Chapter Text
The Tether held; through cold steel already soiled with another monster's blood, through the pounding of shattering masonry, through the sickening fall to earth. By the end of it, the Pupil knew that it was in pieces, and yet it had not died. It felt diffuse; its substance thinned out to near insensibility but bloated with information so that it contained the whole of the world.
It could see Everything, spread out below it. The globe spun, though not smoothly. Time itself moved like a lava flow, sometimes in runny rivulets, sometimes halting entirely before passing in indigestible lumps. The outlines of the continents were still visible, though the colors were wrong in places; blacks and reds and oil-slick rainbows concentrated where people congregated, while the unpopulated regions remained stubbornly washed-out green, desert tan, and arctic white. The ocean's blue was greener than it had been, closer to emerald than sapphire, with paisley slicks of color near the cities on the coasts.
The Eye looked upon the ruined world with something akin to disappointment. It had been less than a year and a half by the movement of the planet around its star--the only measurement of time that was remotely stable now--and already the beings held captive to Fear grew muted and dull with despair. The Eye's Pupil looked upon the ruined world and wept with ten billion eyes, but it also Saw the intricacy of what had grown up in the ecology of Fear. The Pupil longed to understand, and in doing so remembered at last that it was still Jon, and The-Pupil-As-Jon forced himself to take the time to study what only the Eye could see before he would allow himself to be lost again to despair.
From here, he could see why all of the Fears had been necessary to remake the world. Each domain was a node that fed strands of that Fear's power through a network of conduits. The Buried and the Vast manipulated space while the Spiral manipulated time. The Corruption churned up raw material with which to build horrors, while the Flesh repaired devastated bodies and breathed life into forms that should not sustain it. The Web bound the will of human beings, while the Dark kept them from understanding enough to free themselves. The Stranger and the Slaughter enforced barriers of distrust and violence, while the Lonely isolated sufferers so they could take no comfort in each other. Desolation, perhaps fittingly, parasitized the misery produced by the others, feeding on reminders of all that was lost. The End formed a conveyor along which each doomed life could be dragged from domain to domain as one Fear grew too familiar and was replaced with another, and the Hunt collected any who managed to escape their domains and efficiently returned them.
And the Eye watched.
The Eye's Pupil was restless. Jon was tired of Watching.
He stretched, pushing at the edges of his form to see just what he was made of and what he could do. First and foremost, he was eyes. The Panopticon and its Pupil took the form of a single, enormous Eye looking down from the sky, judgmental and inescapable. Without the Panopticon and free of Jonah's desire to emulate a god-king, the single Eye had dissolved into billions. Whatever had made Jon who he was blended with Beholding to form a multitude of tiny eyes that flitted through the broken landscape, some high among the clouds, others right within the domains, close enough to touch each victim. Strands of the Web wound through everything, sometimes intangible, elsewhere stretching shining strands thicker than cable or thinner than a hair. Without the intense pressure from Jonah's Eye, the world was held together with uncountable strands of spider silk and the fickle attention of Jonathan Sims.
He was many parts, and while the Eye was still built into the foundations of the world, he did not have the power he thought he would. He couldn't alter the destinies of billions with a thought, drive them inexorably toward the End so this travesty of a world could be extinguished. The press of Knowledge from his ten billion eyes drowned out what he truly wanted to Know. Had Melanie and Georgie survived? Had Basira? Against all odds, had Martin?
Finding them tested the limits of his patience, but he finally Saw that they had not passed through the End, nor fallen to Hunters. His little eyes caught glimpses of the three women, as safe as could be expected in the ruins of London, which for now would be enough. Martin would have been pulverized just as surely as Jon was, but surely he would have reformed in his Domain. He Looked into the Lonely and Saw Martin, but Martin lost, Martin Alone.
Martin remembered pain. Stones, rough and heavy, pounded his body. He felt bones break and skin avulse from muscle. For a few moments, he thought he was suspended in the Vast, but he was merely falling, and at the end of it, he was buried in the dark while dust settled in his crushed lungs, and then there was nothing. It was silent and dark, and he was bodiless in it. He waited for the End, sorry that in this state he couldn’t even feel whether Jon’s body rested against his own.
The End did not come. Instead, he dreamed of thick, cold fog. He walked, numbed by it, in humid air just enough above freezing to dampen his clothes, across hard, uneven ground. Other forms moved at the edge of his ability to sense them. They reminded him of the shades in Hades, dead souls gradually losing substance and memory. He shivered, or at least thought of the sense-memory of a shiver. He'd like to have a sit and think of what to do next. There was a park bench just beside him, a little damp from the mist, but serviceable.
So. Martin had returned to his Domain after the Panopticon fell, which meant that first, he had not died--or at least, had not died permanently, and second, he still had a Domain, so the Web's plan to shove the fears through the portal to Everywhere Else had not worked. If he wasn't dead, then Jon probably wasn't, right? Unless being the Pupil of the Eye when the Panopticon fell could extra-kill him or something in a way that he couldn't come back from. No. Martin needed to believe that Jon was not gone. He started to hum a little, to fill the fog with a voice, and settled into an old tune. "My bonnie lies over the ocean..."
A greenish spark appeared, slipping in and out of the fog like a firefly, distant and indistinct. The song continued, his voice absorbed into the fog and doubled back so it sounded as though another voice sang with him. Jon's voice. He counted two eyes, then, and three, and more. He reached out to capture one. It looked up at him, tiny and bright, warm in his hands. More began to cluster about him. Together they pushed back the fog. At his feet, he could see chalky stones and improbably tenacious wisps of grass, mostly straw-blond but touched here and there with pale green. A thousand or so little eyes separated from the cluster surrounding Martin to whirl nearby, then gradually settled down into a familiar shape picked out in prickling static.
“You're not dead," Martin said.
Jon crackled. "For a certain value of not dead, I suppose."
"We didn't make it Somewhere Else, though."
"No. Annabelle's scheme was only possible because Elias' body was still alive. The tether could only be cut by the death of the Pupil. And I can't die." Martin didn't know what to make of the disappointment in Jon's voice.
"Are you—you?”
“More than I would have been if the Panopticon had not fallen," Jon said, not very reassuringly.
“Can you See?”
Jon fizzed a harsh laugh. “Can I See? Yes, I can See Everything. Every lie the Web told, every little twist and tug she made to shape this world to her liking. She doesn’t like what I did to her plans.”
“I’ll bet she doesn’t.” He didn’t either. Not really. It wasn’t fair of Jon to have taken it all upon himself, even if it was typical. He tried to banish the bitterness of the last thought. Blame it on the Lonely.
The static made a sound like a sigh. “Martin.”
“Yes?” Martin said, the word heavy on his weary tongue.
“You’re still here. Still alive. Because you have a choice to make.”
He should have guessed. “One of those kind of choices is it?”
Jon pressed on. “There are three options. One is the Lonely, of course. You’d be fed and alive, after a fashion, at least until the world winds down to its End. Or you can choose to End now.” Jon’s voice broke on the last word. “Sorry. It’s difficult for me to be objective about that one. I very much want you to stay here with me, though if you decide you're done, I won't stop you. Or you can make the most difficult choice.”
“And what might that be?”
“I'm the Pupil, now. Of the Eye. I need someone to be my--my Archive.”
Martin should have been afraid, or angry, but he found himself merely weary. “I told you before we would be together. To the bitter end.”
“That’s only part of the choice. We could go with the original plan, speed up the process, and drive humanity toward the End. It ends here, but it ends. Eventually. It's a little more complicated than I thought, before. I can't just force the issue. We'd have to get help, from other avatars.”
“Or what? Are you actually still entertaining trying to take the Fears through the rift on Hilltop Road?”
“No. I won’t do that to another world now that there might be another option. And it would do little good anyway. Like I said, the Mother of Puppets lied. She conveniently omitted what would happen to this world when the Fears left it, and she discouraged the rest of us from thinking it through. If we take the Fears out of this world, billions of people die within the hour, with torn and twisted bodies, filled with rot and worms, crushed underground, or falling out of the sky. Billions more won’t last much longer. The world has been without human attention for seventeen months. There won’t be enough food, or shelter, or clean water. Worse, those who survive to rebuild will just create the Entities all over again. They’re a waste product of our having minds, Martin. Inevitable.”
“So we do nothing? Just try to exist in this world?” The fog edged in closer to brush chill wisps across Martin’s cheeks.
“No. I’m not content to let suffering go unanswered. We either push the world toward its end or--I don’t Know. I—there’s another way, I just can’t See the shape of it yet.”
Martin contemplated the subtle billows of fog that offered to dissolve him. It was tempting to surrender to it. It would be easier than a choice that meant more effort, more disappointment, more loss. “Can you promise me there’s hope?”
Jon was silent for too long a time again. “No, I can’t promise.”
There had never been any choice, not really. Martin flicked away the mist gathering around him. “We go together. That’s the deal.”
“You’re sure?”
“Of course I’m sure, you idiot!”
“I’ll be right here.” Jon dissolved into a swarm of tiny green eyes again. The eyes whirled around Martin, closer and tighter so he could see nothing but green stars embedded in static, then they were in his skin, pinching and burning like a thousand wasp stings. He went to his knees, throat suddenly raw from a scream he couldn't hold back, not even for Jon's sake. The static filled his ears and poured into his brain, resolving into snippets of knowledge while the eyes that burrowed into his skin turned outward and opened.
It was too much for his mind to hold. He felt himself ballooning outward to contain it all and thought he might shatter. He was everyone and everywhere, and it all hurt, and he hated it and needed it, and he could barely squeeze his thoughts into the spaces between. He could See--he could hardly do anything but See--but he couldn't find Jon. No, that wasn't right, he needed Jon, he couldn't do this without Jon, Jon said he would be right here and he wouldn't lie about this, would he? His heart twisted. Jon had lied before about things that mattered at least as much as this.
The Lonely grasped at Martin's fear that Jon had betrayed him, drawing power from it. The fog put a fragile barrier between himself and the Everything overwhelming his mind. It wasn't much, but it was just enough for a breath, for the Seeing and Knowing to recede enough for him to feel past the physical pain of the stinging wounds where the eyes had made their home, past the rolling echo of other people's suffering, to the ghost of pressure at his back, along his arms, pressed into the hollow behind his skull.
The Eye cannot See Itself.
And in the moment that he realized that the invisible presence holding him was Jon, the Lonely fled, and the world poured back in. He no longer needed to breathe, but his breaths came quick with panic. Give it a little time, you'll sort it out, the Eye said, or Jon said if there was really any difference anymore. It still sounded like Jon, but the voice came from inside Martin, as close to him as his own muscle was to his bone. He had to trust. Jon was there, holding him, waiting for him to sort out the mess in his mind. Don't try so hard. Here. When the night has come, and the land is dark--
"And the moon is the only light we see," Martin added, his usually strong tenor rendered hoarse and thready. It had been a long time since he'd heard the song, but Jon and the Eye were happy to supply the lyrics, and the song gave him something to think about, his mind settling as he moved naturally into harmony with Jon's staticky baritone. By the time the song ended, he felt that he had expanded enough to hold the torrent passing through him with a margin of room for himself.
There was a Statement out there in the Lonely, a story that wanted to be heard and told. He longed to Know it, down to what passed for his bones. He walked with the fog curling hesitantly around his ankles but rising no further. Jon drifted both through him and beside him, a barely corporeal cloud of static and tiny, flitting eyes. He had no hands for Martin to hold, no solid form for him to lean into while they traveled. The fog cleared around them just enough for them to see that they were walking along a dirt-and-gravel path between two fields gray with dormant grasses. An older woman, squarely built, with plaits wrapped into a bun stood with her back to them, facing out into the fog. Her name was Lizzie.
“Lizzie,” Martin said. He sat down on a low stone bench at the edge of the path. The eyes inside him focused on her, all of them, all at once. It was intense, this kind of seeing. His attention was fully captured by every frayed fiber of her shawl, every wrinkle on her skin, the brown spots on her hands and arms, the tremor of a muscle in her cheek where she faced into the light, cold wind.
Lizzie noticed their presence for the first time, then. Her eyes grew wide, and her gasp ended in a little squeak before she very deliberately smoothed her hands over her woolen skirt and primly took a seat beside Martin on the bench, leaving as much space between them as she could manage. “So," she huffed. "Monsters, are you? Better than no one, I suppose.” She didn’t sound convinced of that.
Martin startled. "You can see me. Jon, she can see me!"
"I can see the both of you, though your Jon looks like a swarm of sad bees. You look like someone ought to bundle you into bed and fill you with soup. It's too bad I can't find my way back to the cottage."
Martin licked his lips and tried not to be reminded that they, like the rest of him, weren't quite solid. "Would you do me a favor, Lizzie?"
She narrowed her eyes. "What sort of favor?"
This part of being the Archive might actually be easier for him than it had been for Jon. People liked to tell him their stories. They thought he cared.
Because you do, Jon told him. He wasn't sure he did. He had, once. But the Lonely made caring hard.
He offered a friendly sort of a smile. "I'd like to hear your story, if I could?"
"Hmm. It's not much of a story. But telling it would break up the monotony."
"Thank you. And I could see you back home, after."
"I'll believe that when I see it." Lizzie regarded her own hands as they worried at the edges of her scarf.
Martin prompted, “Lizzie McGann’s story of loneliness, which has good cows in it. Go on, then.”
Lizzie scoffed, but began to speak.
“No one wants to hear an old woman rattle on about the dead—or the "got a job in land management and moved to Australia", which is little different if you’re counting on a visit to break up the long months alone. I’ve been alone for a long time, now, much longer than I’ve been wandering in this blasted fog—at least I think I have. Time seems to have gotten as lost as I am.
I married young. My husband was a solid man and quiet, a decade older than I was, with a bit of land and a couple dozen head of cattle. Kept a roof over our heads, me and the children, though he was poor company for a young girl out in the country with no one else to talk to but her own babies. There were three of them, all boys, and all of them left as soon as they could. Can’t even blame them for it. They didn’t feel the land in their bones the way my husband did. I never did either, but I didn’t marry for love or the land, I married because a sixth daughter can’t afford to be choosy, and when a heart attack took him young I thought I might enjoy the freedom to do what I will, for once. But after so many years out here with cattle for my only company, I’d lost the knack of making friends, to the extent I ever had it. The cows needed looking after, so there wasn’t much opportunity to get away. Do you know, I knit? I used to knit. Makes my hands ache. Not much reason to when there’s no one to knit for.
Fog gets thick out here. Weeks on end you can’t see much beyond the kitchen garden. One day, feels like ages ago, I left the house to take the car into town for groceries and I remember—I remember I went through the gate, closed it behind me, and I couldn’t find the car. Well, you know, I thought it might have been taken joyriding or summat, so I turned round to go back to the house and call the police—and I couldn’t find the gate. I walked up and down this little stretch of road for ages in the fog—‘twas spitting rain too, ice cold, until just before you came. I made my way down toward the nearest neighbors more than once, but the road just keeps going, and there’s no one there.
I try to pass the time by thinking about the kids; where they are, how they’re doing, if I might get more from them than a photograph at Christmas of grandchildren I’ve never met. I can’t remember their faces. Cost of living long enough to get old, I suppose. The memory fades. But why did it happen so sudden? Sometimes I wonder if I died on the way to the car, from a heart attack like my husband, and I've been wandering Hell ever since. Seems like Hell wouldn't be quite so dull.
It gets colder if I try to stretch out on the verge--or even if I stop walking for long. And it never gets dark or properly light, and my feet hurt and my back aches—but you wouldn’t want to hear about my aches and pains, seems that’s all someone my age has to talk about. I half wonder if that’s part of why the children all up and left me. It’s odd, though, I always hurt, and I’m always tired, but I’ve never had to stop. I just keep walking and thinking about my empty house, and how it was empty even when it was full.
I suppose that’s all I’ve got to say.”
“So ends Lizzie’s Story of the Lonely," Martin said, releasing her.
Lizzie slapped her palms against her lap. “Well. That’s it then. Thank you for the chance to rest my legs. Do me a favor and eat me up quickly. Not sure I mind. I’m not much use to anyone, least of all myself, out here.”
Martin reached around Lizzie’s shoulders and squeezed her to his side. “Thank you, Lizzie.” She stiffened briefly, thinking she was about to be swallowed, but after a moment, she lay her head on his shoulder and sniffled into his jumper. He couldn't stop himself from adding, "I already have. You could come with us if you like.” Martin found himself offering before he'd properly thought it through.
"Come with you where?"
Jon's discomfort at the very idea fizzed under his skin. Martin ignored him, for the moment. “You can come along with us. It’s likely to be frightening, and dangerous, but you won’t be alone. We’ve got some friends—human friends—who could use the company.”
“And if I don’t want to?”
The Eye presented the Knowledge as though Martin had always known it. “You’ll stay here in the Lonely, and before long you'll forget you ever saw us.”
Lizzie got to her feet using the arm of the bench to push herself up. “I’m long past adventures, young man. But I don’t suppose you could help me find my cottage? I’m used to being Lonely, but I’d rather be doing it dry.”
The tiny eyes freckling Martin’s skin opened, earning him another gasp from Lizzie. He Saw the way to the stone cottage at the top of the hill. “It’s just up this way,” he said, offering a chivalrous arm.
"You bringing your extra eyes with you? The ones you called Jon?"
"He doesn't want to make you uncomfortable."
She looked in the general direction of the rest of Jon. "Come on, you. Don't know how you manage to make whatever you are look like you need a cup of tea and a sit down by the fire, but you do."
The cottage emerged from the fog piecemeal during their climb to the top of the rise on which it sat. Martin lit a fire in the hearth while Lizzie took a rag and wiped down where the misty rain had dampened the windowsills. Jon huddled indistinctly beside Martin, but once the fire caught and the room began to warm up a little he settled into what must be a more comfortable shape for him, a sort of fizzy, humming blob of static on the rug in front of the fire surrounded by eyes that spread out to fill the cottage and poke themselves into every cupboard and corner.
Martin found a kettle in the kitchen alcove and put water on for tea. He found Lizzie nestled in a rocking chair and wrapped in a blanket, with her feet propped up to warm by the fire. "Where did you get the tea?" she asked.
"It was in your cupboard," he said. "Or, it might not have been. Might be a monster thing."
"Monster tea, hmm." She took a sip. "S'not bad."
Martin took a sip of his own. "It's not oolong," he said, surprised.
"And why would it be?" she asked absently while she wriggled her warming toes.
Martin watched Jon flit about. One of his eyes got caught in her hair for a moment, buzzing among the strands frantically until it freed itself as accidentally as it had gotten stuck. "It's just--different. Things are different. In a good way, I think."
"Warm feet. That's good different," Lizzie agreed.
They sat in silence for a while with their tea while Jon's eyes explored the cottage. After they finished, Martin took their cups to the sink. "I don't know how long you'll remember us, but I'm leaving a note on the door to remind you not to go out without a rope to lead you back."
"That's kind of you," she said absently.
"Least I can do. Goodbye, Lizzie." Jon drifted out the door, followed by most, though not all of his eyes. As Martin turned back he could see her smiling at one that had alighted on the arm of her chair.
Outside, Jon was barely a wrinkle in the uniform grayness, but Martin didn't need his eyes to find him. He bumped the edge of him with a shoulder, inviting him to follow, but he had a lot on his mind, and he hoped they could walk in silence for a while. Jon kept close to his side, buzzing with questions but willing to wait until Martin was ready to speak. The fog was thinner here. When he looked up, he thought he could see patches of sky that were almost blue. "Jon?"
Martin?
“You said before that we could never make anything better—that the Fears wouldn’t let us.”
Maybe you’re just talented, Jon suggested.
Martin scoffed. “No, that’s not it.”
Oh, then what is it?
Martin chuckled. “The Eye really can’t See itself, can it? The Entities are us. Waste products of our minds, like you said before. Jonah made this ruined world, so it was a reflection of him. Now he's gone, and the Eye takes its shape from you.”
I don’t understand.
Martin wished Jon was solid enough to hug. “The Eye never does. You are a good person in a way Jonah Magnus very much was not." He caught Jon's vehement denial in the prickliness of his form and the turning away of a dozen little eyes. "Don’t argue with me, you are."
I was never a nice person, Jon protested.
"Didn't say nice. Said good."
The Eye is still evil."You told me yourself the Eye is barely smart enough to be aware of itself. It's what? A toddler? Are toddlers evil?"
Yes, Jon said, but Martin could tell he was teasing. We should move on from here--if you can. Find allies among other avatars.
"Who haven't you already smited? Smote?"
Smitten? Jon suggested.
"That would be me you've smitten."
Jon's static crackled a laugh. There are thousands all over the world. But I think Oliver Banks would make a good start.
Martin still felt grumbles of jealousy when the End Avatar's name was mentioned, but he stuffed them down. "Why him?"
Because he understands consequences. Inevitabilities. And because the End is passive. It won't push Oliver around more than it has to--and there's plenty of death for it to gorge on already.
"I don't suppose we can take a more direct route this time, given you're everywhere already?"
Martin. Love. Archive. I think if you ask yourself that question, you'll Know the answer.
"Fine. If you're sure you can't just make a flying carpet out of eyes." He took a moment to think about the pattern of knowledge sifting through his mind. "The journey will be what the journey will be. Again. I just wish I knew whether this time the journey is still being directed by Annabelle Cane." Despite his weariness, he felt warmth, real warmth, on his skin. He looked down at his pale hands, the nails baby short from his recent reconstruction from loneliness and narrativium, and was surprised to see sunshine and soft-edged shadows. The sky above was aquamarine and laced with fine clouds like spiderwebs stretched from horizon to horizon. It was yet to be seen whether Jon's world would be enough better to matter in the long run. But it was without a doubt more lovely, and he permitted himself to bask in a moment of light.