### JON What was [[Robinson, Gertrude|Gertrude]]’s work? ### GERARD What? ### JON I-I mean, I – Sorry, I-I know a lot about what [[Robinson, Gertrude|Gertrude]] did, but I don’t really know… why she was doing any of it, or w-what her intentions were. ### GERARD Same as you. I think. ### JON Stopping [[the Unknowing]]? ### GERARD Not just [[the Unknowing]]. All of them. ### JON There are more rituals… ### GERARD That’s what she said. ### JON W-W-What do they do? ### GERARD I mean… they change the world. They make it new. ### JON An apocalypse. ### GERARD Kind of. How much do you know about these things, [[the Eye]] and that? ### JON I don’t – Uh… they’re, they’re malicious. Many consider them god-like and t-they have the power to affect the world in unnatural ways, but they cannot directly exist within it, so they rely on avatars or, or servants that they corrupt and… sometimes monsters that they create. They use their power in ways small enough to stay hidden, a-and I think… I think they feed on our fear. ### GERARD No, they don’t feed on it. They are it. ### JON What? W-what do you mean? ### GERARD I mean what I said. These things, these forces, they are our fear. Deep fears. Primordial. Always looking for ways to grow and spread. ### JON No… B-B-But that doesn’t – I m-mean, it doesn’t make – ### GERARD What? So you thought it was coincidence that unknowable alien consciousnesses from beyond our universe just so happen to basically be all the things we’re terrified of? ### JON I – How?! ### GERARD No idea. Smarter people than me have died trying to figure that one out. I mean, maybe they appeared out of nothing the first time something felt afraid. Maybe they’re older than that, and they just got inspired by all the things that we dread. Did they make themselves from our fears, or are they why we’re afraid? I really don’t know. ### JON But, but not everything they do inspires fear. ### GERARD And if you’re having an omelette for lunch, not every moment is spent eating the omelette. Some things take preparation. Especially if, you know, your spatula has a bit of free will. And sometimes I think bits of them just… ooze into the world without any purpose at all. Or sometimes they’re summoned. ### JON Fears change. Fears are-are-are cultural. ### GERARD A lot of them, yeah, but others are deeper than that. And when our fears change, so do these things. But it’s not quick. [[Robinson, Gertrude|Gertrude]] reckons they’ve basically been the same since the [[Industrial Revolution]]. She and my mum both liked to follow [[Smirke, Robert|Smirke]]’s list of fourteen. ### JON **\[Disbelieving]** Th– I mean, there are a lot more than fourteen things to be afraid of in the world. Where do you draw the line? ### GERARD Hmmm. I always think it helps to imagine them like colours. The edges bleed together, and you can talk about little differences: “oh, that’s indigo, that’s more lilac”, but they’re both purple. I mean, I guess there are technically infinite colours, but you group them together into a few big ones. A lot of it’s kind of arbitrary. I mean, why are navy blue and sky blue both called blue, when pink’s an entirely different colour from red? Y’know? I don’t know, that’s just how it works. And like colours, some of these powers, they feed into or balance each other. Some really clash, and you just can’t put them together. I mean, you could see them all as just one thing, I guess, but it would be pretty much meaningless, y’know, like… like trying to describe a… shirt by talking about the concept of colour. O-Of course, with these things it’s not a simple spectrum, y’know, it’s more like – ### JON An infinite amorphous blob of terror bleeding out in every direction at once. ### GERARD Now you’re getting it. ### JON Like colours, but if colours hated me. Got it. Christ, I need a cigarette. ### GERARD Yeah, well, you can wait. Don’t know how much longer we have. ### JON Hang on, if these entities are all based on our, on our fear, the-the-then what, what about the, the rest – ### GERARD No. There aren’t any god-like powers of hope, or love, or indigestion, or whatever. At least not that I’ve seen. Just fear. I don’t know why. ### JON Fine. So… so, I know a, a few… but what are they, these fourteen? ### GERARD **\[Reciting from rote]** “[[Smirke, Robert|Robert Smirke]] divided the beings into fourteen distinct Powers, each comprising a variety of smaller terrors, some direct and practical, and some more abstract.” ### JON R-r-right. I know [[the Eye]]. Fear of being watched, right? ### GERARD Being watched, being followed, having your deepest secrets exposed. Needing to know, even if your discoveries might destroy you. The feeling that something, somewhere, is letting you suffer, just so it can watch. ### JON Is… is that me? Is… is that what I do? ### GERARD You’re the [[Archivist]], you tell me. ### JON Ah… Ah. [[The Spiral]] is the fear of madness, right? That worry that your world isn’t right, th-that your mind is lying to you? ### GERARD Yeah, pretty much. ### JON And [[the End]] is fear of death. ### GERARD Simple, but always there. ### JON [[The Stranger]] is the, the unknown. The uncanny. ### GERARD That kind of creeping sense that something’s not right. That guy you saw that might be following you, might mean you harm. ### JON Isolation. ### GERARD [[Smirke, Robert|Smirke]] called it [[the Lonely]]. The feeling that you’re just… alone. Maybe there’s no-one else there at all, maybe you just can’t connect. ### JON Then there’s… burning, the, uh, [[The Desolation|the Lightless Flame]]. ### GERARD [[The Desolation]]. Fear of pain, fear of loss, fear of unthinking or cruel destruction. ### JON Does it… watch over, um, war as, as well? Or is, is that [[the End]]? ### GERARD I mean, I think they both get a lot out of war, but you’re thinking of [[the Slaughter]]. It’s not cruel, exactly, or unstoppable like [[The End]]. It’s just pure violence, not targeted or premeditated, just… unpredictable violence. And you don’t know when, or if it’s even coming. Sometimes it’s aggressive, like a frenzied killer, but sometimes it’s calm, like an army firing shells into a village. [[the Slaughter]]’s not that common in peace but, well, you know, there’s always a war somewhere. ### JON Right. And, and then th-there’s, uh… [[The Vast|Vertigo]]. The fear of, the fear of falling. ### GERARD [[The Vast]]. Vertigo, agoraphobia, the dread of deep water, of our own insignificance before the universe. ### JON And on the other side, claustrophobia? ### GERARD [[The Buried]]. Small spaces, crushing, you can’t breathe. You’re at the centre of everything, and it all pushes down on you. If [[the Vast]] is like losing yourself in too much space, [[the Buried]] is being trapped without enough. ### JON Darkness? ### GERARD [[The Dark]], yeah. That’s an old one, and one of the deepest. I mean, who isn’t a little bit afraid of [[the Dark]]? Of what might be in it? ### JON Yeah. And there, um… I think [[the corruption|Filth]], it’s, it’s disease, but also insects? ### GERARD [[The Corruption]]. Ooh, it’s a nasty one, that one. Just… disgust. Rot, decay, infection. That feeling of your skin crawling or itching, being touched by something that might burrow inside you. Swarming and hollowing you out. Leaving you full of holes. ### JON Yeah. Not spiders, though? ### GERARD No. They belong to [[the Web]]. ### JON Which is… spiders a-and control. Your, your will not being your own. ### GERARD Yeah. Being manipulated or puppeted. The worry you’re caught in a trap you can’t see. ### JON Yes. … What about meat? How does that work? ### GERARD Ah, [[the Flesh]]? ### JON Yeah, I-I mean, are we really so afraid of being… eaten? Of our bodies being all twisted up, i-i-is that… I mean, some people sure, but… how is it one of the fourteen great fears? ### GERARD What? You think people are so special it’s only our fear that counts? ### JON Wh– No… ### GERARD Everything feels afraid sometimes. Sure, maybe it’s not as complicated or… existential as our fear, but it’s real. And there’s, what, twenty billion chickens in the world? A few billion pigs, cows… How many of them are dying of old age? All that terror, it has to go somewhere. So it does. ### JON And when something formed out of an animalistic fear of the slaughterhouse reaches out to, to people… ### GERARD Things get weird. Yeah. It gets mixed all up with human neuroses: bodies, gore, y’know, that nagging worry that deep down we’re just electrified meat squeezing air at each other. ### JON Good lord. ### GERARD I think it’s quite new. Only just beginning its, uh, ascendance when [[Smirke, Robert|Smirke]] labelled it. Before that there just weren’t enough animals for it to be a fear of its own. Back then I think the only animal fear was [[the Hunt]]. ### JON [[The Hunt]] is also animals? ### GERARD Yeah. Been a long time since humans had any proper sense of our place on the food chain. I mean, we haven’t been ‘prey’ for, what, thousands of years? ### JON But, I mean, hunting, killing each other. That-That’s just how wild animals work. I-I-It’s… natural. ### GERARD So’s death. But we’re still afraid of it. ### JON I suppose. And again, when an animalistic fear touches a human… ### GERARD You get the Predator’s granddad out there. ### JON **\[Considering]** This is, uh… No, I don’t have time. Tell me about the rituals. ### GERARD Well, they all have one. Most of them, anyway. Takes centuries to build up to a level of power where they can try it, and if they fail, it’s back to square one. ### JON Okay, but what do the rituals do? ### GERARD They… kind of ‘shift’ the world, just enough for the Power to come through. Merge with reality. Some say, or well, they guess, that it could bring other entities through with them. I mean, I doubt [[the Buried]] would be bringing through [[the Vast]], but you know. ### JON But what does that actually mean. F-For the world? ‘Merging with reality’? ### GERARD Okay, well… You know how I was just talking about [[the Hunt]] and [[the Flesh]]? ### JON Yes. ### GERARD Well, think of it this way: right now all the entities have to act like a hunter, they pick off the weak ones around the edges, the ones that wander too close, and the rest of the time they have to just graze on whatever fear we all passively give away. ### JON And if one of the rituals succeeds? ### GERARD The world becomes a factory farm. ### JON … Why would anyone want that? I-I mean, there are people, or they used to be people, who are trying to do this. Why? ### GERARD I dunno. Power, maybe? Or they’ve just got close enough to their patron or whatever that they also feed on it. I guess maybe some people just have a weird relationship with fear. ### JON And [[Robinson, Gertrude|Gertrude]] wanted to stop them. At any cost. ### GERARD She worked out they’d all be happening quite close together. She’d already been doing it a while. And [[the Unknowing]] was the next on her list. That and [[the Watcher’s Crown]]. ### JON The what? ### GERARD Uh, the Rite of [[the Watcher’s Crown]]. It’s what she called the ritual for [[the Eye]]. She didn’t tell me much about that one, just that she knew how to take care of it. To be honest, when she was going through this stuff, that was about the time I thought I had found [[Leitner, Jurgen|Leitner]], so I wasn’t much in the mood to listen. ### JON [[Leitner, Jurgen|Leitner]]? ### GERARD Yeah. [[Robinson, Gertrude|Gertrude]] reckoned he was alive somewhere. Said she thought she’d found him. I tracked him down, but it… well, it wasn’t him. ### JON Y-You’re sure? ### GERARD It was just some pathetic old man. Couldn’t have been him. He was so scared of me, I just… just let him go. ### JON Are you alright? ### GERARD I think… I think I’m ready to go. I’m done. Hide my page, and when you’re out of here, burn it. Please. ### JON I will. Thank you, [[Keay, Gerard|Gerard]]. ### GERARD [[Keay, Gerard|Gerry]]. ### JON What? ### GERRY [[Keay, Gerard|Gerard]] was what my mum called me. *He chuckles in embarassment.* I always wanted my friends to call me [[Keay, Gerard|Gerry]]. ### JON Thank you, [[Keay, Gerard|Gerry]]. Uh… I dismiss you. *[[Keay, Gerard|GERRY]] sighs in relief, over background static, as he disappears.* Oh. Alright. *[[Person of interest/The Magnus Institute/The Magnus Archives/Archive staff/Sims, Jonathan|JON]] closes the book and clears his throat.* I’m ready!