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rainbowchewynuggets · 1 year

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TMA Encore #14a

The earth is crushingly heavy. Jon has no room to expand his lungs, nor any air to breathe. His lungs are on fire. He could try to struggle his way out. A knowing voice in the back of his mind tells him that there is a way out. But the voice also says that every movement he makes presses on someone else trapped nearby in the trench of soil. The thought of squeezing the life out of them to grant him a feeling of agency makes him sick. It could be someone he cares about. Someone who doesn’t deserve it. Tense brittle bodies press on him between layers of dirt as he sinks further and further. He keeps his eyes screwed shut as grit creeps through his nose and ears.

The sand slides off of part of his elbow, and his skin prickles in open air. His heart quickens. It could be an escape, or at least a pocket of air. Should he move? Can he risk it? He seriously considers, but too late. His arm is quickly entrenched again.

His blood pressure builds, pressing on his throat. A strained grunt escapes him. The sand around him is shifting, pressing harder. He pulls a little tighter, but the pressure prods at his arm. Something cold grabs him and pulls. He resists, but the force is overwhelming.

The next thing he knows, he’s on the ground, staring up into a pale familiar face. It looks like Martin–if Martin had been left out in the cold. His colorless skin doesn’t move an inch, staring down with featureless scrutiny. There’s almost something hostile in it.

Jon tears his arm out of the hand that still holds it and scrambles to his feet. He brushes off the dirt and lets himself stabilize, sizing up his rescuer. This Martin mirrors his gaze. Then, the Martin steps back and walks away. Jon says nothing. His throat is too dry, anyway. He takes in his surroundings.

He’s standing on a piece of flooring beside what used to be part of the prison exterior. Martin just pulled him out through a window. The sand shifts down solidly as if the window weren’t there. The area around him is dark and hazy like a humid cave. Dingy light trickles in through the ceiling high above and quickly diffuses. It’s hard to see beyond the assembled chunks of stone that clutter his immediate eyeline.

Jon follows cautiously behind Martin to a patch of amber light over mesh wire–only because Martin proves that it’s sturdy enough to stand on. Jon swallows and starts to ask a question when Martin shushes him. He looks upward. So does Jon, reluctantly.

A shaft above them looks like it was burrowed out through layers of wreckage. Something long, black, and spindly blots out the light for a moment, accompanied by echoes of screeching metal. Bits of rock rain down around them.

Martin heads off in the opposite direction as the creature above them. Jon follows. This Martin doesn’t seem as intimidating as he first thought. Mostly just tired and fidgety. Still, he doesn’t follow too close. He tries to get Martin’s attention, to ask him questions only the real Martin would know. The man only returns a quick glance back at Jon before continuing.

The atmosphere finally lightens, revealing a room filled with fog. Ghosts of bulky forms and tilting pillars pass on either side of them. A far away clamor overhead gets Jon’s attention. Martin stops as it grows closer.

Be ready to run, Jon tells himself wearily.

The scraping of metal hinges and breaking of heavy objects compete to be heard over a monstrous voice that shakes Jon to his core. Another voice answers, but he can’t understand it past the prevailing sound of tumbling boulders and spokes. Jon throws himself back as they arrive from out of the haze above them and break cleanly through the mesh into the void below. Martin makes no adjustment to his position, his head turned skyward to face the falling debris.

Jon sees an iron rod the width of his thumb bury itself in the front of Martin’s shoulder. Martin stifles a yelp and manages to stay on his feet. He wraps a hand around it and removes it. The bar clatters loudly on the mesh. Only then does he turn to Jon, who is sat down, stupefied. Open confusion crosses Martin’s face.

Martin: Jon? You’re alive?

He asks as if seeing him for the first time. Jon’s jaw moves somewhat, unable to make words. Martin awkwardly slaps a hand over the wound in his shoulder.

Martin: Don’t freak out! Don’t freak out! I can explain.

The detached demeanor is gone so fast that Jon can’t help feeling a little slapped. He snaps up and charges over.

Jon: Martin, what the hell?!

Martin: It’s not as bad as it looks, I promise.

Jon ignores him and tears his cold hand away to see the puncture. To his utter surprise, he finds nothing there. Not even a blood stain.

Martin sheepishly explains his method of subverting the Fears’ influence in their new domain. As long as he’s not afraid, he can’t really be harmed. Jon doesn’t like to think that’s right, remembering the cuts on his arms that aren’t there anymore.

Jon: That’s insane.

Martin: Yeah, but it’s working.

Jon pushes his hair back. He does his best to express his bafflement and exhaustion, but he looks nothing but relieved. Martin stifles a smile.

Martin: Uh, actually, could you do me a huge favor? I think there’s one in my back.

Jon turns Martin around and sees another rod sticking out. He cringes.

Jon: Oh, god.

He shuts his eyes and pulls. It hits the floor with another loud clang.

Tim and Sasha want to find a way out.

They want to find Jon and Martin first.

They search.

Sasha finds a new area.

The way is locked.

Tim finds a way to open it.

They search.

Something terrible happens.

They can’t continue.

They go back.

Tim and Sasha want to find a way out.

They want to find Jon and Martin first.

They search.

Tim finds a hidden passage.

Something terrible happens.

They continue.

Sasha finds a new area.

Sasha hears Jon and Martin nearby.

Something terrible happens.

They go back.

Tim and Sasha want to find a way out.

They search.

Tim and Sasha get separated.

Tim gets injured.

They go back.

Tim and Sasha want to find a way out.

Something terrible happens.

Sasha gets injured.

Tim gets injured.

They go back.

Tim and Sasha want to find a way out.

They go back.

Tim and Sasha want to find Jon and Martin.

They move forward.

Sasha finds a new area.

The way is locked.

Tim finds a new area.

Something terrible happens.

They go back.

Tim and Sasha want to find Jon and Martin.

They move forward.

The way is locked.

Sasha finds a way around.

They continue.

Tim finds a new area.

Something terrible happens.

They continue.

Sasha finds a new area.

Something terrible happens.

They get separated.

They continue.

They find each other.

Sasha finds a hidden passage

Tim finds a new area.

Something terrible happens.

They go back.

Tim and Sasha want to find Jon and Martin.

They move forward.

The hellscape is silent and eerie. Everything feels far away, leaving Jon and Martin to talk quietly to each other as the area around them grades from mangled prison to mangled tunnels.

Jon recounts his ordeal being chased by the voices of their friends in the concrete forest. The coercion of the whole exercise is obvious upon retelling. He apologizes for being suspicious of Martin all the same. Martin listens solemnly and accepts. He, himself, had chosen to be cagey earlier rather than risk giving Not-Jon any information he didn’t already have.

Jon: You thought I was a spy?

Martin: Kind of.

Martin tells Jon about the fake death snare in the entry area. It’s sickening to hear, yet Jon finds himself hanging on every word. He stops himself from asking for details, not trusting the desire.

Jon: You said you haven’t seen either of them since?

Martin: I looked for a long, long time. There’s just no sign at all.

Jon sighs worriedly.

Martin: I’m starting to think it’s that way on purpose. I tried to go back the way I came, but the arrangement of this place is nonsense. When you just popped out in front of me as I was exploring, I found it… suspect.

Jon nods.

Martin: I’ve mostly been trying to get the lay of the land and track Not-Jon’s movements. It’s weird. It doesn’t seem like he’s actually all that focused on us. As long as I’m steadfast, everything mostly leaves me alone. It’s--I dunno--reactionary. Like he’s just leaving the place on autopilot while he does other things.

Jon: He sought me out.

Martin: Well, he doesn’t like you.

Jon: True.

Martin: When he’s not trying to get away from Not-Martin, he goes somewhere up in the very top. Like there’s something he wants. I mean, I don’t have a full picture of what the apocalypse is supposed to look like, but doesn’t this all feel shaky? Small-scale, y’know?

Jon: I suppose.

Martin: Based on the arguing I’ve overheard, I think he’s stuck in his own domain. The rest of the world is out there, and he’s trying to dig his way out. That’s why the walls keep shifting down.

A thought immediately stirs in Jon’s mind. Something about the tunnels collapsing. It struggles to form fully, but it compels him to agree with Martin.

Jon: It might explain why he’s not after either of us at the moment. Kind of a poor omniscient, if you ask me. Unless he’s still planning something.

Martin and Jon decide that if they can’t find Tim and Sasha, they’ll have to free them from the hellscape before anything happens to them. Martin has observed that Not-Martin can’t get Not-Jon to stop, only distract him temporarily. He summarizes the conversation he had with him before–about how their mortality functions and the possibility that Not-Jon is going to have to die. Jon is magnetized to the idea. He replies that Not-Jon might actually be vulnerable by that logic. He could see into the creature somewhat as it stared into him.

It was scared. Really scared.

Not-Jon has been deeply shaken by his transformation. He feels like he’s losing all control as everything spirals back to the outcome he was trying to avoid. He knows he’s on the cusp of leaving Not-Martin with all the hunger because he’s already so weak. However, he refuses to give up on salvaging the situation. He can’t be stopped, but he could be killed.

Martin concedes. It doesn’t sound like a guarantee, but it’s better than what they had before. Neither of them are reluctant to put Not-Jon out of his misery at this point. They’ll have to figure out what to do about Not-Martin, though.

Their surroundings grow narrower and clearer as they reach pathways leading upward.

Sasha: Think you can make it?

Tim: I think I’d be better off growing an extra foot first, but I’ll give it a try.

Tim takes a step back, sprints, and clambers up a plaster wall nearly twice his size. He scrubs his hands against the floor of the next story up and pulls himself over the lip. Sasha jumps to clasp his hand, and he pulls her up to join him.

Tim and Sasha are deep inside the interior of the island. They had lost all concept of direction hours ago. After fighting, fleeing, and clawing their way through gauntlet after gauntlet, they’ve made it to a region where their nightmare encounters are further apart. They take the chance to rest before restarting their search for their Jon and Martin. They need it. Both of them are ragged.

They pause among the shattered halls of the Institute.

Tim: You think he needs a lot of oil for all those arms?

Sasha: I’m sure he does, and I’m sure he’s not using any. My ears are still ringing.

They chuckle.

They had encountered their grotesque warden some time ago. Even now, miles deep in the folds of the enigma, he follows them in spirit. Might as well laugh at it, however difficult. Tim’s idea.

It’s a nice distraction. Neither of them dare think about what comes next. The onslaught of terror had forced them to measure their survival in moments. Looking back at all those moments strung together to bring them this far is elating. But they can’t look ahead. Can’t wonder where all this could possibly lead until they find the boys. It just isn’t practical. Sasha’s idea.

They’re shoved back to their feet before long by the sagging of the ground underneath them. The path ahead continues to sag as it branches upward. Tim and Sasha are hurried to stay ahead of it, having to make their decisions on instinct. Left. Right. Left. Left. The middle one. Right. Left. The warped hallway degrades to exposed wood to paper to a tight ventricle of pulp.

Tim feels his feet lose traction. He careens forward, propelled by Sasha’s body. They jam together in the limp paper tube as the path behind them fully tears away. A thundering mass of paper, then wood, then stone and brick fall inches from the soles of their shoes. The two of them are dumped out as the dust settles.

They don’t go far, landing hard on the pile of brick. The fallen path has exposed their trajectory: a long winding branching track strung back and forth across a deep red cavern. The entire thing, every step since they began their journey, has torn out of its fastenings and now slips down into the gloom. Sasha can only tear her eyes away when she feels Tim nudging her.

The mess of bricks had the fortune to spill out onto an outcropping in a wall that looks like someone made chewed meat out of a building. The paper shaft ahead of them continues, and there are several narrow ridges they could take down to other platforms. But they instead become fixated on part of the wall that came down with the tunnel. It left a craggy cone-shaped hole behind.

As they approach, they can smell fresh air. A twinkle of sunlight peeks in the distance between more layers of rubble. Tim and Sasha instantly dig at the brick and stone. The hole widens marginally. Sediment and iron mix with the fresh air. Just as the hole widens enough to crawl into, the ground under their feet suddenly comes away, as if yanked.

They fall for what feels like years.

Sasha wakes up and finds herself staring ruefully from the bottom of yet another hill. The foulness in the air she had all but forgotten pours heavily in her lungs. Everything hurts, but not as badly as before. She works her way to her feet. Turning, she sees Tim sitting nearby at the edge of the peninsula that apparently caught them in their descent. He’s facing away from her, his shoulders hunched tiredly.

Sasha: Well. That sucked. I guess we’ll get started again.

Tim: We can’t.

She swallows her despair so as not to lose her nerve.

Sasha: We’ve done it once. We can do it twice.

Tim: Sasha, come look at this.

Sasha wills her legs to show her what’s beyond the edge of the cliff.

Tim is staring into an acre-wide pit filled with bodies. Their bodies. Many are broken and torn in obvious ways. The injuries are precisely consistent with their journey so far. He points to a pair among those in the most recent layer. They have bloody fingers.

Sasha is repelled.

Sasha: It’s just a scare. It doesn’t mean anything.

Tim: How’d we survive that fall, Sasha?

Sasha: Come on. The Things upstairs wouldn’t want us dead. We can’t give them anything that way.

He looks at her with urgency, letting the thought he’d been sitting with propel to the surface.

Tim: They’re hardly getting anything from us at all. They want the whole planet. If they kill us and make us into their ghosts, they can send us out to do their dirty work.

Sasha: That’s what Not-Jon is for.

Tim: Maybe he’s not doing it fast enough for them. He may be screwed up like them, but he hates them. He wants to do the right thing, so he tries to stop them from using us. He threw everything at us he could to keep us from getting out, and then showed us the landfill of failed tries when we found a way around him.

Sasha: Or to just stop us from escaping. We almost had it!

Tim: We weren’t supposed to escape! We were supposed to be looking for Jon and Martin! That was the plan, no distractions, right? And it was working. But we couldn’t help ourselves when we saw that opening, could we?

Sasha hesitates.

She can’t deny that he has a point. This isn’t the first time they’ve fallen for a false exit–they should know better. She retraces their route through the paper tunnel. The odds that they wound up at the one part attached to the wall seem uncomfortably slim. More memories surface. Drowning. Crushing. Burning. She had pushed them away before as intrusive thoughts brought on by close calls. She isn’t sure now. How many times, indeed, should they have died by this point?

She desperately wants to argue with him. She wants to prove that she hasn’t already been replaced. The more she searches, the foggier it gets. Tim reads her face.

Tim: I’m not sure, either. But if we’ve come this far to keep them from having their way, we can’t risk it.

Sasha: We shouldn’t even go after Jon and Martin, should we?

Tim frowns.

Sasha buckles to her knees. She and Tim sit in silence.

With nothing else to draw his attention, Tim notices a variance in the color of the ruddy ground. Something plasticky is wedged in the crags just under the cliff. One of the crappy old handheld tape players from the supply closet. He reaches for it, careful not to fall in with the rest of the dolls. It’s heavy. Through the clear plastic window on the front, he finds that it has a cracked cassette inside.

Martin and Jon come to an intersection of paths in the wet grey stone that surrounds them. Things are closer and clearer than they have been in a while. Unsettling noise comes from each option, a promise of danger. Martin takes a breath.

Martin: *rhetorically* Any preference?

Jon: *definitively* Second from the right.

Martin looks at him with wider eyes. Jon had told Martin about the glimpses he’d been getting from the Eye, but this is the first time it had done anything but make both of them more nervous.

Martin: You can see where he is?

Jon nods shortly.

Jon: Both of them. They move around, but they’ve been over this way for a while. This is the best way through. Our other options here are… nasty.

Martin considers. Avoiding the nasty stuff kind of defeats his immunity, but he supposes that Jon wouldn’t make it alive. He accepts, and they move on.

They approach the sound of rushing water again. The hollow ends at a T-junction with a giant water pipe. Fluid spews down into a hole that’s been punched into the rock. There are speckles of erosion everywhere.

Jon picks up a long piece of stone from a place where the wall is cracked. He holds it out to the current, and the rock forcefully melts. They both step back.

Jon: I didn’t realize. We should turn around.

Martin: Is there another way through that won’t kill us?

Jon: … No. We can look for something further back.

Martin doesn’t move.

Jon: Martin.

Martin: Well... I was hoping it wouldn’t be this way. Should have known better.

Jon: No. We’re not going in there.

Martin: Jon, we both knew we might not be getting out of this alive. You said yourself that was on the bill from the start.

Jon: I lied! I was never willing to let any of you get hurt. Me? Maybe. But not like this.

Martin. That was before. We’re on Their rules now. Our mortality’s a handicap. And death is-- Well, we... we could use it if we’re not afraid of it, and it’s just about all we’ve got left.

Martin exhales, having successfully dragged himself through the sentence.

Jon: You should be afraid. Not-Martin might act like he’s on the side of reason, but there’s clearly as much wrong with him as the other me. Think about what this could do to you!

The anxiety Martin had been pushing down since the talk in the security chamber boils high in his chest. It isn’t the anger in Jon’s voice that disheartens him but the genuine concern in his face. He is suddenly overwhelmed with a desire to listen. He doesn’t want any of this. He wants someone to tell him it’s okay to stop.

Jon waits, trying to appear resolute.

Martin’s face loses its softness.

Martin: We have to accept it, Jon.

Jon gives in to impulse and decides for him. He takes Martin by the hand and pulls him back the way they came. Martin’s ice cold fingers numb his own.

He refuses to let this get any worse. He searches through the Eye for Tim and Sasha, but it still won’t show him. He tries harder, despite the prickling discomfort. It takes him a minute to realize that his deadened hand is clutching nothing.

Martin isn’t behind him. He’s nowhere that the Eye can see, in all the cavities in the stone around the one Jon is standing in. Jon stares into the rushing acid.

Could he survive if he jumped? If he mustered the detachment that Martin talked about, maybe he could catch up to him. Save him from whatever he’s about to try to do alone. But he can’t. He knows he can’t. His skin burns. Anger, guilt, and powerlessness rush through him. All he can do is go back and be reabsorbed by the hellscape.

A drop hits his neck with a sizzle. He quickly wipes it away. Another one plinks down on his arm from the eroded stone roof before he can put it down. To Jon’s surprise, the liquid isn’t eating through his skin. It’s evaporating, leaving his skin untouched. It’s so cold here, he hadn’t discerned his temperature growing exceedingly hot. Desolately hot.

The Eye made sense, but not this. He could have been marked–at most–by the door knob, if that even counts here. He shouldn’t be able to use it. It doesn’t work like this. What did he do wrong?

Jon approaches the wall of the passage. He extends a hand, and the cement recedes at the command of the Buried. Jon looks dejectedly at his palm. He can still feel the burning. The grit and filth in his pores. The wind whistling in his ears. The cuts all over. The mortifying terror or being hunted and loathed. He rubs his eyes as a white-hot streak of fire walks across his face.

He has to keep going. Or it will all have been for nothing.

Jon opens a way for himself and steps through.

————

First

So, I’ve decided on a solution to my second big problem. I’m going to finish posting the text with longer chapters and way less art. Maybe one panel per. Hope that works. Thx! :)

Index

#the magnus archives #mag200 spoilers #magnus pod #tma fancomic #tma encore 14 #tma encore 14a #martin blackwood #jonathan sims #sasha james #tim stoker #cw buried alive #cw tapophobia #cw impaling #cw violence #cw falling #cw blood #cw death #cw burning

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