̓̋̽Ḑ̸͓̰̈́̀̚O̷̭̠̱̫͛̏N̵̡̧̗̟̺̋̀̽͛’̶̭͕̼̄̋̽̆̄͜T̴͔̬̪͉̗́͆ ̶̰̩̥̪̼͆̀́̕͝L̵̦͓̈́͐͝͝E̵̡̯̝̠̊A̸̟͗̔̚V̴̤̭͕̥̐̌̔͊ͅÉ̷̝͈͎̊͝.̸͍̻̠̿́̅͊ ̴̟̼̄Y̶̼͗͂͌Ö̸͚́̏͘̚͝U̶͚̒̓̎̚ ̴͇̥̳̞̲̌Ḏ̵͛͆O̷͓̮̭̩̓͑͛̀N̶̥̅’̴̻̋̈́̄̊͘T̸͇̫̜̀̓̂̏ ̵̗̬̞͇̤̍G̶͎̱͚͖͇̉Ê̵̖̫͗̀T̵̥̠̊͘ ̷̟̃͐̈́T̶̘͕̉̔Ọ̶̒̉̆̾̐ ̸̝̱̬̑͂Ḽ̵̛͕͇̽̂Ě̵̗̰̪̗̂A̵̢̲͈͉̤͂̾V̸̧̞̯̿̎͠Ė̷͍͚͈̗̮ ”

When you turned, it was only brick wall, the building solid and blank. You didn’t wait. You staggered down the street, blood seeping from your temple, breath tearing ragged from your throat.

The ride home from Oxford, where you had exited the Distortion, took a while but it gave you time to collect your shaking thoughts. By the time you reached your flat, the adrenaline had faded into a trembling exhaustion. You were extra careful in paying attention to which door the door to your flat was. Finally hunched over your bathroom sink, you pressed a tissue to the burning wound, cleaning away the blood that had since dried tacky against your skin. The cut was shallow but vicious.

When at last you dared to look up, you froze. In the mirror, your face looked pale, more sunken than usual. You leaned closer. At your temple, stark against the blood-smeared skin and the rest of your hair, a single strand had gone grey. You brushed your hand over the wet, blood-crusted hair but the colour stayed. You let out a long, shuddering breath. That had been too close. Far, far too close.

Michael’s howl still rang in your ears.

Chapter Text

Psalm 39:1-3: “I said, “I will watch my ways and keep my tongue from sin; I will put a muzzle on my mouth while in the presence of the wicked.” So I remained utterly silent, not even saying anything good. But my anguish increased; my heart grew hot within me. While I meditated, the fire burned; then I spoke with my tongue”.

Statement #0120411-GR

(Unfiled/Restricted. Box 13, Storage Unit, behind false panel. Handwritten, unpublished.)

Subject: An unnamed associate.

If you’re reading this, you’ve likely been dragged into the pit the rest of us died in, one way or another. I pity you, but I won’t apologise. Knowledge saves nothing. It only clarifies where you need to point the edge of the blade. I doubt you’ll trust my words, but I’ve left them regardless because there’s something, someone, I need to leave record of. I write this not for the sake of sentiment – sentiment is indulgence. Nor do I write it in search of understanding. Some things are not meant to be understood. But someone may stumble into this. And if you do, you will be ill-equipped to interpret what you see. This is my attempt to bridge that failure.

In the course of my work, I have seen many strange things, things the world has no language for. I have spoken with avatars, monsters, and men who think they are both. Those desperate and brimming with confessions, looking for safety in the shadow of the Magnus Institute. Many who claim knowledge or power. Cultists and madmen. The frightened and the fervent. But only once did I meet someone who refused to claim anything at all and still knew far too much.

“I have met the most peculiar person.” That is the first sentence I ever wrote about them. That was almost twenty-one years ago. 1991, I believe, though the memory is slippery. I had tracked a minor ritual. Said person was already there, watching from the shadows, seemingly without the intention of stopping it. Eventually, I stopped it and we spoke. There was no need for names. They gave me one, eventually, but it didn’t matter. It was brief, unspecific. It could have been a lie, might still be, but I believe it isn’t. Not because I trust them not to, but because they do not care whether I believe them or not. That kind of indifference is often more honest than conviction.

They are, to the Powers, what absence is to pattern, what silence is to sound. The Powers touch everything, infect everything, but them.

I don’t know if they were always like this, if they were born this way, or became it. I’m not sure if they are truly immune, I doubt such a thing exists, but they are not aligned, it seems, as if they hover outside their stories, as though the script ends just before it would reach them.

I have tried, of course, to learn more. One always does and it does lie in my nature. I have watched them, when I could, through the tools at my disposal. They blink clean through the lenses of the Eye, leave no trail in the records. That, in itself, is a threat and it is to me as much disconcerting as it is comforting. But they have been a knife pointed in the right direction. And for now, that is enough.

I suspect they’ve been watching much longer than I’ve been breathing, that they are older than they appear. I do not know how much older, though they seemingly have not aged since I met them first, and I will not insult them by pretending this ‘immortality’ – if that is what it is – is a gift. They carry memory like a punishment. Maybe that’s why they stayed away for so long. They stood apart, detached, observed more than acted. Never involved themselves in the matters of avatars, never interfered. It frustrated me to no end. They knew more than they ever said and did nothing. I thought them a voyeur. A scholar with no stomach for pain, interested in fear only so far as it could be watched from a safe distance. Now I know they simply hated the Powers too much to get involved.

I asked them once what they wanted. They said:  “Not all of us want to rule what we don’t understand. Some of us just want it to stop.” That was the first time I believed we might share the same goal. Not the same methods perhaps but a similar shape of intent.

They’ve changed now, slowly. I think I did that. Maybe I regret it now. I convinced them to act instead of just knowing. They could have stayed outside the game forever but I showed them what happened to the hundreds of people who wandered too close. I am not a sentimentalist; I find emotion cumbersome at best and dangerous at worst. But if I had to define the pattern, I would say they began to care. From the detachment that had kept them free, they grew into something like empathy. And that is a dangerous line to tread when you’re supposed to be untouchable.

They started leaving things for me. Notes and names I hadn’t yet uncovered. The first was a page from a torn Leitner I had tracked across three continents, through smugglers and private collections. It vanished again in Cairo. I resigned myself to never finding it. Then, one morning, it was simply there, folded neatly into a volume on my desk. In the margin, in an unfamiliar hand: you’re late. They never explained, never admitted it, but it was them. Then the exact coordinates of a ritual site in Romania arrived in my mail with no return address when I couldn’t find it. I have seen the aftermath of their work, unfinished and incomplete, as if they were nudging rather than derailing events, refracting them, casting everything in a different light. Since then, our paths have crossed sporadically, always at the edges of something dreadful. We have worked together...though alliance is perhaps too generous a word.  

They prefer to keep their hands clean. That is another danger. When you keep too much distance, you forget what blood feels like. You forget what guilt means. I think I scared them with how easily I carried mine. They prefer to nudge, I prefer to burn. We argued, several times. But when the Spiral nearly swallowed a block of flats in Camden, they found me before it happened and we stopped it together. We left without speaking.

I did not trust them. I still don’t. Trust is not a currency I deal in lightly. But there are moments, in this war we are waging, where usefulness supersedes suspicion. They are not one of us. And yet, a shared enemy will sometimes have to serve in place of friendship. We helped each other, though not often, and not cleanly. They saved me once. We started working together here and there and never spoke of it. That suited us both fine. They’re useful, clever too. I don’t ask questions about their person, and they don’t volunteer answers. But I imagine they’ve seen too many like me to mistake me for anything but doomed.

I also know that they are starting to accept the cost of resistance; they just haven’t paid it yet. They will though. We all will.

If you’re reading this, you’ve likely taken my place. Or perhaps you’ve stumbled on what’s left of me. Either way, this is your warning:

You think Elias Bouchard is just a man playing god? He isn’t playing. If I don’t manage to, you have to stop him. Whatever you are. Archivist, assistant, intruder, watchdog, I don’t care. The hidden strings he pulls, the decisions he allows to unfold, all of it calculated, patient, deliberate. I believe the Institute is his chrysalis. And when he emerges, what remains of the human shell will not matter anymore. He wants something dreadful and he will do everything in his power to achieve it.

I believe that if he finds them, he will seek to unmake them. If they stand in his way, you protect them. If they stand in your way, you’ll have to get rid of them too.

Listen, but never fully. Trust, but never unarmed. If they stand aside, know that they have already calculated the outcome. They’re not bound by what binds the rest of us. But they might be the only chance you’ll get of stopping all of this.

– G.R.

Chapter Text

Psalm 82:4: “Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”

To: Inner Circle
Subject: Interference during collection

Task didn’t go as planned. I had the target cornered: young, scared, alone, and ideal for cleansing. Should have been easy work but some unknown individual intervened before I could proceed.

Don’t know who exactly. Doesn’t belong to us, that’s for sure. They got between me and the child, so I tried to burn both.

They should’ve been screaming, should’ve been cinders but the flame wouldn’t take. I pressed again but their flesh remained unmarked. It felt off.

It’s like the fire wouldn’t touch them. It was unnatural. It was rude.

Eventually, I had to leave before drawing too much attention.

Both got away. That wasn’t my fault though.

I’ll find out more.

Personal Notes

There was one of the Desolation’s devotees there when I was walking back from Park Royal. She was trailing a child, no more than twelve, probably younger. Her gait was loose and easy, seemingly already picturing the smoke.

I told myself to keep walking. I’ve told myself that a thousand times before. I’ve seen worse and looked away. But the thought refused to leave me. The weight of it settled in my stomach, insistent enough not to look away. It pinned me to the sight of her narrowing the distance, the little shape of the child moving faster, not knowing what was behind them. So I followed.

The pursuit ended in a gutted shell of a warehouse where I heard the echoes of small, panicked feet stumbling and another, slower set of steps before I saw what was happening.

When I found them, the child was cornered, back pressed against rusted beams and crumbling plaster, wide eyes fixed on the woman who blocked their way out. She let the child stew in terror, feeding it like tinder before the spark.

I had to step in. There was no argument left to make with myself.

I caught the kid by the arm just as the first wave of heat flared and pulled us both behind what was left of a crumbling wall. Invisible, hungry fire bit across the air but the stone held. The child was trembling so hard in my arms I could swear I heard their teeth chatter over their panicked breath and sobs. I held them, as steady as I could, even though I knew there was no true safety there. Their tears streaked a clean path through the soot on their cheeks. I could feel them through my shirt.

The fire continued to roar as it shook the old boards. It smelled like smoking plaster, the bitter tang of old paint catching.

I told them they would be alright. Lies taste bitter, but sometimes they’re necessary. Then I pushed them toward a gap in the wall, pointed toward the exit and the dark street behind it. I told them to run once I got the attention of the woman. The child looked at me, uncomprehending at first, but terrified enough to listen.

I stepped out then to draw the fire to me instead as I ran in another direction. It licked against my skin, curling along my coat. I felt the heat climb my spine, felt the bite, as it singed the hem of my sleeve, charring the cloth. It didn’t claim me. But I could still feel the burn, shallow and blunted.

When the smoke cleared, I was face to face with her. A woman of the Desolation, eyes bright as embers and skin droopy like wax left too long in the sun. Heat still shimmered around her, so hard the air bent with it, the aftertaste of sanctified suffering.

She blinked at me as if surprised, a fraction of hesitation, enough to show her confusion, and then she filled that hesitation with fury. The heat was grim and earnest, the burning a holy thing in the only sense that fanaticism makes anything holy: absolute and without mercy. She shouted as she threw her fire. I heard the echo of a line about boots and garments rolled in blood burned as fuel for the fire and it sounded wrong in her mouth, twisted until it was worship of the ash. Her liturgy imagines every wound and atrocity as kindling, one that promises a glorious conflagration and counts the bodies as offerings.

I tried to dodge most of her maledictions, likely not very graceful, and eventually, I managed to duck into a side corridor. When I dared to glance behind me, the child was gone. The woman followed but her fanaticism made her predictable in the end; fire worshippers like her throw blaze in the same sloppy way children throw stones, with the same compulsion to watch the damage. I kept moving until the world narrowed to my breath and the ringing in my ears. I didn’t stay to watch her fail. I left her there, throwing her fit.

The coat is ruined, no point pretending. Unfortunately, so are the documents inside my bag which had taken months to track down. Reduced to bitter, fragile ashes in a neat, contemptuous pile. All that careful patient work, gone in a single-handed sermon of flame. I don’t like losing research. I don’t like losing things that should not be lost.

The Desolation is a dangerous lot… Everything is getting too close. I am tired of running the arithmetic of who notices me. First Michael, now this. Not to mention that wretched servant of the Eye Bouchard, that slick, dangerous appetite of a man. The only reason he cast his attention my way in the first place was because of that slimy Reid guy and his damned little arrangement with Maxwell Rayner. He would have signed something he did not understand and doomed God knows how many. At least I got him to turn it down at the last minute. He is a messy, self-serving thing of a man, and yet I am thankful for the half-measure of incompetence he finally offered. Small mercies.

But my proximity to these events is a problem. There is a momentum to these encounters, a sloppiness that scares me more than precision would. A spider noticing a gap, a bargain made at the wrong table. These are the ways the world narrows dangerously. When a predator starts circling, it is either because the prey has been noticed by accident or because the prey has become valuable. I would prefer to be neither interesting nor valuable. I prefer to be unnoticed. But I feel my choices piling up like dry kindling.

I am tired. That admission rings too true in my ears, like a confession. Sleep does little. I have had many nights of staying awake too long and know the promises of dawn; what nags at me is how quickly the present can crowd in. I am not invulnerable, and it would be foolish to pretend otherwise. The nick on my temple still burns. The grey strand remains, absurd and absolute. I can survive flame, but I should not be flirting with it.

Today was unavoidable in one sense: a child had been in the feed range of an avatar whose doctrine includes immolation. That is black-and-white, no room left for moral curves. But I regret the paperwork I lost and the time now required to rebuild what I had been piecing together.

I need to be more careful. I’m forgetting that the habits that once saved me are still valid even if my impatience argues otherwise. For too long, I have been the quiet in crowded rooms by choice; it seems the world will not allow me that peace any longer. I have to be less conspicuous about the things I am following. I cannot risk trails or stupid intermediaries who will take a contract because it flatters them. I cannot afford that anymore.

Chapter Text

Mark 8:36–37: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

The park was quiet that evening, even by London standards. The city’s roar muffled itself to a dull hum and the lamps blinked on one by one, spilling their weary circles of orange. You had chosen the spot deliberately: neutral ground, somewhere that didn’t belong to either of you. A bench under an oak tree, the water of the pond shivering with the occasional ripple of wind. The lamplight pooled steady and honest here and made faces easier to read and lies harder to hide.

You had written him a letter three nights ago. It was a ridiculous old ritual, summoning someone with paper and ink in a world that had far more efficient ways to draw a person in. But paper was quieter. Paper made a person come more willingly. His reply had been perfunctory, full of the careful language of someone trying very hard not to admit to a need.

Jon arrived on time as you expected he would. His coat was pulled tightly around him, his shoulders locked in a tension that never seemed to leave. He looked hollow somehow, and yet like a vessel filled to the brim with things he didn’t want to carry. The damp gravel crunched as his steps drew nearer.

You had been still, watching the water, the people on the other side but you turned to face him. The light caught him at a good angle, sharp cheekbones, eyes too bright, scars like maps of all the compromises he’d made, and for a moment you let him be an image you could set aside in your mind. It was easier than looking at him whole. The tension in his body reminded you of an animal ready to bolt, though you wondered if he even remembered how to run from danger anymore.

He sat down beside you then, just close enough that his arm brushed your sleeve. The contact was small, accidental, and he flinched from it as if surprised by its ordinariness. For a breath you let him be surprised. For a moment you let him feel what it meant to be ordinary.

He noticed the line of grey at your hairline before he noticed anything else. “What happened to your hair?” he asked, too casual.

“What happened to your hand?” you countered, nodding toward it.

He rubbed at it as though you’d named something awkward about him. His fingers found his palm, traced the bandaged skin there in a nervous circuit. He looked away as if he had revealed something private simply by being asked about it.

He didn’t answer either. The quiet stretched and, for a sliver of a second, you saw the old Jon beneath the Archivist, shredded at the edges by the new pressure inside him. Then he looked back, determination glinting in his gaze. “Who are you really?”

You felt the question drop into still water. It disturbed the surface in neat rings. It was a question that would usually slide into the private corners of people’s heads, into names and confessions, and build up a brittle scaffolding of fear. His eyes searched yours the way they always did now, that itch of the Eye pressing outward through him. The instinctive reflex to pry, to know, something that had become automatic and terrible for him now. You felt it reach for you, scrape at you, and find nothing. A silence where there should have been screaming. Something in his expression tightened.

You raised an eyebrow at him, the smallest motion: a contained command, a polite, clinical retracting of invitation.

There was an awkward pause. You watched him fluster, the colour rising in his cheeks, young and ridiculous, and all of a sudden he looked like someone caught cheating at a game he’d been taught to play too well.

“Don’t do that again,” you told him, soft but with the kind of authority that didn’t need to be loud.

He stared at you, confusion and something that might have been shame churning in quick, small motions across his face. “I– sorry,” he managed, awkward and genuine and in that order. He folded his hands together, clasping them as if they could keep his questions from spilling over. You let it go.

He cleared his throat. “You look…” He faltered, searching for a diplomatic adjective. “You look tired.”

You could have told him about the Spiral, about Michael’s voice folding through all the wrong places. You could have told him about the claw and the moment something that had been human in Michael recognised you, for an instant, as more than a target. You could have told him how the cut on your temple throbbed in a rhythm that hummed with memories. But none of that belonged to the bench under the oak tree. It belonged to corridors that turned on themselves and to men who had been unmade.

Instead you shook your head minutely. “Just marks. Reminders.”

Jon’s fingers stopped rubbing his hand and, for the first time since he sat down, he reached out, curiously, almost involuntarily, and then placed them lightly over the faint line at your hairline, as if contact could prove solid anything you both tried desperately to insist on: that you were still here. You didn’t pull away, let him feel the warmth of your skin and the small pulse there that was still stubbornly human. For the first time in a long while you felt the tug of something that was not calculation or a sense of duty. It was a quiet tenderness that made decisions more complicated.

The atmosphere eased, the awkwardness receding into a companionable silence where the two of you simply existed in the same space. The small distance between you and him was partly physical and partly the way two kinds of loneliness kept their own counsel. Yet here you were, two shapes in the lamplight, deciding to share a bench.

“How are you?” he asked, clumsy with concern.

“How are you?” you repeated.

He retracted his hand and closed his eyes briefly, like he was waiting for the words to be delivered. When he opened them, there was a kind of honest exhaustion there that made your chest catch. “I’m…I’m okay.” He took a breath. “I’m back at the Institute. Working. I sleep badly. I keep listening to statements. I try not to read too many. Sometimes I think making a tape will make things…clearer, more tangible, and that helps. And sometimes I don’t want to listen to the tapes at all. I feel like there’s a distance that keeps growing inside me, like something sliding between my words and my voice. It makes me tired.”

You watched him speak, his fingers worrying at a seam on his sleeve, the way his eyes momentarily flicked to the puddles where the lamplight reflected. The truth of him was a physical thing, in the set of his jaw and the tiny betrayals sorrow had etched into him. Up close, the shadows under his eyes were worse.

Your answer was measured. “You already have a price on your soul,” you told him then. “You don’t need to add fine print to it.”

He straightened, a laugh escaping him, the humour that might have softened the claim didn’t reach the edges. “Not sure I have much of a soul left.” The admission hung in the air and terrified you for him.

“You do,” you reassured him, with the same quiet conviction you had given him before. “I wouldn’t be here if you didn’t.” The sentence was small, but in the hush of the park it was enormous. The pond reflected a shard of the moon and the nearest lamps in trembling duplicates, and the world felt, for a few breaths, like a place where the wrong things might still be kept at bay by two wary, persistent hands.

You watched him weigh the truth in his mouth, roll it around like an unfamiliar object. You could tell he didn’t know what to do with it. It was a reassurance that he was worth preserving, the most dangerous kind of compliment. His hands twisted in his lap in a way that betrayed his restlessness. There was a fragility to him now that hadn’t been there before, a worn softness.

“Are you…angry with me? For what I’ve done? For what I might…” He swallowed. “For going back to the Institute, for what I am becoming?”

You shook your head. “Anger is a useless thing for this. It does not save anyone. It won’t stop anything.”

 Jon curled into himself a bit, clutching his coat tighter, a man in the process of becoming something he had not chosen. “Every day I feel less human. More like…like I’m turning into something else.” The lamplight caught his profile, stark against the dark of the park, his face a study in chiaroscuro. “I feel like I’m becoming a monster.”

The words, though whispered, weighed heavy. The darkening sky held them, small as an animal in hand.

Sympathy bloomed in your chest. For a moment you were quiet, then you extended your hand across the space between you. “Let me see your hand. The unbandaged one.”

He blinked. “What?”

“Give it here. Let me check.” Your mouth quirked.

You could practically see his brain connecting the dots. He stared at you, incredulous. “…palm reading? You can’t be serious. That’s– that’s nonsense!”

“Maybe. Humour me.”

For a moment he hesitated, skeptical. But at last, almost grudgingly, he let you when you reached out and gently took his hand, turning it over so the lines of his palm caught the glow of the nearest lamp. His hand was cold, restless, the skin rough where pens and cigarettes had worn at it. You kept your grip steady but gentle.

“Hmm,” you murmured, letting your thumb trace the deep crease of the head line etched into his palm. “This one’s strong. Long. It says you think too much. That your mind never rests. That you carry the weight of every choice you’ve ever made. That’s why it breaks here, you see? Because you push yourself past the limit, think yourself into corners.”

Jon snorted dryly. “That hardly requires mysticism.”

You ignored him, shifting to the next line. “Your fate line’s been broken, more than once. You are shaped by things outside your control. Pulled off the path by forces you didn’t choose. But it’s still here. You’re still here. That means you kept walking, carving it back.”

He frowned, lips pressing thin, but he didn’t pull away.

 “The heart line. It bends. That means you care, fiercely, too much sometimes. Even when it hurts you.” Your thumb brushed lower. “The branching means that your love and your grief both run so strong they threaten to undo you. That you’ve been broken, yes, but it also says you can trust again. Hold again.”

You looked up at him then. He was watching you, eyes dark, searching your face for the condemnation he always expected to find in others.

You tilted his hand slightly, studying it with exaggerated scrutiny, then shook your head softly. “That’s…odd.”

Jon’s eyes flicked up, wary. “What?”

“I don’t see any.”                                

“Any what?”

You let the silence hang a beat, then looked him dead in the eye. “Monster lines. There are none. I guess that means you’re safe after all.”

For a heartbeat he just stared at you, caught between suspicion and something rawer, more fragile. His lips pressed together, then parted as if he might speak. Whatever it was never left his throat. He rolled his eyes instead, pulling his hand back from yours. “That’s ridiculous,” he muttered. But you saw the flicker in his expression before he looked away, caught the way his shoulders eased, just slightly.

“I understand that you are scared,” you acknowledged, more serious now. “You’ve been through hell. And worse, it seems. I’m sorry for that.”

Jon let out a humourless laugh. “You talk like you know how this ends.”

“I’ve seen it before.”

His voice dropped as he looked over the pond. “You know…what is happening to me?”

You didn’t answer, just studied him for a moment. The silence stretched. The lamp buzzed faintly. A child ran by the pond’s edge in the distance, chasing ducks as her father called after her. Life continuing, as it always did, even as Jon’s world shrank around him.

Finally, you continued: “Archivists burn out quickly. They think knowledge is the path to truth. Or safety. Or power.” You closed your eyes for a moment. “But their eyes are useless when the mind is blind. And you’ll find every statement comes with a footnote written in blood.”

His throat worked. “So I’ve discovered.” He turned back to you. “I’m not the first Archivist you’ve met.”

You nodded. A couple passed with umbrellas and the faint echo of a laugh.

“How many?”, he asked, voice small.

“Enough.”

“What happened to them?”

You suppressed your sigh as the last wisps of the earlier lightheartedness dissolved. “What do you think?”

He leaned back against the bench as if letting gravity take him for a minute. “Did you…did you know Gertrude?”

“Yes.” The word hung there, as brittle as the bare branches above you. A pregnant pause followed.

“You are like her, sometimes,” you revealed at last, though your mouth quirked bitterly. “Stubborn. Curious to the point of self-destruction. A little too eager to hold the match over the barrel just to see if it burns.”

Jon rubbed his palm against his thigh, somewhat embarrassed. “What was she like?”

“Relentless,” you said and the word tasted both admiring and accusing on your tongue. “Sharp. Unforgiving. She knew the cost of her choices and made them anyway. Carried her knowledge like a blade, always honed. Patient, too. She had learned to live alongside her hunger, to keep it on a leash. She’d had decades to teach herself discipline. She was…collected, controlled. And utterly unwilling to stop.”

Jon shifted on the bench, uncomfortable in his own skin. His face shifted through too many emotions at once: admiration, apprehension, a flicker of longing he didn’t want you to notice. You watched the way his jaw tightened at the edges. The Eye had stripped him down to his rawest nerves, and the discipline Gertrude had cultivated was still far from his reach. You saw it in the tremor of his hand, in the desperate way he dug his hole deeper and deeper.

You leaned back against the bench with a sigh, eyes focused on the lamplight, then took in the afterimage of the park. “I’ve compared you to her too much,” you admitted. “Perhaps that was my mistake.”

His head turned sharply, frown deepening. “What do you mean?”

You drew in a breath that misted pale in the cold air. “Taking you to the auction. Throwing you into that room with its secrets bleeding out. Gertrude could have stood there untouched, fed only what she chose, turned away from the rest. She had trained herself to resist, to use it without letting it use her. But you, you are still raw, still learning to shoulder what’s been forced on you. In my desire to throw a brick in Elias’s road, I overestimated you. I overwhelmed you. I put you in the middle of things you weren’t ready to see.”

Jon’s face twisted at your words, hurt and reluctant recognition tangling together. He drew back a little, spine straightening, as though to armour himself against the admission. “I thought–” he began, then cut himself short, shaking his head. His voice came quieter, strained. “I thought you believed I could handle it.”

You regarded him. “I do believe you can,” you conceded, each word deliberate. “But not all at once. Not yet.”

 His mouth twisted. “You make it sound easy.”

“It is not,” you agreed. “But things worth doing rarely are.”

Jon ran a hand through his hair. The motion caught the light and for a second he looked younger than he had in weeks and then older again, as if the lighting had aged him a decade in the span of that gesture. He stared out past the pond where the lights fractured into a dozen tiny, borrowed suns. The man from before had managed to scoop up his giggling daughter. She turned in his arms, half hugging him, half trying to escape. There was something achingly soft in the gesture. Something that didn’t fit into the heaviness of the conversation. It didn’t fit into your life. Or Jon’s. You tore your eyes away.

“Gertrude,” Jon said finally, voice tight. “She always had it figured out, didn’t she? I mean… she would have ended the Unknowing by now, if anyone could. Wouldn’t she have known where it would happen, where the centre of it would be?” His eyes were fixed on you as he asked, hungry for any piece of a map he could get.

“I didn’t know the plan, Jon. Not in full. Not the when and not the how. I only knew she was moving toward something drastic.”

“What do you mean, not in full? What did she have planned? Where will it happen?” The questions rushed out like a half-plea. You could see the desperation bloom behind his eyes, how he yearned for any axis to spin his world on, some tidy cosmology he could consult.

Your mouth opened but you hesitated.

“You could help me, if you wanted.” The words cracked out of him before he could stop them, almost petulant.

“I am helping you.”                                                   

“But you know something. Tell me. Tell me what to do.” His voice betrayed his fear of being excluded from whatever agency he believed you had, even if the agency meant ruin.

You shook your head once, decisively. “I’m not omniscient, Jon. And I’m not Elias. I won’t script your story for you.” Your tone was a boundary set in place before he could overreach and try to make you an oracle. He drew back and his jaw moved, as if to bite back the frustration he tasted.

“That–” he began. “Elias doesn’t tell me shit either.” You could see the bitter resentment there: the Archivist’s hunger manipulated into obedience, and the man beneath left with crumbs and indignity. “He guards everything behind that arrogant, slow-smiling thing of his.”

You let out a breath. “Elias’s definition of knowledge is very convenient. One that burns other people and calls it illumination.”

He looked away, anger and shame flickering across his face in quick, ashamed motions.

You took pity on him. “I don’t know where. Not in the sense of coordinates and times. I do know she had planned something drastic. She thought that if the ritual itself was destroyed while it was going on, it could break it. It is reckless, and she had reasons. She thought it might stop more than it cost.” You watched the effect of the words on him; he didn’t recoil so much as his mouth formed the shape of questions unsaid. You kept your voice level. “I’ve seen some of the notes. I saw her schematic once. If the physical structure hosting it were removed, the Unknowing would have less of an anchor. She planned, in a very real way, to blow it up. Take the building down.”

He went still, absorbing the idea. “Blow it up…,” he repeated slowly. “She would– that’s–” The rest of the sentence collapsed into a sound that could have been awe or horror.

“She wasn’t reckless for the sake of spectacle,” you clarified. “Desperate times sometimes call for desperate measures. I learned that from her. Hard lessons.”

Jon’s mouth worked, then gave a short, almost incredulous snort. “Tim would…approve, I think,” he said with a brittle smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “He’d like the idea of an end that is destructive.”

You glanced at him, curious. “Tim?” you asked, head tilting.

He bristled, then muttered the name like it hurt to say. “Tim Stoker, one of my assistants. The Stranger is responsible for his brother’s death. He’s furious. He’s been walking a line for weeks, and I’m worried he’ll snap. Do something rash.” He rubbed the back of his hand again, a nervous tic.

You let the worry sit between you without trying to erase it. Then you felt, as you always did when you let the logic set before sentiment, the cold spool of facts and the warm thread of people tied to them.

Your teeth caught your lip absentmindedly while you were identifying the pieces on the table. You heard the implication in Jon’s voice more than the words themselves: anger and grief make good fuel for desperate acts. Tim, who’d rather act than hold counsel, made whatever fragile equilibrium you’d been fighting to preserve feel more precarious. If the Unknowing started, the people who would rush toward it – Jon, desperate for answers, Tim, desperate for vengeance – could become a hazard. They were unsteady variables in a system that held too many already. “You worry about him.”

Jon nodded. “He is dangerous when he’s angry. He keeps promising himself it’ll make the hurt make sense. And Martin– ” His voice shifted, the net widening. “Martin isn’t doing great either. I worry about all of them. They’re all fraying.” He stared at his hands as though they were instruments he was relearning to use and failing.

You did not offer easy comfort. You had none to give. Instead you folded your hands in your lap. “You worry for them because you care. That is not a failure.”

“It’s just…they look at me like…like wire under too much tension.”

You caught the undercurrent of his guilt. “You’re not a bad person, Jon.”

His lip twitched in disbelief. “That’s not going to save them. I don’t want to lose any more people,” he admitted, quietly. “I don’t know if I’m strong enough to watch them go.”

You listened, let him unspool; he needed that more than answers in that moment. He needed to speak the worry aloud so it could be felt.

 “Tim will do something stupid, I know it.”

“He may,” you agreed. “And if he does, he will need someone to stop him. Or someone to bury him. Which one you become depends on how you choose.”

Jon let out a small, pained sound and buried his face in his hands, hunched forward. An indifferent choir of insects and distant traffic hummed around you, the city’s usual small machinery of life. You allowed the pause to lengthen; there was no comfort in immediate answers, only the slow work of thinking and weighing.

“I can give you one thing,” you spoke up at last. “A lead. A storage unit. Gertrude kept a number of her less-significant artifacts and plans in Unit 31 at Langley Storage. Grafton, near the old canal. If you’re looking for notes, things she kept to be prepared, that’s the place.”

You did not say how to use those things. You did not become complicit in the mechanics. You showed him a thread he could tug on if he chose to. That was all. And still, deep down, you felt like an executioner, like you were calculating just how much rope to give him before he hanged himself with it.

His reaction was immediate, as he lifted his head with a mixture of surprise and then measured determination. “She kept things there?” he asked.

“Don’t get your hopes up too much. Someone might have already gotten in before you; it could already be empty. And not all of it may be salvageable. Some of her plans were more thought than implementable strategy. Go with one of your assistants, someone you trust.”

He hesitated, then nodded. “I will.” Somewhere inside him the gears were turning, crafting strategies, panic turned to plans.

Jon’s shoulders hunched as he leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands folded as if praying. “Come with me. To stop the Unknowing. If you know so much, if you can keep your head where the rest of us can’t…come with us.”

You froze, just long enough for him to notice. You shook your head. “No.”

His head snapped toward you, confused. “Why not?” The words cut sharp.

You hesitated, your silence hanging loud in the air between you. A dozen reasons pressed against your tongue, stacked themselves neatly in your mind, each heavier than the last, none of them words you wanted to give. Because Elias would love it; he would feast on the sight of you tangled up in the Eye’s machinations and twist your presence into another move in his own game. Because once you had sworn to watch and only watch and you were already way too deep. Because the Spiral had almost claimed you, and you still felt the ghost of Michael’s claws against your temple, felt the scar throb, felt how his howl had rung in your bones until your lungs had wanted to choke on themselves. Because for the first time in forever, you had remembered what it was to feel that raw, instinctive panic. A pit in your stomach. The hairs at your nape bristling. The shallow, eager need to gasp for air.

You couldn’t explain any of that to him. You wouldn’t. So you let the words live in the shadows, where they belonged. “I can’t,” you said at last.

“You mean you won’t.” Something in his eyes flashed.

“Both,” you admitted.

Jon’s jaw clenched, the muscle jumping as he bit back something harsher. “That’s not– ” He cut himself off, shook his head sharply. His frustration rippled off him like heat. “Fine.”  He turned away from you, searching his pockets with a sharp movement, and brought out a battered pack of cigarettes. One slid between his lips with familiarity. The scrape of the lighter’s wheel broke the silence, the orange glow lighting his face harshly.

You stared. Not at the cigarette, but at the lighter in his hand. “Where did you get that?” Your voice was suddenly sharper than you intended.

He blinked at you, caught mid-drag. The ember flared in the dark. “What? This?” He held the lighter up, turning it over, the metal catching the lamplight. “It’s just…it’s just a lighter.”

Your throat tightened, eyes remaining fixed on the small thing, the shape of it. A talisman wrapped in something ordinary. You felt a prickle down your spine, apprehension and a recognition of patterns repeating themselves.

“You should get rid of that.”

His brow furrowed, smoke curling between you. “Why?”

You didn’t answer. You didn’t tell him who it belonged to or why its flame burned too neatly. You only shook your head once, deliberate. “Just be careful, Jon. Don’t underestimate the Fears.”

The words fell heavy in the cold air. You stood then, brushing the damp from your coat, that cold prickle down your spine a reminder that there were still things in this world that could unsettle even you.

“Wait– ” Jon started, but you were already stepping out of the circle of light, your back to him, suppressing a shiver.

Chapter Text

Proverbs 16:18: “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”

[CONVERSATION]

GERARD

I think you know the rest. I joined Gertrude’s work for a few years. Didn’t realise how ill I was until it finally caught up with me. Then I died.

I think… I think I finally understand why she brought me back. I just don’t understand why she left me behind.

ARCHIVIST

Gertrude always seemed hard to understand. Like she had her own intentions.

GERARD

She did.

ARCHIVIST

Did you ever… [Pause] Did you ever know someone else she might’ve worked with? A person called [Y/N]?… I don’t even know if that’s their real name. They’ve been… involved, here and there.

GERARD

Not sure. What did you say they were like?

ARCHIVIST

[Hesitantly] Hard to explain. They know a lot of things they shouldn’t. They seem detached, but not necessarily uncaring. At least not to me. Gertrude knew them, apparently. They helped each other, I suppose? But they seem quite secretive.

GERARD

 [Low hum] Huh. That does ring a bell, actually.

ARCHIVIST

Really?

GERARD

Yeah. They were one of Gertrude’s ghosts. You know the type. She had a few people like that, folks she’d see in out-of-the-way places. Gertrude didn’t talk about them much, though. Avoided the topic, really. I think she didn’t want to give the details a chance to stick. Said they were… useful, sometimes. Not sure if that’s a compliment, coming from her.

ARCHIVIST

[dryly] I’ll take it as one.

GERARD

Don’t.

[HE LAUGHS QUIETLY, THEN THE SOUND DIES AWAY.]

ARCHIVIST

You never met them yourself?

GERARD

No, I…[Pause, faint hiss of the tape] Not properly. Not as an adult. But there was this one time. Long before I ever met Gertrude. When I was still a kid.

ARCHIVIST

[Eagerly] Go on.

GERARD

[Quiet, reflective] Mum had… company. I’d been told not to go into my mum’s study. Which, of course, meant I did exactly that. [Chuckle without humour]

I remember because I’d taken a book from the side table; one of the ones I wasn’t meant to read. My mum always said there were pages that “bit back,” and I wanted to see if she was lying. I didn’t get far. She came in, my mum, in one of her moods again, and behind her was this person.

ARCHIVIST

[Y/N].

GERARD

It must’ve been them, yeah. Didn’t know it at the time but the way you describe them fits. They weren’t like the usual sycophants who came to trade with my mum or beg for information. They didn’t look impressed. I ran to hide behind the cabinet. Not my proudest moment, I admit. I didn’t see much. But I listened.

ARCHIVIST

What were they talking about?

GERARD

It was the tail end of a fight, I think. Something about a book, as always. One my mother had just brought back from Morocco. And then she started, I don’t know, needling them. Too controlled to shout, but with that sort of venom that dripped between her teeth. Her voice was sharp enough to cut glass. She said… [Pause, trying to recall] “You always had the luxury of picking your battles.”

This other person, they didn’t even raise their voice. Just answered, calm as anything: “Someone has to. Not all wars are worth the blood.”

Mum started pacing, continued: “Some of us actually have to work for our achievements; we can’t all have everything handed to us.”

And then they said this line… I remember that part clear as anything.

[In awe, almost reverent] “Envy doesn’t suit you, Mary. Makes you look ugly. Though I suppose you’ve worn it all your life.”

[Exhales, shaking his head softly] You could’ve heard the silence in there creak. I remember I held my breath. And then my mum again: “You don’t get to judge me. You don’t know what it’s like. What it costs to make a name in this world.”

ARCHIVIST

[Softly] That doesn’t sound like she was very amused.

GERARD

Oh, she was furious. But they didn’t even flinch. There was a noise, a chair scraping, a book slamming shut, and then Mum stepped toward them. I remember her hand rising, in that awful gesture, like she always did when she was about to make someone smaller, to push them or to grab them by the shirt or arm or something. And they just… stopped her. Not violently. Just caught her wrist and pushed her hand back down. Like… like you might push aside a fly that’s brushed your face. Then they said something quiet. I couldn’t hear it. But whatever it was, it made my mum still. God, she always hated when she didn’t get her way but she just stumbled back, sat down, didn’t look at them.

They left not long after that. Right before walking out, they looked right at me. I thought I was hidden, but I must have leaned forward while trying to listen in. I thought my heart was going to hammer out of my chest. They didn’t say a word, just looked at me like they knew I shouldn’t be there, but they weren’t angry at me. Then the door shut and that was it. They were gone. I never saw them after.

[THERE’S A LONG SILENCE. THE FAINT HUM OF THE TAPE CONTINUES.]

ARCHIVIST

Did you ever ask your mother who they were?

GERARD

Years later, yeah. She brushed it off. Said they were “a curiosity best forgotten.” Which, coming from her, probably means they scared her.

[Pause] I suppose that was the first time I ever saw someone stand up to her. Didn’t think it was possible.

ARCHIVIST

[Murmurs] That doesn’t help me much.

GERARD

Sorry. That’s all I’ve got.

ARCHIVIST

[Under his breath] It never is simple, is it?

GERARD

Not with us. Gertrude might’ve known more, but she never said. I thought they’d be dead by now, same as most of her confidantes. I didn’t realise you were in touch with them.

ARCHIVIST

 I… I’m not sure what to call it. They seem to be helping… most of the time. It’s hard to tell what their motives really are.

GERARD

[Surprised] Helping? Well. That’s a twist. If it’s the same one I remember, then they were the only person who ever made my mum hesitate. So if they’re on your side… maybe that’s worth something.

ARCHIVIST

I’ll try to believe that. Thank you.

GERARD

Don’t thank me. It’s a rotten thing, remembering people who wanted to be forgotten. And I can’t help much further. All I really know that they were useful for Gertrude’s work.

ARCHIVIST

What was Gertrude’s work?

GERARD

What?

ARCHIVIST

I-I mean, I – Sorry, I-I know a lot about what Gertrude did, but I don’t really know… why she was doing any of it, or w-what her intentions were.

GERARD

Same as you. I think.

ARCHIVIST

Stopping the Unknowing?

GERARD

Not just the Unknowing. All of them.

ARCHIVIST

There are more rituals…

GERARD

That’s what she said.

[CONVERSATION CONTINUES]

Chapter Text

Matthew 5:38-9: “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ But now I tell you: do not take revenge on someone who wrongs you. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, let him slap your left cheek too.”

You hadn’t wanted to come here, hadn’t planned to step within the Eye’s reach again. Even standing across the street, the building’s looming façade made your stomach knot. The windows stared down in neat, grid-like rows, too uniform to be comforting, too dark to be empty.

You lingered in the shadow of a narrow alley that stank faintly. To anyone passing by, you were just another person no one paid attention to.

You didn’t want to go in. Not without knowing if Elias was there. You had learned that proximity was permission and that was a risk you wouldn’t allow yourself to pay.

But the conversation with Jon lingered, looping through your thoughts. You couldn’t go with him, you refused to walk into the jaws of a trap willingly, but you could still clear the board. Remove the pieces that were lined up, threatening to fall. Or at least try to.

So you waited, hidden, counting exits and watching who went in and out. Researchers, visitors, interns, a delivery driver. And then finally the waiting paid off.

You’d seen his face in a photograph online. Seeing him in motion was different. He was taller than you expected, handsome in a way that made people look twice, the sort of man who might’ve been easy with a smile once. Now his stride was quick and his mouth a thin, angry line. He muttered to himself, words caught under his breath, paced a few steps down the street, kicked at a loose stone, glared at nothing in particular. He was halfway to the corner when you stepped out of the alley.

“Tim Stoker?”

He stopped mid-stride, blinking at you. His expression shifted instantly into wary annoyance. “Uh, yeah, that’s me. Who’s asking?”

Then with a wry smile that wasn’t really a smile he added: “If you’re another journalist, you can piss off. We’ve had enough vultures.”

“I’m not a journalist,” you replied. “Jon sent me.”

That did it. His expression soured instantly. “Oh, did he now?” he said, voice dripping with sarcasm. “Great. Should’ve figured he’d start sending errand runners now. What is this, an apology? Another secret briefing? A–”

“Tim–”

“No, really,” he cut in, voice rising, “if the great and mighty Archivist can’t be bothered to talk to me himself, he can get lost. You can, too, while you’re at it.” He started to walk, long strides that suggested he wanted the conversation buried behind him.

You hurried after him and stepped more neatly into his path. “I need a word.”

He gave you a look that could’ve cut glass. “You people really don’t quit, do you?”

“… I’m not people,” you said, frowning, then tried again.  “Please. I’ve begun badly. Just listen for a moment.”

He stared, shoulders still braced for a fight, but curiosity or exhaustion made him stay. “You’ve got two minutes.”

You moved a little closer. “You’re angry. You have every right to be.”

“Glad we agree on something.”

“But you’re also walking into something that will kill you.”

That earned a dry bark of laughter. “You’ll have to be more specific.”

“The Unknowing,” you continued. “Destroying it won’t give you peace. It won’t save you.”

He scoffed “Save me? From what, exactly? A boring desk job? Monsters? Or waking up surrounded by statements and wondering where your sanity went? I know what I’m doing.” That was all the confirmation you needed.

“You want to sacrifice yourself for revenge?”

He folded his arms. His shoulders hunched a little, as though daring you to object. “That’s the general idea, yeah.”

You exhaled slowly, studying his expression – a wreck of frustration and exhaustion.  Grief had hollowed out the space beneath his eyes. A man burning himself alive by inches and calling it control. “It won’t fix anything.”

His voice hardened. “Yeah, well, I’m done with speeches. With the Institute, with Jon, with Elias, all of it. If blowing it all to hell takes me down too, fine. At least it’s something I chose.”

You took a small step forward, cautious not to trigger the fight already simmering behind his clenched fists. “You think you’re acting of your own will? You’re not. All of you, you’re just collateral.”

“Collateral?” he snapped. “We are people.”

“Not to Elias you’re not,” you said, sharper now. “Or to the thing he serves. You’re just pawns. Pieces he can move on the board as he sees fit.”

Tim looked away, scoffing. “Yeah, tell me something I didn’t know.”

“He’ll keep using you until you break.”

He gave you a look that might have been amusement or contempt. “Newsflash: already broken. When you’re employed by an eldritch monster, it turns out you don’t stay in one piece for long.”

“You can leave, you know. Or at least not be part of it,” you said quietly.

“Leave?” He barked out a laugh. “Sure. Real helpful advice. I’ve tried that already.”

He turned more fully to you, suspicion hardening his features. “Who even are you?” he demanded. “Jon sends me some…what, handler? Some weird friend with a God complex?”

You sighed, more tired than offended, and rubbed your temple. You could smell rain again.

“That’s what I thought,” he said.

Before he could leave, you reached into your coat pocket and drew out a small object, a dull metal charm. It was old brass, etched with lines that caught the light strangely, with a small, carved bone in the middle. It had been near impossible to procure.

He stared at it, wary. “What is that?”

“Something that might keep you safe. It won’t stop what’s coming, but it can shield you, just for a few moments. Long enough to get away.”

He looked at the charm again, then at you, suspicion flickering in his eyes. “You show up out of nowhere, spouting half-truths, trying to hand me creepy jewelry. Did Jon cook this up? Or is handing people cursed knick-knacks your thing?”

“It’s not cursed.”

“That’s exactly what someone with a cursed object would say. For all I know, you could be one of them.”

You met his eyes, exasperated. “If I were one of them, you’d already be dead.”

He looked away, jaw tight. “I’m not afraid to die,” he muttered. “And a bit of jewelry’s not gonna save me from all this.”

You reached for his hand, pressed the charm into his palm. “Please. You don’t have to believe me. Just take it.”

He stared at it and turned it over in his hand. For a moment you thought he’d pocket it. Then he tossed it hard into the gutter. It landed with a dull metallic clink against wet concrete.

“Save your charity,” he snapped. “I don’t need your magic trinkets. And I’ve had enough of ‘good samaritans’ trying to help.”

“Tim–”

“Look, I don’t know who you are, or why Jon tolerates your cryptic bullshit, but I’m done with mysterious weirdos. You want to help? Go tell Jon to stop being creepy and pretending he can fix everyone. I’ve got my own mess to deal with.”

He started walking.

“Don’t do it,” you called again, softly. You didn’t follow.

He stopped, back to you, head tilted slightly as if listening.

“Revenge isn’t worth dying for,” you said. “Don’t let that be the last thing you are.”

“You don’t get it. None of you do. It’s the only thing I have left.” His voice carried back over his shoulder.

“And that’s reason enough to hand them your death too?”

“You talk pretty, you know that?” He looked back then, smiling wryly. The sun peaked out for a second and framed his profile, casting it in a glow that would have been a sight to see if not for the weight of the situation pressing down on you. “But you’re wasting your time. It’s not your call to make.”

Then he turned and walked away, the set of his shoulders rigid.

For a heartbeat, you thought about calling out. But the words stayed behind your teeth. You understood his posture. There was nothing left to say. So you only watched his silhouette until it disappeared down the slick street.

You had tried to save him. You failed. You were merely a witness to his pain, a stranger to his grief.

The charm lay in the gutter untouched, catching the glow of the light. For a moment, it looked almost alive. Then a passing car splashed water over it, and it went dark.

And you thought, not for the first time: The future is already written, but it’s in a language only the dying can read.

Chapter Text

1 John 4:18: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out all fear. For fear has painfulness. He who fears is not perfect in love.”

Tim had stormed out of the Archives in one of those moods, jaw clenched, shoulders tight, and Martin had followed because that’s what he did. Because no one else ever seemed to care anymore. 

Of course, he had run straight into David and sent an entire stack of papers flying. When he finally exited the building and turned onto the narrow street, scanning faces that blurred into one another in the dim afternoon light, he couldn’t find Tim anymore. Martin jogged down the pavement. 

“Hey!” he called, a little breathless, eyes catching on a figure standing still by the kerb. They were staring down the street, almost ignoring him.

 “Sorry,” Martin puffed, slowing down. “Have you seen someone, uh, tall, dark jacket, looks like he’s about to punch a wall?”

The person turned their head, gaze settling on him. “If you mean Tim,” they said quietly, “I just spoke to him. I don’t think he wants to talk right now.”

“Oh.” Martin blinked. “Yeah, that sounds about right.” He rubbed the back of his neck, unsure whether to feel grateful or awkward.“Thanks for trying, I guess.” He lingered, uncomfortable, as the silence stretched between them. “Wait, why are you here? Oh! Are you here for a statement? You can do it with me if you like. I work at the Institute too.”

He stuck out his hand, almost sheepishly. That was the right thing to do, right? “I’m Martin.”

The person looked down at his hand, then back up at him, as though weighing the meaning of it. Their eyes lingered for a moment too long, thoughtful. Then they nodded and took his hand. “Sure.”

Martin smiled, trying to dispel the oddness prickling under his skin. “Right then. Follow me? The Archives are just down that way. It’s not far.”

He started toward the Institute, glancing back now and then to make sure they were following. They did but slowed when the looming silhouette appeared. “I’d rather not go inside. Or underground.”

Martin nodded quickly. “That’s fine! We could–” he rubbed his palms together, trying to think, “maybe talk in the courtyard instead? There’s a bench, and it’s...you know, less basement-y.” He gave an awkward chuckle. “Some people get a bit weirded out by the Archives.”

Something in their expression softened. “That would be fine.”

So he led them there, across the uneven cobblestones and through the iron gate and narrow passage that led to the back of the Institute. The courtyard was half-forgotten, just a few old benches, some ivy trying its best to die gracefully along the brick walls.

Martin gestured awkwardly. “Here we are. Sorry, it’s not exactly the Ritz but at least it’s open air.”

They smiled faint but genuine. “It’s alright.” 

He stood there for a moment, not sure what to say next. Something about them made him want to fill the silence, to be kind, to make things normal. 

“So, um,” Martin began at last, voice gentle. “You said you talked to Tim. Was he…okay?”

Their eyes flicked to him. “Angry. But he’ll make his choice soon enough.”

Martin frowned. “Right. Yeah. I guess.”

They didn’t elaborate, and Martin didn’t push. He just nodded, looking down at his shoes. He felt that strange heaviness again, that sense of standing too close to something he didn’t quite understand.

Still, he smiled a little, because that’s what he did. “Well, let’s start then.”

They sat down on the bench, Martin on one end, the stranger on the other. He fumbled in his jacket pocket, pulling out a battered little tape recorder and a notebook. He balanced the recorder on the bench between them, pressing the red button. The familiar click gave him a strange kind of comfort.

The stranger’s eyes flicked to the device, then back to him.

Martin cleared his throat. “Statement of…” He looked up. “Oh, I didn’t actually get your name.”

“…Robin Vanderbilt.”

“Okay…so statement of Robin Vanderbilt, taken by Martin Blackwood, archival assistant, outside the Magnus Institute, London. Recorded seventh of July, 2017, regarding…”

“A quicksand pit in Normandy.”

Martin blinked but scribbled it down. “Statement begins. Whenever you’re ready.”

Robin began. “I heard about it first from a fisherman. He said there was a stretch of sand on the coast that moved. That's not so unusual, sometimes the sand catches your boots, but he said this felt alive, or close enough. The more you struggled, the deeper you went. There were stories. The locals avoided the place, stopped walking that way altogether, said that animals went missing there. A horse once, a child’s dog. But people make up ghost stories about anything. I thought it might be just that, a story. Until the summer when it wasn’t.

It wasn’t marked on any map. All there was was a stretch of pale, rippled sand between the dunes, and it looked harmless. It always looks harmless, doesn’t it? There were footprints ahead of me, a trail leading further out. I thought I would take a look. The tide didn’t reach it, and yet it looked damp, like it had only just retreated. People said it was the sea reclaiming what it wanted. 

There was a group of hikers. I saw them from the ridge. Twenty, maybe twenty-two people. They crossed the same patch, laughing and taking pictures. Someone had a guitar. You could smell the salt in the wind, hear the gulls. Then the sand started to move.”

Martin shifted slightly, pen frozen halfway down the page.

“They didn’t notice at first,” Robin continued. “It was slow, the ground softening, rippling under their boots. Then one woman fell to her knees and screamed. The others reached for her, but the more they pulled, the deeper she went. Her arms disappeared up to the elbows, then her shoulders. Her mouth filled with sand. And then she was swallowed entirely.

They tried to form a chain, but the ground didn’t care. It swallowed them one by one. They didn’t even have time to call out for help properly. The sound got swallowed first as if the air itself didn’t want to carry it. 

The last hiker shouted. It was a man in a red jacket. It was shrill, voice breaking. Then he was gone. The sand smoothed over them like nothing had happened. There was nothing left. No movement at all. Just the tide starting to creep back in.

I went down after, hours later. The authorities came. There were no footprints, no indentation, no bodies, no sign that twenty people had ever been there. There were no missing persons matching the description. It was as if they hadn’t existed. They told me that, if there had been someone there, the tide must’ve taken them, that the sun on the water had been too bright, that the wind must have blown too harshly to see clearly. But I remember how still the air was that day, how it didn’t move at all.”

Silence stretched out. The tape whirred faintly in the recorder.

Martin licked his lips. “And you got out?”

“Yeah,” Robin said after a beat. “I guess I managed to evade it.”

“When was this?”

“Some time ago.”

Martin looked up from his notes. “Right, yes, could you…could you kind of narrow it down?”

There was a pause. “No.”

“Got it…okay. No problem.” He wrote something vague and illegible in the margin. “Do you remember where this was? Any defining landmarks or–?”

“It was near Barfleur,” Robin explained. “A few kilometers south. There’s a farmhouse on the ridge. Or there was.”

“Oh, great! Thanks.” He jotted it down, glancing up. “You mentioned there were about twenty people?”

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t…know any of them?”

“No.”

“And you were there alone?”

They looked at him blankly. “Yes.” A pause. “It was…scary?”

Martin hesitated. Scary, he thought. That’s all? He tried not to let his expression show what he was thinking. What an odd person. Their statement was barely a statement, vague and distant, almost like a half-remembered dream. It reminded him unpleasantly of Lynne Hammond’s: all mood and barely any substance.

“Sorry,” he continued after a moment, rubbing his temple. “Usually our head archivist does this. He’s better at it.”

“Jon?” Robin asked, their gaze flicking to the recorder.

Martin froze. “…You know him?”

Robin didn’t answer. Their eyes returned to the recorder. “You should turn the tape off.”

“Oh, eh, just ignore it. It’s fine, they’re, uh–”

“The statement is over,” Robin insisted.

“Yeah. It’s, uh, they’re kind of– well, the recorders have been acting up lately.” He chuckled weakly. “You know, old machines, temperamental.” 

“Let me.” Robin reached out and clicked it off. The tape whirring stopped. The courtyard felt strangely still. 

Martin found himself staring at the device, waiting for it to click back on by itself. It didn’t.

“Huh,” he muttered. “That’s weird…” He tore his eyes away. “So, Jon?”

Robin didn’t answer at first. Their eyes slid away, following the ivy creeping up the wall as if it had just said something more interesting. 

Martin felt the silence stretch until it started to itch. He filled it, because that’s what he did best. He cleared his throat again, voice coming out a bit too high. “Are you, um…a friend of his? Jon’s, I mean. He doesn’t really get out much, so if you know him that’s…well, surprising, really.”

“I suppose? Something like that.” Their voice was so soft it almost got lost in the wind.

For a second the green-eyed monster reared its ugly head. Martin stomped it down. “Well, that’s good! He’s not the easiest person to get close to but he could use more friends, I think. Not that he’d admit it, of course. He’s always,” he laughed awkwardly, “you know, broody, all intense, muttering to himself about statements and avatars and all that. Not that he’s wrong, I guess, but he doesn’t make it easy for anyone to talk to him. Half the time he’s in the Archives, he is glaring at his desk like it is at fault somehow.”

Robin’s lips twitched upwards, a ghost of a smile, and they exhaled through their nose, before chuckling properly. 

Martin blinked at them, startled. “Oh! Did you just laugh?”

“Maybe a little.”

He smiled despite himself, warmth rising in his chest despite the chill. “Hah. Well, that’s a first. Most people just tell me to stop rambling.”

“I didn’t say you should stop.”

Martin’s ears went pink. “Oh, uh, thanks.” He rubbed at the back of his neck, trying to will the heat out of his cheeks.

Robin’s head tilted, curious. “He cares about you, you know. I understand why.”

Martin blinked, mouth opening before his brain could decide what to do with it. “He– what? No, he doesn’t– well, I mean, not like that, he’s just…he’s Jon. He’s nice, sometimes. He’s not exactly the–”

Robin’s faint smile deepened, patient, knowing. Martin’s voice faltered.

If he could see himself right then, he thought, his face would probably rival a traffic light. He felt his cheeks burning. “You think so?” His voice was small, hope curling around the words before he could stop it.

Their gaze softened, and for a moment, Martin felt completely seen, as if Robin understood what it cost him to hope. They only nodded once, slowly, like it was obvious.

And that was all the encouragement Martin needed to start rambling. “Jon’s– well, he’s brilliant, you know? Smartest person I’ve ever met, probably. People think he’s cold, but he’s not, he’s just– he’s got so much on his mind, always thinking, worrying. He takes everything on himself, like he’s got to save the whole bloody world on his own. And he can be frustrating as hell, sure, but the way he sees things, the way he cares even when he pretends he doesn’t. When he’s kind, God, he’s really kind. It sneaks up on you. I just wish he’d take a break, sometimes. Eat a proper meal. Sleep. Let someone else carry a bit of it for once.” He caught himself, realising how easily he’d slipped into talking about Jon, and how he always did that without meaning to.

Robin watched him with an expression that might have been fondness, or pity, or something between. Then they said simply: “You love him.”

Martin froze. His throat went dry. He tried to laugh it off, but it came out strangled. “I– uh, well, that’s a bit–”

He didn’t know what to do with his hands, or his face, or any part of himself really. Eventually, he found his pen, fidgeting with the clip. “That obvious, huh?”

“To anyone who’s paying attention,” Robin noted, amused.

He was thankful that they didn’t tease him. They looked at him with those strange, knowing eyes, and the silence said enough.

“I–” He swallowed, then tried again. “He’s important to me. I just– I want him to be okay.”

When Robin finally spoke again, their tone had changed, edged with something akin to worry. “He’s changing, Martin. You can see that, can’t you? You know it. The things he’s seen, they’re not letting him go.”

Martin’s brows furrowed. “Yeah, well, of course he’s– he’s been through a lot. We all have, but Jon especially. But he’s strong. He’ll get through it.”

“He’s digging deeper into things no one should look at. Every day, he steps further from what he was. The thing he’s becoming doesn’t stop for anyone. Not even you.”

Something about the words stretched between them made Martin’s palms go clammy. “What do you mean?”

Their expression flickered, briefly pained. “You shouldn’t follow him into the fire.”

Martin frowned. The confusion that had been twisting in his stomach started bleeding into something hot and defensive. “Why are you telling me this? What is this, some kind of...warning? Because if you’re just here to–” He shook his head, then scoffed. “So that’s what this is. Another person having a go at Jon, yeah?”

“I’m not criticising him.”

“You are!” Martin’s voice cracked. His hands clenched on his knees. “Everyone is! So what, you’re warning me of him? You think I shouldn’t help him? You sound like everyone else who’s ever looked down their nose at him.” 

His voice rose, trembled with emotion, anger and fear tangled together. “Why is everyone always so bloody angry at him? God, he’s trying so hard and everyone just– just tears him apart for it! He’s trying, don’t you get that? He’s doing his best, and no one seems to care how hard that is! Cut him so slack!”

Robin shook their head. “I’m not angry with him. Or with you. But you endanger him, Martin. He can’t afford distractions. He can’t be divided.”

Martin shot to his feet, breath catching. “He can’t do this alone! I won’t let him!”

Robin stood too, though their movements were slower. They exhaled a sigh. “Love isn’t enough to stop what’s coming.”

Martin stared at them, heart hammering, the air between them charged and cold. He shook his head, jaw set. “You don’t know that. You don’t even know us.” 

“No,” they admitted, “I suppose I don’t.”

The silence stretched again. Martin turned away. He didn’t know if he was angry or afraid, didn’t know what to do with the feeling in his mouth, as if he had been chewing on the very words now pressing against his teeth.

Robin closed their eyes for a moment. “You don’t know what you are up against. They want you to be afraid.” They sounded almost pleading. “That’s how they win.”

Martin’s voice steadied, low and fierce. “Then the only way to fight against fear is to love. To be happy. To live.” He looked at their too-calm eyes, their stillness that wasn’t quite human. “Maybe you should try it.”

For a second, Robin looked as if they had been slapped. The silence that followed was heavy, humming with something neither of them could name.

Martin’s fist clenched. He looked away. “I think you should go.”

Robin stood next to him for a long, quiet moment. Then they nodded, tucked their hands into the pockets of their jacket, turned, and walked away.

Martin watched until they disappeared around the corner, the air somehow colder for their absence. Then, alone in the courtyard, he looked down at the recorder on the bench, still silent. He swallowed hard, throat tight. He didn’t quite know what to do with the ache the conversation left behind. He only knew that whatever they meant, it scared him a little.

Chapter Text

Proverbs 27:6: “Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful.”

It was 4:13 in the morning when you realised that you had spaced out. You knew because the clock above the desk had been beating its hollow pulse into your skull for the last five hours, its hands seemingly ticking way louder than usual. Your study was awash in lamplight and the room had become a hollow, breathing thing. Piles of documents rose around you, too many to still be able to call it organised. You had stopped drinking the tea sometime around midnight; it had cooled, untouched, the surface reflecting your face in sepia hues.

Your hands had been motionless for a while, so you clench and unclench them before you dragged another file toward you, one with faded ink on brittle paper. German again.

You flipped through it until you found what you had been looking for. It barely still sounded like Johann. It had been written years after that initial letter that you had read, that much was true, but his entire speech had changed, his obsession turning him away from anything that he had been before. It was as if the Eye had erased every inch of him that wasn’t part of its pursuit of anguish.

You traced the lines, translating as you read:

“Ein Mensch mag nur dann wahrhaftig herrschen, so denn alles gesehen wird.
Eine Krone aus Augen soll sich auf mein Haupt legen, und durch sie werd ich die Welt allenthalben durchdringen. Kein Winkel bleib ungesehen, kein Gedanke unlesbar, so nur das Grausen groß gnug sei.”

“A man may only truly rule when all is seen. A crown of eyes shall settle upon my brow,
and through it I shall pierce all of the world. No corner left unobserved, no thought left unread, if only the terror be great enough.”

Eine Krone aus Augen, you mouthed silently. A Crown of Eyes.

Sighing, you rubbed yours in turn. What did that even mean? You knew it had to do with the Eye’s ritual. But details were so vague that couldn’t make any sense of it.

You sat back and exhaled through your teeth. Your gaze began to lose focus, drifted across the table toward the yellowed blueprint of Millbank Prison. Circular design with endless, uninterrupted lines of sight. Every cell angled toward the central tower.

You had traced those lines so many times the paper had begun to soften under the pressure of your fingers. Still, your eyes followed each pentagon, the radial symmetry of it all. The sponsors had called it efficient. An innovation of surveillance. Others had called it grotesque. You knew better.

When you squinted, the cell blocks kind of looked like a crown, you supposed. A two-dimensional rendering of it, of course, as if looking down on it from above. But that ritual had failed. Even without your interference.

You glanced at your notebook:

Beholding: 1867. Jonah Magnus. Attempted ritual. Site: Millbank Panopticon, original architectural supervision by Smirke. Failed due to unknown reasons.

You sorted through the attached newspaper clippings and annotations.

“TRAGEDY AT MILLBANK–PENITENTIARY. HUNDREDS DEAD.”

“No cause found. Witness reports inmates screaming about eyes in the walls. A prisoner claimed there was someone walking the corridors. It is thought the man was hallucinating due to isolation.”

“collective hysteria...hallucinations...mass casualties...roaming dread”

You rested a thumb near the ink. No firm explanation. You smoothed the crease of the paper. Laid it aside.

Your thoughts flickered to the Eye, to Elias Bouchard, his calm voice, his burning eyes. He knew the original ritual failed. He knew why. You were sure of it. So what would he do? You considered possible methods. He wouldn’t repeat past mistakes. No. Elias was cautious, patient. A planner. But what the hell did Elias need Jon for? He was an avatar of the Eye, but so was Elias. Why the need for Jon?

Why risk another Archivist after Gertrude’s rebellion?

You simply couldn’t piece together what role he was playing in all of this. Or, well, what role he had been supposed to play.

You pushed the thought away and instead thumbed through your notebook. Timelines and reports and theories and half-written thoughts fluttered by until an old entry caught your eye.

A rubbed charcoal sketch of a carved stone tablet. Mesoamerican, very early Postclassic. You had tried to take pictures of it but they had turned out too grainy, so you had resorted to the good, old art of tracing it directly on top of the stone.

You remembered the day you had done it. You had run away, had tried to shut yourself off, and there, in the middle of the forest, you had found it. You remembered how you had nearly screamed, how it had felt like you could never get away from it all. That there was no escape and no way out.

It had been a carving of a circle, stylised as a serpent, akin to an Ouroboros. Its scales featured ten smaller figures: an eye, a giant bird, a jaguar, an ant, a spider, a skull, a figure without a face, the mouth of a beast, and lastly two sections, one fully empty, one with a tiny figure in the middle. As you had learned, the K’iche’ had had linking pairs: sight and night, cavern and sky, hollow and hive, mask and fang, weave and silence. But all were intertwined, all bound.

You almost wanted to laugh. Or scream. All of the Fears together. How terrible that would be.

You looked away and closed the notebook. A familiar ache burned behind your eyelids. You were so very tired.

It had been a while since you had slept. You let the silence settle for a long moment, as your gaze drifted toward the window. Unlike you, London slept outside, peacefully. The river, visible from your flat, seemed distant and wrong.

You were chasing your own thoughts in circles, chewing the same conclusions down to pulp and finding no nourishment in them. Crown, prison, eyes, blueprints, ghosts. Round and round until the room felt too small to contain your skull. It was slowly but surely driving you absolutely bonkers.

You got up. Too quickly. The room tilted, just a little. Your knee knocked the table and a stack of photocopies slid, whispering, to the floor. You didn’t bother tidying. Papers stayed where they were, lamp stayed on. You got out.

Cold air slapped you awake the moment you stepped outside. The city took you in without asking. Your coat hung open. You didn’t remember putting it on. Or your shoes. You moved anyway, sure and automatic. Streetlights smeared gold across wet asphalt. A siren far enough away to be almost abstract. You walked. Your thoughts lagged behind your body, dragged along. Your feet knew where to go even when you didn’t want them to. Crossing, curb, along the river, across the park, the rhythm of movement taking over before thought could intervene. You passed shop windows without paying attention to your reflection sliding across. You were only half-aware of where you were, of the cold biting through your clothes.

At some point you looked up. And there it was.

Your stomach dropped in a sick, hollow lurch, as if you had just missed a step. The hospital rose in front of you, all glass and pale cement. You stopped short on the pavement, breath catching, and tasted bile sharp at the back of your throat. You had been avoiding this place with an almost religious fervour. Crossing streets to avoid even glimpsing it. Turning your head away on buses. For a second you considered turning around, letting momentum carry you anywhere else and walk until dawn.

Still, you entered.

Visiting hours wouldn’t start for quite a while yet, but rules had always been suggestions to you. Doors, locks, were made for people who believed in being stopped. You slipped inside on instinct, past the desk, nodded vaguely at a nurse who didn’t really see you, then down the corridor. Same trick as always. People looked only where they expected to see someone. You made yourself unremarkable.

You knew where to go. You had read the room number months ago, had filed it away, buried it under layers of later and not yet and I can’t. You had pushed it down until it stopped pressing back.

Now the door was right in front of you.

You hadn’t dared to come closer. Hadn’t dared to look at him. As long as you didn’t see him, some small, treacherous part of you could pretend he wasn’t really like this. Schrödinger’s Archivist. Awake somewhere. Angry, possibly, but alive. That coma was just a word, not a state, and he would wake up whether or not you bore witness.

Your hand hovered over the handle. It trembled and you, confused, stared at it like it belonged to someone else. A stranger’s hand, about to do something irreversible. Then you pushed it down.

The room was dim, lit by a single low lamp and the glow of monitors. Machines murmured softly, a quiet electronic breathing. You took it in in pieces, because the whole was too much. Curtains. Side table. Flowers. Bed. Tubes.

There he was.

A thick lump rose in your throat. You tried to swallow but it didn’t help.

He looked smaller like this, diminished by the bed, by the stillness. His hair had grown a little longer, darker than you remembered. His face looked even thinner, and yet, familiar in a way that hurt. The scars were still there. They mapped his skin with a history of events you wished you could forget. Faint, pale tracks from worms. Other lines from other ordeals, cuts that never quite healed right, skin discoloured, tight. Proof of every threshold he had crossed because someone, you, hadn’t stopped him.

It looked wrong on him, this softness, this unkemptness, as if time had been moving on without his consent. Dread pooled low and heavy in your gut.

You stepped closer, cleared your throat. The sound seemed obscenely loud in the quiet.

 “Hi, Jon,” you said, stupidly, as if this were normal and he might look up at you, offended, and complain about the hour. “I, um. I don’t…I don’t know if you can hear me.”

Of course he didn’t answer.

You shifted your weight, suddenly unsure what to do with your body. Your hands felt clumsy and oversized. You clasped them together, then let go again. They felt useless at your sides.

“How are you doing?” you asked because the words came out before you could stop them. You huffed a breath that could almost have been a laugh if it hadn’t broken halfway through. “That’s– that’s a ridiculous question. I’m sorry.”

Silence, interrupted only by the steady beep of the monitor and your own breathing, too loud in your ears.

“I should have come earlier,” you went on. The apology was automatic, muscle memory. “I should have been here. I just– I didn’t know how to…I didn’t know how to look at you like this.”

You shuffled closer to the bed, then stopped, hovering again, caught between impulse and restraint. Finally, you sat on the chair next to the bed. It creaked under your weight and the sound almost made you flinch.

 “I didn’t know what to say,” you admitted to the floor. “I still don’t. I’m…not very good at this. At being here.”

You took a breath. In. Out. Then finally said the thing that had been sitting heavy in your chest.

“I’m sorry I let you go without me.” It was inadequate. You knew it. He would have known it too if he only had been awake. Guilt pressed in from all sides, suffocating you. Images flashed, his face in the car, in the park. The way he had looked at you, sometimes, asking permission you never gave.

“You were right,” you continued, voice tight. “About…about not doing this alone. About me.” You closed your eyes briefly. “I thought if I stayed outside it all, I wouldn’t–” You trailed off, jaw tightening. “I wouldn’t care this much.”

You stared at his still form. Your fingers curled into the fabric of your coat.

“I should’ve been there,” you whispered. “I should’ve stayed. I should’ve…done something.”

You risked a glance at his face then. He looked almost peaceful, in a way that felt cruel. It seemed someone had carved the living out of him and left the rest behind.

“I’m sorry,” you said again, because there was nothing else that fit, because you didn’t know what else to say.

You sat there, uselessly, surrounded by the quiet proof of your failure.

You didn’t know how long you stayed.

Time did something strange when you just remained still long enough. It stretched and dissolved around you. The beeping and low hum of machines mingled with your own breathing until it became background noise.

Eventually, the light changed. Gradually, the grey-blue of pre-dawn bled in through the narrow window, diluting the shadows, making everything look more fragile.

At some point your legs went numb. Pins and needles bloomed and faded without you moving to relieve them. The chair stopped being uncomfortable and became part of you, a fixed point in the room.

Dawn broke without ceremony. The first light appeared and crept sideways, touched the edges of the bed. You noticed because Jon’s face changed; his expression looked more human in the daylight, less like an artifact behind glass. You watched his chest rise and fall. Rise and fall.

The door opened and it startled you more than you’d expected. Your head snapped up while your nerves jittered at the intrusion. For a split second you half-expected Elias had come to taunt and smile thinly from the threshold. Or a nurse, maybe, polite but confused.

Instead Martin stood in the doorway. He looked exhausted; his eyes were rimmed red and etched with dark circles underneath. He stopped short. Surprise flickered across his face when he saw you seated by the bed. A breath caught halfway in. Then he hardened. His mouth twisted into something sharp and brittle.

“Oh,” he exhaled. “You finally show.”

You stood slowly, the chair scraping softly this time. Your legs were stiff.

 “What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded, stepping fully into the room.

“I wanted to see how he was,” you said quietly. Your voice sounded thin in the morning light, even to your own ears.

Martin scoffed, a sharp, ugly sound. “Right. Course you did.” He shut the door behind him with a little more force than necessary. “A little late though. Maybe you should’ve thought about that before.”

You exhaled, looking to the side.

His eyes flicked to Jon, then back to you. Assessing. “Robin, huh?”

“I didn’t want to give the Eye any more than what was needed,” you explained carefully. True but incomplete. You didn’t say that giving a statement was stepping into a spotlight you’d spent centuries avoiding, that it had gone against everything you were. You didn’t say that you had wanted an excuse to talk to him, to get to know the man Jon cared so much about, and a statement had been a compromise you’d been willing to risk, only a small betrayal of yourself for the sake of human connection.

Martin snorted at that, indignant. “So what, you’re back to watch now? Like a rat in the rafters? How are you any different to all those things out there?”

“That’s not entirely fair,” you said, before you could stop yourself.

Martin’s lips twitched. “No, you’re right. Rats know when they’re not welcome.”

You let the words pass over you. Still, something tightened in your chest that you wouldn’t acknowledge.

 “You did nothing,” he went on, voice rising despite himself. The accusation was wholly unadorned. “You knew things. You always do. And still you did nothing. You just stood back and watched it all fall apart.”

Slowly, carefully, you said: “I can’t hold back a man from drowning if he’s diving in willingly.” It sounded rehearsed and pathetic the moment it left your mouth.

Something in him snapped. Martin’s anger flared, sudden and fierce, and his shoulders drew up. You saw it then, clear as anything you’d ever seen, the feral loyalty, the bone-deep fury wrapped in brittle vulnerability. He was all sharp edges and open wounds, his grief stripped bare. Every instinct screamed protect, protect, protect, to shield Jon with his own body if he had to. A small, stubborn man standing in front of a tidal wave and refusing to move. “Don’t,” he snapped. “Don’t you dare talk like that. Like this was some…inevitability. Like it just happened.”

His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed hard, then took a rattling breath. “So that’s it? You just…wash your hands of it?”

For a moment, just one, you wanted to tell him everything. That you admired him. That his hope terrified you because it was so fragile and so strong at the same time that it had shaken you. That you were sorry. That you understood why he was angry.

You said none of it. You feared that if you did, you’d unravel right there, on the floor of a hospital room in the soft light of morning.

“You know,” Martin continued suddenly, “Jon told me about you. Well. What he knows anyway. Or what you let him know.” His mouth twisted. “Always nudging things, never taking responsibility. Sounds kind off manipulative if you ask me.”

You opened your mouth but he continued, words tumbling now. “Well, you got what you wanted. The Unknowing failed. Elias is in prison–”

That made you look up, despite yourself. Prison. The word hummed with implications.

Martin faltered for half a second, surprised by your reaction. “Oh, that got your attention, did it? Yeah, he is. Congratulations.”

Your attention faltered at his next words.

“And Jon’s out of the way. So I guess that works out nicely for you too.”

“No,” you shook your head immediately. “I didn’t plan for that. I never–”

He stepped closer. Close enough that you could feel the heat of his anger. “I really hope you didn’t. Not that it would make a difference. Funny how that works. You pull strings and somehow everyone else pays the price.”

“You think I wanted this?” you asked, a crack finally breaking through your calm. “You think I wanted him like this?”

“I don’t know what you want.” Martin’s eyes burned. “I just know that you’re a coward. Only ever trying to save your own skin.”

The word hung between you in all its ugly undeniability. You had been called worse, by humans and monsters alike, but it fit too well, nestled in like a splinter somewhere beneath your ribs, where nothing should have been able reach you anymore.

Martin’s voice was shaking now. “Jon is like this.” He gestured helplessly at the bed. “Tim is dead. And that’s on you.”

For a second time, his condemnation hit you. You staggered just a fraction. It echoed, a hollow scraping dragging along the inside of your skull. Regret spread icy in your veins.

“You let him die. You could have done something.”

You didn’t argue.

There was a moment were neither of you said anything. Then Martin’s hoarse voice shattered the silence.

 “‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’ Isn’t that what people say?” His eyes were wet, fury blurring into grief, as his hands trembled at his sides. He looked wrecked.

 “Just–” He scrubbed a hand across his face. “Just leave. Leave me alone. Don’t come back here. I don’t want to see you.”

You looked at him.

You remembered him in the courtyard, sunlight on stone, the way he had spoken of hope and love as if they were tangible, living things. He had believed it, really believed it. You wondered what that must feel like.

You thought of Tim, too. Thought of how love hadn’t been enough to save one and anger had doomed the other.

You nodded once. Then turned and left before he could say anything else.

The corridor swallowed you up, every surface white and sterile and reflecting itself back at you until depth became meaningless. The doors all looked the same. For the first time in a long while, you didn’t know where to go next.

Your nails bit into your palms. You welcomed the sting. It kept you anchored.

That didn’t go as planned.

Understatement of the century. The entire day felt like a failure stacked on top of another failure, a careful tower of intentions knocked over with one well-placed word.

You kept walking. Your shoes squeaked faintly against the polished floor.

“It would be so easy to disappear.”

The thought came unbidden, soft as a whisper pressed directly into your ear.

You closed your eyes. Took a breath. Pushed down the shaking that had started to creep into your limbs. Opened them again.

Peter Lukas was standing in the corridor before you.

The temperature dropped ten degrees in the space between one blink and the next. The air pressed in on you suddenly, oppressive and heavy with damp and distance. The walls seemed farther away, the ceiling higher. You had the distinct, visceral impression of being underwater, like the sea swallowed you in its icy depths.

“Oh, please fuck off,” you murmured under your breath.

He smiled, though the expression was only an approximation of one he had once learned. His eyes were calm in a way that had nothing to do with kindness.

“Good morning,” he greeted you like an old acquaintance at a dreary social function.

 “Not now,” you said in an attempt to sound annoyed, but it came out choked. “Go haunt someone else.”

 “It’s been a while.”

“I’d prefer to keep it that way,” you added, still weaker than you’d like, “and not see you for a while longer.”

“Yes,” Peter said mildly, “so would I.”

You turned your face away, staring at a blank stretch of wall. You didn’t want to look at him. Didn’t want him looking at you.

“You don’t belong here.” Peter’s tone was conversational. “You never have.”

You snorted softly. “Oh, that’s rich, coming from you.”

“You’re tired, alone.” He tilted his head. “You wear it very badly, you know? You’re cracking.”

 “Get to the point or get out of my way.”

“This world,” he continued, unperturbed, “is not built for someone like you. You strain against it. Tear at its seams just by existing. I can offer you a way out.”

You glanced back toward him despite yourself.

“You’ve been noticed by the others. They will use you, one way or another.”

You straightened at that. “I’ve survived worse things than being used. Or being unwanted.” You met his gaze now. “It’s nothing new.”

“Still. You will keep being alone. You endanger those around you simply by staying. Just look how this one turned out.” He gestured back the way you’d come from. “They are better off without you.”

Normally, his honeyed poison slid off you, harmless as the Lonely’s fog. You knew this game. But today you had a hard time fighting the chill as it seeped deeper, through fabric, into your bones. Today Jon lay unmoving under white sheets and Martin Blackwood hated you. And you didn’t blame him.

“They will rip you apart,” Peter murmured. The air grew colder still. “Unless you leave it behind. You can find peace.”

“You mistake silence for peace.” You bared your teeth in a poor imitation of defiance, forcing the words out past the tightness in your chest.

“Isn’t it the same?”

You didn’t answer. Then old, sharp anger flared inside you, cutting through the cold. “Get out of my way,” you snapped. “You don’t get to claim me. You don’t get to tell me who I am or where I belong. And I will stay here, whether the world wants me or not.”

For a moment, annoyance flickered across his face. “You’ll come to regret that.”

“Maybe. But it’s better than floating along your quiet tides until I forget how to feel.”

He inclined his head and then dissolved into mist that curled low and brushed against your legs. You felt it stick to you.

You moved fast, following the corridor until it spit you out into the lobby, then the street. You gulped down the fresh air greedily. You left the hospital behind you.

Chapter Text

Psalm 143:3-5: “The enemy pursues me, he crushes me to the ground; he makes me dwell in the darkness like those long dead. So my spirit grows faint within me; my heart within me is dismayed. I remember the days of long ago; I meditate on all your works and consider what your hands have done.”

The knife makes a dull sound when it hits the board. The rhythm is steady. Chop, slide, gather. Vegetables in neat, compliant rows. There is too much for one person, there always is. Enough for two, for four, for a family that never existed, for ghosts sat at the table.

The sound catches when the blade sticks a little too deep in the wood. The light above the counter hums a thin electric whine. Too white, too cold. You’ll have to change the bulb. You’ve said that before. Weeks ago? Months? It used to be softer once, the colour a hue of yellow that made everything look warmer. The world doesn’t seem to make bulbs like that anymore. Or maybe it’s you. Maybe you’ve changed, and the light is only showing it. The thought drifts, slides away. Oil on water.

The first wisps of steam curl from the pot on the stove, soft and pale. It smells faintly of herbs, something you forgot to stir. You’ve always been good at forgetting.

Peppers first, then the carrots. The smell of onion seeps into your sleeves. You see Martin’s face, red with fury, the way the words came out of him like something scraped raw.

Coward.

You had not flinched then. You are flinching now.

Gather the peppers, into the bowl. A piece of thin, papery onion skin still sticks to your wrist. Ghosts of old hands that once held candles, ropes, books, other hands?

Carrots now, in slippery fingers. You think they look like something else, not food, not anything worth eating. Hands stained orange, or is it red? Can’t tell. When you rub your fingers together, they are tacky either way. The light’s wrong, like that awful hospital brightness. You should really change it. Tomorrow, maybe.

Wet eyes and shaking. You let him die. You could have done something.

You could have. You didn’t.

The knife clatters against the board, this time not by accident. For a moment you think of it cutting into skin – not yours, never yours – just imagined, memory resurfacing. You push it away forcefully, metal scraping against wood, orange circles scattering with it. The sound of it runs through your skull.

It’s too quiet.

No, it’s not. The fridge hums. The clock ticks. Water droplets hiss on the stovetop. Your blood pulses in your ears.

You think of Tim and his anger, his voice rising and rising until silence swallowed him too. Tim in a dark museum, unmade.
You think of Jon, the stillness of him in that bed, machines whispering and beeping too slowly.
You think of Gertrude, long since rot and rumour. You had admired her, once. She had done what you never could.
You think of Martin, bright with grief, full of words he could never say, alive and angry and right.
And yourself, somewhere between all of it, half-alive, half-not, a thing the world forgot to finish.

You lean on the counter. You can feel your pulse again, still in your ears but also in the base of your throat, in your fingertips, in your skull, in the hollow behind your eyes. Your hand presses to your chest, surprised by the stubborn rhythm there. Still beating. Still.

Something wet hits the board. Again. Again.

You blink in confusion, but it keeps happening, a slow fall of saltwater from nowhere. Your face is wet. Why is your face wet? You are–

You stare at the dark, spreading circles on wood, absurd, alien things. It’s been centuries since.

Centuries stretch thin and translucent, paper centuries, parchment peeling away. There were plagues and wars and fires and floods and you didn’t cry then. You didn’t feel. You were safe inside your distance, your beautiful curse.

Salt tastes foreign on your lips. You lick them out of habit, and it feels wrong, too alive. You do it again, almost in disbelief. It’s been so long.

You fold forward, elbows on the counter, shoulders heaving.

The sound that comes out of you isn’t a sob at first, only a hitch of breath, then another, and then it’s there, a shaking, ugly thing that pulls you under.

You weep, and the air doesn’t know what to do with it. It sits heavy in your lungs, turned to stone, refusing to leave.

You shouldn’t feel this way. The world took that from you long ago: the easy flood of emotion, the ache that feels like living. You had thought it gone for good.

What’s the point. What’s the point. What’s the point.

You tear yourself away from the counter, straighten in a gasp, stumble back a step, unsteady, shoulder hitting the cabinet. A pot rattles, a small domestic noise that feels obscene in its normalcy. The wall catches you; the cold window finds your spine. 

You are on the ground, knees folded, body collapsed. A body that is yours and isn’t somehow.

Inhale. The smell of onion and salt thick around you. Exhale. Cloudy glass turning clear again. The tile is black and cold, and that is good. It should be. Tile is stone. Stone is cold. It is right. You don’t deserve warmth.

Your face feels hot. Your legs tingle numbly. Your hands tremble in your lap and you look at them and can’t decide which part of you they belong to, the living one or the dead.

The world starts to tilt and for a second you almost panic before you come to realise that you are slowly keeling over. Your forehead comes to rest against the windowpane and the glass kisses your feverish skin with frost. It vibrates faintly with the outside air, the evening pressing close, sounds present but far away. London never stops. Not for grief and certainly not for you. The cold seeps in. The city’s breath fogs the other side; you match it with your own until the world outside blurs entirely.

Your gaze is out of focus. Your flat looks clinical, you realise, like a morgue, not a home. You had a home once. Centuries ago. Wooden panelling and tapestries, laughter echoing through it, though it sounded wrong. You were supposed to die, weren’t you? But you didn’t.

Chopping vegetables. You wanted to chop vegetables. Why are you on the floor?

The absurdity of it all almost makes you laugh. Tears come faster instead, finding their path down your face.

You think of Martin again. His voice trembling with hope, a flickering flame held in the wind of a world that is utterly uncaring. He had spoken of it, or maybe you had thought it for him, you can’t tell anymore.

Oh, to hope and hope and hope, recklessly and without fear. 

Hope. What a dangerous thing. Love, worse still. You’ve seen what it does. You’ve watched empires crumble, watched gods born of terror and longing devour themselves. You learned to stand apart because to care is to be seen and to be seen is to fall.

And yet here you are, crying over carrots and ghosts, over a woman who is gone, over an almost-stranger who believed too hard and a man who’s still half-dead.

The way he still believes in love like it’s an act of rebellion, like it’s something holy. You can’t. You never have.

You had envied him then. You still do. Envied that stupid boy with his ink-stained, trembling hands. Envied his faith in the unfixable, his love for a man who couldn’t even look himself in the mirror anymore.

But you see it now: you can’t stop love. Even when it ruins you. Especially when it ruins you.

You had never had something like that.

You press your palm flat against the cold glass. The city lights smear against your skin as if they are trying to paint your bruises on in a way that is visible.

Maybe hope is the cruelest of the Fears.

Heavy weariness settles in. Frustration bubbles underneath it. What good is any of it? For once you don’t mean eternity, you mean this ache, this foolish heart that still remembers how to hurt.

In this terrible, fleeting moment, you feel undoubtedly human. It feels you have crossed a threshold, a tangible return to salt and flesh, as you experience the grief of remembering how to feel. And just this once you allow it without restraint or composure. The pain. The guilt. The envy. The loneliness. And underneath it all, the tiny, terrible spark of love that still survives in you, even though it is utterly unwanted and yet undeniable.

You cry. You breathe. You exist. And the world keeps turning in its indifferent, merciless normalcy.

Breath against the glass again.

The sound of the pot boiling over on the stove, water evaporating and steam climbing, hesitant, as if it too doubts the worth of rising up.

You don’t move. You just sit there, watching it all spill.

You stay there until the tears dry on your cheeks. You blink slowly, eyelashes stuck together, cheeks sticky with salt.

In the window your reflection stares back, uncertain and warped somehow. You raise a hand, touch the glass where its cheek would be. It doesn’t move. It looks nothing like you at all. The eyes look like someone else’s, the hollows beneath them deep. The grey streak is stark against your hair. The face looks impossible, older than you remember, younger. You barely recognise it anymore. You’ve seen this face reflected in the eyes of dying men and in the glass of burning buildings, but it never looked like this before: cracked open, raw, salt-streaked, and still, still, alive.

The pot’s gone silent, boiled dry. The air slowly turns acrid, rosemary overcooked, not burned yet.

You know it’s still on the counter, folded badly. You never finish reading them anymore, just scan the headlines, pretend you’re still the kind of person who keeps up with the world, save for the catastrophes.

You hadn’t meant to look at it again but it draws you in anyway. The photograph of half a house, gaping and blackened. A child’s face in the corner of the page, ten years old, smiling, not knowing that it’s already over. A window that didn’t open fast enough. Accidental. Tragic. The authorities couldn’t explain how the fire started but you could.

Fire can appear without a cause. You know that. You’ve seen it born from hunger and devotion too deep to ever be holy. You can see it in your mind, licking at the walls, the unmaking of a small life.

Nothing you do matters.

Save one child and another dies. Close one wound and another opens somewhere you’ll never find. Stop one monster only for another to sharpen its teeth. The world never balances, never learns; it only tips, over and over again, into the same pit.

The pointlessness is swelling in your ribcage, a dull ache, a vacuum, inflating and collapsing inwards. You feel like everything you touch bleeds.

Empathy is corroded like rust, both creeping and ruinous. It is effort wasted, emotion wasted. Mercy only delays the inevitable.

Maybe you should leave again. The thought comes violently and refuses to settle. Remove yourself from the equation and return into the comfort of shadows, the not-being. You’ve done it before. Centuries of silence and safety. No connections, no stakes. No loss either. Stillness and waiting. Peace, almost.

Then a second thought with aching clarity: It’s too late for that now. You’ve been seen. You’ve spoken. You’ve cared. And now you’ve wept.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

You laugh, or choke rather, because who said you were good? What does that even mean anymore?

Your voice then: “They were still my choices.” And the answer: “Yes. And you’ll live with them. Or you don’t. That’s all there is.” You don’t remember whose voice that second one was. Gertrude’s probably or someone else’s from too long ago. Maybe it was yours too. Maybe you’ve just lived long enough to start arguing with echoes.

How do you continue? Can you at all?

You stare at your hands. You turn them over as if there’ll be a difference this time. Same as always. Same lines, same pale crescents of nail. Hands that have burned, prayed, written, held. Hands that have done nothing at all.

Your detachment had been a boundary once, against collapse, against self-destruction. Carefully built and meticulously maintained. It had kept you intact, kept you from falling into every grief you touched. It was the fence you built around the ruin. Now it feels more like glass around a flame, meant to contain, but suffocating instead.

There’s an argument forming in your mind, fragile and age-old: the ethics of interference and the cruelty of inaction. Which is worse? Which makes you human? Both sides wear the same face. Both sound like you.

You remember the many times your hands hadn’t been enough. How Gertrude had done what needed to be done – though terrible – and you’d watched her do it and said nothing, only told yourself you’d never do the same. Pragmatism. Survival. But the weight of complicity is not theoretical. It sits under your clavicle, a shard that won’t dissolve, a bruise you can’t reach. You try to breathe around it.

The quiet watcher. The one who knows better than to intervene. It was the ethical thing, wasn’t it? The rational thing? To do nothing unless you could do everything. But ethics blur, lines blur. All the people you didn’t save because you told yourself it wasn’t your place or because you didn’t want to be part of the whole machinery, because you thought that that was wisdom and not cowardice in disguise. All the mortals you brushed against, all burnt down. And you. What are you? Only smoke without fire.

Your exhale sounds too loud in your ears. You used to be unbothered by the largeness of everything that hides in plain sight, behind the veil of the ordinary, all the horrible beings and the endless, endless appetite of the world. You used to float above it. Now it is inside you.

You say, out loud, to no one: “You are useless.”

And the person in the reflection, wet-eyed, wrong, says nothing back.

The next time you open your eyes, the last light has faded. That dull grey absence before true night remains. Streetlamps blink on one by one, a slow stuttered awakening. Sodium orange halos bloom in the dark. And above, gently, tentatively, the first snow of the season drifts down, swirling in loose tufts. Snowflakes fill the night, delicate static, hesitating before committing to descent.

For a long time, you only watch.

Then movement catches at the edge of your vision, pulling your gaze downward.

The street is dark and wet but two silhouettes make their way across anyway. Two women, it seems, with half-buttoned coats and damp hair from the melting flakes. One of them pulls the other close and spins her in a crooked imitation of a waltz. Shoes slip on asphalt, skirts catch the snow. The other laughs; you can’t hear it, but you know the sound. She leans in, presses a kiss to her lover’s mouth, slow and certain, a flare against the cold. One hand on the other’s neck, the other interlacing fingers with her own. The world stills, except for the swirling snow. It’s like something out of another lifetime. Something before fear and all the ugly miracles of survival. This kind of moment shouldn’t exist in this world anymore, and yet there it is, in all its brilliant, ordinary defiance.

You can’t look away.

You want to look away. You can’t.

You feel something you cannot name curling in your stomach, something heavy and cold and quick and sweet and aching and soft. A gentle spring rain soothing your soul after a scorching blaze. You are seized by a pulse of longing or maybe just the echo of what it used to mean to be human. To live without knowing how brief that living is.

You watch them weave between puddles and slippery patches of leaves until they disappear down the street. Your chest aches and empties at once. The snow keeps falling.

You know what to do.

You can’t leave. You know that. Not yet, not after everything, after the centuries of turning away. You’d watch over him. Wait until he wakes from the coma. He has to. He must.

He was still breathing. Machines said so, his heartbeat said so. Something was still tying him here. Coma was so small a word for such a long sleep. You imagine him floating somewhere beneath consciousness, trapped in the dark, and you – outside it all, again – waiting.

You’d do what you’d done for Gertrude and more, you’d stop pretending it had been enough. No more hiding behind the comfort of being the quiet hand, unseen to anyone but him, the whisper that nudged fate without touching it. You would still plant your hints and breadcrumbs in the cracks of the world, notes in drawers, phone calls never traced, coincidences that weren’t, but you would no longer limit yourself to that. For once, you would act when action was required. You had to help, as well as you could, alter something at least, more than just what was needed to soothe your conscience. Enough to matter, enough for him to survive whatever was coming, even if it meant you could not.

You push yourself up off the floor. Tile still cold under palms, floor still wet from tears and water. Stand, knees stiff, spine aching, the dull throb of exhaustion in every muscle.

The room swims for a moment, the air thick. Knife still on the board, pot too hot to touch, vegetables on the counter, rosemary burnt.

You move slowly as if wading through water. Turn off the stove, dump the blackened sprigs, rinse the knife. The mundane reclaiming its place against the enormity of loss.

You lean against the counter again. Outside, the snow keeps falling. You watch the flakes spiral, lost in their own descent, each one vanishing before it hits the pavement. The sky keeps making them anyway.

“I’ll wait for you,” you murmur. And in the quiet of your flat, you allow yourself to begin again.

Chapter Text

Jeremiah 11:19: “I had been like a gentle lamb led to the slaughter; I did not realise that they had plotted against me, saying, ‘Let us destroy the tree and its fruit; let us cut him off from the land of the living, that his name be remembered no more.’”

Jon had woken up.

The words still didn’t quite feel real, even weeks later. You kept expecting them to slip through your fingers like everything else had. But no: he was awake. Changed, yes, in ways that had nothing to do with the coma, but alive.

You helped where you could. You sent messages, tracked down leads he couldn’t. You told him what you knew of the coffin and the Buried’s appetite for drawn-out anguish, how escape was never immediate but still possible. You warned him about the dark sun in Ny-Ålesund. 

When his message came, it was panicked, stripped bare of pleasantries. Your stomach sank the moment you read it. There was an address attached. A long-abandoned warehouse.

You should have known.

The warehouse crouched at the edge of the city, windows punched out, all corrugated metal and crumbling brickwork scarred with neglect. You circled it once, twice, then slipped inside through a side door hanging loose on rusted hinges. 

You shouldn’t be here. The certainty settled in your gut the moment you crossed the threshold. The air was stale. Your footsteps echoed too loudly, swallowed and returned by the cavernous dark.

You didn’t have the time to turn before Elias stepped into the light.

He looked exactly as he always did: irritatingly composed, as though prison had been an inconvenience at most, a temporary rearranging of furniture. Certainty radiated from him, the unshakable confidence of someone who already knew the outcome. “You’ve been very clever,” he said mildly. “Very…evasive. An impressive run, all told. But you’ve come to the end of your usefulness.”

You frowned despite yourself. “Aren’t you meant to be in prison?”

Elias smiled, indulgent, as if you’d asked a childishly naïve question. He began to circle you with the patience of a vulture. “I’ve tolerated your… interference,” he continued. “But I’m tired of guessing what you are. And you’ve gone too far.”

You turned your head with him, keeping your eyes level with his. You hated how calm he was. As though this conversation had already ended and you were the only one who hadn’t caught up. “Helping people survive?” you murmured. “Yes. I can see how that would offend your sensibilities.”

His smile didn’t waver. If anything, his eyes brightened, lit with something far older than his face. He came to rest across from you.

“You think this is what this is about?” he asked. “I’ve got you right where I want you.”

You locked your anger behind your teeth. “Fine, then. Here I am. Daniel in the lion’s den. Judith in Holofernes’s tent. I’ve been both before. I can be both again.”

“Ah,” Elias said. “Another martyr who thinks themself a saviour. How quaint.” His gaze raked over you. “You’re just a bitter echo. A Jezebel still clinging to a story you don’t control, doomed to be thrown down and devoured. Saul, stripped of favour, gnawing on madness before your end. Don’t flatter yourself. You will be torn apart in the end.”

“We’ll see.”

“Now,” he said pleasantly, “you will tell me who you are.”

This was getting annoying. You crossed your arms.  “No.”

“Pity.” He clasped his hands behind his back again. “But that’s fine. I thought you’d resist. So I took precautions.”

The door creaked. You tensed. Your blood turned to ice.

“Y/N?” Jon’s voice echoed faintly. “I got your–” He froze. “Elias.” His eyebrows drew together. “What is this?”

You spun. “What the hell are you doing?”

Elias glanced between you, almost fond. “Reminding you of your place. If you won’t give me your secrets freely, I’ll find a way in.”

He lifted a hand.

Jon gasped. The sound was strangled, torn from him as he doubled over, clutching his head. There were no marks, no hands on him. It took you a terrifying second to realise that something was burrowing into his mind, forcing knowledge down his throat like molten glass. He coughed and curled forward against the ground as if trying to escape his own skull. He squeezed his eyes shut. It did nothing.

You stepped toward him without thinking. “What’s wrong with you?!” Your voice cracked, caught between the urge to rush to Jon and keep your distance from Elias. “He’s one of your people!”

Elias looked genuinely amused. “Exactly. He belongs to the Eye. He is mine. And I will do with him as I please.”

Your silence, usually power, became a blade pressed to your throat. “You’d hurt him for this?” you demanded. “For pride? For knowledge you’re not meant to hold?”

“I would hurt a thousand Archivists to get what I want.”

Jon whimpered, a sound that tore something open in you.

You stumbled back a step. The weight of what was about to happen nearly broke your knees. “Stop.”

“I will,” Elias replied, “if you obey.”

You watched blood trickle down Jon’s nose, red streaking down onto the concrete. His body shook with each shallow breath. And something in you cracked. You couldn’t let him pay for your silence.

“Fine,” you whispered.

The pressure vanished. Jon collapsed, gasping for air, shaking as he dragged oxygen back into his lungs.

Elias smiled, satisfied. “You see? We all have our limits.” You could feel his self-satisfaction radiating off him like heat from an old lamp. He had been right. He had found a way.

You met Jon’s gaze. He sat crumpled nearby, shoulders heaving as he fought to steady his shallow breathing. His face was pale, slick with sweat. There was blood on his lip, fear in his eyes, and something worse, curiosity. Despite everything. The Eye had already marked him too deeply.

The air felt suffocating. Dust swirled in the light cutting through the dark, faint as motes of ash.

You weren’t being compelled, the truth wasn’t being pulled out through your clenched teeth. Still you were forced to reveal what you had carefully buried in the most inner confines of yourself. This was what Elias did, what the Eye did.  

You exhaled, then breathed back in, trying to collect yourself.

 And so you began.

“My name is– my name is no longer relevant. Names don’t survive this kind of thing intact. Neither do dates and in truth I have stopped caring to keep the exact timeline straight. I have spent a very long time not thinking about it. But for the sake of record, and because I know you insist on records, I was born in what was then the outskirts of a minor trade city, one that had grown fat on commerce and thin on conscience. It was in the 1340s, sometime between famine cycles and religious panic. People whispered that God’s wrath had come and brought the apocalypse, that the Earth was cursed for its sins. The Black Death had been sweeping across Europe, killing fast and indiscriminately. Entire families vanished in days and farms emptied. The social order crumbled.

My family was old money, though not powerful enough to be important. Minor nobility, landholders. They were respectable, educated, quietly ambitious and quietly afraid. They donated to the Church and the poor and never spoke of certain rooms in the house. Their connections and standing kept them protected even when hunger and violence ravaged their neighbours, but security meant little when the world was burning.”

You paused, tried to keep your hands from shaking.

“I was born in winter, in the coldest part of the year, when the river froze hard enough to carry carts and the sun felt distant. The midwife had crossed herself before she ever touched me. 

I was born still. All blue-lipped and unmoving.

My mother cried in the way mothers do when they placed me in her arms, even though she had already lost three children before me. And they wrapped me in linen and handed me to my father to burn my body in the garden because the ground was too hard to dig. 

But in that moment, something happened. A flicker of light in the lantern or a raven cawing too loudly.

And then, against all odds, I cried. 

They told me it was a sharp, reedy sound. Like something dragged unwillingly back through a door that should have been closed. Life clawing its way back to where it apparently did not belong. I have heard the story often enough that it has worn a groove in my memory, even if I do not remember it myself. The room, they said, watched in stunned silence. 

My bloodline had always courted death. The elders said the women of my line were too close to the grave, that children born to us would straddle it. When I came back, when my corpse turned infant again, they knew. They called it a miracle – a child born closer to death than to life – a sign that I was chosen for a higher purpose.”

You laughed softly, bitterly. The sound had no humour in it.

“They were part of a cult, you know. Of course, they didn’t call it that. But they had a certain reverence for endings, for mercy through oblivion. The End, they said, was the only honest power, the only one that did not lie. Everything else promised continuation, growth, hope. Death, or Pax Ultima as they called it, promised only completion. 

And so they raised me. I grew up cherished; that is important to me. There was no cruelty in my childhood. No locked rooms or chains. I was well-fed, well-educated, taught languages and numbers, was given the best tutors. I learned to read early and to sit still. I learned to pray. 

They loved me. In a way.

From the beginning, I was for something though I didn’t understand what for when I was young. They spoke often of purpose and dignity in sacrifice, of how few people were ever allowed to matter in the grand accounting of the world. I was told I was special. I…I believed them.

There were small rituals woven into my upbringing and questions asked about my dreams. Eventually, I realised that whoever I saw would die shortly after. They noted them carefully, marked each one in celebration.

When I was older, they told me the truth. Gently and not all at once. Easing me into cold water so to speak. The world was sick, they said. Rotting under the weight of its own continuation. Too many mouths. Too much suffering dragged out beyond usefulness. The End was mercy. And mercy required offering. They had been waiting for someone like me.”

You pressed your lips together as the words got stuck in your throat. You’d agreed. That’s the part that hurt the most, when you remembered it. You’d agreed. 

“They never forced me. By the time I was old enough to understand what they were asking, I already believed it. I felt honoured.

I was eighteen, I think. I had known that I wouldn’t grow old but I remember thinking I had lived a full life already. That there was something noble, something clean about choosing to stop. That I would be remembered. That I would help. That it would...mean something.

I was born of death, and so I had to return to it. I was the vessel and when the final moment came, my death would usher in The End.”

“A ritual,” Jon exhaled, the breath rattling like broken glass in his chest.

Elias turned his gaze on him, then looked back to you, eyes narrowing. “That’s ridiculous. The End doesn’t attempt rituals. It has no need for one.”

Your eyebrows drew together. “The End doesn’t. People who worship it do. It’s always people thinking they can craft finality with their own hands who ruin themselves for gods.” 

That stopped him. Under different circumstances, it would have been satisfying to shut him up but right now it only delayed the most painful memories. You averted your gaze. Your mouth felt dry. You swallowed but it didn’t help.

“I remember that night with terrible clarity. The damp air. The cold of the stone beneath my bare feet. The smell of incense and iron. The sigils on the floor. The candle wax dripping. Faces in the crowd of people who had held me as a child, taught me to read or laughed with me. They weren’t crying. I wasn’t either.

It was an old stone chamber beneath our house. I lay down where they told me to. I held still, I didn’t struggle when the blade cut. I remember thinking, with a strange calm: So this is it. This is what I am for.”

For a second, you bit your lip, hesitating, then you continued.

“As I bled, they began to pray for it to take me and them, to show them the mercy of the final silence. Their chants echoed through the chamber: ‘Ave, morituri te salutant’. Hail, those who are about to die salute you. A phrase borrowed from gladiators and repurposed into reverence. Again and again and again, the words folding over themselves, growing duller, slower, as the air thickened and my vision narrowed. The pain faded, everything faded. Time stretched until it stopped.

And then there was the End. I saw it.”

You heard Jon suck in a breath.

“It was an absence so complete it felt almost gentle. A silent nothingness. The promise that nothing lasts and therefore nothing hurts forever. The end of everything.

And then– it did not take me.

I don’t know how else to say it. The End was there, it reached – or maybe I did – and it recoiled. Or…or hesitated. Something went wrong. The ritual collapsed inward as if punctured mid-breath. 

The chamber turned ice-cold. People screamed, then stopped. They collapsed one by one, exactly as the had worshipped: suddenly and unceremoniously. Some aged and withered, some burned out from within. The chamber turned into a tomb in seconds. The End disappeared.

I remember lying there, blood pooled beneath me; I was barely there, dizzy as all hell. My heart was still beating, I was breathing, but something essential had been taken and not returned. I was alive. I was dead.”

The ache in your chest was living, crawling thing now. You could taste it at the back of your throat, dry and metallic. You felt your hands shake, so you clasped them together and dug your nails into your skin.

“When I came to and managed to sit up, I was alone in a room full of bodies. The air was heavy with the smell of smoke and burned flesh. When my feet touched the floor, the chalk was smeared into meaningless lines, the candles were extinguished. I left and never looked back.

I didn’t age after. I did not heal properly, in the way living things do. Wounds closed, but wrong. Sleep became shallow and I stopped dreaming entirely. I do not miss it as much as I think I should.

Years passed. Decades. Plagues came, wars, fires. I watched civilisations rise and rot. I tried, at first, to live normally. Learned trades and languages. I married once. That ended badly. People notice when you don’t age. They notice when you outlive expectations. I buried friends, lovers. Children I did not have the courage to raise.

I was alive enough to feel every pain. Dead enough to be beyond normal life. I stayed the same while everyone around me changed so I learned how to disappear just before questions started. I learned to hide and to survive quietly. How to become unremarkable.”

Elias regarded you with a cruel smile. “So that is why you’re not human. Equal parts living flesh and equal parts dead matter. You’re not a miracle. You’re just a corpse that won’t stay buried.”

You tried not to let his words get to you. “Perhaps. But I have stared into the abyss, Elias, and it stared back. And when it looked away, I lived. I lived and everyone else died. And I have hated the Entities ever since.

I came to know that it wasn’t just the End. And that the Entities have no claim on me. The Eye cannot see me. The Stranger cannot wear me. The Web can’t spin threads that hold me. I am outside their grasp, and they despise me for it. Because what is dead cannot die and what has already died cannot fear. 

I wanted no part of them. I hated them for their cruelty and their endless desire to consume, for what they did to others, what they had done to me. I hated the End most of all. So I stayed in the shadows and watched as the Fears gorged themselves on suffering and played their endless games.” 

Your voice faltered. “I did nothing, for a very, very long time.”

Elias tilted his head, studying you with the patience of a predator at play. “And why appear now, after all your centuries of sulking in the dark?”

You hesitated. “Gertrude Robinson.”

The name landed like a stone dropped in still water. Jon’s head jerked up, his eyes wide. Elias’s expression sharpened.

“I went to observe a ritual. It wasn’t the first I’d seen nor the last. I told myself that, if they ever came too close, I would stop it. If they succeeded, what would spill through would not be contained and it would have spread across half the country before morning. It was the first one that nearly made me act. I hated them enough to do it, though I despised the thought of touching their work. But I wasn’t the only one there. She ended it. Then she found me after. Or perhaps I let her find me,” you admitted. “We regarded one another across the wreckage, two scavengers who had both survived the same storm. She was clever. She saw me, not completely, but she understood enough. She demanded to know what I was, what side I served. I almost laughed in her face. I told her I served nothing. That I had no side. She didn’t believe me at first. I distrusted her and she me. But we understood one another. And she convinced me of one thing: the Fears must be stopped. Not endured. Stopped.”

You looked down at Jon who was still staring up at you from the floor, wide-eyed, before returning your gaze to meet Elias’s. “And now she is dead, like everyone else. You killed her. You took her from me.”

Elias’s expression barely shifted, but his voice was silk and venom both. “She was in the way. And besides…she was always going to die. They all do.” His eyes glowed faintly in the dim warehouse light, pupils almost swallowing the colour. “Except you, it seems.”

Something in your chest snapped taut. You stared at him – at the puppeteer, the parasite wearing a borrowed face – and felt anger claw up your spine, deep and incandescent. “It is the strongest of all the Fears,” you said with your last ounce of restraint. “It comes for all things. You will fall to it too.”

“We’ll see.” Elias smiled. “You know,” he continued, “for someone who’s lived as long as you have, you’ve accomplished remarkably little. All those centuries of watching and waiting. Such a waste of time. Such wasted potential.”

You bit back a remark. You knew he was only trying to get a rise out of you.

Near the entrance, Jon pushed himself upright, bracing a hand against a crate. His legs shook, but he stood.

Elias glanced at him briefly. “Sit back down, Jonathan. You’ve served your purpose for now.”

“No.” Jon’s voice was determined. It surprised all three of you. He straightened, shoulders still trembling a bit but set. “I won’t.

Elias shot him an annoyed look.

You turned back to him. “You wanted my secret, so here it is. That is the only truth I owe you. You’ll get no more.”

“It doesn’t matter anymore. You’ve fed the Eye now.” Elias stepped back, already disengaging, interest bleeding away. “You’re not interesting anymore. You’re not important. It’s done.” His smile was self-satisfied. “You’ve become irrelevant.”

The word struck harder than you expected. After all this time, centuries of careful obscurity, to finally choose to act, only to be dismissed offhandedly. 

You were meant to die, to usher the End. But instead you survived as a thing that should not exist – a foot in this world, a toe in the next. Now you were a nobody. Merely an error corrected.

Something hot sparked in your chest. “Then I hope you enjoy what you’ve bought,” you spat. “I hope you choke on it.”

You didn’t wait to be dismissed. You turned and walked past him, past the slanted rays of light and drifting dust, toward the door. Your footsteps echoed steady despite the way your hands still shook.

Behind you, Jon followed. You didn’t stop.

Chapter Text

Galatians 4:16: “Have I then become your enemy by telling you the truth?”

The Institute was out of the question, you had insisted on that. Not your flat either. You had never invited an avatar across your threshold, and you weren’t about to start now. You liked Jon. You trusted him further than almost anyone, but principle was principle. His place it was then; neutral ground, if such a thing still existed.

So here you were, standing next to Jon who sat perched at the edge of his chair. The table before you had vanished beneath layers of work. His notes in tight, increasingly cramped handwriting with margins crowded with arrows and corrections. A map of Northern Scotland stained with the ringed imprint of someone’s mug. Newspaper articles dating back decades. Photocopies from the Archives. Your own translations beside them, of texts rendered into English with careful annotations. Your notebook, older than anything else on the table.

Jon mumbled underneath his breath as he flipped through a folder with an almost unsettling speed, one hand braced against his temple. You watched the way his brow furrowed, the way his fingers paused on certain lines. His shoulders were hunched and sleeves rolled up, revealing scars he no longer bothered to hide. He looked terrible, objectively speaking, with dark circles bruising the skin beneath his eyes. His hair had escaped its usual attempt at order, curling at the nape of his neck, falling into his face when he leaned down to read. He looked exhausted. He looked alive. There was something else there, something taut and alert beneath the weariness. He moved with more certainty than he used to. Whenever his gaze lifted to meet yours, it held longer than it once would have, unflinching. You tried not to think too hard about that.

And for a while, it almost felt like before. You hadn’t realised how much you’d missed it until now, the quiet collaboration, the sense of purpose stitched together from fragments and dread. You were both leaning forward, elbows touching over the mess of paper, and for a dangerous moment you let yourself believe that this was what friendship looked like.

“Right,” Jon started, tapping a pen against the table, breaking the moment. “You were talking about the distinctions between the Stranger and the Spiral before. And the way they overlap in creating a constructed unreality.”

You nodded, grateful for the anchor to the work. “Yes. They both rely on confusion but one is otherness and replacement and the other internal madness.”

Jon hummed, eyes drifting away as he thought. “They could be working together, especially in cases of prolonged exposure, where the subject’s sense of sanity erodes enough that the distinction becomes quasi non-existent. I mean, they are all interconnected, in one way or another.”

You paused. “I…I haven’t really seen them interact. And there’s still–”

“–a thematic separation, yes,” he finished, absent-mindedly, leafing through some papers. “But after a certain point, the fear response collapses inward. It stops being about what’s wrong and becomes about whether anything at all was ever right to begin with.”

You frowned. “Jon.”

He looked up. “What?”

“You’re jumping ahead.”

He sheepishly rubbed his neck for a second. “Sorry. Habit.”

You let it go, returning to your notes. Eventually you pointed out a passage you’d translated from an early seventeenth-century account, one that described a sickness that never quite left a town in Portugal. You traced the logic carefully, the way the influence spread through proximity and repetition and how there were no more efforts to cure it after the 1770s.

Halfway through your explanation, Jon nodded. “Once it was there, removing it would have meant tearing the town apart. So people stopped trying to get rid of it. They just coexisted with it.”

“That’s–” you began, then hesitated, looking back at your notes, confused. “That isn’t in the text.”

He blinked at you, looking genuinely puzzled. “Isn’t it?”

“No,” you said slowly, leaning back slightly. “It’s an inference. A reasonable one, I guess, but still–”

He glanced back down at the paper, then frowned, as if seeing it for the first time. “Huh.”

As the hours passed, it kept happening. You’d start to outline a theory, and Jon would interrupt, without meaning to be rude but nonetheless with a certainty that cut cleanly through your words. He corrected dates you hadn’t finished citing, supplied names you hadn’t yet reached, finished sentences you hadn’t fully formed.

At first, you bristled. Then you teased him for it.

“Let me finish,” you said at one point. “I promise I’m going somewhere with this.”

He smiled apologetically. “Right. Sorry. Please.”

You continued but the sense lingered like grit between your teeth. Eventually, you tried again, more firmly. “Jon, you’re drawing conclusions too fast. We don’t have enough to be sure.”

He shrugged, already scribbling something in the margins of his notes. You watched his pen move, neat and decisive. He didn’t hesitate. “I just know.”

The way he said it made something cold slide down your back. You realised for the first time, with a quiet, unsettling clarity, that he wasn’t asking questions anymore, merely checking his answers. You let work distract you. As you rounded the table and shifted a precarious stack of papers, something slid free and fluttered to the ground.

The plans lay open sketched in faint ink, the building’s shape unmistakable even half-obscured by time. The radial corridors all leading to one central observation point.

Jon’s gaze snapped to it instantly. He leaned forward without quite realising he was doing so and gathered it up before you could. His eyes tracked the lines, followed the geometry inward.

“What’s this?” he asked, though there was a note in his voice that suggested he already knew.

“Millbank,” you said carefully. “A copy of the original blueprint. I thought I left it at home.”

“It’s–” He paused, then, without thinking, finished, “–efficient.”

You looked down at him. He seemed to realise what he’d said at the same moment you did. His lips pressed together. He cleared his throat. “I meant,” he added quickly, “architecturally. From a…from a containment perspective.”

You didn’t say anything. The silence stretched thin and taut between the two of you. Jon shifted in his chair, the leg scraping faintly against the floor as he straightened and slid the plans back toward you as though they’d burned him. “It’s just a prison, I suppose. A nightmare, obviously. Victorian obsession with order.”

You kept your voice level. “It’s more than that. Bentham didn’t invent it for kindness. And Smirke only made it worse.” You folded the paper with deliberate care before tucking it back away.

He hesitated. “It was Magnus’s staging ground?”

“It was his attempt at a ritual for the Eye. Millbank was a machine built to see.”

He opened his mouth, then closed it again. You could almost see him rearranging his thoughts, selecting which ones were safe to say out loud.

“I’ve seen this pattern repeat itself for centuries. Centralise the Fear. Feed it. Pretend you’re in control right up until it decides you’re not.” You continued. “Elias’s power is the Institute. Its records, its reach, its access. Destroy that, and you cripple him.”

Jon’s brows drew together. “I’m not disagreeing about Elias.”

“But?”

He hesitated, then added, “But he is the problem. Not the building.”

“It’s his seat. Getting rid of Elias means nothing if the Institute remains. You remove the man and leave the engine running, someone else will sit down eventually.”

His jaw tightened. “That’s speculative.”

“You know it isn’t.”

You watched him wrestle with the thought, saw the way he kept skirting around it. He shuffled his papers, stacking and restacking them as if order might emerge through repetition.

“Look,” he said, forcing a lighter tone. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves. We can’t afford to fixate on the Eye right now. There are more immediate threats and we should prioritise them.”

“I’m not saying we shouldn’t,” you replied. “I’m saying the Eye isn’t passive.”

Jon scoffed softly. “It watches. That’s what it does. It’s not like the Desolation or the Slaughter. It doesn’t act like that.”

You stared at him, almost indignantly. “That’s generous. Watching isn’t neutral.”

“It’s not good,” he conceded the point with a sharp shake of his head. “I’m not arguing that. But compared to the others–”

“Compared to the others, it lies in wait,” you interrupted. “It records suffering.”

He hesitated. His fingers curled against the edge of the table. “We don’t have time for philosophical objections. If we spread ourselves thin worrying about every Fear, we won’t stop any of them. I’m trying to be pragmatic.”

“So am I.”

“You’re giving it too much weight,” he tried once more. “The Eye isn’t what’s going to end the world.”

You held his gaze. “Are you sure?”

His eyes flicked away. For a moment, neither of you spoke. He broke the silence first, his tone clipped. “We’re not talking about this right now.” He pushed his hair back, sorted the papers in front of him. “Let’s get back to the Lonely.”

You swallowed heavily, then nodded once. “All right.”

You tried to let it go, you really did. But the quiet that followed was more charged than before. The Millbank plans sat folded between your notes, a paper heart still beating under layers of ink. And the more you worked with Jon, the more restless you grew.

He shifted some folders. “The Buried has been active again, more than usual. There’s some statements from Sheffield and Leeds, and another one from Prague that–” he pauses, eyes unfocusing for a second, “–that connects back to people feeling crushed hours before the buildings collapsed.”

You blink. “You got that that fast?”

“It’s obvious.”

You opened the folder and glanced down at the page. The connection was there, yes, but it was tenuous. It would have taken you hours of cross-referencing and gut-checking. You frowned. “You didn’t even read the whole thing.”

Jon bristled. “I read enough.”

“You felt enough.”

He sighed. “I don’t think there’s a meaningful difference anymore.”

You forced yourself to keep your tone even. “There is. There has to be.”

Jon exhaled slowly, rubbing his eyes. “Look, it’s not like I’m pulling answers out of thin air. It’s pattern recognition. Context. We’ve both done it.”

“Yes,” you said. “But I arrive at conclusions. You just know.”

 “You don’t trust me.” He sounded hurt.

“I trust you,” you replied. “I don’t trust what’s helping you.”

Jon’s shoulders stiffened. “It’s not helping. It’s just…there.”

“That’s worse.”

“That’s not what this is about,” he dismissed, waving his hand.

“Isn’t it?” You gestured at the growing pile of statements. “You’re jumping from Fear to Fear like they’re all equal pieces on a board. They’re not.”

“The Eye doesn’t get special treatment just because Elias happens to be its avatar and you don’t like him,” Jon snapped. “The Desolation is still out there. The Dark hasn’t gone quiet. The Lonely–,” his voice stumbled, then hardened. “The Lonely is actively targeting my assistants.”

You softened just a fraction. “I know.”

“Then why are you fixated on this?” He spread his hands, frustration bleeding through. “Why Elias, why the Institute, when everything else is burning?”

“Because it’s dangerous.”

He scoffed. “You’re exaggerating. You barely know it.”

You remained firm. “The Institute has to be destroyed. All of it.”

Jon stilled completely, fingers frozen where they’d been worrying the edge of a page. He stared at you, his breathing shallow. “You’re talking about arson,” he stated flatly.

“I’m talking about dismantling a funnel that has been feeding the Eye for decades. Gertrude tried it. I’m going to finish it.”

Jon got up so fast he nearly knocked his chair back. “You can’t!”

“Jon–”

“You can’t just–” Panic bled into his tone. He shook his head and dragged a hand through his hair, Adam’s apple bobbing. “There are people in that building! Researchers, admin staff, assistants, visitors, people who don’t deserve to be collateral–”

“Yes.”

He stared at you, incredulous. “You–”

“I know,” you explained, “which is why I won’t do it during the day. Minimise casualties.”

“That’s your solution? Night?”

“It’s almost completely empty at night,” you insisted. “Security is minimal. I’ve mapped the patrols.”

His hands were braced against the table, knuckles pale. “That’s–” His voice cracked. “That’s not how this works. You can’t just level it. It’s not that simple.”

You leaned forward. “Then explain it to me.”

He gestured helplessly at the papers, the unseen weight of the building itself. “You don’t know what it would do. Even empty, the Institute isn’t inert. It’s connected to everyone working there.” He swallowed. “Even if no one’s inside, it could hurt them. Kill them even. Innocents. People I–” He stopped himself. “–care about.” Something in his voice fractured on that last part.

“I wouldn’t suggest this if–” 

“You would,” he interrupted , voice rising. “You would suggest it because you don’t have to live with the aftermath!” 

You went very still. “What does that mean?”

“It means that you can afford to think in hypotheticals. You walk away. You always do.”

“I don’t walk away.”

“You leave!” he snapped. “You leave and people die anyway, and then you come back and tell me it couldn’t have been helped. So you don’t get to lecture me about cost. You’ve never had anything to lose.”

The room went very quiet. You pressed your lips together. “That’s not the real reason.”

Jon froze. “Excuse me?”

“You’re not wrong about the risks. I’m not dismissing them. But that isn’t why you’re panicking,” you said, your own voice turning sharper despite yourself. “It’s part of it, yes. But it’s not all of it.”

His eyes flashed. “You don’t get to decide what my reasons are.”

“You’re too entangled,” you shot back. “You are too close to this.”

“And you think you’re not?”

 You opened your mouth but the words lodged in your throat. Because the answer was complicated. Because the answer was no, but I’m trying. So you swallowed them and stepped closer instead, heart hammering now, fear and anger finally bleeding through the careful restraint you’d been holding onto all evening. “Jon. You need to sever your connection to the Eye. It’ll destroy you.”

Jon’s shoulders were rigid, his gaze locked somewhere behind you. “I’m handling it.”

“You are actively putting yourself in danger, me, others. You need to let it go.”

“What? By burning a building down like you want to? I’m choosing reality over this crusade of yours!”

“You’re choosing a building over people. You’re choosing the Eye.”

“I’m choosing not to become a murderer!”

You stepped back like he’d struck you. “After everything I have done for you.”You tried to keep quiet but the insult slipped out before you could bite it back. “Maybe you are becoming like him.”

Jon stared at you, fists clenching. “That’s a vile thing to say.”

“Is it?”

His denial came fast. “I don’t want this!”

“You don’t want it,” you agreed, voice tight, “but you don’t want to be without it either.”

Jon backed away from you. His mouth was moving but it was as if he couldn’t get the words out. “That’s not–” He cut himself off. “That’s not fair.”

“You talk about responsibility, about protecting people, but the moment the Institute is threatened you shut down. You get defensive. You change the subject. All because you don’t want to lose this!”

His face flushed. “Lose what?”

“The power, the certainty you get from it!”

He let out a breathless huff. “Right. So now I’m power-hungry?”

“I think you’re scared,” you said. “And instead of admitting it, you’re wrapping it in ethics.”

His jaw ticked. His eyes were bright with something that might be fear, might be fury. Then quietly, he asked: “You think you’re any better than me? You sit there judging, like you’re above it all.”

You stared at him. “Don’t turn this around on me.”

“I’m not. I’m finally being honest,” his voice rose into something brittle and sharp, “You stand there judging every choice I make while spending centuries refusing to make any yourself. Waiting and deciding when it’s convenient to intervene.”

Your temper snapped. “Oh, so now I’m interfering too much? First I do nothing, then I do too much. What do you actually want from me, Jon? To save everyone without touching anything? To make sure it doesn’t bother you?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“It’s exactly what you’re saying.”

His hands were shaking now. “You don’t get to decide who lives and dies!”

Silence slammed down between you, thick and suffocating. Your breathing was laboured. A feeling dug its sharp claws into your chest. You didn’t dare name it.

Finally, you broke the silence. “If the Institute stands, the Eye wins. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But it will. And you’ll be sitting at its centre, telling yourself it is necessary.”

He watched you with dark, unyielding eyes. “I won’t let you turn this into some grand, righteous purge. If you do this – if you even try – I won’t help you.”

“Then don’t.”

A beat. Two.

“Get out,” he said under his breath. “I don’t want to see you.”

Something cold settled in your gut. “You don’t mean that.”

Jon met your eyes. He didn’t look away. “Get. Out.”

For a moment, you thought you might say something unforgivable. Instead, you turned away, grabbing your notebook, your books, whatever was closest, shoving papers into your bag with numb fingers. “Fine,” you muttered, more to yourself than him. “Fuck it.” The room suddenly felt too small. You didn’t look at him as you stormed past. The door slammed shut behind you. The sound echoed down the stairwell long after you were gone.

You felt truly alone.

Chapter Text

Isaiah 47:10–15: “You feel safe in your wickedness and say, “No one can see me.” Your wisdom and knowledge have led you astray, so you say to yourself, “I’m the only one, and there’s no one else.”

But evil will happen to you. You won’t know how to keep it away. Disaster will strike you. You won’t be able to stop it. Destruction will overtake you suddenly. You won’t expect it. [...] You are worn out by your many plans […], and there will be no one to save you.”

Your handwriting was slanted and unfamiliar. Lines you’d written before you knew you were writing them, almost as an afterthought. You stared at them and felt nothing. You were so tired of papers.

They lay open across the desk in neat rows you no longer recognised as your own work. You should have been able to lose yourself in research. That had always been the safest refuge: patterns and dates accompanied by the quiet certainty that if you just looked long enough, the shape of the world would reveal itself. Now you desperately waited for the clarity that had once come so easily. You pressed your thumb into the margin of the file until the paper bent and forced yourself to read the line in front of you again – something about sight, containment, an equilibrium – but the words, empty and meaningless, slid apart the moment you focused on them. You tried again, you really did. Picked up a pen, pressed it to paper, drew half a line before your hand stilled. Your eyes moved. Your mind, traitor that it was, didn’t. Instead it settled on something heavier, something infinitely more human.

You were too prideful, you had always known that. It was the price for surviving this long, the stubborn refusal to bend, to let anyone see where you might crack. Choosing to be more active in a world influenced by the Fears meant interacting with avatars. You had known that too. Had known it would end badly. You had stepped into the current willingly anyway, aware of how it would drag you somewhere you couldn’t entirely control. You had told yourself you were prepared. Another thing you had been wrong about.

You picked up your notebook, flipping through pages of cramped script, diagrams of crowns and serpents, fragments of statements, circles within circles, a neat geometry of ink, but the logic refused to hold. Every thought curved back until Jon’s face pushed in unbidden, exhausted, but alight with that terrible, relentless knowing. The way he had looked at you when you had accused him. The way something wounded hidden beneath his anger had broken apart.

You squeezed your eyes shut. The line between warning and condemnation had blurred beneath your feet, and now you stood on the wrong side of it, unable to cross back or to take back what you had said.

You exhaled sharply through the unspoken apologies and before you realised you were moving, your arm snapped forward. The notebook left your hand in a hard, ugly arc and struck the wall with a dull crack. It slid down, pages fanning open like pale, startled birds. Loose papers followed, disturbed by the impact, drifting down in helpless spirals.

You just stood there for a moment, chest rising and falling too fast, staring at the mess, waiting for calmness to settle back in. But it didn’t, and instead something inside you broke loose. Your hands swept across the desk in one brutal motion. Pens clattered to the floor. A stack of copies slid off the edge and burst apart on impact.

You braced both hands against the bare wood and bent forward, breathing hard, shoulders shaking with something that refused to settle into a single emotion, all of them tangled and impossible to separate.

Your thoughts circled, relentless. You hated this, this discord. And you couldn’t take back what you’d said. The echo of your own words sat heavy in your chest. You had told yourself that he needed to hear it, that someone had to say the truth aloud. But it had come out sharp-edged, harder than you had intended.

No. You were lying to yourself. You had said exactly what your anger had dictated you.

The decision came suddenly. You were already reaching for your coat before you fully understood why. The weight of the fabric settled over your shoulders. Research could wait. Or maybe it couldn’t and everything depended on it and you were making a horrible mistake but you couldn’t sit here another second pretending your mind was steady enough to follow threads and patterns.

You hesitated long enough to glance back at the wreckage of your study, papers everywhere, fragments you almost understood. Several lifetimes’ work scattered and crumpled. Then you left it behind.

Your footsteps echoed as you descended the stairs in an uneven rhythm, betraying the storm inside your chest. By the time you stepped out into the street, the air tasted strangely metallic. You turned toward the familiar streets, toward the place you had avoided for so long.

You weren’t sure which version of you was going to the Institute. The one who would burn it down and watch the Eye’s influence collapse into ash or the one who would stand in front of him and beg him to leave. The two possibilities existed side by side, equally real.

You kept your eyes forward, hands buried deep in your coat pockets, feet on damp asphalt, trying to anchor yourself in the rhythm of motion rather than the chaos of thought.

The Institute rose at the end of the street, all stone and quiet authority, its silhouette stark against the fading October sky.

Your steps slowed for a second. A quiet, familiar weight settled beneath your ribs, part dread and part inevitability. You took a deep breath, letting the cold air steady you. Whatever version of you had made this choice, there was no turning back now.

You crossed the street and approached the doors, already knowing deep down – though you could not yet explain how – that something inside had shifted beyond repair. You stepped forward anyway.

The doors opened without resistance. Inside, the air felt quiet. You took three steps in, your eyes set n the corridor that led to the Archives.

“Ah. There you are.”

Your shoulders drew up, teeth clenching.

He stepped into view with infuriating calm, his hands folded neatly behind his back. His eyes caught the light and held it.

“I don’t have time for your ego,” you said flatly. Your voice didn’t shake. You were proud of that. “Move.”

Elias smiled as though you’d said something faintly amusing. “Oh, I think you do,” he replied. “After all, you came here.”

“I came for Jon.”

“Yes. So you did.” He stepped into your way more thoroughly. “You’ve spent a very long time watching him, watching others, haven’t you?”

You didn’t respond, shifting your weight, suddenly aware of how exposed you were in the open space of the foyer.

He tilted his head, studying you with that quiet, clinical interest. “Observing, recording, remembering. Letting things happen just so you can understand them.”

Your jaw clenched. “That’s not the same thing.”

“Isn’t it? You sound very much like one of mine.”

You physically recoiled. “I don’t serve the Eye,” you spat.

”No, you don’t. But tell me.” Elias smiled faintly. “You never wondered what it would feel like? To see like that? To understand everything, all at once?”

Had you? All this time, studying the Fears, their avatars…

You shut the thought down. “No.”

Elias regarded you. “When you watch them struggle…when you catalogue their suffering…don’t you enjoy it? Even a little?”

Your stomach dropped. You shook your head.

His smile widened, just slightly. “Are you quite sure?”

“No.” You pressed the answer out between your teeth. You wouldn’t let him poison your mind, wouldn’t let him stop you.

“How disappointing, I had hoped you might be honest.”

“Where is Jon?” you asked with more vehemence.

“Busy,” Elias said pleasantly. “Occupied with matters of rather more consequence than you.”

Something sharp twisted in your chest, like you had swallowed shards of glass that were now cutting you up from the inside. You had the distinct, awful sense that you were missing an important puzzle piece.

“You’re late,” he continued. “I was beginning to wonder if you’d decided not to interfere this time.”

You laughed humourlessly. “Interfere? I’m here to end this.”

“Are you?” he asked, mildly curious. “Or are you here to tidy up after a mess you finally realise you helped create?”

You stiffened. Elias stepped closer, unhurried, his presence pressing in without touching you. The Eye’s attention sharpened with him, a thousand invisible pinpricks skimming your skin. His smile widened. “I didn’t do anything to get you here. I didn’t need to. You came because you felt it, the shape of what’s happening, the pressure building. You’re clever enough for that.”

Your fingers twitched at your sides. “What did you do?” Your thoughts started to race, fragments snapping together too fast to grasp.

“You were the last unaccounted factor, you know,” Elias added. “An irritant variable that refused to resolve. Now you’re far too late to stop it.”

Your eyebrows drew together. You looked away, forced yourself to focus. Millbank. Sightlines. Containment. Observation.

“The last ritual failed,” you said slowly. “Crowning the Eye in Millbank didn’t work.”

Elias tilted his head approvingly. “Very good.”

Your stomach dropped. Millbank had been intended as an equilibrium between all the Fears. You had read it before. The words swam before your eyes.

“Sight alone is insufficient,” you whispered. The words tasted wrong now, heavier than they had on the page. Sight alone. 

Elias’s eyes gleamed. “It is.”

Your thoughts began to align, locking into place with a terrible, inevitable clarity. You felt sick.

The Mayan carving. The serpent devouring itself. All of them. Together.

The Watcher’s Crown wasn’t meant to stand alone, it was meant to anchor everything else. Every Fear feeding into it, reflected back through the Eye, dragged into the world all at once.

“Not one,” you whispered. The room seemed to tilt. “A mass ritual. You’re going to pull them through.”

“Pull?” Elias repeated mildly. “Such a crude term. I prefer to think of it as…opening the door.”

“No,” you said, the word instinctive, useless. “No, that– you can’t–”

“Can’t?” Elias echoed. “My dear, I assure you, I very much can.”

You staggered back half a step before you could stop yourself.

His mouth was still moving, forming words, something about purpose, about completion, but his voice became background noise, barely audible over the rushing of blood in your ears and the tidal wave of churning thoughts as something else forced its way to the surface.

Jon. His lighter. His hand. The scars the worms had left. You pushing him to Ny-Ålesund. No doubt dozens of other encounters.

“Jon,” you said hoarsely, the name catching slightly in your throat. “You marked him. You’re using him. He…he’s the key.”

Elias’s gaze flickered, just briefly, toward the direction of the Archives. “He is the Archivist. Of course he is.”

Your vision swam.

“He was always going to be important. You should be proud. You helped prepare him beautifully.”

Rage flared, hot and desperate, burning through the cold. “I’ll kill you.” The words trembled with you.

Elias regarded you with something like fondness. “No. You won’t.”

“Don’t tell me what I–”

“Even if you could,” he said almost gently, “it wouldn’t matter. The mechanism is already in motion.”

You faltered. Your throat constricted painfully. You couldn’t breathe.

Elias waved his hand, dismissive, brushing you aside. “Now if you don’t mind, I have more pressing matters to attend to.”

Sharp breaths filled your lungs as you stumbled back, then turned and hurried to the entrance. Behind you, Elias chuckled to himself softly. You didn’t look back.

You broke into a run the moment you cleared the doors, fumbling for your phone, heart in your throat.

“Jon,” you whispered, already dialing. “Pick up. Please.”

The line rang. Then the operator’s voice, flat and distant: “This person cannot be reached at this time.”

“No,” you muttered, already moving, already turning down the street. “No, no, no–”

The world around you blurred into noise and movement, entirely too loud, too bright, like it had been turned up a degree too high. The sky was the wrong colour. Your body moved on instinct while your mind still scrambled, trying to catch up to something that had already outpaced you.

You tried again. Voicemail. You hung up before it finished. There was nothing you could say that would reach him. Your fingers tightened around the phone until the plastic creaked faintly in protest.

There was no time. Your mind scrambled, searching, grasping. Think. Think.

The young woman he had stayed with.

The thought cracked through your mind, the only solid thing in the storm. The one place that still existed outside of the Institute’s orbit. The one person who might– Might what? Help? Understand? Know where he was? You weren’t sure. But it was something. She was your only hope now.

You changed direction without slowing, nearly missing your footing, and broke into a run toward the Underground. The entrance yawned ahead of you, an open mouth swallowing people in a steady, indifferent stream. You half skittered down the steps into the station, nearly colliding with someone. They muttered something, insults perhaps or an apology, but the words slipped past you. The descent was too fast, the air stale and carrying that familiar underground smell of metal and electricity. The tiled tunnels seemed longer than usual.

You forced yourself to slow as you passed through the barriers with jerky movements. People moved in a steady surge of bodies that carried you forward, oblivious, absorbed in their own small worlds, sealed off with phones and ear buds.

Normal. Everything looked normal.

You weaved through the masses and stepped onto the crowded platform just as the train screeched into the station, the sound grating. It made your teeth ache.

The doors slid open. You stumbled inside. The carriage was half full. A man reading a newspaper. A woman staring at her reflection in the darkened window and fixing her hair. Two teenagers whispering over a phone, shoulder to shoulder. Someone asleep, head tilted at an awkward angle.

You squeezed your eyes shut for a moment. “You idiot,” you whispered under your breath. You had seen it. All the pieces had been there. Your mind had just refused to assemble them. And now the world had to pay for your mistake unless you managed to fix it. You were going to. You had to.

The train lurched into motion and you gripped the pole beside you, grounding yourself in something solid. The lights flickered. You looked around but no one else seemed to notice. The woman by the window adjusted her coat. The teenagers laughed at something on their screen.

You tried to breathe, still your restless feet and your hammering pulse. Your reflection stared back at you from the glass, wide-eyed and overlayed with the dark tunnel rushing past beyond it. The serpent coiled in your mind. Connected, feeding one into the next.

You are not afraid, you told yourself. You are not afraid.

You got off one stop early.

You hurried past shops and residential buildings, rounded the corner and turned onto the street, your body remembering what your mind could barely keep hold of.

Please.

Your skin prickled. The air felt wrong in your lungs, as if something essential had been removed.

You continued. Her house was just ahead. You could see the door. You could make it.

A sudden scream cut through your thoughts. Your head whipped around. A young woman backed away from a spilt coffee cup on the pavement before her. Her eyes were fixed upwards. You followed her gaze.

No. No, that’s–

A sickly, glowing fissure tore across the sky, stretching across the horizon, ripping and tearing it apart as if something vast had been waiting just beyond it, pressing patiently against the surface until, at last, it gave way. You choked on a gasp.

The Eye opened.

And you felt seen.

You gasped, stumbling slightly, your hand shooting out to brace against the nearest wall. The brick was cold beneath your palm. You tried to cling to it. “I’m not afraid,” you whispered, the words wrong even to your ears.

For one long, suspended moment, the world held its breath around you, the city waking all at once to something it could not understand.

And then everything broke.

Chapter Text

John 15:13: “There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

*A skull cracks beside you. The noise is too close and you turn just in time to see it split, bone giving way under the force of the impact like brittle porcelain. The woman’s body jerks, convulsing. You watch her eye slip out of its socket, hanging for a moment before spilling down her cheek with the slow, obscene consistency of yolk, trailing gelatinous threads that stretch and snap.

You avert your gaze in a jerk of motion so sudden it sends a spike of pain through your neck while your mind tries to reject what your eyes insist on understanding. Too late. You’ve already seen it. You stumble back, your heel catching on uneven pavement, and bitter bile surges up your throat violently. You swallow it down, choking on it, your entire body recoiling from what you’ve just witnessed.

The woman lets out a wet, choking gurgle as blood fills her mouth, flooding her throat faster than she can swallow it and running down the ruin of her jaw. It bubbles between her lips, bright red and impossibly alive. Her hands claw at nothing, fingers scraping uselessly at the air as if she could pull herself back together somehow. She is drowning, in herself.

You stagger back out of sight and into the nearest alley, boots skidding on something slick you force yourself not to look at. The brick wall catches you hard between the shoulders as you slam against it, the impact grounding you just enough to keep you upright. You press a hand to your mouth, forcing it shut, forcing yourself to breathe quieter.

The wet crunching and splintering cracks continue behind you. So does the woman’s suffering as she is still achingly, terribly alive while being pulled apart.

You cannot help her.

You could step back out there, could kneel beside her. You could try– what? Pressure on the wound? Words of comfort? You scoff. It would not matter. It would not change her fate. You are powerless. Now the world is breaking and you can only watch it happen.

There is blood on the wall, on your hands. You don’t remember touching anything.

You shove away from the wall, pushing yourself upright with more force than necessary. You cannot stay here.

You push forward, clambering over fallen masonry, fingers scraping against rough stone as you haul yourself up and over a collapsed wall. Your coat catches on something sharp and you tear it free with an impatient jerk, fabric ripping with a sound that feels far too loud. You continue, ducking beneath a half-fallen beam, shoulders brushing splintered wood, then drop down onto the other side, landing on dust and debris. Eventually, the stone on either side of you opens up and you emerge onto an open street.

It is chaos. People running, screaming, tripping over on another, others not running at all, paralysed by fear. They look wrong, you think: blood-streaked, missing limbs, joints bent at odd angles, some barely human anymore.

You reach for one of them without thinking. Your hand closes over their shoulder. “Hey. Do you–” you start.

They turn to you but their eyes are vacant and terrified. They scream, immediate and total, a sound that tears itself out of their chest as they claw at your arm, fingers digging into skin, dragging down hard enough to leave red, ragged lines. You let go with a hiss. They stumble onwards with the rest of the group.

You don’t stay to see what is pursuing them. You don’t know if they can touch you. You don’t know anything anymore. But you also don’t particularly care to find out.

You drag your hood further down over your face with clumsy fingers as if it could shield you from something that vast, that absolute, and slip back into another alleyway.

You flit from cover to cover, from broken doorway to crumbling wall. You press yourself flat against cold stone as something thumps nearby, then dart across open ground before whatever it is can round the corner. You duck behind an overturned car, breath held tight in your chest, then slip through a narrow gap between two buildings where the light barely reaches.

The streets blur together, fragments of horror slipping past your vision in flashes you don’t allow yourself to linger on.

You taste blood in the air, thick and metallic on your tongue. It coats the back of your throat with every breath, sticks there, and won’t go down. You try to swallow anyway. As expected, it doesn’t help.

You find the source. A teenager, barely a man, maybe sixteen, is on his knees in the middle of the street, hands slick with blood that is not all his own. Someone lies motionless before him, chest unmoving, eyes glassy and unfocused.

“I didn’t–” he chokes. “I didn’t mean to–” His hands shake.

He killed them, maybe by accident, maybe not. Either way, the blood is still there and it won’t wash away.

Before you can even debate on whether you should step closer, someone drags you backwards by your arm. You gasp, try to turn in your captor’s grasp – a woman with dark brown curls – but when you see her wild, desperate eyes, you let her pull you around the next corner.

“Don’t. Don’t go near that boy,” she hisses. “He killed him.”

“What?” You stumble along as she continues to drag you with increasingly hurried steps.

“I knew them, I knew them both. He killed his brother. I saw it.”

You try to get her to slow down by digging your heels in and tugging your arm back. “Shouldn’t we at least-”

“No!” She spins on you so suddenly you nearly collide with her. She tries again, quieter this time, though it doesn’t make it any less frantic. “No, he will only turn on us. There are people here who are insane, who- who- you can’t. I need you. We need to stick together. We need to get out of here.”

You take a moment to look her over. Blood streaks down one side of her face, matting her hair, dripping from her chin. Her sundress, or what is left of it, is bloodied and torn at the seams. Her arm– A deep, jagged gash runs from elbow to wrist, hastily wrapped in a strip of cloth that is already saturated.

You let her pull you along.

“Where are we going?” you ask, your voice steadier than you feel.

“My son,” she says immediately. “I have to find my son.” The way she says the words seems like she is repeating them just to keep herself moving. “He was at school,” she continues, half-talking to you, half to herself. “I just…I need to get to him, I need to– he’ll be scared, he doesn’t– he hates the dark, he–” Her voice breaks.

You don’t interrupt. What could you possibly say?

You walk with her. You follow because she has a direction, because she has something to hold onto.

At once, something moves behind her. You see it before she does. You don’t have time to warn her.

A hand – no, something shaped like one – hooks into her shoulder, fingers sinking in too easily, too deep. She screams a piercing scream.

Her hand catches your sleeve, her grip is desperate. “Help me,” she sobs. You grab her instinctively, trying to pull her back–

The force yanks her from your grip like she weighs nothing. Your fingers slip, her blood slick, impossible to hold. She is dragged backward, fingers digging into the dirt and leaving thin, broken lines behind her. Her eyes lock on yours. You see it, the understanding, the betrayal. Then she is gone, pulled out of sight.

You pant, run after her. You follow the lines and then you see it, God, you see it. She’s crawling, dragging herself forward with one arm, her bad one, the other hanging at an angle that doesn’t make sense. Her mouth opens, closes, opens again but no sound comes out.

*You watch, frozen, rooted, useless, as the thing moves behind her. It doesn’t hesitate, grabs her. Her head is ripped backwards. It kneels over her, too large, limbs bulging and bending in ways you don’t understand. Its movements are eager and it seems to laugh, a warm, satisfied sound. Flesh bulges and splits under its hands as it works, reshaping, pulling apart. The woman writhes at its feet as her ribs are forced outward, skin stretched thin enough to shine. Then it lowers its head, tearing into her with its teeth, chewing and swallowing punctuated by low, delighted grunts. Her bones crunch and snap. The woman’s eyes roll back, trembling.

Then its eyes lift, fixing on you.

You pull back instantly, diving for cover. Every muscle in your body is locked tight. You won’t be able escape if it comes after you, you know that. Your heart hammers so hard you think it will give you away.

You wait. Seconds stretch. You brace for sudden violence, for hands or teeth or worse tearing into you.

For some reason, it doesn’t come. So, slowly, you risk a glance.

It has already turned back to its victim.

You don’t know what to do. You have no plan. Empathy is worth nothing here.

So you turn and run like the coward that you are.

You make it two blocks before collapsing, bending over, hands on your knees. You look at them. They are shaking. That is new. The tremor won’t stop, a fine, constant vibration that runs up your arms and settles somewhere deep in your chest. You had almost forgotten what this felt like and yet, there it is. Fear.

It crawls under your skin, sinks its teeth into your bones, wraps icy fingers around your spine and squeezes. Every instinct in you recoils from the truth and yet it stands there anyway, undeniable.

You inhale and it doesn’t fill your chest properly. You exhale and it doesn’t leave.

The only time you have come close to this, even just a little, has been with Michael. And even then, you had held the edges of it and kept it contained.

This is different. There is no stable ground to stand on. And you have changed.

You must be immune still, somehow. At the very least you are able to run, able to hide. None of the people you see have that privilege. On the other hand…

You rub the prickling skin on your neck.

What are you afraid of? Not pain, not death. It is this, this loss of control, this vast, indifferent collapse of meaning, the idea that you cannot fix this, that you will have to watch as everything burns. Your breath comes faster.

Stop.

You can't be afraid. You have stood before things worse than this. You have seen death. You have known it. But this– If you feel this–

A sharp, invasive pressure builds behind your eyes like something pressing inward from the other side. You flinch. Your hands come up, pressing against your temples. You grit your teeth. You force it back, force your thoughts to scatter, to become something harder to grasp.

You will your legs to move again. You don’t know where you’re going. There is no safe direction. Somewhere. Anywhere but here. As if it’s any better somewhere else.

You don’t know what to do next.

The world continues to end around you.

You don’t remember how long you’ve been running. Only that stopping feels impossible. Time has lost its edges, smeared thin between moments of motion and quiet, breath and noise.

The air changes. It creeps in gradually: a sourness at the back of your throat, something acrid that burns just enough to make you cough. Your lungs feel lined with ash.

Sirens begin to wail somewhere in the distance. Fragments of announcements crackle through broken speakers mounted to buildings, their casings half-melted, wires hanging loose like their own exposed nerves. The voice barely resembles language anymore: “…please remain…do not attempt…safety.”

No one listens. There is no one left to listen.

Traffic lights still change at the empty intersection ahead. Red, yellow, green, looping dutifully, endlessly, filtering through the heavy wafts of smoke that roll in low along the street. You cough again, harder this time. Your eyes sting and you blink rapidly, trying to make out your surroundings but all you can do is stumble through the fumes that swallow details and turn everything around you into mere silhouettes.

Finally, it thins out. The horizon still looks sickly but at least it is visible again.

A path that once curved gently through trimmed grass and scattered leaves is cracked now, the stone split apart in jagged lines. The grass is gone. What remains is a dull, ashen spread, only brittle dust that crunches faintly under your boots. The ground itself has been drained of anything that could sustain growth.

You still. You remember this place. You had sat here.

At first, your mind refuses to accept it, tries to overlay memory onto ruin, onto the wasteland that stretches before you.

The oak tree looms ahead, and for a moment you almost don’t recognise it. It has been stripped down to something skeletal and contorted. Its trunk twists upwards, bark peeled back in long, curling strips. There are no leaves left. It looks less like a tree and more like something that used to be alive and is now barely remembering how to stand. It is the last tree in the park that hasn’t been felled, that hasn’t been reduced to a stump. Maybe as a way to remind people of what they have lost.

The lamppost nearby has folded in on itself, metal softened, bent at an angle as though it had melted under an invisible heat and then been left to cool in the wrong shape.

The lake– it hurts to look at it. It has been dried out, reduced to a shallow basin of thick, black, stinking sludge. There is an oily sheen to it.

Something shifts beneath the viscous surface. Shapes of various sizes, most indistinct. Animals, you realise with a start. You step closer.

A deer whose fur is matted and smeared black lies half-submerged near the edge; its flank rises and falls in shallow, laboured breaths. Its eyes are open but unfocused. It does not move when you approach, doesn’t even react. It has no strength left to. And yet, it is alive. Barely.

Its legs are caught in the sludge, sunk deep enough that you cannot see where flesh ends and that black, clinging substance begins. Its mouth opens slightly; no sound comes out.

Behind it, something smaller, a fox perhaps, twitches weakly, one paw dragging uselessly through the thick surface.

They are trapped. The only thing they can do now is wait. For what you don’t know. You don’t think there is an answer.

Pity rises in your stomach but it has nowhere to go, no action, no solution to attach itself to.

So you stand there and watch. Partake in their suffering until you can no longer bear to look at it.

You turn away.

The bench is still there. It sits at the edge of the path exactly where it always has, paint chipped in familiar places on its steady iron frame. A piece of the old world that refuses to acknowledge what has happened around it.

You move toward it slowly because there is nothing else left to do. The wood is rough when you trace it and you pull away before a splinter catches in your skin. Of course, even this remnant doesn’t allow for comfort.

You lean back against what remains of the oak tree, its bark rough and splintered against your back, and close your eyes.

The atmosphere may be oppressive, a long way from the once peaceful park, but at least there is no immediate threat here.

You recall the last time you had been here. The way the lamplight had filtered through the leaves. The distant hum of the city softened into something almost gentle. Parkgoers laughing in a quiet moment away from their hectic lives. Jon beside you, awkward and uncertain and desperate and trying, in his own way, to be kind.

You miss it, the simplicity of it. You are so tired.

You wonder what happened to him. This entire time you have pushed the thought away, too scared of its answer.

Did he turn into one of them? Something warped and broken and reshaped by whatever rules govern this new world?

Is he out there somewhere, fighting to survive? Or…or suffering?

The thought shifts into something darker. You swallow.

Or he might already be gone. Burned out in a ritual that never should have taken place.

Would that be mercy? For him? For you? Maybe. The idea tastes bitter on your tongue all the same.

You hope he is well, in whatever shape that could be. It seems foolish, ridiculous, in a world like this but you keep that hope close, fan it until it burns your heart with grief and a hollow, reaching ache.

You slip down the tree until you are seated between its gnarled roots, hug your legs close, and rest your head on your knees. You know you won’t be able to sleep. All you can do now is sit here in the quiet of remembrance.

A sound breaks the silence. You go still. It is not the faint, wet shifting from the lake beside you.

Voices.

Your eyes snap open, body already moving before your mind can catch up. You push off from the tree, slipping behind the twisted remains of the shrubbery with held breath, and crouch low.

You peer past a branch but whoever is there is too far away and partially hidden behind the bushes and halfway melted lamp posts. They’re coming closer. If it’s an avatar, you will– Who are you kidding? You wouldn’t be able to do anything at all.

At once, your heart stutters.

No. No, that– you haven’t heard– not in days, weeks, months. It all bleeds together into the same endless, stagnant now. And yet, you know those voices. You know them.

You lean just slightly, careful to stay hidden.

There they are. Still too far away to hear completely clearly, their words lost to distance, but unmistakable all the same. Their voices. The shape of them. The way they move. The way they are.

It feels as though your thoughts have summoned him.

It can’t be. It can’t. Your brain fails to process it.

You press yourself further into cover, pulse roaring in your ears. You don’t move.

It has to be a trick, something this broken world has conjured just to see how you’ll react. Or finally, an illusion handmade just to torment you.

“…I don’t like this place.” Whatever it is talks in Martin’s voice. “It feels wrong. Even for…all of this.”

A sigh, then:  “It’s quieter. Though not particularly comforting, I suppose.”

A huff. “Right, yeah, because the screaming everywhere else was really comforting.”

Silence.

“Anything about Georgie or Melanie now that we’re closer?”

“Nothing.”

“Do you think…No. Sorry. Stupid question.”

Another pause.

They step closer. You can hear the crunching of dead earth beneath their feet.

There is a pause, then: “…I met with Y/N here once.” Jon’s voice this close hits you like a physical thing.

“Really?” You can practically hear Martin frowning. “What do you think happened to them?”

The question hangs there.

Martin hesitates. “Are they– Do you think they’re dead?”

Jon is quiet for a moment. “You know, I have never been able to see them. Not properly, like I can with– you know. It was like looking at something and knowing it was there, but never quite being able to focus on it.” He trails off. “But…ah.”

Your pulse spikes. Did he spot you? You bite your lip, peeking.

Martin frowns. “What is it?”

Jon clears his throat.

Martin sighs, already stepping back a pace. “That time again huh?”

Jon doesn’t answer directly. He just moves to the bench, sitting down heavily, gaze distant. He pulls out his tape recorder. He doesn’t see you, you realise; he is too pulled inward.

Martin lingers for a moment, then exhales, rubbing the back of his neck. “Right. I’ll be right back.” He wanders off, only a few steps, stretching his legs, glancing around with wary unease.

Jon clicks the recorder on.

It looks just like him. Whether it is the cruel lure of an avatar or – more likely – the cunning way in which your slipping mind is trying to come to terms with what has happened, it sure is doing an excellent job.

What if it isn’t him? You had already lost him once. You don’t think you could survive doing it again.

“Caroline had known this would happen. It is exactly what she had feared.” Jon begins, voice shifting, settling into that cadence.

Your breath stills. You know it. You’ve heard it before.

“She had stood in conference rooms with flickering projectors and lukewarm coffee, pointing to graphs that dipped and dipped and never rose again. She had explained, patiently at first, then desperately, how pollination chains were fracturing and ecosystems weren’t resilient so much as interdependent. They are fragile in ways people didn’t want to understand. And they had smiled and nodded and told her the funding simply wasn’t there anymore. The lobbyists had been more convincing. No one cared about the decline in insect populations or critically endangered plants. No one cared about the loss of biodiversity.”

It’s him. He’s real. He has to be.

“She has moved every plant that she could save into the living room. Pots crowd every available surface, clustering near the windows where the light used to be best. She still arranges them carefully but it doesn’t matter anymore. She dreads entering the room every time.”

Martin shifts somewhere off to the side. You barely notice him anymore, lost in Jon’s voice.

“Today it is the Bromus interruptus. She sees it immediately. The angle of the culm is slightly bowed where it should stand upright. The spikelets lost their colour. She kneels beside it slowly, fingers hovering just above the blades before she touches them. They are dry.”

Your gaze flicks toward the lake. The deer. The fox.

“‘I watered you,’ she says quietly. ‘I did everything right.’ She sounds absurd and she knows it. Everything right. The water is poisoned, though she filters it, the soil is full of cadmium. She looks at the other plants. A room full of survivors that cannot survive. Caroline sinks back onto the floor, hands–”

A startled noise cuts through the air. Your gaze snaps to the side.

Three figures step out of the smoke next to Martin, their yellowed hazmat suits slick with condensation, the plastic layers fused and warped. The visors are fogged into opaque nothingness. They move in tandem, in a motion that lacks anything human; one grips his arm, the other two his legs. Martin is thrown to the ground and dragged toward the dried lake.

He tries to kick to no avail. “Get off, get off!” Martin’s breath hitches into something sharp and panicked. “Jon!”

Jon startles upright. “Ma– Martin!”

Everything moves at once. You don’t think, you run. Out of cover, across the broken ground, faster than you realise you can, your body already ahead of your thoughts.

You are faster. You reach him first.

Your hand closes around his free arm, solid like no mirage could be, and you pull, throwing your body back. Your hood slips off. There’s no time.

Recognition flashes across his face, shock wide in his features, but he grabs your forearm nonetheless and holds tight.

Jon arrives a heartbeat later, breath sharp, eyes blazing with something vast and terrible. “Let him go,” he says, voice no longer entirely his own.

“You were built to endure what others could not. To contain and persist beyond failure. But there is nothing left to contain.”

The figures loosen their grip. You manage to free Martin with one harsh pull and he staggers to his feet.

“The only contamination left is you.”

Dark stains bloom on the inside of the visors. The figures stumble backward, clutching at themselves in frantic movements.

 “You are obsolete.”

They begin to convulse violently, then crumple inward.

He sounds terrifying. “Ceaseless Watcher, take this imitation of endurance. Strip it of its illusion.”

Their heads tilt sharply, all at once. Then they are unmade, erased mid-existence until they are nothing more than shadows. And finally, not even that.

Silence crashes down.

Martin stumbles forward, straight into Jon, who catches him, holds him upright.

You stand there, chest heaving and heart racing, the echo of violence still vibrating through your bones. None of you move.

The world narrows to the three of you.

Then Martin exhales shakily. “…Jesus.”

Jon’s grip tightens. “You’re alright,” he says in a low voice.

Martin nods, though his hands are still shaking. “Yeah, yeah, I think so. Just–” He swallows hard, straightening slowly. “Damn.”

Jon doesn’t let go immediately. His hands linger, protective, as he brushes Martin’s hair back, before he finally exhales and steps back.

He looks up at you. 

Everything else – the wreckage of the park, the thick, contaminated air, the monsters, and the distant horrors – falls away into something dim and irrelevant. For an impossible second, it is calm. “Y/N.”

There is a fragile moment where it feels like you might speak but your throat constricts. There are no words that fit. You watch Jon step forward.

The impact, though gentle, hits you hard. His arms come around you in all their grounding, solid realness. Though you are startled by the strength of it, you clutch him back just as tightly. Your hands tremble but you refuse to let go.

Neither of you says anything for a while. You stand there and when he pulls back to look at you, your hands still grip his coat as if you need the contact to anchor yourself.

“I shouldn’t have–” you start, the sentence breaking halfway through. “I was wrong.” It comes out raw and quiet. “Forgive me?”

He stares at you with a soft expression, exhales, shakes his head slightly. “There’s nothing to forgive.” A pause. “I missed you.”

“I missed you too,” you manage, the truth of it catching in your chest on the way out.

Behind him, Martin shifts, watching the two of you with something complicated in his expression. You draw back fully from Jon and turn to him. There’s gratitude there and relief, that’s unmistakable, but also something else, wariness perhaps or just the lingering edge of everything that has happened. You can’t blame him.

“You–” he starts, then shakes his head slightly, like he’s not sure where to begin. “You saved me. Back there.”

“Seemed like the right thing to do.”

He huffs out a breath that sounds almost like a laugh. “Yeah. Yeah, I–” He hesitates, then nods. “Thanks.”

Your gaze flicks between them. Jon, standing just a little too close to Martin. Martin, still half-leaning into him without quite realising it. Understanding blooms in you with all the gentleness of a spring dawn.

A small, tired smile tugs at your mouth. “You two, huh?”

“What?” Martin blinks. “Ah, uh. yeah.”

Jon glances to the side, clearing his throat, though he doesn’t step back.

You smile for real this time. “Finally figured it out then.”

Jon’s mouth twitches faintly.

Martin lets out an awkward half-laugh. “Yeah, well, took us long enough, didn’t it? But, probably not the time to talk about it.”

“Seems like exactly the time,” you murmur. There’s something tender and almost wistful in it. “I’m glad.”

The park falls silent again. For a moment it feels almost serene. The illusion, however, doesn’t last and the weight of everything settles back in.

“What happened?” you ask, more serious now. “I tried to find you. But…”

Jon’s expression darkens immediately. “He tricked me. He marked me for the ritual. I didn’t understand at the time, I thought I was stopping something.” He gestures vaguely at the broken world around you. “This, all of this, it’s because of me.”

“No.” You shake your head, stepping closer again. “No. It wasn’t you. It was him. Elias. Jonah. Whatever name he’s wearing now.” Your voice drops to a quieter cadence but it’s no less certain. “This was always his plan.”

Jon doesn’t look convinced.

“It’s not your fault.” You shake your head faintly, a sad, bitter smile ghosting across your lips. “If only I’d had an enemy bigger than my own apathy,” you murmur, almost to yourself. “Maybe I could have prevented it.”

Jon lifts his hand, touches your shoulder. You shoot him a grateful look. What happened weighs on you but at least you can bear it together.

Silence settles again, heavier this time. You break it. “So what now?”

Jon straightens slightly. “We end this,” he says. “Kill him if we have to.”

You shake your head slowly and murmur: “An eye for an eye and the world goes blind.”

Martin exhales sharply, exasperation bleeding through. “Oh, come on! You want to spare him?”

“I don’t,” you insist. “If I could have killed him, I would have. I was looking for Jon. And then…” You take a breath. “But it won’t end it.”

That gets their attention.

“Killing him won’t stop this,” you say, gesturing at the ruined park, the broken world beyond it. “The Eye won’t lose its throne. And the seat won’t stay empty.”

Jon’s mouth draws into a thin line. He has heard you say it before but he understands now.

Martin frowns. “You’re saying, someone else would just…”

“Take his place,” you finish.

“Are you sure?” Martin asks, a thread of desperation in his voice.

You hesitate, then shake your head slowly. “No.”

Martin lets out a breath, glancing at Jon.

“But it’s the way it has always been. Why would this be any different?”

His face falls immediately.

Jon looks grim too. No, not just grim, resolute. “I’ll do it.”

“No,” you say immediately.

Martin echoes you more vehemently. “Jon, no–”

“I started this,” he says, cutting across both of you.

You step forward, shaking your head. “Jon, let me do it. I’m immune, I can–”

Jon doesn’t back down. “I belong to the Eye. If someone has to–”

“No,” you interrupt. “You don’t have to.”

“It’s already inside me.”

The moment he destroyed the creatures flashes through your mind. Ceaseless Watcher.

It slams into your chest, knocks the breath from your lungs just like a physical blow would. You suck in air, but it doesn’t feel enough.

You see it, the shape of it, the inevitability. There is no version of this where he walks away untouched.

The world seems to tilt. You are dizzy, light-headed.

Your chest tightens, a crushing coldness crawling up your throat. Your hands tremble, your vision blurs at the edges.

He is going to die. In vain. And you can’t do anything to stop it. There is no going back, there is no fixing it.

This is it. This is all there is.

You can’t breathe.

“Hey.” Martin’s alarmed voice cuts in. “Are you–”

You don’t hear him properly. You try to speak but it won’t come out right.

You are terrified. The realisation is as shocking as the feeling itself.

Jon goes still. Something in his expression changes, as if he’s focusing on something beyond sight. “I felt that,” he says, startled.

Your head snaps toward him. “What?”

His eyes are fixed on you, wide with disbelief. “You–” He swallows. “You’re afraid.”

You shudder. “I am,” you admit quietly. You’ve never said it aloud before. Saying it makes it real somehow.

Jon stares at you. “But that’s not possible.”

You let out a shaky breath. Your gaze flicks between him and Martin and the fear mixes with a bittersweet feeling. “Knowing you has changed me. You made me care again.”

Jon doesn’t respond. He just looks at you.

Suddenly a low sound rumbles in the distance. All three of you turn at once.

It starts faint, more vibration than noise, before building quickly, rising into something unbearable: a godforsaken cacophony of overlapping noises, wet tearing and screeching, distorted voices layered on top of each other.

Your blood runs cold. You meet Jon’s eyes. He knows.

Martin looks between you and Jon, panic rising. “What is that? What’s going on?”

“They’re here,” you whisper.

Martin’s brows draw together, confused, but he doesn’t wait for you to explain. “Let’s go!”

You don’t argue.

All three of you break into motion, your feet pounding against the brittle ground as the sound swells behind you, closer now, something moving through the air itself, a pressure shattering the entire atmosphere.

“It’s–” Jon starts.

“It doesn’t matter!” Martin snaps. “Just run!”

You take the moment you round a toppled lamp post as a chance to glance back. You shouldn’t. You do it anyway. It’s impossible to see clearly, only glimpsed in flickers and distortions, but it’s there. You see it and you know.

“They’re not here for you,” you say while running.

Martin shoots you a look and nearly stumbles over some dried up, gnarled roots. “What do you mean?”

“Y/N’s right, they’re not.” Jon sounds grave, certain.

Your breath catches on the words. “They’re here for me.”

Martin shakes his head and grabs Jon’s arm to pull him along, waving you forward. “We can take shelter over there, come on!”

You slow. You feel it now, the pull as something vast and hungry has turned its attention toward you specifically.

Then you stop entirely. There’s no point in running. You won’t be able to outrun it.

Martin keeps going a few steps before he realises. “Y/N?”

The things in the air close in, silhouettes forming in the commotion, too many limbs, too many teeth, too many everything. You let them come.

“Go,” you say softly. “It’s alright.”

“Y/N, no–” Martin starts, already moving back toward you but Jon holds him back.

They arrive. They simply are there suddenly, completely, as they surround you. Shapes that never fully settle into form, made of noise and absence and shadow and the echo of something that should not exist. The air itself screams.

You don’t move. And the last thing you see is them, alive and together.

Chapter Text

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.”

Someone is screaming.

It tears through the air in its rawness, a sound so full of pain it seems to split the world open at its seams. For a moment you don’t understand what is happening.

Is it you?

Surely not. The voice is distant and unfamiliar in your ears.

Someone else then. It must be. That’s what logic dictates. You cling to the small, fraying threads of reason.

But logic feels thin here. You are not even sure it still exists, if anything still exists beyond chaos and pain or if that is all that is left.

The scream breaks and you feel your throat tear with it.

Oh.

It is you.

It comes all at once. A terrible, overlapping convergence of everything you have taunted by century-long avoidance finds you, the thing between states, slipping through their fingers like a shadow. Now they find purchase. And they are angry.

Something jerks your arm upward in a harsh pull. Your shoulder wrenches with a sickening crack as invisible strings bite into your skin, wrapping around bone and tendon, tugging you upright like a broken, mindless puppet. Silk-thin threads dig into your flesh and force motion that is not yours. Your fingers twitch against your will. You are not in control. You have never felt less so.

The light goes first, snuffed out so completely it feels as though it was never there at all. You cannot see your own body, cannot even be certain you still have one. The darkness presses in all around you in all its terrifying, glorious, icy obscurity. You feel it close to your skin, closer than that even, slipping into every space left open. Something moves in it, you know it does. You cannot prove it though you do not need to; you feel it in the thrum of your heart and the rush of your blood and briefly you wonder if that is what will draw it to you. You stop breathing and wait and wait and wait. What is out there? When will it strike? You flinch at every sound and brush. No matter: the darkness does not leave, neither will the things inside it, and you have nowhere left to go.

Glinting teeth sink into your side with brutal force, tearing fabric and skin alike as the hunters find you at last. You were always going to be caught. Hot, eager breath at your back. Claws rake across you when you try to pull away. As if escape had ever truly been an option. There is no ceremony to it. All it is is the primal, ecstatic violence of predator meeting prey, a chase fulfilled. Flesh gives and you scream again, only for the sound to be swallowed by the frenzy almost immediately. They are not done. They will not be done until you stop moving.

The ground tilts. No, no, that’s wrong. There is no ground. There never was. The world folds in on itself, its angles bending, logic collapsing into something slippery. Your thoughts fragment mid-formation. You try to remember but the memory twists in your grasp. Was that real? Were you ever real? You reach for something certain and find only your own doubt staring back.

A blinding, all-consuming heat follows. Your skin blisters in seconds, the air itself igniting around you as The Desolation claims its due. Everything you have ever held dear is reduced to ash before your eyes. You cry but the tears evaporate the second they form. Your nerves light up like kindling. Every inch of you is aflame. Burn. That is all you can do. Burn from the inside out, and know that nothing of you will remain untouched.

Something presses against your face. Your fingers – are those your fingers? – slide beneath your skin, peeling and tugging, work at you with quiet, invasive curiosity. Your cheek stretches, your jaw aches, as something tries you on, testing the fit. You don’t know where you end and it begins. Your skin does not belong to you anymore. Your body is not yours.

A slow, blooming rot, both sweet and sickening, spreads through muscle and marrow alike. You feel it writhe, feel it multiply, tiny movements beneath the surface, too many to stop even if you could. Your body becomes a host for the infestation, a nest to be hollowed out and consumed in its entirety. Tiny, crawling things move in your throat. You gag.

Sudden violence descends on you without rhyme or reason, with no purpose beyond the act itself. Force slams into you from all sides, blows you cannot anticipate or defend against. Something strikes your ribs and you feel them give, something else tears across your back until your skin flays. It does neither pause nor care. This is different than the Hunt with its chase and anticipation, with its hunger for blood and desire to devour. This is the brutal, unthinking certainty that you are something to be broken and that breaking you is enough.

The ground gives way and you are dragged downward, are crushed beneath an impossible weight as stone closes around you. Don’t you know? The earth itself has decided to reclaim you. In its pursuit, soil packs your mouth first and then everything else until there is nothing left but a suffocating, smothering pressure that swallows you whole. You know what this is: Guilt, the fault for every single thing you have done, everything you have not. How could you, how could you, how could you?

It seems only a moment passes before you are ripped free, rock cutting your skin on your way out, and thrown into an endless nothingness. You are falling for what seems like forever. There is no ground anymore. You are but a speck suspended in a vastness so immense it erases meaning. Untethered, you are left with the unbearable knowledge of how small you are. Oh, how meaningless your entire life is and how nothing you have ever done has mattered at all. You are nothing.

Suddenly muscle pulls in an internal lurch, too tight in some places, too loose in others. Your limbs twitch not from outside influence this time but from within, all tendons tightening and releasing without your permission. You groan, then whimper, then all you can do is tremble and try to endure it. You feel the structure of yourself unravel, bone grinding where it shouldn’t and flesh stretching and compressing under probing, unseen hands. Your body has betrayed you: it is no longer a fixed thing, only matter, only meat.

Beneath all of that is something quieter, less powerful but worse still. A stillness settles into your bones, creeping in between the pain and terror, filling the spaces where resistance once lived. It isn’t death, to your dismay, but instead the certainty of what comes after. You have seen the world around you, all its decay and destruction, its catastrophes that you yourself have contributed to. How could you? You feel yourself thinning as though the very idea of you is being worn away and replaced by another thing. The world does not need you, it never did. The realisation that you are but temporary lodges deep. Something else will take your place, something that will not suffer like this and won’t even remember you existed.

The Lonely settles in last. A thick fog shrouds you from everything else around you. It is cold, so very cold. Everyone else falls away, though the pain, the sensation stays, and you are left in a silence so complete it devours you. No one is coming, no one ever was. They've all left. You have always been utterly alone.

And above, the enormous, unblinking eye drinks it all in. Its presence is everywhere, around you, inside you. Your thoughts are no longer your own; they are pulled out and dissected under its relentless gaze. Every nerve is laid bare before it, every hidden memory dragged into the light screaming, every quiet moment and emotion stripped of intimacy, every fragile, human part you tried to protect is torn from you and turned into something to be consumed. They are peeled back, layer by agonising layer, flayed open mercilessly. There is no privacy left here; it dies screaming alongside you.

And it gleams, joyfully, gorging itself on your endless, endless suffering.

So this is what fear feels like.

Through the storm, through the churning chaos of pressing eyes and smothering shadows, through gnashing teeth and binding threads, through senseless pain and searing destruction, through rotting flesh and crawling decay, through choking earth and endless depths, through whispers of madness and stolen faces, through the cold void of abandonment and the crushing promise of catastrophe–

You see it.

Something emerges from the dark beyond the swirling pandemonium.

A hand.

A single, skeletal hand, pale beyond pallor, beyond anything that belongs to the living world. Palm up.

And all of a sudden everything stops.

The pressure vanishes, teeth withdraw, fog dissipates, fire dies. Pain lingers.

The Fears recoil and though they don’t vanish, they scatter, circling above you, unwilling or unable to come closer.

You collapse, strings cut, sputtering, and hit the ground hard. Your body aches in ways you cannot begin to comprehend. You can still feel where they touched you. For a moment, you do nothing. Too weak to move or even sob, you just lie there with ringing ears and breathe in ragged, desperate gasps. If it can be called that. If your lungs are still intact enough to hold air.

Breath after rattling breath, you try to find some sort of composure. Slowly, slowly, you turn your head towards the hand. You know it in the marrow of your bones and the spaces between your breaths. It is a memory that has never quite left you. You have felt this before, on the cold stone of an altar slick with your own blood, surrounded by your murderers chanting words you understood too well. It was there, the same certain, patient presence.

Pax Ultima. The Coming End That Waits For All And Cannot Be Ignored.

It has found you again. If it has ever truly left at all.

Suddenly exhaustion crashes over you, harder than any pain. The weight of seven centuries settles into your bones. You have been running for so long. Watching, hiding, avoiding, scheming, enduring. Caring, despite yourself. Losing, despite everything.

You are so tired.

And, all at once, calm. The world is quiet, not safe, but quiet. The calm in the eye of the storm. It spreads slowly, like cool water over scorched earth, like the first breath after drowning. The Fears are still there, the world is still broken. But this is an ending, or the promise of one.

Fingers twitch against the ground, dig into ash and crumbling earth. Your body protests but you ignore it and push yourself up nonetheless. Your gaze fixes on the hand which is still waiting patiently.

Maybe, at last, you could lay it all down, all the endless, futile attempts to tip the scales, and finally rest. Maybe you could find peace here, beneath the shadow of its wings.

Could you leave it behind? All of it?

Your life answers for you as it surges up to meet you.

Your mother’s face first, clearer than it has any right to be after all this time. The softness of her hands, the way she had hesitated, just for a moment, before giving you up. You had thought you had forgotten that.

Others follow. Lovers, half-remembered, their names long since worn smooth with time, companions, friends, strangers who mattered once. Laughter in dim rooms, candlelight flickering against bare skin, promises made like they could ever last. Faces press in close in the dark, hands that held you like you might stay. You left before you could watch them wither and die. Or you stayed, and regretted it.

Gertrude remains in all her unyielding sharpness. Smoke curling in the air between you, the quiet understanding of what must be done and what it would cost. The first person you cared about again. Her purpose that became yours.

Jon. Just Jon. Leaning over a desk, frowning at something only he can see. You see him as he was, as he is, as he might have been. All layered, indistinguishable. Tired, stubborn, always trying.

Martin, in the courtyard, loving recklessly.

Your mind settles on the moments in-between. A hand brushing another, a quiet joke. The small, fragile insistence of connection. The only thing that matters, that remains.

Maybe this is all life ever was. Not the rituals and the archives and the hidden wars, not endless calculations of what must be done, not the hoarding of knowledge, not centuries of playing chess with gods and monsters.

Maybe it was just this: the way the sun slanted through a cracked window in the early morning when no one remembered to close the curtains. Dust floating suspended in a shaft of light. The clink of porcelain as the kettle hissed and steam curling into ghost-shapes above chipped mugs. The stray hum of a song overheard and never identified. The faint chill of the floorboards against bare feet. The clatter of keys tossed onto a counter when returning home. The warmth of soup spooned out and shared. The memory of a laugh you didn’t mean to give away.

Maybe it was in the ordinary grace of people who never knew they were being watched: A student fidgeting, lips moving as they rehearsed lines for an exam. A grandmother leaning out of her window, watering basil and rosemary in chipped terracotta pots, the scent rising up on hot nights, an offering to the sky. A teenager laughing too loudly at a joke his friends made, carried through thin apartment walls, muffled, imperfect, and unashamed.

Maybe love was the small, invisible things, the adjustments no one ever saw: A scarf pulled tighter against the cold, a stray thread tucked back into its seam. The sound of rain against glass, not remarkable in itself and yet a rhythm that filled a room with peace. The coins slipped into a child’s palm when no one was looking. The drifting snowflakes catching on clothes. Or the long exhale after surviving something terrible, when your heart slowed and you realised you had not been unmade.

For so long, you had kept your distance, only circling the edges of monstrosities and never once daring to step inside the circle. You had convinced yourself that the world was theirs to feast upon, not yours to protect. You had been untouchable, a witness moving without leaving fingerprints. That was the bargain you’d made with survival: hide, watch, record, interfere just enough, but never care. Caring was the crack where the cold got in. Caring was how you lost everything.

But without realising when it began, you had found yourself watching the wrong things. No rituals or avatars. People. All your struggle about the intricacies of immortality and of morality stretched thin, just to return to these tiny pieces that made humanity human.

You noticed how they touched one another’s sleeves mid-conversation, grounding each other with the smallest gesture. How neighbours passed baked goods back and forth across stairwells. How someone hummed to themselves while stirring sauce on a stove, completely unaware that anyone might be listening. How people would brush an eyelash off another’s cheek, or set a cup of tea by their elbow without a word.

You noticed the quiet weight of another body shifting on the bus beside you, breathing the same air, too absorbed in their book to notice you watching them. The joy of a giggling child in her father’s arms when he catches her. The tired determination of students occupying a library at night. The love of a couple dancing in the night. Or even the fragile courage of someone who carried grief but still managed to smile when they met a friend.The sacred intimacy of the ordinary set against the vast enormity of the apocalypse. The simplicity of human life here to remind you that it had always been worth living.

Tiny, human things that no ritual ever accounted for, no god of terror could devour without choking on their humility. And you realised, perhaps too late, that these were the things worth protecting. To leave behind the grand sweep of history and the shifting tides of power.

If you didn’t love, you didn’t live. That is the thought that rises through the chaos around you and for the first time in longer than you can measure, you don’t push it away. You had loved. It may not have been in grand declarations or binding oaths, but you had loved in the quiet way of staying, even if no one else knew what it cost you. You think of these moments now, standing in the middle of the storm, as though your whole life has collapsed into a handful of details.

You remember brushing ash from your clothes and telling a child to run. You remember pressing your hand over Jon’s wrist when he was trembling and how his pulse stuttered against your palm. You remember the bitter taste of tea gone cold because you were too wrapped up in someone’s story to drink it. You remember that perfect, endless silence when the world seemed, for once, to be at rest.

You had died once and lived. You had lived again and felt, always, that your life didn’t matter. But now you see it differently.  Maybe you did live after all. Maybe you did care, and it had cost you everything and marked you deeper than archives or rituals, and it had made it worth it. You had been in love with humanity. A tenderness you told yourself you weren’t capable of, and yet there it was. Every time you stepped in, every time you gave a warning you swore you wouldn’t give.

Human are stubborn and  ruthless and violent and scared. But they are also forgiving and gentle and happy. And kind and kind and kind. You hold onto that. Faced with insignificance, faced with futility, faced with loneliness, faced with fear and terror, helping people, caring still matters. You can feel it, like a pulse thrumming through the world, every small act you thought was futile is still echoing, every kindness is still moving, even now, even here. Your love, your empathy, your pity will continue to live on. They are seeds already scattered in a world you’re leaving behind, tucked into other people’s lives. In the people you helped save, in the people whose lives you brushed against, even if they never knew your name, in a child who survived without ever knowing why, in a tired archivist who breathed easier for a night because you intervened, in a stranger who picked up a charm that had been left behind and lived another day because of it. You will be remembered, maybe only in fragments, in stories, but remembered nonetheless. You will have mattered.

Maybe life is nothing but a fragile weave of these things, too small to be written in any archive, too fleeting to be remembered by anyone but you. And maybe that is all it needed to be. The fragile, breakable beauty of being here at all.

While the Fears try to close in and the noise of screeching, crushing, howling, whispering swells, you are whole again, standing in a space of endless hush.

The End stands before you, both terrifying and gentle. Its deep quiet cradles your ragged edges. It does not speak, but you understand. You are serene, suspended in the balance between what was and what will be.

You look back one last time. Jon and Martin are pressed together, holding each other’s hands so tightly their knuckles are white. Reality around them is breaking apart, but neither lets go. Two people, clinging to each other at the edge of the world, refusing to let the darkness take them alone.

You see the shock in Martin’s eyes when they land on you. His mouth opens in something like a plea. Jon’s lips shape your name against the roar. His voice is lost in the din, but you feel his desperation anyway. You know what he’s saying.

You smile. It feels strange at first, to let that softness through the cracks but it is real and it is yours. You smile, quietly, because the truth is luminous in the chaos: They can end this. You know it. They can bring back a world where people can live in peace, where the Fears only bleed in through the cracks. It was never yours to save, perhaps it never could have been. Maybe it had always been theirs.

You lift your voice, steady despite the cacophony. “Go,” you tell them. “The rest is yours. I trust you.”

Jon shakes his head. You see him shout again, trying to reach you across the tempest, to call your name, to stop you, to hold you back.

“You can do it. I know you can. No-one escapes at the end. Even if they don't want to.” Your voice gets carried by the wind, almost swallowed by the howling. “Good luck.”

Martin clutches Jon’s arm tighter, shielding his face from the wind that tears at his clothes and tugs at his hair. Jon’s eyes flare with understanding and regret and they glisten, wide and wild, but the storm is pulling at him too hard. That’s all right, he heard you, he always did.

Somewhere, distantly, you remember how the old story goes: a man who reached too far, and the devil, sure of his claim, who waited patiently to corrupt him. It should have ended in ruin, it nearly did. But love, stubborn and fragile, refused to let it. Mephisto, for all his certainty, is denied in the end. Faust and Gretchen are reunited. All is well.

So you let them hold onto each other, let them stand firm in the calamity that you can no longer face.

And then you turn back. The End waits, impossibly patient, as if it had known all along that this would be the choice you made. You look at the pale palm extended. You think of your hands, the ones that held children, that touched shoulders, that passed cups of tea, that wrote warnings, that traced a trembling palm. Hands that steadied and saved.

You draw one last breath. You think of the lives you’ve touched and all the fragments you are leaving behind. And then, slowly, you reach out and lay your hand in its palm. Cold meets warm, silence meets heartbeat. The grip that closes over yours is not greedy, not violent. You let it pull you forward, pull you home with a quiet acceptance that hums in your bones.

The storm collapses into silence. The Fears scatter like smoke on the wind, back to their torment, their domains.

You let go of fear, of pain. You let go of yourself. You are not afraid.

You let yourself sink into the final surrender. The world blurs around you, the endless horizon of fear disappears until the last thing you see is the image of Jon and Martin, hand in hand, standing unbroken in the ruins. Darkness blooms around your edges like a final, exquisite bloom. And in that exquisite darkness, there is a strange, terrible beauty, a quiet, unending stillness. You carry with you the last warmth of hope and the knowledge that the world is in capable hands, that love and courage can endure even the most impossible night.

Your heartbeat slows, your soul dissolves into something eternal. You are neither gone nor lost. You are at peace.

And then there is no more you. Only the hush and your echo lingering in those who remain.