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he opens
the door
and the world is new and lost and he is lost within it
and he cannot breathe for the weight of the fear on his chest and the rot in his veins and the darkness in his head like a fog of shadows and the knowledge of everything everywhere all at once all the time
and he cannot scream for the dirt in his throat, wet with saliva and thickening to mud,
and he cannot scream for the blistering agony of his hand, the wounds in his shoulder and throat and punctured pockmarked skin writhing with the ghosts of an infestation that called his muscle home
and at once, with everything, the Archivist sees
how the bricks of the panopticon grow black as ink and jut from the landscape, everpresent, inexplicably inescapable gaze razing over city, country, land, sea, drinking in those dregs of fluttering fear that are restless and alight in so many people’s screams
how Martin, his love, his lighthouse and anchor drops the shopping bags as the world chasms and yawns beneath him, rifts into oblivion cracking open like sets of jaws intent on devouring the little village; how Martin runs despite the terror blooming in his gut and screams his name through the smoke
(how he whispers, he will return unharmed, and commands every fear to bow to this)
and how the safehouse groans like a creature, alive, sinews overwriting the beams and tendons strung between the floorboards and pulling at the brick-and-dust until dust-no-brick is all that remains between the substance that bleeds and pulses and howls at the blinking sky
and how the life of every person everywhere has changed, shifted irreparably, and it is all his fault
he knows too much, and his skull swells under the strain, pressure building beneath his eyeballs and beneath those bulging spheres tucked under thin stretches of skin until he feels his temples could split and out of it would only spill that ceaseless surge of knowledge and horrible power and it is all too much
outside, the storm shrieks
and there is no longer a face by the window.
The Archivist lies on the planks of the safehouse floor, strewn with shattered glass like scales of shed skin, and he does not move save for the slow, steady flicker of the lids of a new eye nestled in the bones of his forehead.
A figure slams through the door. “Jon,” Martin gasps, tears running in thin white rivulets down his blue cheeks, “Jon— oh, damn.”
(the sterile cage of the hospital bunk fills the front of his mind; a thousand beeping monitors and the device declaring him as dead and another swelling and falling to the spark of his thoughts and the tube feeding air into his broken lungs; it should have killed you, I will not lose you again)
His knees buckle; he grabs hold of the shoulder of the Archivist’s shirt and shakes it, only rocking the thin form of the person cocooned within it. “Wake up, wake up—”
He bites back a sob.
“Come on!”
The Archivist stirs. Bile rises in Martin’s throat as it is not the sets of eyelashes beneath Jon’s gold-rimmed glasses that twitch and shift like insect legs, but the hundreds of other eyes peeling open across his scarred, pitted flesh, pupils quivering, fixing Martin in their unwavering stare.
Martin looks at the fearscape outside the shattered window and to the broken form of the Archivist, prone on the floor, and for a moment they register in his mind the same — fearing the monster he loves and the world at the mercy of the god in his veins.
The Archivist wakes. The sky blinks.
(These two statements are connected.)
Basira shifts. “What happens if you open the door?”
There is a pause, a hiatus, in which the Archivist swallows to clear his desiccated mouth as the words stick like gravel in the soft, spongy flesh of his throat. The handle in his mind twists, oil-slick ocean seeping through the gaps in the frame. Knowledge can kill. The itching thirst in his throat to guzzle the sea prickles, calls like a siren. He steps from the threshold and does not look at the gentle, lapping waves that push at his ankles and soak his trousers black.
Like the cracking of a dam wall, another surge thrusts against the door. Foam bursts through the peeling planks, sprays through the hinges, and he steels himself against the swell of power clustering in the back of his mind like the darkening clouds of a hurricane.
“I drown."