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The oft-dying Archivist no longer wonders at the cold crisp air of the world above. This being the sixth time he has emerged from the yellow door separating it from the Panopticon below, it has gotten somewhat old, you understand. Instead, when he steps out into the snow, his focus is only on whether he can still reach for the earth under that frozen surface.
He has hopes that this, his thirty-seventh attempt at escaping, will finally be it.
After dragging himself here from the depths of the Archives, through the dangers of each of its three levels, through the pain and exhaustion and hunger scraping at his nerves, of course he has hopes. They are what have gotten him this far.
And because he has hopes, the stubborn Archivist watches the sky and says, “Well? Let’s get it over with.”
When the sky splits open and looks back, he is ready.
Or so he thinks.
All the weight of Beholding is no easy thing to withstand, a world turned to watch you. His voice spools around him, every mistake and secret and horror he has committed replayed so loud it reverberates through his bones. But the Archivist has learned from his previous encounters and is no longer pinned by it. He sinks into the waiting earth instead, calling upon the suffocating boon granted to him by the Buried, and in doing so pulls down the other minions of the Eye that would have swiftly dispatched him. They are crushed beneath the earth as easily as popped...er, well. Grapes do not exist in the Panopticon, but you know what I mean.
Bolstered by his victory, he bursts out of the earth with the beginnings of fire and frost wrapped around his hands, and as the screens swarm around him, babbling and flashing, the Desolation eating his flesh finds purchase in theirs and dissolves them, one after the next after the next.
He does not notice the Eye opening in the earth as well until he has stepped into its wet lens. And once he has sunk into its pupil, dark and hungry, the Beholding’s...erm, well, hold is very difficult to shake. The more he struggles, the further he sinks. And then a wave of the Archivist’s worst fears, too myriad and horrible to possibly describe, washes over him, sucking the vitality from our intrepid hero’s body.
And for the thirty-seventh time, inky blackness wells up from below to claim its Archivist.
*
He washes up on the shores of the Archives to the susurrus of pages and murmuring and one very distinctive laugh, and as he drags himself up its steps, the entity that sometimes calls itself Helen gleefully checks his name off of her list.
“REDACTED got you again, hm? Must be awfully tough to kill you this many times in a row, and so close to the surface too. Poor thing. Have you tried not dying?”
“Your advice is indispensable as ever, Helen,” the Archivist grouses.
The translucent shades of statement givers, though preserved in this memory of their final moments of fear, nonetheless have enough awareness to titter at this exchange. The Archivist shoulders through them and they puff into green wisps of choked screams, only to reform themselves behind him once he has passed and resume their tittering and gossiping.
You may not be aware of this, but the Archivist is quite the important figure here in the Archives, and his escapades have not gone unnoticed. Thus, his little pettiness in walking through them has really only given them something new to talk about. One might say he deserved it, but even the Archivist is allowed a little pettiness, given everything he has endured.
“Oh, I’m allowed, am I? How generous,” he mutters to nobody.
Returning to the Archives always puts him in a foul mood, you see. Even worse than its association with his repeated failures, the starting point from which he cannot escape, even worse than the cold empty corners that should be neither cold nor—
“No,” the Archivist says, stopping. He looks to the air and addresses nobody very firmly. “Narrate what you want, but you will not talk about him.”
Er, yes. Well.
Even aside from the, ah, many reasons that we will not go into—
(the Archivist nods and resumes his dejected trudging through the stacks)
—there is the unassailable truth that, simply, the Archives are where he belongs.
Each of these wretched shades’ fatal fears is known to the Archivist, as though it were written inside his skin. And should you pull any statement from the towering stacks, brush the dust and cobwebs from their surface, he would reel off the words long before you could begin to decipher the skittering handwriting.
He does not hunger here. He does not ache.
And there is, as well, the shade of Tim standing guard by document storage, awaiting the news he has of the stranger the Archivist meets sometimes on the third level. There is Daisy in the break room, snarling as she always does that she will not let him win so easily next time. Even Gerry makes one of his rare appearances, smoking moodily by the railing as he watches the river of ink from which the Archivist emerged.
This crowded maze of shelves and boxes, this wash of dark wood under sourceless weak light, it is a comforting, familiar space. Even despite the hated spiders that sometimes surprise him when he reaches for said boxes, it is safe, and it is where he belongs.
The Archivist begins attempt thirty-eight anyway.
*
What you must understand about the Beholding and the Archivist is that they are inexorably tied together, feeding each other in a continuous cycle of knowing and learning and consuming, eternal. Shades find their way to the Archives, the Archivist records their accounts. Through his terror, the Beholding is fed, and through Beholding and its knowledge of their lives, the Archivist is fed, and so it goes.
This does not stop merely because the Archivist is trying to escape Beholding’s clutches, much as he would prefer otherwise.
On his thirty-eighth attempt, the Archivist finds that the Ceaseless Watcher has learned his Desolation trick from his thirty-seventh attempt. Even utilising the gifts of the Vast, flight cannot evade the devastating cold. He crashes to the ground and the eyestalks crowd over him, replaying mistakes past and mistakes to come until mortification, or perhaps it is the hypothermia, send him hurtling back down to the Archives.
The doppelgangers he created back on his thirty-sixth attempt, courtesy of the Stranger’s intervention, are there to face him on the thirty-ninth. Still animated by bits of his skin, they are intent on gaining more, and their newfound ability to harness gravity makes it very difficult to refuse them. He evades their attacks only through the Flesh’s boon, which allows him to twist them apart with nary a thought.
But on his fortieth attempt, when the doppelgangers return with their own Fleshly learnings...well. Let us not linger on such terrible things.
*
As the guardian of the first level, it has been some time since Daisy last successfully prevented the Archivist from accessing the stairs behind her. Nonetheless, as he enters her chamber, she stands firm between him and the exit. Her limbs are contorted into beastly angles, and her teeth are very sharp and very many.
Her voice sounds as though it is coming through gravel when she says, “Didn’t think we’d be seeing you again. Heard you got out last time.”
“Well. Obviously I didn’t.” It is the very beginning of his forty-second attempt, but already the exhaustion has seeped into his limbs. He sighs and says, “We know how this is going to go, Daisy. You can’t just let me through?”
“If you’re tired, Jon, then turn around. Your place is in the Archives like the rest of us freaks.”
“Maybe. But I don’t want it to be.”
“That’s a lie and you know it.”
“I don’t...want to want it. Neither do you. I know that as well.”
She growls low, teeth bared. “Enough talking.”
Despite her overall aggressive stance, however, she does not attack him straight away.
There was a time when she would not have bothered to wait, when his unpreparedness would have been a weakness to exploit and she would simply rip his throat out and send him home. Now, although she still has her part to play as guardian of the Archives, she nonetheless waits for the Archivist to call upon his boon. Only once the Archivist has pulled dirt to his hands and a shadowy hound has coalesced at his heels does she surge forward to strike.
“Two of them? You’re getting cocky,” she says, his blood on her claws.
And perhaps she is right, as in his struggle to contain the shadow hound she does manage to kill him, a feat she has not managed in some time. But the stubborn Archivist is not one to be stopped by merely one death anymore.
That is not the case for Daisy, who has no convenient regeneration abilities and nowhere to go from the crushing dirt.
In appreciation for her kind gesture earlier, he does not wait to watch the ink claim her when she is dead.
*
A shade sits by a window in the third level. The window shows nothing but a stretching dark and the shade’s reflection in the glass, but he is still always there. Sometimes, if the Archivist is very lucky, or perhaps very unlucky, he chooses the right door in the labyrinth and finds him.
This attempt, number fifty-two, he is very unlucky.
There is a hunger, you see, that gnaws at his ribcage the further he gets from the Archive. When he has not exerted himself too much, it is gentle and he can ignore it. When he has, when the hunger is rabid, when his skin feels too tight, it is all the Archivist can do to parse the words the shade says.
And what he says this time is, “I thought you’d be gone by now, Stranger.”
“I, ah…” It takes a few moments for the Archivist to find words of his own. “Yes. Yes, I thought I would be as well. Hoped, rather.”
He can taste it in the air, a story untold, waiting.
For whatever reason, the shade on the third level never came through the Archives. The Archivist knows nothing about him except what the shade has chosen to divulge in their brief chats when he passes through, and this is a refreshing novelty in itself. He knows the shade’s many hobbies in life, his favourite foods, the movies he watched over and over. He does not know how the shade died. He does know how or why this oversight happened.
Except, in the right light, when the shade’s features are a little clearer, the Archivist thinks he bears a remarkable resemblance to Tim. A coincidence, to be sure. Never mind Tim’s eagerness to hear any word of him. Tim is merely curious.
“You don’t look so great,” the shade says. “You need to sit down?”
“No, I - I shouldn’t.” The Archivist takes a deep, shuddering breath and closes his hands into fists to keep them shaking at his sides. “I need to keep going. Thank you, though.”
The Archivist could know everything about him so very easily. All he would need to do is ask. And he would be stronger for it, he knows he would. He has been trying new pairings, testing the limits of what he can withstand by accepting more boons, and this attempt has taken too much out of him already. An unknown life’s story would do a great deal to help. It might even get him out of here.
“Shut up, please shut up.”
“What was that?” The shade has a broad, friendly smile, warm even through the washed-out green translucence.
“Never mind. Have a good day. Er. Night. Whichever it is, have a good one.”
The Archivist hurries from this room and into the next, the shade sending a bright, “Bye!” behind him.
He does not reach the Eye.
*
On his fifty-fifth attempt, the Archivist has finally trained himself to withstand and skillfully wield multiple boons at once. Thus armed with the fog of the Lonely, the precision of the Hunt, and the ferocity of the Slaughter, the Archivist once again overcomes the final obstacle of the third level, the two champions of the Panopticon, slaying first Lukas and then Magnus in what must be record time.
His brief fizzle of pride is somewhat soured by Magnus wheezing with laughter on the theatre floor, despite what is undoubtedly a great deal of pain from his empty eye-sockets.
Even without eyes, his gaze has weight to it when he turns his face in the Archivist’s general direction and says, “How many times have we done this, Jon? Do you really think it will let you leave?”
There are marionettes on the stage with them. Gigantic and humanoid, they are held in various dramatic poses and do not move, though they still bear the scorch marks and dirt and other such signs of his many previous passings. The one nearest to the Archivist looks like the hero, perhaps. Dressed in their grand but bloodied costume, their arms are held up, head raised taut, as they deliver a soliloquy to a captive audience.
“You said you wouldn’t let me leave too,” the Archivist says, and tugs at the bottom of the marionette’s shirt to straighten it out. He is making a point of looking nonchalant, you see. “And then I learned, and I got stronger, and here you are.”
Ink is seeping up from the wooden slats to pool around Magnus. Although it never rises beyond the level of a shallow puddle, not even enough to cover the Archivist’s shoes, Magnus sinks slowly below it. As it is not yet time for him to be claimed by the Archives, the Archivist does not.
“And here you are.” And with only his grin visible over the ink, yellowing skin stretched over his ancient skull, Magnus says, “And here you will be. No matter what new tricks you learn, the Beholding will learn them too, and so you’ll keep coming back. Again and again and—”
It swallows him, and his words, and the Archivist is left with only the sound of recorded applause from the tapes in the seats above.
He heads for the door.
*
Beholding has, indeed, learned. It is exceedingly painful.
*
“It’s only thirteen other entities and they’ve been around for, what? Ever? What could it possibly still have to learn?” the shade of Tim says as they lounge in the breakroom. It seems that Archivists, too, have need of rest on occasion and Tim, who is often dissatisfied with his post here in the Archive, is more than happy to abandon it and offer his company for the duration of said rest.
“I don’t know,” the Archivist says.
“Wow. Gotta be a first for you, huh, Boss? Although I guess it makes sense, what with your spooky knowledge coming from the Eyeball. Bet it isn’t too happy you’re trying to leave.”
The Archivist watches his reflection in his lukewarm and, frankly, poorly-made tea, far too much milk to try and make up for the fact it’s oversteeped. His reflection ripples as he taps his nails against the side of the cup. It’s an improvement.
“I don’t know that either. There...have been things it doesn’t want me to know, as you’re well aware, and yes, evidently it doesn’t want me leaving either. But having interacted with the others...you know, I’m not sure if feelings like happiness or sadness or even anger are really things you can ascribe to them.”
“I dunno, seems like they have enough feeling to hate each other just fine.”
“I’m not sure they do. There’s a lot more overlap than you’d think. It’s just…” The Archivist holds his hand out, burned and scarred from time upon time wielding the Desolation, and moves his fingers in a way that might have summoned flames to their tips. “Water puts out fire, sure, but fire can evaporate water too.”
“You’re not gonna give me some balance between the elements bullshit, are you?”
“No, Tim, that’s not—my point is, it’s not that they hate each other, per se. They simply...are. And some aspects of their being may interact positively or negatively with each other, but even that isn’t static. I used the Vast and the Buried together once, for instance.”
“And how’d that work out for you?”
“They have oceans, don’t they? Aboveground. For a while, so did I.” The Archivist smiles briefly, a twitch of the mouth that seems almost alien between these walls. “And now, so does the Eye. Sometimes. And you wouldn’t think that all of Extinction’s ever-changing nonsense would play well with the stasis of the End, but—”
“I’m very familiar with the stasis of the End, Jon,” says Tim, who is himself a moment of death held unchanging.
“Oh, ah….Sorry. I shouldn’t have—sorry.”
Tim waves his hand. “It’s fine, nevermind. So, you can use stuff together.”
“Right, yes. I think that, really, every one of them can be used in tandem with another. They all have points of overlap.”
“Maybe that’s what it wants, then. To understand how to use them all.”
“Maybe. I doubt I’ll ever get to the point of using all of them at once, mind you. or...I hope not.” With a sigh, the Archivist rises to his feet. He finishes his tea until the gritty dregs and takes up his tape recorder. “I should get going. If I see that shade, I’ll let you know.”
“Wait—Jon, but what if you are feeding it?”
The Archivist shrugs. “We already are.”
*
Despite the aforementioned conversation, the Archivist cannot help but feel the eyeball in the sky exhibits a certain sense of glee when it wields the many new combinations the Archivist has shown it against him.
It is a small mercy that the Beholding does not think to create its own combinations. One would think that, given its vast, ah, archive of boons and terrible things, it might have realised the Dark was very well suited to the Vast and Buried’s combined ocean, and yet, there is light at its bottom. As the Archivist is slowly crushed by the ocean’s weight, he can see the Eye watching him above.
*
The shade of Danny, as he has since introduced himself, is very cheerful when the Archivist reaches his third-level room.
“Sit a while, Stranger!” he says.
And the Archivist sees, then, the ghost of stitches and tears all over the shade’s skin. Beholding? Or is it the Stranger’s power he wields that recognises its victim? There is so much pain waiting to be uncovered, if only he asks, and the Archivist is salivating to ask. Which is why he says, “Can’t, sorry!” and tries to keep going.
But the shade stands in his path, smile fitted wrong now that the Archivist can see the hints of what might have happened to him, or perhaps it is merely the Archivist’s imagination, painting distress where there is none.
“Then tell me about Tim? Or - or they say you’re reaching the surface. Tell me about that.”
“Tim is fine. He sends his love, as always. And the surface is cold and I die before I can see much more.”
“Oh. I’m sorry...Is he well? In the Archives?”
“As well as he can be. Nothing has changed, Danny. There’s nothing to tell.”
“No...no, I guess not.”
There is such dejection in the shade’s voice that the Archivist’s heart might have broken, if he had a heart to break. As it is, all the Archivist can do is mumble a slightly awkward apology as he inches past the shade and to the next room, where the fight is suitably distracting.
*
As the collector of stories and shades, Gerry should not be assisting the Archivist in his escape attempts. He has made very many loud statements that he is not, and would not be, assisting the Archivist in any way.
His very occasional appearances in the Archivist’s path to call up creatures of the Beholding and then swiftly dispatch them are, instead, called contests, where he might be able to claim that by killing more enemies than the Archivist and winning said contests, Gerry can show the Archivist how utterly outmatched he is and encourage him to head back.
Nobody particularly believes it, least of all Gerry or the Archivist, but it is the appearance of the thing, you understand. They all have their parts to play, and so when Gerry finds the Archivist again on the second level during his fifty-eighth escape attempt, the Archivist assumes it is for another of their bouts and throws himself into the killing.
The music of the Slaughter is loud in his ears and in his heart, mimicking perhaps the beat it might once have had. With the End in his eyes, he sees precisely where to strike, and where to pull, and these barely-alive creatures succumb to the oily black tendrils pulsing in time to the Slaughter’s beat with gleeful ease. These things the Beholding throws at him are dead, or should be, and returning them to this state is such a sense of glorious rightness—on a sharp knife’s edge, no less—that it isn’t until Gerry’s cold hands are on his cheeks that the Archivist notices the enemies are long gone, shredded paper on the wind. And that in their absence he has plunged his knife in Gerry’s side as well.
“Shit! Sorry! The, ah...Sorry.”
“Easy, Jon. Just breathe.”
Gerry pulls the knife from his side with a sound like pages sliding together and returns it to the Archivist. And then, unprecedented, he does not immediately disappear in a wash of green light as he usually does, but settles beside the Archivist on the hot tile.
The Archivist is unsure of how many of the enemies he consumed, whether they were more or less than what Gerry burned. Even Gerry’s offer of a cigarette, his usual prize for winning, does not clarify things, since Gerry takes one for himself too. Gerry offers his spiderweb lighter and they smoke in companionable—and in the Archivist’s case, slightly confused—silence, until Gerry says, “You can’t keep doing this, Jon. Look at you.”
He gestures at the Archivist; his face, Corruption-marked; his palms, Desolation-burned; his bleeding ears and twisted chest and scarred throat and dark, dark eyes; and more still, hidden from Gerry’s sight. All bearing testament to the gifts he has wielded.
“Perhaps not.” The reckless Archivist is already carrying two, and intending to court at least two more before he reaches Magnus. The stairs to the top of the Panopticon and to the world beyond loom long, endless. “But I’ll keep trying.”
“You know that’s not what I mean.”
“I know. But I can’t stop trying. You know I can’t. Please don’t start this argument again.”
“Do you think you’re the only one who misses him? Do you really think he’d have wanted you to—”
“Gerry.”
“Fine...fine.” There is, between them, echoes of many such arguments that we will not delve into, but suffice it to say, Gerry was not best pleased when he discovered the Archivist was trying to escape, and he is not pleased now. “I just—You can’t brute-force this, Jon. No matter how many boons you collect, it won’t be enough to beat the Watcher.”
The Archivist inhales deeply of his foul-tasting cigarette. If he still had lungs, he imagines they would burn. “I almost got it last time, you know.”
“Yeah? Then what happened?”
“...It got back up.”
“Uh-huh. Like a certain someone we know?”
The Archivist’s silence is answer enough. He, too, has surprised many an enemy by rising after they thought he was slain. He had not particularly enjoyed being the recipient of that surprise.
Especially not when the Beholding had returned with lasers, just for added flavour.
Gerry flicks the Archivist’s arm to get his attention. “Your learning theory.”
“What about it?”
“You considered giving the old eyeball less to chew on?”
“What?”
“You’ve been piling on the freaky powers since the Spiral first reached out. If it’s learning from what you take, then just don’t. Take nothing.”
“It already has them, Gerry. At least if I pick something up on the way, I have some method of fighting back. What else would I use? My fists?”
The Archivist holds up his fists in demonstration. They are, indeed, paltry weapons.
“See? Even the voice knows.”
“Shut it, voice!” says Gerry, rather rudely in fact, as he stares into the middle distance. Receiving no response to his terribly lacklustre scowl, he elects to continue addressing the Archivist. “Probably not your fists. We can figure something out, though. Something the Eye can’t copy. Or at least something that won’t make it stronger.”
“Going to smuggle me a regular weapon, then? Seems remarkably difficult to get an axe in the Panopticon.”
“I’ll figure it out.”
“And until you do…”
The Archivist stubs out his cigarette and staggers to his feet.
“Jon…”
“I’ll see you later, Gerry.”
The Archivist resumes his journey to the surface, where his inevitable doom awaits.
*
It is only on his sixty-seventh escape attempt that the Archivist is finally successful in testing out his theory regarding the Entities.
If the Entities have no feelings one way or the other, as you may recall from his conversation with the shade of Tim, it stands to reason they may also have no...well, reasons, no will and, indeed, no independent thought. Consider how the Eye fails to wield their powers in any combinations or aspects the Archivist has not already shown it.
Building upon this, the Archivist theorises that all manifestations of fear he has thus far wielded have been a result of his own understanding of them, and his knowledge of what they are capable of. Shades are plentiful and their fears and deaths are in his bones, and so he has been applying his expectations of what they can do to create his boons.
But awareness of his expectations does not allow him to simply shed them, much as telling a person not to think of a pink elephant—ah, you’re thinking of it, hm? You see, then, why his many attempts have yet to bear fruit.
Here is the difference this time: he is tired.
He has not stopped in the Archives for always-wrong tea or a smoke or a chat in several runs, he has not spoken to Danny or Gerry or even stopped by Oliver to purchase any last minute aid. He has pushed through cycle after cycle.
And so now, faced with the writhing squirming mass that is and always has been and always will be Filth, the Archivist does not think of wasps or worms or ants or all that crawls under earth and skin, he does not think of rot or disease or the liquid stench of putrefaction. He is too tired to think. He closes his eyes, reaches out his hand, and simply sinks within it.
And for the first time, he hears a song.
The champions of the Panopticon are helpless before it. But, more interestingly, it is not a swift and painful death the Archivist delivers. Or rather, it is not the Archivist who delivers it.
Caught in the strands of That Which Loves You, Magnus and Lukas turn on each other. To be entirely fair, they already did so often within the theatre without the Archivist to egg them on, but such a thing was sport, the basis upon which their bond was built. This is not sport. No one enjoys this. The marionettes dance on their hooks as Magnus and Lukas knock into them, faceless and uncaring. The tape recorders offer their tinned applause. There is the occasional pause for laughter.
When the ink comes for them, the Archivist drowns himself in it. He will not allow Beholding to learn this as well.
*
He has not seen Beholding in very many attempts now, a fact Magnus does not fail to note as he dies on the seventy-ninth.
“Given up, have you? I knew you would eventually.”
His voice breaks into a thousand little shards in colours unseen in the Archives for many, many years. The Archivist does not wince away from the sharp brightness of That Which Lies, last and most difficult for him to grasp, though it hurts his eyes and his mind. It is important for him to see.
When next he emerges from the pool of ink, the Archivist can finally see the edges in Helen’s smile as she greets him.
“Could I have a word, Helen? Perhaps we could share some tea in the breakroom,” he says, and that smile curls wider.
“A drink with little old me?” says the entity that had sympathised with him, that had promised to put him in touch with a way to get out of here, that sometimes calls itself Helen. “I am fairly busy, you know.”
“I’m sure.” The Archivist smiles back, wan as it is. “But can’t you spare even a moment for an old friend?”
“Well. If it’s for a friend…”
The Archivist knows better than to expect answers from the throat of delusion. But it’s a start. And besides, he does need someone to practice on if he’s going to use more than just his fists.
It has occurred to him, since his talk with Gerry, that he does have one thing he can use that would not make the Eye stronger.
Sat with Helen in the break room, he clicks on a tape and says, “Tell me.”
From his voice come hooks that pull, and pull, and where shades would tell him their stories and their traumas and then go about their way, the Distortion unravels in the telling. All he is left with in the end is a golden thread, frayed, and the certainty Helen had not known what compelled her to introduce him to the Spiral for that first fateful boon and show him the way out when, honestly, she had been enjoying seeing him mope alone here in the Archives. Something greater had been at work. But despite this, despite Helen being aware she had not been acting entirely of her own volition, she had enjoyed it.
Watching his many deaths had, apparently, been fun.
He washes off the aftertaste of betrayal with cold tea before leaving to begin his next attempt. He does not notice, or perhaps does not care to notice, the eyes of every shade upon him.
*
On his eighty-ninth escape attempt, the Archivist arrives at the yellow door wielding no boons. He has neither Spiral nor Stranger, Hunt nor Slaughter, not Lonely or Corruption or Buried or Vast or Flesh or Extinction or Dark or Desolation or End. It has taken him many, many attempts to get here again once he decided to carry only Beholding with him and yet, despite everything, he is here.
He has Seen and Known the truth behind each of the guardians of the Panopticon, each of the boons offered to him, and he has prepared in every way he knows how. What is left is for him to try and See the truth behind the Eye as well. The issue here, of course, is that the Eye cannot see inside of itself, and such a thing is very unlikely to succeed.
Our weary Archivist is nonetheless, and perhaps unwisely, hopeful. And in this hope, he rediscovers his wonder of the bracing cold, the snow still gently falling from the closed sky. He holds his palm out to try and catch it.
The sky opens almost lazily, but the eyestalks that begin to sprout from the ground are anything but. The Archivist takes a deep breath.
From his pockets, he pulls statements. Statements upon statements upon statements written in ink and in blood and freed from their dusty cobwebbed boxes, they cover the ground behind him. A suitable space for an offering.
“I was wondering, you know. You have all of these in your domain, and all of those fearful dead, and plenty plenty who are or were servants of the others. And yet you’re using me to learn. Why?”
The Eye above settles on him, steady. The eyestalks are still pulling themselves free of the soil, but they do not approach, and even the doppelgangers wait at the periphery. He can feel the weight of the Watcher’s attention and, for once, the Archivist gives into it. He is wielding nothing but Beholding, and he cannot use that to fight Beholding. To understand, he must give in.
His breathing slows then ends on an exhale. His thoughts trail off. After practicing with all of the other Entities, the Archivist has become fairly good at emptying himself of expectations.
Unblinking, he watches the sky Watch him as he sinks into the pile of statements he has made. It engulfs him entirely.
Offering accepted, it seems.
Time has never existed under the Ceaseless Watcher’s gaze, and so the Archivist cannot tell how much of it has passed. All he knows is the flurry of activity outside of what he has come to realise is his cocoon. What had been a loose pile of paper statements has since curved and solidified around him into a more purposeful structure. He thinks they add material to it, a heaviness that settles on his chest and liquid voices and something viscous that drip-drip-drips over his head.
It is painful. There’s that too. Surrendering to the Eye is somehow far more excruciating than fighting it. He must die at least once or twice because he can feel the ink come for him, is aware of the familiar sinking feeling, but he does not know when it withdraws without him or why, except that this, not the Archives, is where he belongs.
And then he Knows it is time.
There is no cold when he breaks free of his cocoon, no snow to greet him, only the large wet lens bearing down upon the earth. It looks close enough to touch.
Behind him, papery wings flutter. He carefully unfurls them, finding brief wonder in the action and despite everything, they are beautiful. If he squints, he can even tell the statements they have been built from.
“Oh,” the Archivist says. “I see.”
The Eye has issued him an invitation.
No eyestalks or doppelgangers stop the Archivist from flying, only the press of the Eye’s gaze upon him, and even that he has grown accustomed to. With every beat, he hears the voices of shades drifting on the breeze, fearful wails and quiet weeping and gasping exhortations to please, please leave me alone.
The Archivist reaches out to the hungry gaping emptiness of pupil, flies as hard and as fast as he can.
And this is all symbolic, you realise. It does not matter that he has wings and that the wings have eyes and that he is rising to a giant eyeball in the sky, precisely. What matters is that he brought offering and subjected himself to transformation and is coming to give himself and what he has learned to it. Everything else is more...faff, I suppose you could say, but that’s the Entities for you.
“You want to understand,” the Archivist says, and laughs the laugh of someone knowing they approach an end. “You see, but you can’t experience. I can. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
Unsurprisingly, the Eye does not respond. It does not need to.
When the Archivist disappears into its depths, the Eye closes behind him.
No, fear not, this is not the end. Wait. Look closely.
The Eye sees, yes, and knows, certainly. But it is not meant to understand. That is not its domain. Understanding pain and fear and death, especially death...ah, there, do you see? The curve of the Eye begins to implode. It seems our Archivist may have done it after all.
And I hear you ask, why would the Eye have allowed this? Would it not have known, at some level, that this may be the end result? Perhaps. Who can say how these beings think, or if they think, or if their actions are their own at all.
Even if it did know, and its actions were its own...well. The Archivist knows all about impossible aspirations, does he not?
*
The Archivist awakens to sunlight, warm and prickling and far, far too bright for one who has been underground for so long. Almost as soon as he opens his eyes he has to close them again, holding up a hand to shield them. Disoriented as he is, the Archivist does not realise that this is, in fact, the sun, or the enormity of the fact it is the sun, for some time.
It is only when he notices that he isn’t being attacked despite being, for all intents and purposes, a sitting duck, that he chances squinting against the brightness and actually has a look around.
Empty.
The sky is a lovely blue now that it isn’t being swallowed by an eye. An expanse of fresh-fallen snow stretches at either side of him, not a single eyestalk or wavering doppelganger to mar it, and not too far away, an idyllic sparkling lake. Like something from a children’s storybook.
Just to the right of the lake is a door.
Not a yellow one, nothing so threatening. It is merely a dark wooden door stood upright in the middle of nothing.
The Archivist staggers to his feet like a newborn calf. His wings slough off behind him, paper curling and flaking away, lightening his spine with each step as he approaches the door. He reaches for the door knob, only to hesitate at the last.
The world above is a large place, after all. Who knows if the one he seeks is anywhere nearby or, if he is, whether he would want to see the Archivist in the first place.
“You’re not helping,” the Archivist mutters.
For the first time in a very long time, the Archivist has no idea what lies behind this door. It is, perhaps, more frightening than anything he has faced thus far.
But fear has never stopped him before and will not stop him now. How’s that for helping?
Our enduring Archivist steels himself with, “It’s fine. It’ll be fine. Even if Martin doesn’t want to see me, he—I’ll have tried. I’ll have...shown him I can try.” And thus fortified, the Archivist opens the door and steps over the threshold, into the world beyond.
Behind him, eight impossibly long, hairy legs slowly unfurl from the doorway.
They wait until the Archivist is aware of the shadow they cast upon him—for the drama, you see—before clamping down. There is the start of a scream, what sounds like, “Mar—!” But alas for the Archivist, he is pulled into the darkness before he can finish it.
The door slams shut, and he is returned to the Archives where he must begin his escape again.
And again.
And again.
END