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The glory of the Panopticon as it serves its ultimate purpose is unutterable, and yet the moment it becomes the epicentre of this new, ruined world, all Elias can do—all Jonah Magnus can do—is speak. He is crowned with eyes, opening up inside him to scour every inch of this kingdom he has wrought for himself. He takes in one great lungful of air, and gazes out from the back of his own throat. It doesn’t even matter that he knows, and knows instantly, that the Watcher has never wanted him. He knows just as well that he is useful enough that it will give him what he wants. The Beholding wrenches him open to let in the light of this glorious wreckage, pouring the horror of the world into his mind. It rips through everything; through everyone he has ever been in all the stolen years of his life. He isn’t Jonah Magnus anymore. He isn’t even Elias Bouchard. And it is ecstasy.
Horrors beyond counting, beyond time, bleed into him, into each other, clawing their way out of his mouth in fragments and all the while he burns like an inextinguishable spark, drifting up towards infinity. Billions of lives, each at their most vital, their most desperate, swallow him up, clinging for dear life. He takes them all in, cracking open their despair like so many bones, so that the Eye can suck the marrow out. It knows, and knows, and knows, but it cannot quite connect without his mind to bridge the gap, carrying the current until the very stuff of him is aglow, until it is scorched black with every plea, every anguished cry for mercy. The silent dread, the sickening realization, the paranoia, the anger, all of it is his. The coffers of his treasury are overflowing, and he is nothing if not a generous king. Every moment is a feast for the Eye, transforming all that pain and fear and helplessness into a pleasure so absolute that it overwhelms. For an instant, this one more exquisitely painful than anything that came before it, he wonders—as much as he can wonder—if Peter ever felt anything close to this, adrift on the endless sea. Then it sinks down into the rest, washed away by the wild delight of this eternal triumph.
This is the annihilation that he craves, the annihilation that he has lied, has betrayed, has killed for—a destruction that he alone can survive. He is a through-note that will continue even when the rest of this symphony is silent. His voice will be the last sound on earth before the End. A part of him, buried under the onslaught of Knowing, knows that it is still coming. That he will be powerless before it. He watches as others light the way. But there in the embrace of the Great Watcher, he cannot begin to comprehend what that means. Then he feels something new, like tension in a loose thread, and he begins to unravel from the centre of this most perfect storm. There is a name attached to him, still, and it acts, now, as an anchor.
Jonah Magnus.
The voice that calls him is one he recognizes. He has listened to its recitations. All those precious statements that pleased their master so. His blessed Archivist, without whom he would never have known so much, who has seen the beauty of the Beholding, and walked its blasted landscape. The Eye releases Jonah Magnus gently, though now it seems ridiculous to imagine that it does so out of gratitude. It takes a moment before he can think through the haze left behind by the euphoria of Watching. Had he dreamt it? He knows that he has before, many times. But the Eye has not taken back all of its gifts, and Jonah Magnus begins to understand where he is, who stands before him, and what, no doubt, has come for him at last. It’s over.
Jonathan has become so much more than he might ever have conceived. He has seen him on the edges of the sublime visions that the Watcher has gifted him, unfurling so, so beautifully, but now that he has come, Jonah can barely recognize him. Resplendent and terrible and raw as an exposed nerve. He cannot believe that his Archivist, who could never have become this without him, will have the fortitude to end him here, to take his place within the Eye. But the onslaught of vengeful blows that Jon administers soon fill him with the cold terror that has chased him all the way to the end of the world. He is too afraid even to save himself. And his pleas are met with nothing but the promise that there will be no escape. Not for him. Not for anyone. The Archivist grasps him by the hair, jerking his head back. Jonah glimpses the silver flash of the knife as it comes up. And then it descends. And then he is dying.
The sharp edge burying itself in his heart brings with it an agony that clarifies. That alters. Death looms over him as he writhes in the Archivist’s grasp, and its descent manages to be both too slow and impossibly fast. From deep within the Eye, Jonah has seen the poor souls down below begging for release from the clutches of this world, and it’s only then that he begins to understand that impulse which runs so counter to his very nature. He wants it to be over, now. Finally, finally, when the knife comes out, and the Archivist lets him fall, it is almost a relief.
His stolen body shudders as his grip on it begins to loosen. Jonah had almost forgotten about poor Elias, who gasps so stubbornly for breath, for a moment to exist again, and for the first, the only time, they do it in near-perfect unison. Jonah knows, just as Elias has no choice but to know, that one can only be certain of what will come of an apocalypse after the final piece has fallen into place. He had intended his for humanity, and now his own Archivist, fashioned for that purpose, would begin his own, this one for the Fears themselves. Perhaps he might even succeed. Perhaps it would be wonderful, too. The words are almost too difficult to form, and they come out stained with blood.
“Good… luck…”