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The multiverse is a bundle of parallel lines that can never touch. Are never supposed to touch. But they are connected. The lives of every person who has ever existed are etched into the fabric of reality that stretches across dimensions. Sometimes, a person is left out of one universe, never to even exist there. Like Anya Villette, and the dimension where the powers that be feed on the fear and terror of its inhabitants. If a person is not etched into the bones of a universe, they are never meant to exist there. Like Anya Villette.
But then it tears.
A rift, jagged and twisted, rips in the fabric. And the worlds that are never meant to touch each other suddenly can.
Most people in most dimensions never notice. If people slip between realities, they are normal missing persons. If one specific location has more missing persons than others, it is simply haunted. No universe makes the connection, the leap that the location has something to do with the disappearances, that something in the universe is irreversibly incorrect. None, except for one.
And that one is the world of fear. In the world of fear, something notices the rift, the tear, the gap in reality where others can leak in. And it hatches a plan to spread the fear of this world to every other one. The being is known as many things, though it is not truly independent, only a part of a larger, more complex being that is incomprehensible to the minds of anything in that world. The Mother of Puppets, the Weaver, the Hidden Machination, the Spider. But in most cases, it is simply called the Web. And the Web’s grand design begins with one of its siblings, the most foolish and susceptible to manipulation. The Eye, the Ceaseless Watcher, Beholding, I Know You. The being that thrived on knowing too much, more than it should, but never understanding it.
And the first step in the Web’s plan is a boy, aged eight, named Jonathan Sims. A curious boy, always consuming knowledge and books, but only ever seeing the bigger picture far too late. A good fit for the Eye. And so, the Web feeds him trauma and tragedy in the form of a small, gray book with an innocuous name. A Guest for Mr. Spider. And the first step in the Web’s plan is finished. It guides Jon’s path, influencing his decisions in subtle ways that he will never see until the end.
It leads him to the Magnus Institute. An organization dedicated to researching the esoteric and paranormal. Of course, that is and was never its true purpose. Its true purpose was to serve the Web’s most important puppet: the Eye. The Institute and its head were always pawns in the Web’s game. Jonah Magnus is an egotistical fool, intent on using the Eye to gain unlimited power for himself, using unnatural methods to live for as long as possible. He attempted a ritual once, to bring the Eye into being, before the Institute existed. It didn’t work, as no ritual will ever work, save for one that brings all the beings of fear into the world as one. None of the Web’s siblings understand this, for they do not have the capacity for understanding, only being ravenous and greedy for more.
Jonah Magnus has a capability to manipulate those around him as well, a good fit for the Web if he was not so fixated on his own power and success. But he is also rash sometimes. But one of these moments of rashness is good for the Web, and it is when Magnus kills the Head Archivist, Gertrude Robinson, who was too ruthless to be marked by any Entity, intent on stopping as many of them as possible, even her own patron. Both Gertrude and Magnus had finally learned what the Web had always known: that the rituals were never able to succeed because every Entity of Fear was inextricably linked. And the Web knew that Magnus would need an Archivist marked by all of its siblings for his grand ritual of summoning all the Entities to work.
Now, the position of Archivist, the Web understood, was always necessary to its machinations. And so, the Web subtly pushes Jon towards the Institute and the position of Archivist. And Magnus, despite being a master manipulator, falls for the bait. And Jon becomes the Archivist.
This is where our story begins, the story of Martin Blackwood and Jonathan Sims in a world ruled by fear, and how their relationship changes the backbone of reality as we know it.
When Jon is promoted to Head Archivist, for his Becoming will come much later, he chooses two assistants. Sasha James, an inquisitive soul who recklessly charges into danger to satisfy her curiosity, one who was always of the Eye. Timothy Stoker, a jokester who hides, touched by creatures of the Stranger, of the unknown, who had too much rage and nowhere to spend it, always pushing it down.
But the assistant we care about for this story is the one who Jon never wanted. Martin Blackwood, a gentle soul who cares deeply for everyone, even those who never give any of that care back. A man who is surprisingly adept at using his supposed clumsiness and awkwardness to get what he wants, more attuned to the Web than is expected. A deeply isolated person, attuned to the Lonely, another Entity. Now, in every other world, if Martin meets Jon, they will never work out, never become anything more than friends. That is even how it starts here, with Jon’s disdain for the assistant who can never do his job right. But no other universe deals with the machinations of the Mother of Puppets. In no other universe do the two of them share so much trauma and pain and tragedy.
And trauma and pain and tragedy is what they share before they ever fall in love. Because for Magnus’s ritual to work, the Archivist must fear all the Entities of Fear itself.
It begins with Jane Prentiss. A woman, though she is more accurately described as a Flesh-Hive. A thing that only exists to host manifestations of the Corruption, the fear of insects and disease and decay and rot. In this case, these manifestations are worms. Her attack brings Jon and Martin closer together, despite pushing away everyone else who Jon cares for. Sasha, dead and replaced by a thing of the Stranger, only one person able to remember who she truly was. Tim, consumed by anger against the things that killed his brother, against Jon himself for falling to the depths of paranoia, who eventually blows himself up to feel fulfilled in his revenge.
And Jon, despite losing almost everyone, keeps going. He is marked and hurt and scarred by more people touched by the Entities. Avatars, he calls them. And every mark brings him and Martin closer and closer.
Until the End. The only other Entity, besides the Web, that never has and never will attempt a ritual. For it understands something very different from the rift, something that the Web also knows: everything in the world will die eventually. And it takes Jon. For six months, Martin is left alone, and he falls deeper and deeper into the clutches of the Lonely.
But Jon survives, Jon wakes up. But he is changed. More resigned to his fate as something inhuman, something monstrous. And this resignation brings with it clarity. The clarity of his feelings, which he had been avoiding. His growing affection and love for Martin. And the roles reversed. Martin now the one denying his feelings, and Jon the one trying to get him back. He does, after a long time of pain and more marks that Jon is unable to ask for help from anyone to heal from. All the people he gained on his journey of pain and scars repelled by his inhumanity, his monstrosity. But he gets Martin back, and for Jon, that is enough.
The time at the safehouse allows both Jon and Martin to finally accept their feelings, to truly fall in love. Something that should have been impossible, something never sewn into the fabric of the multiverse. And yet, it happens, because of the machinations of the Web. The machinations that have somehow defied the very nature of reality itself.
And then the Web moves the next pawn in its path. Once again, something for Jon to read, something to feed him more trauma and pain. A statement that is not a statement, a monologue from Jonah Magnus, and the apocalypse.
Jon crashes, hard, into the self-doubt and guilt that have shadowed him his whole life. But this time, Martin is there to pick up the pieces. They do what the Web intended all along, travelling to London to reverse the horrible Change that brought Fear itself into reality. They encounter more pain and more terror on their unholy pilgrimage, but they have each other, and that is enough. The Spider sends one of its little ones, a messenger by the name of Annabelle Cane, to finally reveal the hidden truth of its machinations. And it understands that it has succeeded.
Jon betrays the others, trying to keep the Entities of Fear contained to his universe. But the Web has seen this strand of possibility, and it made sure that the one thing that could force Jon’s hand was something he always forgot about, an innocent, inconspicuous, lighter. The Web has seen the depth of his love for Martin, and it uses that as well, to force Jon to follow through with its plan. After all, who can be better at manipulation than the manifestation of control itself?
The tether is cut, and the Fears are set free, sewn into the very essence of the multiverse, rewriting reality itself, though they manifest differently in every world. Every universe is a parallel line. All except one. The world of fear is a line that curves, touching all the others. The Web has one gift, though, for the ones who it could not have completed its plan without. Jon and Martin. As appreciation for their… shall we say, cooperation, the Web does two things. One of these is more important than the others for this story. And that act is: the Web etches the deep love and affection between Jon and Martin into the backbone of reality, rewriting it so that they are together in every universe, archiving their story into the bones of the multiverse.
In a world where the Fears manifest as arcane magic, Jon a village mage and Martin a humble baker, a world where they are only friends, feelings start to grow. Feelings that are ignored by both sides until they are too strong to deny anymore, and both people accept them.
In a world that Fear has deemed uninteresting and ignored, Jon meets Martin during his time at Oxford. They both realize that they have been missing the other for as long as they could remember, despite never having met each other before. And they fall in love slowly, so slowly, but it happens.
In a world where the Fears have suffused in everyday life, Jon is a vampire and Martin is a librarian with a penchant for the supernatural. Their love is a whirlwind, but it occurs all the same.
And there are many more worlds where Jon and Martin, who were never meant to have a happy ending, get one because of the Web and the sacrifice of its Jon and Martin.
But not every world gives them a happy ending. In one world, a world very close to Jon and Martin’s original one, the Magnus Institute was quite a different place, and it went up in flames long before anything truly terrible could happen there. But in this world, Jon and Martin don’t get their happy ending. In this world, Jonathan Sims and Martin Blackwood die separately, unrelated causes of death, before they ever have the chance to meet each other. But then again, in this world, Jon never reads the book that started it all.
And in a world on the edge of the fabric, a world where the Fears influence, despite being imprinted on the spine of the multiverse, barely existed, the Web’s final gift appears. A world that never ran parallel to the others, but rather ran perpendicular. A world for the dead. Of course, just like the rest of the multiverse, it too would come to a close eventually. But that moment would only come after a long, long time. And it’s in this world that the Web sends the essences of the Jon and Martin who had allowed its master plan to come to fruition. It lets them live happily, unbothered, fully human in this world with the faint influence it had. It gives them the somewhere else that Jon had weakly promised to his love in their final moments. It gives them a life without the presence of Fear, a life worth living. And they do, for many years, for they already have friends in this final resting place for the dead. Sasha, who they could make new memories with after their original ones were stolen. Tim, who Jon could finally reconcile with and begin healing. Daisy, who they helped to recover from the loss of her partner. And when familiar faces join them, Melanie, Georgie, and Basira, they too are welcomed with open arms. And when the end finally comes, for it always does, Jon, Martin, and all their friends are ready, for they have suffered and fought for and against things that are both unavoidable and inevitable. And the ones who gave up so much are allowed to rest and drift in the endless expanse of nothingness that comes after the end of everything.
Of course, in worlds where they never existed, they never would, for that is not how the rules of reality work. Ours is one such world. Our world of stories and tales. Jon and Martin are one such tale, one to be told and shared around the world. But our world is not the focus of this story. This story is about Jon and Martin, and how their love reshaped reality. And it comes to a close.
Fin.