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It starts, as so many of the worst things do, so very small.
The doctors call it 'premature greying'. It's exceedingly unusual for it to happen to an 8-year-old boy, but not unheard of. It's unusual for it to not get worse as that boy grows up. At least, until Jonathan Sims becomes Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute.
He doesn't notice it, of course, not at first. The webs in his hair, the "white hairs" he's lived with almost since before he can remember, multiply so very slowly. How many strands of hair are on a human head? One hundred thousand? And each new Statement read into the tape recorder only adds a handful to the mix, mere single digits, only sometimes edging into the double digits. Subtle. Always subtle.
The second Mark isn't so easily ignored, but is just as quickly dismissed in the face of Jon's much larger concerns after Jane Prentiss' attack. The worm scars are always there, but no, they're not all. They're only the most visible part. Corruption seeps into Jon's flesh irrevocably. At night, when he's failing to sleep, he sometimes feels his veins squirm. Sometimes the scars itch, and when he goes to scratch them he thinks, for a moment too quick to be remembered, that his fingers touch an open hole instead of a little bump.
The third Mark is another scar. The third Mark is so much more. Michael's stab heals into a spiraling knot of scar tissue that never feels the same, be it to how the skin and meat used to be before the wound, or from one day to the next. The scar is thick and stiff. The scar is thin, barely there. The scar is raw and pink and almost bloody. The scar was never there at all. The scar is elsewhere, even though Jon remembers Martin asking him about the wound on his... shoulder? Arm? Leg? The scar always seems to keep him up at night.
He becomes very familiar with every single one of his worm scars. Those, at least, don't wander.
The fourth Mark never appears physically. His face doesn't peel off or get lost after the confrontation with the Not-Sasha. But, every now and then he notices odd looks from his assistants, a confused glance as though, for just a second, they don't recognize him. Sometimes, Jon catches a glimpse of himself in a mirror and has to look again when his reflection isn't quite right.
The fifth Mark is impossible to ignore. Jude Perry does her job well. Jon's hand becomes a glove of gnarled scar tissue so stiff in places he can't fully spread out his fingers anymore. It also becomes a beacon of impossible heat. Jon's hands have always been cold, bad circulation or something, but not anymore.
His right hand forever burns now. The heat radiates up his arm, sometimes only up to the elbow, sometimes all the way past his shoulder. He has to get into the habit of holding Statements with his left hand, because his right sometimes leaves burnt fingerprints on the paper. One night, in the dark and quiet of his bedroom, Jon snaps his fingers and swears he sees sparks.
The sixth Mark also isn't physical. Michael Crew never laid a hand on Jon, after all. Instead, it's his hair that sometimes curls and ripples in an unseen breeze, just often enough that Jon notices it because, when it happens, he feels like he's falling again. He stumbles and almost does fall flat on his face more than once.
The seventh Mark leaves him tasting blood in the back of his throat, even after the cut fully heals. At this point, that's the least of Jon's worries. He's just thankful that Daisy's knife didn't carve out his voice. For some reason, the thought of no longer being able to speak scares him almost as much as being dragged out to the woods to die.
And then...
And then.
Everything changes after the End.
The eighth Mark in and of itself is simple. Jon's heart sits still and lifeless in his chest. The cold of the grave soaks into his flesh. And very rarely, he catches a glimpse of the corpse roots Oliver spoke of so eloquently. But none of that is the most important part.
Every other Mark gets worse.
The cobwebs in his hair get so thick he can't fool himself into thinking they're just white hairs anymore. The worm scars sink into inch-deep holes that are, at the very least, full of skin instead of exposed raw flesh. The spiraling scar becomes even less consistent, moving and warping and twisting so often Jon sometimes feels it change right under his touch. He's so unrecognizable at times that Basira almost shoots him once when he accidentally sneaks up on her.
His right hand burns so hot that clasping his corpse-cold left hand into it causes pain so intense it stops registering as pain. His hair never sits still anymore, always waving and rippling in a wind only he can feel, forcing the cobwebs to stretch between the messy locks. His throat is always full of blood, the smell of it filling his nose, the taste coating his tongue.
The only silver lining is that he can hold a cup of tea in his hand and warm it up within seconds. It's not really enough to replace the longing for Martin's tea, but it's something.
The ninth Mark is a welcome change of pace. It heals into a simple, plain scar, small and unassuming. And it hurts. It's not the burning pain of his hand, but a stabbing agony, an ache that comes in waves, an ache that burrows deeper whenever he moves or when Melanie is nearby. But, by now Jon is so stranger to pain. Even if it feels like the scalpel blade is still embedded in his flesh, even if it's a pain he can't ignore, he's used to it. He has to be.
The tenth Mark is almost comically straightforward. The results of the Boneturner's extraction aren't scars, but splits across Jon's skin, two lines at the bottom of his ribcage where the flesh has been permanently unzipped. They don't bleed. They don't even hurt, not really. They're just there. The raw meat pulls apart with a quiet wet sound whenever he bends his torso a certain way. He can slip his fingers inside the long pockets where his ribs used to be and feel the slick surface of the pleural sac.
He has little time to dwell on it, however, before gaining the eleventh Mark, one that he and Daisy share. Neither of them ever manage to fully wash off the dirt from the coffin. It clings to them like glue. When it gets damp with sweat, the grit on Daisy smells of rust and metal. Jon isn't entirely sure if he's still capable of sweating, but in the shower, his dirt smells of mold and petrichor.
The twelfth Mark should, by all rights, have been the end of it. The Dark Sun should've rendered him blind. Instead, his pupils are blown out wide enough to encompass the entirety of his eyeballs. His eyes become pits of impenetrable dark, tiny black holes squatting in his eye sockets to take in everything around him. Basira tells him about them during the dizzying walk through Helens's corridors. He can't find it in him to be surprised.
Finally, the last. The thirteenth Mark. Jon is almost fond of it, because this one he shares with Martin.
Fog shrouds them. It follows them everywhere, drifting in their wake. It fills their breaths no matter the temperature. Around Jon's right hand, it blackens into smoke. The white fog and the white cobwebs in his hair are all but indistinguishable as it drifts in the unseen wind of the Vast.
For a few glorious weeks, all Jon and Martin have to worry about is living around the many Marks Jon bears. Needless to say, it's Martin who always goes to the village.
And then one day, when he heads out, Beholding swallows reality.
If the End's Mark made all the others worse, the Watcher's Crown only multiplies that. Jon becomes a patchwork of skin, flesh and bone that is ever-changing under the Spiral's influence.
The slits that used to house his ribs blink around misshapen eyes, their edges ringed with teeth, or fingernails, or tufts of hair, or nothing at all besides bare pink skin. Where skin and flesh overlap, Corruption bores holes that twitch around squirming eyeballs. His face collapses like a dying star into an all-consuming void where no light escapes, and yet his voice and his ability to stare are never affected by the lack of mouth and eyes.
Vast wind and Lonely fog combine into a perpetual twister that varies wildly in intensity from hour to hour, though it's always cut through with the black smoke that pours from the dim flames burning around his right hand. It's one of the few places that's consistent despite the Spiral's constant mad shifting; flesh and skin never linger atop the charred black bone.
His throat is always slashed and bleeding, as is any patch of skin and meat that manifests too close to the gaping wound. The ever-present pain of Slaughter forms into actual weapons, sometimes arrows scattered across his back, sometimes a sword jammed in his ribs, sometimes the deceptively tiny holes of bullets festering under his skin. Removing them only makes new weapons appear.
When Jon has them, dirt fills his lungs. Any gap in his organs gets packed full of soil, sharp aching grit that scrapes at his insides and, often, trickles out to chafe across his skin when it gets caught up in the whirlwind of fog. The grains of it fill the cobwebs that cling to him even now, no longer confined to their disguise as white hairs but free to stretch between the patches of skin and muscle, as though trying to smooth out his mismatched self with their gossamer strands.
Jon would call it hell if he weren't keenly, impossibly, undeniably aware of just how many hells make up the world now, like many-colored bricks laid with a mortar of crushed eyeballs.
The journey through said hells only heightens each Mark. In the Dark, the void of his face expands across the whole of his body. In the Vast, the wind carries him wherever he needs to go. In the Web, the strands of silk burrow into his joints and drag behind him like puppet strings. He hates those domains the most out of all of them.
It's not always possible, but he holds Martin's hand through it all as often as he can.
Still, all things must End. The Fears. The world. Even the Archivist's torture.
When he kills Jonah and takes his rightful place atop the Panopticon, Jon is reborn. All the Marks are pulled out of him like teeth, sucked up into the voyeuristic pleasure of his Master.
Saying he's returned to his old self wouldn't be accurate, because he was never like this. No white in his hair, no scars on his skin, no maddening spiral gouged into his flesh to keep him up at night. Jonathan Sims, the Archivist, the Pupil of the Eye, appears as he would have if the Fears had never touched him.
With one exception. The power of Beholding beams from his eyes out into the world, transforming the Panopticon into an ever-watchful lighthouse, the axis upon which the world of fear turns.
For a few glorious seconds, Jon gets to enjoy absolute knowledge of Everything.
And then Martin arrives.
His eyes lock with Jon's, despite the impossible light that shines from them. There's confusion, relief, dread, elation, so many emotions that clog up Martin's mind under Jon's all-knowing gaze. Martin's breath shakes.
"John?"
The Archivist smiles.
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