Chapter Text
Everything was too sharp, too new. The dust-and-paper smell of the archives, the dim gaslight, the chill air. Jon found himself overwhelmed, shaking - but also smiling, happier to have all his senses reeling than he ever could have imagined.
He was alive, to some degree. He was within his own centre of power. He was back .
It was like appreciating the absence of a pain he had grown accustomed to, an old ache finally relieved: the ability to feel the softness and the comfort of the pallet and blankets it turned out he was lying on was strange, profuse bliss. When he raised his eyes, he could see discarded clothes, a flask, the remains of someone’s lunch, and a haphazard pile of statements. The others must have found him and brought him here to recover - but, god, his friends, were they alright? He had stopped the ritual, yes, but he had still ended up in danger, and perhaps they had too…
Jon craned his neck to look around - though, now he was moving, he felt stronger than he imagined he should be, probably able to stand. Oliver said he had gone days at least without food or water, without blood pumping through his veins or air in his lungs. He felt fine despite it, only unsettled. If anything, he thought his eyesight might actually be better than before, preternaturally crisp and clear. The room was empty. He was dressed only in the same shirt and trousers as he had been wearing inside the Spiral; there was even a glimmering rainbow stain, now devoid of any power, marring the grey material over his calf to prove it. The rest of his clothes were folded neatly on top of his shoes by a desk, a single tidy spot in a sea of abandoned chaos: from this angle, he could see dirty bowls and cups, half-read statements and scrawled research, another makeshift bed, a shawl he recognised as belonging to Melanie, left cast carelessly over Martin’s coat. They seemed to be living here, keeping watch, waiting for him. Jon swallowed a lump of emotion at the thought of such care.
But where were the others?
He Knew instantly that there was no one else anywhere in the archives. It was only just evening, as far as he could tell - no sunlight ever breached the basement, but there wasn’t the bitter cold of deep night - and the rest of the Institute should be empty, or close to empty, its employees probably still recovering from whatever atrocities they might have endured during the Great Twisting.
Curious, but not yet alarmed, still overwhelmingly glad to be alive, Jon Looked through the building.
Only to recoil at what he saw.
There was a presence in the Institute: it belonged here, it was at home here, powerful, but the power that it held over him was not that of the Ceaseless Watcher. This man owned him in a very mundane and yet unbreakable way. His pace as he made his way down the stairs was seemingly urgent, but the expression Jon Saw on his face was as haughty and unreadable as ever.
Jon didn’t have time to react, to do anything but freeze, stare blankly forward in bone-deep dread.
With glassy composure hiding any hint of feeling or purpose, Mister Magnus walked calmly into the archives; he was utterly poised, unperturbed, as he paused just over the threshold to smoothly adjust his already-perfect suit cuffs. The serenity of his actions did not fool Jon in the slightest. When his master looked down his nose to make eye contact, it was like a dagger through his frightened mind, like cruel, cold fingers combing through his thoughts.
“No hysterics,” Magnus warned him, before he could even begin to truly panic, implied threat deafening in each soft word.
As ordered, Jon clamped down on the urge to run, to hide. But without acquiescing to his terror, he had no idea how to react - so he remained on the floor, stiff, scared, staring.
“Get up, boy.”
Jon pushed himself to stand on fawn-trembling limbs, shoulders up around his ears.
“Get dressed.”
His eyes flicked briefly to his pile of clothes: but, no, he did not feel so naked in shirtsleeves that he jumped immediately to cover himself, and his instinct to mollify this man with deference was not so great that he could force himself to move, to put himself in the vulnerable and humiliating position of fumbling with his suit before eyes that watched with the sole aim to terrify. He didn’t move. Magnus raised a single disdainful eyebrow at this small resistance, full of disdain.
“Very well, then. Follow me .”
The words were laden heavy with compulsion. That ability extracted truth, not compliance: Magnus had not asked a question, there was nothing there that Jon could be forced to answer, but that was not the point. It was intended as a power play, a reminder that Magnus had been favoured of their patron long before his apprentice’s birth, and that in the service of the Eye, Jon was nothing more than an upstart brat. It was a reminder that he had no other choice but to obey.
So Jon followed him.
They walked, to his considerable surprise, not up into the body of the Institute proper, but further into the archives. Jon knew each and every corridor of his own domain, of course, but he had never had much interest in this most distant one. It was a narrow, snaking thing at the back of the building where they sometimes kept discredited statements. The most that he could have said of it was that it was peaceful, perhaps, but Jon had little free time to waste on peace.
Magnus gave no word of explanation. He reached out and pulled an empty bookshelf away from the wall, which swung open too smoothly, too silently, on disguised hinges kept well-oiled, and revealed a simple wooden door set back in the wall, sturdy and unmarked. Jon’s brows furrowed - he had had no idea that this was here, had never thought to look. The key that Mister Magnus withdrew from his pocket turned easily in the door’s lock, as though this was a perfectly normal, everyday action. And behind the door stretched out a strange, empty space, a set of stone stairs leading down into what seemed to be a long tunnel made of the same material. Chill, musty air drifted up out of the dark toward them; not the empty black of the End’s dead planet, nor the rich, threatening black of the Divine Host’s Dark, but a simple gap, a blind spot. He could not See inside, Jon realised, with a jolt of discomfort. No wonder he had never discovered this: whoever had made this tunnel had taken great lengths to occlude it from the Ceaseless Watcher’s gaze.
Jon flinched at the hand that landed on his shoulder, gripping meaningfully too tight through the thin material of his shirt.
Magnus’s blank expression was uncompromising, though he said no words. Powerless, Jon swallowed his fear, put one foot in front of the other, over and over, and walked into the unnatural stillness. Once they were inside, Magnus let go of him, as though in distaste; but Jon barely noticed, too stunned by the absence of the Eye, so linked in his mind with the sensation of being trapped, or dead.
Well-practiced and efficient, Magnus lifted a candlestick apparently set ready at the entrance of the tunnel and lit it, then closed the door behind them with a heavy thunk . He gestured forward coolly.
“Walk.”
With a little hesitancy now, Jon did as he was told, thoughts moving a thousand miles a minute to try and piece together what was happening - and more importantly, why. Perhaps his master had finally decided to be rid of him; though for a man of such means, there must surely be easier methods? He could have had Jon’s throat cut and his body dumped in the river, or if he didn’t want it known that his servant was dead, dragged away to a country estate and buried there. But then, perhaps there some special method of destroying avatars hidden below London, some unspeakable nightmare that Mister Magnus could use to be certain he would be gone forever - Jon had enough expertise with the Entities to conceive of what that could entail, and he felt tremors running up and down his body at the thought, even as his master’s pace increased and he had to hurry to keep up. It might not be anything of the sort, though. Maybe there was an element of the Great Twisting that he had missed, failed to eliminate? That would certainly explain Magnus’s apparent urgency, if Jon was being directed to complete a duty he had unknowingly neglected.
Or maybe , whispered a dark, foreboding voice inside him, he heard you say aloud that you didn’t care about the Watcher’s Crown, that you had no intention ever to complete it, and you are being punished for such disrespect.
The possibility was awful, but something he could at least apologise, atone for. Not knowing was far more unbearable than the deeply-entrenched fear of asking impertinent questions, so Jon anxious mustered himself to speak, and opened his mouth.
Anticipating the interruption, Magnus grabbed him by the wrist and began to walk even faster, pulling Jon forward so abruptly that he stumbled in the dark. Though he had only a simple, flickering light, and the many-branching tunnels turned and separated at seemingly random intervals, Magnus was utterly certain in his trajectory, unaccepting of any hesitation, his resolve unshakeable and his grip on Jon’s arm like iron.
The dull pain of the Desolation’s burn being jostled was nothing to the ever more urgent worry Jon felt. Even when he was small and ignorant and afraid, he had never actually needed to be dragged anywhere, always unfailingly dutiful. Was this so much worse than anything else he had been forced into?
Jon’s mind whirled, frenzied, as he attempted to decipher the clues around him. Reaching for the Eye gave him no more vision deep within the tunnels as it had at their entrance, but it did at least reveal that these subterranean passages were not, as they had initially seemed, empty of fear: rather, every fear had a presence here, all equal, all neatly ordered, and in symmetry they amounted to nothing. Balance, measure, Smirke. this network of tunnels had all the hallmarks of Robert Smirke’s theories, they had to have been his doing.
Then this was why Magnus had decided to move his Institute to London? This was why he had chosen the edge of the Thames, Millbank specifically? Jon had always assumed that his master had selected the location merely because of its proximity to his home - but such a wealthy man could surely purchase a townhouse anywhere in the city, and Jon knew for a fact that Mister Magnus’s current residence had not been occupied very long before he had moved Jon there. That was the only order of events that made sense: he chose the house because it was near to the Institute, and the Institute because it was above the tunnels. God only knew what horrors had been visited upon the work crews to keep them quiet.
Something had happened down here. Something terrible, something engineered by Magnus for the Eye, before he devised whatever plan he had enacted through Jon. And in the culmination of that plan, something terrible was happening here again. He was about to be made its catalyst.
Jon felt the gut-punch alarm of the realisation helplessly. In some ways, he had already known it, had accepted that he would have to do something in the payment of his debt. The thought occurred to him, then drifted away, and as he continued to be dragged deeper underground, his mind fixed upon something else entirely.
You tried to feed me to the wolf , Jon kept thinking, body limp and unresisting in his master’s bruising grip even as his head filled with private mutiny. You tried to feed me to the wolf.
Much of what else he had endured, he had long since accepted. The Hunt, though - what manner of training could that possibly have been? What ‘educational’ purpose could it have had, deceiving them all, placing Martin and Georgie and Tim in danger?
The Great Twisting had been a world-ending threat, Jon had the power to stop it, and so of course it made sense for Mister Magnus to utilise him against the Spiral. That was justifiable, right. But the other Entities that had touched him, had he deserved all that too? How could he possibly? Jon had always blamed himself for happening upon the Stranger and the Corruption - but after Magnus had tried so blatantly to push him into the jaws of the Hunter, he found it impossible to believe that those encounters had not also been engineered. The Lonely, the Vast, the Dark, Magnus had ordered him to stand meek and still while each attacked him in turn. An education , yes, but one which had him trembling and vomiting in utter blind terror for years afterwards at the memories, the nightmares; an education which could have killed him. You fed me to the wolf, to the mist, to the sky, to the dark.
The Dark, especially. He had been ten years old, and he had screamed for help and received no answer, only silent, ravenous observation. Jon had fought the Dread Powers alone, with far less power and influence than Magnus, and he knew that it was possible, even while feeding the Eye. He would not ever have left a child screaming in the dark. His gratitude to his master for saving him from it had eclipsed what he should have known even then was an injustice. No child deserved that in exchange for being kept alive, just as he had not deserved hard labour in the workhouse before for no greater crime than being poor and orphaned.
I don’t deserve what you’ve done to me , Jon asserted internally. The thought was new and bold; he had not known he was capable of it.
The further they travelled into the tunnels - far further than he would have guessed; where were they going, how expansive could the network be? - the more the power of the Eye slowly gained over that of the other Entities. It had been gradual, at first, but now Jon could feel the Watcher as intensely as he would under a spotlight or in Mister Magnus’s private office. He wanted badly to draw on its strength, to give into his terrified confusion and Ask a question - but he knew that he would receive no answer, could feel his master like a barrier between him and their patron, and he knew that it would only make Magnus angrier, so he swallowed his dread and his rebellious thoughts.
And then he saw it.
Before them, the tunnels widened and fell away into a cavern, stretching far down into jagged darkness. There was the stink of the marshes, and what looked like the debris of a natural disaster, some act of a wrathful god, buildings blown apart all at once and then left to rot far below the city. But amid the wreckage, a sole survivor stood tall: a tower, reaching up from the ruins like an outstretched hand. Whatever had destroyed its surroundings had left it carbonised but apparently otherwise undamaged, and its exterior, were it not so unnatural, would have been a marvel of art. It was flawlessly smooth and round, a column of glittering black glass, so hard and dark it appeared almost obsidian. At its head was a central observation chamber, a rotunda of wide, hungry windows reinforced by thin columns of metal and dark brick - it was this that connected to the tunnels, the gap bridged only by a short expanse of stone.
Jon had never seen it before, but he Knew it at once. He had felt it each and every day he had spent inside the Institute, had sensed it even from the first moment that he had endured Magnus’s scrutiny. This was the centre, the apex of Beholding: a torture chamber for the Eye, the ultimate, most agonising symbol of the fear of being watched, of being exposed in every secret and private moment, every second of your life laid bare for judgement and for punishment. It was a sacrificial altar for the Ceaseless Watcher.
The Panopticon.
Magnus was still pulling him toward it, ignoring the way his apprentice had jerked back, his cold grey eyes fixed unmoving on the source of his power, bright with anticipation, exhilaration. The tower , said Gerry’s voice in Jon’s mind, chaos, destruction, disaster . Blind panic seized at him as he looked back and forth between them: he pulled away, wrenched his wrist out of his master’s hand, forgetting himself and all his rightful fear of Magnus at the intuitive knowledge that whatever inside that chamber was a fate worse than death by far.
“No-!”
For a brief moment Magnus’s mask slipped. That facade of civility and courtesy which he slathered on thick as stage paint disappeared, and the casual brutality which he was capable of shone through. Jon had always sensed it, a threat lurking unvoiced beneath the surface - and revealed at the first sign of rebellion, as he knew it would be.
He had no time to try and run. Magnus turned suddenly and backhanded him hard across the face, throwing him to the ground. Jon’s vision throbbed with white, coursing with shock and adrenaline, with the momentarily delayed hot sting of the strike, a line of acute pain on his cheek - he must be wearing his ring , Jon thought, half numb, even as he attempted weakly to scramble up, still desperate to escape any way that he could. Another blow: a cruel kick to the ribs that knocked him down again, drew another gasped cry as Jon’s body curled inwards, arms flying up protectively.
From above him he heard a sharp sigh. And then he was being hauled forward with a choking grip on the back of his shirt, dragging him the last few steps toward the chamber despite his pathetic struggling and his half-formed protestations.
Magnus threw him inside the Panopticon and slammed the door after him with a resounding clang . Even as Jon hurled himself against it from the inside, shouting, he could hear the heavy mechanism of the lock falling shut.
“No, no, no, no -”
He could barely think, not past the pain and the fear, not through the electric, hissing power of the Eye, more intense in this place than Jon had ever felt it before. It rung loud in his ears, threatened to take him apart at the seams, to open every unnatural eye it had made within him so that he would Watch eternally, from all angles. And yet, his thoughts still raced: at first he could think only of offerings , that he had failed somehow and was now to be sacrificed to Beholding, as the Desolation or the Dark might sacrifice a victim.
But as he raised his eyes to his master - only a little bedraggled from Jon’s resistance, grinning in vicious triumph - he Knew that this was neither a punishment nor a deviation.
This was merely what the plan had always been, what Magnus had intended for him from the beginning. It was a ritual.
Jon slumped back, shaking, too consumed by horror to look away from Magnus’s monstrous elation. Seeming to realise that all the fight had gone out of his victim, Magnus allowed his expression to return to a shuttered smirk, and ran his fingers through his hair, straightened his necktie.
“You’ve certainly given me some trouble, boy,” he purred, smiling wider at the way that Jon recoiled: here, he could feel his master’s voice reverberating inside his mind, inescapable. And he still could not close his eyes. “But what has it come to, here at the end? What use was all that dragging your heels?”
Jon could not answer; he had no words, but even if he had, his body was held frozen. Magnus continued, pitiless.
“Of course, you know what this building is. I neglected no part of your education, philosophy least of all - though I did take pains not to speak of anything that might touch upon this with you personally. Nonetheless, I know your tutors had you review Jeremy Bentham’s inspection principle , his prison designs, in detail.
“Bentham had no idea what he had done. While the Eye was always present in the concept of the panoptes , the all-seeing observer, he thought to use it to serve the Web.”
Magnus’s face twisted briefly in repugnance at the thought.
“The uninspired ambitions of an unenlightened man,” he spat, “Uninterested in terror for its own sake, to think of utilising the fear of Beholding only as a means of a control.”
His features smoothed out again - he was performing, Jon realised, putting on a show for the Eye.
“The appointment of Robert Smirke to the construction of Millbank Prison was more promising, but Smirke was a dreamer in both the figurative and literal senses, and one that far outlived his usefulness. A temple to all fears was something I could only endorse if the Eye was made foremost among them - dear Robert refused, of course, though I was still able to make my adjustments to his designs, ensuring the preeminence of our own patron. But I feared that he might attempt to reverse those changes, and that made me hasty. It was catastrophic.
“Neither I nor the Ceaseless Watcher were powerful enough, the first time I tried to use the Panopticon for its true purpose, and the prison itself crumbled and fell, those first prisoners struck dead by sheer terror in their cells. Smirke and I, and the rest of our associates, had enough influence over the government to keep the whole debacle quiet, fortunately - and to convince the authorities that the wisest thing to do would not be to destroy the aftermath completely, but to hide it as quickly and cheaply as possible. That left Smirke free rein to build his oh-so-enlightened, balanced tunnels, and gave me the time I needed to lick my wounds and contemplate the flaws in my design.
“Human eyes are simply not capable of channeling the power of the observation chamber. Human minds are not qualified to comprehend what it shows them. They shatter beneath the truth of the Eye. It seemed a problem without a solution. But by that time, my second project, my research institute, was in its infancy in Edinburgh - and I discovered that infinitely more power was available in extracting fear second-hand from victims of other Entities than from the fear the Watcher alone can give. It comes in small increments, yes, but over time all that knowledge, all that experience, feeds the Eye far better than the simple paranoia of Something Is Looking At Me. That was the answer. Any attempt to use the Panopticon by someone unprepared, unschooled in such matters, would always be doomed to fail - but my first Institute had given me a way to build power and knowledge, together.”
Magnus’s voice dropped to a hiss, his eyes gleaming with greed, his expression utterly unhinged.
“I needed a repository of every kind of human suffering, deeply familiar with all fears, ready to gorge on each horror and Know them completely. Balanced between each of our dark gods, just as the first theorists discussed. A living chronicle of terror. An archive. So I made one.
“I had you marked by each and every fear in turn - but, really, Jonathan, you’ve seemed quite determined to show me that I needn’t have gone to all the effort. You came to me already touched by the Web, and then the Desolation, the Slaughter, the End, you sought those powers out all by yourself, no coercion necessary on my part. I must admit to some considerable frustration when you managed to squirm away from the Hunt after I had spent so long helping it to stalk you. Still, that one was easy enough to abandon. What do I care for the fears of beasts?”
Magnus began to laugh, too delighted in his own terrible victory to be irritated.
“Children are so breakable. More malleable than adults, more easily controlled, but… fragile. There was always the possibility that you would die, or that your mind would simply crack open beneath the pressure, and I would have to find a new archive. Yet you lived through every trial. Survival was only half the challenge, of course: I had thought that if you made it to adulthood and still did not show the right kind of potential, then at least I finally had a viable subject on which to test my preparations to last longer than this perishable body - I would transplant your Watching eyes into another’s skull, some assistant perhaps, and see if the procedure I have devised has any merit. Or, if you grew up to be no use to the Watcher at all, I might simply have plucked out your eyes and discarded them, and taken control of your body myself. But your potential was never the problem, was it, Jonathan? All that curiosity, all that delicious fear .”
He leaned even closer to the glass, so close that Jon could see every one of his features twisted in a poisonous mix of spite and glee.
“In the end, the plan worked better than I ever could have hoped: a shining little beacon of Beholding, held beneath my thumb. But then… well, you finally began to resist, and I had to speed things up - any longer and you might actually have tried to escape. It was a difficult game from the start, scaring you enough to torment, but not quite enough that you’d bolt. But you never had anything to run to , before. If those little friends of yours were any less useful in pulling you into danger I would have disposed of them long ago. Perhaps I’ll start getting rid of them, now that you’re here.”
Any aloof, gentlemanly affect that remained on Magnus’s face melted away as he snarled,
“And you’ll have no choice but to watch.”
Every word rang with truth. From the Panopticon, Jon Knew it all as genuine with utter certainty. There was no refuge, no escape from the knowledge. He was both helpless with horror, and brightened by it, the inhuman thing that the End had left him gorging itself on the information he had access from this chamber.
Jon crumpled down against the black marble floor, straining to resist Beholding, to contain his transformed nature. Desperately, he covered his eyes, hands curling inwards as though to claw them out and sever the connection to his god.
But he couldn’t. His eyes were numerous now, even invisible as they were, covering every part of him: there was no way not to See, to force each of them closed.
“No,” he sobbed again - but the word jarred against his ears as a lie. Even while he fought the Ceaseless Watcher, a greater part of him rose up to embrace it. He Looked out from between his fingers and Saw everything at once, past and present, a great screaming flood of information, more than he could focus on or make sense of.
With those same creeping tendrils that Jon had felt pick through his memories earlier, Magnus insinuated himself agonisingly into Jon’s mind, forcing words into his mouth.
In a voice far too clipped to be his own, with a laugh far too cruel, he heard himself begin to speak.
“Now, Jonathan. Repeat after me.”
Jon found himself bound ever closer to the Eye, until he was nothing more than a component of it, a cog in its vast anatomy. And yet he was not close enough: he wanted it nearer, wanted it to clutch him tight, to hold the entire world within its dominion. The words to call for its embrace came to his lips even as he choked down strangled screams.
“ You who watch and know and understand none. You who listen and hear and will not comprehend. You who wait and wait and drink in all that is not yours by right. ”
A clap of thunder like a great blink; the sight of a thousand people simultaneously shuddering, glancing over their shoulders in search for what they suddenly felt Watching them.
“ Come to us in your wholeness. Come to us in your perfection .”
A wave of paranoia spreading over the world like toxic gas, and the sensation, felt collectively, of every deepest, darkest thought of every secret moment rising to the surface, being made visible like bloated corpses washed up with the tide. And it was Jon that saw those bodies, the Eye that examined them through him.
“ Bring all that is fear and all that is terror and all that is the awful dread, bring it beneath your power: all that crawls and chokes and blinds and falls and twists and leaves and hides and weaves and burns and rips and dies, all to be watched, all to be known!”
Every soul in the Institute had frozen, muscles tensed, hearts pounding - there was no move that they could make to get away from what surveilled them, no place to hide. Every servant of every other Power felt their connections waver and slip, the balance of fears shifting to make room for a new dominance.
“Come to us!” Jon screamed, and it echoed in a thousand minds. “I open the door!”
For a second, the universe hesitated, waited with baited breath for reality to be transformed.
And then the moment passed.
There was something missing, a gap in the incantation - hunting , Jon realised, and something else, too, bleeding . They had not touched him, and so he could not Know them, not in full; the ritual couldn’t be completed, the world would not end. Relief and disappointment warred between the two halves of him, until he was almost torn apart in the conflict between his human desires and those of the Eye.
But fear still rushed through his open mouth, suffusing the room, flowing toward Magnus. Power burst forth like a breaking dam from Jon’s roving, rolling eyes, from the tales muttered many-layered out from his tongue.
As Jon shuddered, Magnus laughed.
The Archive and its keeper.
*
Briefly, one of the Archive’s many eyes focused on the building above it. A pair of Jon’s friends were tearing apart the room where they had cared for his body in its long sleep, a furious woman and a forsaken man. The blanket where he had laid was still warm.
But you were here when I left , exclaimed one, you were watching him -
I told you, countered the other, frustrated tears in her eyes, I left you here, I don’t understand how this -
He can’t have just walked off! He was d-
The lonely man pulled at his hair, choking himself off from the horrible truth he had been about to utter.
Jon was unconscious for a week , he has to be somewhere here, u-unless -
- Unless someone - something - took him , agreed the woman. It doesn’t make sense.
I don’t understand. I don’t know.
The Archive felt their lack of knowledge, their fear of every awful, infinite possibility that lurked in that expanse of confusion. But that was a fear that was closed to it, now. It no longer had the privilege of ignorance or reprieve.
Locked in the Panopticon, Jon knew everything .
*
fin.