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The Eye loves its Archivist.
At least, as much as an embodiment of fear and suffering can love anything, Jonah supposes. The ceaseless watcher, all-seeing of all existence concurrently, was nonetheless ever-turned to Jonathan Sims.
Watching Jon as he stumbles through the hellscape beneath it.
Seeing Jon even as he could not see it, masked as it is behind the lens of the panopticon, behind the man’s vantage point.
Always its focus.
He isn’t jealous.
Does it sting? Perhaps. He cannot lie, not here, host and hosted by an entity of bitter truth, rancourous honesty slipping past his tongue, before the human intervention of duplicity can creep in. It is desperately pleasurable, to feel that which the previous Jonah would have once suppressed being wrenched out of him, the Jonah of the Institute forced to be seen, just as Smirke had never managed, as Peter had lied to himself he had succeeded in achieving, before he too had been torn apart before the Eye’s gaze.
Before the Archivist’s gaze.
Before Jon.
And now he had done it again. Yet another entity’s servant (or avatar as the archive employees had taken to calling those who tied themselves to something greater and more terrifying than the mundanity of their humanity), lost to that unrelenting scrutiny.
For the the rewards of being loved we must submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.
The quote crept into his mind, in a way which he would almost have thought of as coincidental, if coincidences had still been possible. Now, every coincidence was a machination of something menacing, lurking just out of sight. This time, he was sure it was Beholding itself nudging the thought to the forefront of his mind. Blissful.
Martin, starry-eyed and pathetically naïve, had spoken the saccharine phrase, quoting from a worn newspaper at employees whose names were far below his notice. Elias (as he had once pretended to be, although the Eye had never been tricked), had watched from afar, had taken a cold pleasure in the irony back then. It was an almost poetic foreshadowing, far before the Archivist was all that he would become (before the man he once was had even pledged himself to their god with the innocuous swipe of ink along a dotted line).
It foreshadowed other things between the Archivist and his follower too. Jonah did not pretend to understand what their relationship had become.
For why would one wait for a want of love to relish the raw, bare-boned, brutal sensation of being torn open and seen, in all your disgusting, sordid, everything?
He could relate to the flesh, in that. In wanting to open up and touch all that a person was and had been and was and would be.
To know them.
To be known.
Beholding had set its gaze upon Jonah so long ago he could scarcely remember a time where he thought privacy was something to be desired. Even before it had finally, permanently, marked him, he had long since let go of any illusions of concealment or discretion when it came to his god. It had been a revelation when his eyes had been opened to a reflection, greater and grander, staring back. He had pitied the other avatars back then; pitied them still now, for what could be greater than your god truly seeing you for all you were? Was that not all mundane, human religions aspired to? In their prayers, and their ceremonies, their temples and churches? Screaming in mind and manner alike to catch the attention of their absent god?
How could he not pity them?
He did not pity Jon.
He could never have been the Archivist himself. He was too closely tied to the Eye from the beginning. Few of the other entities could stomach the ceaseless watcher; the Web particularly, circumvented every attempted interaction. Nothing was worse to the mother of all spiders than to be seen, her machinations known. The Spiral could not abide being understood; the aversion of the Dark, the Forever Blind, was self-explanatory
The Flesh had little care for the Eye, too primitive in its nature to abet or hinder their cause. The Desolation; the buried; the Corruption; all simplistic, they burned, they suffocated, they rotted.
The Eye is more complex. More refined in its terror. Playing upon the psyche of humanity. It knows you; a uniquely human fear. (Even before, Jonah had always had a preference for what was high-class; exclusive).
The lonely of course, had a certain sympathy for their inclinations, for what was more desolate than being seen and yet abandoned?
But no other would willingly align themselves with him, even as they supported his cause to bring everything they were and everything they fed upon closer to their waiting mouths.
So no. The Archivist was never going to be Jonah.
It needed to be someone who was still human.
And Beholding craved it, that humanity that lay within Jon, as he saw and was seen by each and every entity that scarred him, as everything that made him human was stripped away, leaving him open.
And then he opened up a whole world for the Eye, high above, to gorge upon. It did not care that Jonah laid the groundwork, for it was not the Web. The Eye had no interest in the architect, the machinations behind the structure; it cared for the one who threw open the door.
Jonah is not jealous. He has long since lost that sliver of his humanity which would have allowed him to feel such a base emotion. If any of it had remained in Elias, it had been torn away as the panopticon had ascended, forming the foundations of the tower of this new world. Besides, jealousy was the domain of the corruption; a creeping rot, but of mind instead of body. He belongs completely and wholly to Beholding.
And yet, soon (soon, Beholding sighs), the Archivist will arrive the panopticon.
In this new world, the Eye sits above all else.
It has all the power it desires.
It has no need for two avatars.
And the Eye loves its Archivist.
In the crown of the panopticon, the man, the last tie to the remnants of humanity which lie beneath everything he has become, feels a shiver of fear run up his spine.
The Eye drinks it in.