the-magnus-backlogs - Tumblr blog

[the-magnus-backlogs]

Hi! I’m in a really tight spot right now, and just need a little cash for laundry and cat food… anything helps :) so I’m opening…

emergency lineart commissions!!!

For the low low price of whatever the fuck you feel like paying, you too can have a piece of art lined by me. What a prize!!

Need an example? I got examples!

Please message me on discord via helianthus.annuus for more detail or inquiry!!! I take p@yp4l, v3nm0, and even $app, but PYPL is very much prefurred. Please share!!!

[the-magnus-backlogs]

So I caved and with @spacespectres help made an avatarsona! With a big chunky statement to go with it!    (Trigger warnings for homophobia/transphobia, conversion therapy, death and parental abuse. Everyone gets just desserts though.)

‘I’m, actually not sure why I’m here. You can’t help me, my son is gone and the police arn’t saying it but - I’m sorry, my ears are- It’s like- You know those alarms, the ones that are made to disperse kids at shopping centres, keep them from causing trouble- not that i think they work. you see more of them these days, scruffy and dirty, what their parents doing, i don’t-  Anyway, it’s like that noise, that high buzz. it’s meant to be that, as you get older, your brain tunes it out, adults aren’t meant to hear it anymore, just keep on shopping without hoodlums hanging about outside smoking and throwing shit at the elderly.   I don’t miss that, Ben’s smoking, i’ll say that. That’s awful to say, i bet you’re thinking, god how terrible, her child’s missing and she’s moaning about a few nicotine stains on the ceiling.

Keep reading

[the-magnus-backlogs]

Statement of Cali C. Copper, regarding the ‘statements we’re probably going to get from some people soon’, and her childhood. Original statement date unknown, but …. Well, the letter only arrived here yesterday.

I should have known I couldn’t have resisted the pull of the eye forever, but in honesty I’m not completely sure if it’s even that. I always was a sucker for telling a good story, and I don’t particularly care for having any stray archivists try to hunt me down because they got a statement or two about me. Really, you’re all so dreadfully boring.

Well, let’s try to recount this. It all started when I was eight. My parents had always said my hands were long, said they were ‘pianists hands’, and while I never cared for instruments or music, I did care about getting them to love me more.  

So I asked them to spend some of their immense wealth on piano lessons for me, and they accepted. It turned out I was a “natural”. It only took me a year to begin picking up traction online and, by then, I was already something of a celebrity in my town. It was a small place, so I was probably the only interesting thing they had at the time, though I knew deep down that any mistake would have them throw me to the side in minutes. 

I don’t know how, but eventually I started gaining enough traction that a man dressed in a suit I could’ve sworn was bloody on the inside asked me if I would like to play live at a small nearby theatre. I was only 11 at the time, and I really didn’t want to, but my parents seemed to have made some sort of deal with the man, and they were… just overjoyed, really. 

I wasn’t. I didn’t like piano at all. My mother would ignore me in favour of getting me to play, and me and my father had never really gotten along, so me practising piano for hours on end until my fingertips were red and sore gave him a nice break to spend more time working on his woodworking hobby.

It wasn’t all horrific. I had fridays, saturdays, and sundays off, and they had a lovely habit of neglecting my homeschool in favour of my piano, and I would take piano lessons over mathematics any day. 

I did start to fall behind, though. I was so nervous for the upcoming gig that my hands had begun to shake onto different keys, and my heart had begun to pound the moment I saw a piano… Needless to say, it merely fueled my hatred for the instrument.

But my fate had not yet decided that it was time for my ascension, so when the time arrived, I played beautifully. My fingers danced along the keys, even though every time I looked down I could’ve sworn they were bleeding mere moments before. The crowd’s judging eyes were hidden by the beauty of my piano, and my mother had sternly told me minutes before to be grateful, that this was an honour, especially since I was so young. I didn’t think the same, but I would never dare to openly disagree with a woman like her.

She wasn’t evil, and she loved me with her entire heart, but her heart had long since been filled with hatred, and it seemed that she didn’t realise that she was slowly moulding me into the same woman she was. 

Ah, but I’m getting off track. After the show, people in my town- and even towns nearby - began to fall over themselves, just begging for me to play live for them. I’m not even sure if it’s legal to make a kid do that, but the police didn’t care and neither did my family.

It took maybe a year for my hatred for piano to begin leaking through into my playing. The first complaint labelled my music to be “lacking soul,”- and maybe they were right, but I was 13 at the time and yet nobody seemed to spare the person behind the instrument any thought.

But it was a single complaint! We- My family and I, - disregarded it as a matter of… personal taste, though I had a feeling that wasn’t the case. It took two more shows for us to start getting far more complaints, and four more for them to start outweighing the compliments. 

“Really, Cali,” My parents would say, voices tinged with slight dislike, “You’ve got to put more effort into piano. You’re falling behind in your studies as well…”

I didn’t care, really, even if their disappointment stung like needles piercing into my skin.  It was all the same for me, and I felt a distant relief that the audience had begun to realise I had no passion for the instrument I was supposedly ‘born to play’.

And once people began to stop asking me to perform, when shows became rarer and my parents got more and more reserved around me, it happened. It wasn’t anything special, I was just eating some frozen burger I found in the fridge. See, at the time, I developed some strange- haha, - fascination with meat. 

I realised that people really are just… things, little useless blobs of meat that are desperate to think they had a purpose, and that they like to think they’re better than you could ever be.

I wasn’t hungry, so I just scraped my knife uselessly through it, watching tasteless chunks fall apart, and then it happened. God, it felt… amazing. It felt like touching a mind far greater than my own, but it wasn’t a mind, just something. It just Was, like a fact. I didn’t even know what it was, at the time. It didn’t call out to me on purpose, no, my mind was just made  for becoming one of its many loyal assistants.

I do not believe people have a purpose, but I know that I must have been made to feed It. And feed it I did. 

It started slowly, hunger no longer being fulfilled by food. I- It was instinctual, knowing what would really fill that gaping emptiness that had always been with me, lurking under the surface of my soul. So I asked my mother if I could talk to some of my critics, and she regarded me with cold, unfeeling eyes. The greatest mistake she would ever make was shrugging and saying “Sure, just don’t let it get in the way of your next show.”

I did meet them, and perhaps in some grand “rebellious” phase against what I knew I was meant for, I truly tried to talk to them, but they were older than me and angry at everything and I looked like a perfect vessel for blame. I had a show in merely two days. One man raised his hand at me, and that was when I grabbed the knife I didn’t remember hiding in my pocket. 

I tore every single one of them apart, and god was it beautiful. Some of them cried in fear, some of them screamed, some of them tried to shout in ‘righteous’ anger, but in truth I was made to kill them. I was not a wolf, a Hunter, No- I would never be one of those idiots, so obsessed with animals, god.. I was just doing what they would’ve done to everything that wasn’t human. 

My hands began to move of their own accord as I dragged them into my fathers woodworking shop, and while I reasonably knew there was no way to create what I wanted, I trusted It to deliver me what I truly desired.  I didn’t even know how to work the machine.

 But deliver it did, as I stared at the piano that shivered and bled onto the concrete floor, staining the shelves permanently. Its keys pressed of their own accord, quietly, and it sounded like it was trying to scream, as it tried to open the keys of teeth to curse me, or maybe to beg me for freedom, it doesn’t matter. It made a sickening bump, bump, bump, sound as its many hearts were amplified somehow, as if the True Being wanted me to hear it. 

I felt real for the first time in a long time, so I knew what I had to do, so I brought the piano to my next show. 

The crowd screamed as the lights flicked on, but the staff were already mere chunks of gore, and I could no longer be stopped. The exits were so tightly shut, and I could only admire my own handiwork in sealing them shut. I pressed the first key, and a beautiful C rang out of it, tinged with screams. It rang out for so long I could’ve sworn it was trying to speak to me, but I will never care for its empty words.

I’m rambling, aren’t I? I’m sorry. Let me make a very long story short;

A piano plays much much better with a beating heart, and I knew that the show would not be over for a very long time, even if the teeth were digging into my palms. The crowd's screams became gurgled through blood, throats that were slowly closing up with excess flesh.

I was not sorry, to put it very simply.

You can end the recording now, little Archivist. May your suffering be long and your nights unending.

 [originally written by @no-g0ds-no-masters, reposted with permission]

[the-magnus-backlogs]

Statement of Cali C. Copper, regarding the ‘statements we’re probably going to get from some people soon’, and her childhood. Original statement date unknown, but …. Well, the letter only arrived here yesterday.

I should have known I couldn’t have resisted the pull of the eye forever, but in honesty I’m not completely sure if it’s even that. I always was a sucker for telling a good story, and I don’t particularly care for having any stray archivists try to hunt me down because they got a statement or two about me. Really, you’re all so dreadfully boring.

Well, let’s try to recount this. It all started when I was eight. My parents had always said my hands were long, said they were ‘pianists hands’, and while I never cared for instruments or music, I did care about getting them to love me more.  

So I asked them to spend some of their immense wealth on piano lessons for me, and they accepted. It turned out I was a “natural”. It only took me a year to begin picking up traction online and, by then, I was already something of a celebrity in my town. It was a small place, so I was probably the only interesting thing they had at the time, though I knew deep down that any mistake would have them throw me to the side in minutes. 

I don’t know how, but eventually I started gaining enough traction that a man dressed in a suit I could’ve sworn was bloody on the inside asked me if I would like to play live at a small nearby theatre. I was only 11 at the time, and I really didn’t want to, but my parents seemed to have made some sort of deal with the man, and they were… just overjoyed, really. 

I wasn’t. I didn’t like piano at all. My mother would ignore me in favour of getting me to play, and me and my father had never really gotten along, so me practising piano for hours on end until my fingertips were red and sore gave him a nice break to spend more time working on his woodworking hobby.

It wasn’t all horrific. I had fridays, saturdays, and sundays off, and they had a lovely habit of neglecting my homeschool in favour of my piano, and I would take piano lessons over mathematics any day. 

I did start to fall behind, though. I was so nervous for the upcoming gig that my hands had begun to shake onto different keys, and my heart had begun to pound the moment I saw a piano… Needless to say, it merely fueled my hatred for the instrument.

But my fate had not yet decided that it was time for my ascension, so when the time arrived, I played beautifully. My fingers danced along the keys, even though every time I looked down I could’ve sworn they were bleeding mere moments before. The crowd’s judging eyes were hidden by the beauty of my piano, and my mother had sternly told me minutes before to be grateful, that this was an honour, especially since I was so young. I didn’t think the same, but I would never dare to openly disagree with a woman like her.

She wasn’t evil, and she loved me with her entire heart, but her heart had long since been filled with hatred, and it seemed that she didn’t realise that she was slowly moulding me into the same woman she was. 

Ah, but I’m getting off track. After the show, people in my town- and even towns nearby - began to fall over themselves, just begging for me to play live for them. I’m not even sure if it’s legal to make a kid do that, but the police didn’t care and neither did my family.

It took maybe a year for my hatred for piano to begin leaking through into my playing. The first complaint labelled my music to be “lacking soul,”- and maybe they were right, but I was 13 at the time and yet nobody seemed to spare the person behind the instrument any thought.

But it was a single complaint! We- My family and I, - disregarded it as a matter of… personal taste, though I had a feeling that wasn’t the case. It took two more shows for us to start getting far more complaints, and four more for them to start outweighing the compliments. 

“Really, Cali,” My parents would say, voices tinged with slight dislike, “You’ve got to put more effort into piano. You’re falling behind in your studies as well…”

I didn’t care, really, even if their disappointment stung like needles piercing into my skin.  It was all the same for me, and I felt a distant relief that the audience had begun to realise I had no passion for the instrument I was supposedly ‘born to play’.

And once people began to stop asking me to perform, when shows became rarer and my parents got more and more reserved around me, it happened. It wasn’t anything special, I was just eating some frozen burger I found in the fridge. See, at the time, I developed some strange- haha, - fascination with meat. 

I realised that people really are just… things, little useless blobs of meat that are desperate to think they had a purpose, and that they like to think they’re better than you could ever be.

I wasn’t hungry, so I just scraped my knife uselessly through it, watching tasteless chunks fall apart, and then it happened. God, it felt… amazing. It felt like touching a mind far greater than my own, but it wasn’t a mind, just something. It just Was, like a fact. I didn’t even know what it was, at the time. It didn’t call out to me on purpose, no, my mind was just made  for becoming one of its many loyal assistants.

I do not believe people have a purpose, but I know that I must have been made to feed It. And feed it I did. 

It started slowly, hunger no longer being fulfilled by food. I- It was instinctual, knowing what would really fill that gaping emptiness that had always been with me, lurking under the surface of my soul. So I asked my mother if I could talk to some of my critics, and she regarded me with cold, unfeeling eyes. The greatest mistake she would ever make was shrugging and saying “Sure, just don’t let it get in the way of your next show.”

I did meet them, and perhaps in some grand “rebellious” phase against what I knew I was meant for, I truly tried to talk to them, but they were older than me and angry at everything and I looked like a perfect vessel for blame. I had a show in merely two days. One man raised his hand at me, and that was when I grabbed the knife I didn’t remember hiding in my pocket. 

I tore every single one of them apart, and god was it beautiful. Some of them cried in fear, some of them screamed, some of them tried to shout in ‘righteous’ anger, but in truth I was made to kill them. I was not a wolf, a Hunter, No- I would never be one of those idiots, so obsessed with animals, god.. I was just doing what they would’ve done to everything that wasn’t human. 

My hands began to move of their own accord as I dragged them into my fathers woodworking shop, and while I reasonably knew there was no way to create what I wanted, I trusted It to deliver me what I truly desired.  I didn’t even know how to work the machine.

 But deliver it did, as I stared at the piano that shivered and bled onto the concrete floor, staining the shelves permanently. Its keys pressed of their own accord, quietly, and it sounded like it was trying to scream, as it tried to open the keys of teeth to curse me, or maybe to beg me for freedom, it doesn’t matter. It made a sickening bump, bump, bump, sound as its many hearts were amplified somehow, as if the True Being wanted me to hear it. 

I felt real for the first time in a long time, so I knew what I had to do, so I brought the piano to my next show. 

The crowd screamed as the lights flicked on, but the staff were already mere chunks of gore, and I could no longer be stopped. The exits were so tightly shut, and I could only admire my own handiwork in sealing them shut. I pressed the first key, and a beautiful C rang out of it, tinged with screams. It rang out for so long I could’ve sworn it was trying to speak to me, but I will never care for its empty words.

I’m rambling, aren’t I? I’m sorry. Let me make a very long story short;

A piano plays much much better with a beating heart, and I knew that the show would not be over for a very long time, even if the teeth were digging into my palms. The crowd's screams became gurgled through blood, throats that were slowly closing up with excess flesh.

I was not sorry, to put it very simply.

You can end the recording now, little Archivist. May your suffering be long and your nights unending.

 [originally written by @no-g0ds-no-masters, reposted with permission]

[the-magnus-backlogs]

// ooc note. yeah we're coming back. sorry about the sudden absence and hiatus.

[the-magnus-backlogs]

Statement of Remus King

Statement of Remus King regarding something watching him sleep in his home in Flint, Michigan, USA. Original statement given sometime in April, 2021. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, head archivist of the Magnus Institute, London. Statement begins: 

Keep reading

[the-magnus-backlogs]

A blog dedicated to collecting fan made statements, since- as far as I am aware- this has not been done elsewhere on the internet. I am in no way associated with Rusty Quill, this is a nonprofit fan project, only for entertainment.

[the-magnus-backlogs]

My aunt's always been fond of houses out in the middle of nowhere. The kinds of places where your nearest neighbour is at least a 10 minute drive away, and the more remote the better. In one particular house, she used to hear pounding footsteps on the stairs. Not every night, but often enough for it to become fairly routine.

She's got this mate. Really nice guy. Fixed the rain gutter on our old house, but a huge sceptic. He offered to help fix some problems with the pipes and agreed to stay the night since it would have taken him the better part of the day just to get out there and back. She warned him about the "ghost" beforehand and he laughed in her face.

They were playing scrabble and sharing a bottle of wine and just generally hanging out downstairs, lost track of time. At about 1-2am, they hear the noise. Now, this was the first time my aunt had heard it from downstairs and it was LOUD. Made the light shake kind of loud, only this time it was accompanied by a slamming door upstairs. The door opposite my aunt's bedroom.

Her mate leapt to his feet, grabbed a hammer from his tool kit and everything. He was CONVINCED someone had broken in, insisted on searching the whole house. The cats were hiding the whole time.

I've met the guy. Incredibly rational. Still claims he doesn't believe in ghosts, but at 2am he still got back in his van and drove home rather than spend the night. He outright refused to go visit her there again until after she moved house.

Archivist’s Supplement

This is awful interesting! It must’ve been misfiled for months.. Well! time to hunker back down to work. I’ll have someone see if there’s any follow-up work to be done, though I doubt we can find this person’s errant ghost.

[the-magnus-backlogs]

You guys still active?

Yes we are! Both my assistant Arthur and I have been burdened down with academics as of late, as the end of the semester approaches, but we should be able to get back to sorting through the archives soon. 

[the-magnus-backlogs]

Archivist’s Supplement.

This one must’ve been in here for a long time, and must be referring to the archivist a few years prior... Gertrude, I believe her name was? Whatever happened to her? Well- They say she died in the line of duty, and my immediate predecessor, Jonathan Sims, saw fit to leave. Says interesting things about this job, though.. Odd that academic burnout goes quite so far. I’ll have someone look into this case, though our team.. er, Arthur, might not find anything, given that it’s twenty-five years old. - Elisha Roberts, Archivist.

Statement of Jasey Grey, regarding nothing of importance.

Statement found in an envelope labelled “Tell your bloody archivist she can have it” outside archive entrance on 19/2/1995.

I never thought I’d feel this way again. The sinking hopelessness of a blank page that goes on forever. Ink on my lips from chewing a pen. I suppose for this your boss is giving me a hand, but there’s only so much eldritch power can do for me here. Still. It works for a trip down memory lane.

Do you remember your schooldays? Mine are scattered and shattered between moments of joy and despair, but the only reliable memory is of blank pages and ticking clocks. Round and round the hands would spin as I desperately tried to find something worth putting to paper. It didn’t matter that it was just another essay, I had to find the perfect words or it wouldn’t work. I always did eventually, getting stellar grades each time. My parents were so proud of me.

My parents… I wonder if they noticed when things started to change. When the perfect words didn’t come so I stopped speaking for days at a time. When my thoughts whirled so fast I had to sit down and put my head between my knees to sort them. When nothing I thought of seemed good enough so I wrote nothing, and my grades started to slip as I handed in nothing for my lessons. I went to each detention and did nothing because nothing was worth doing. I told no-one because no-one was worth telling. In classes I stared out of the window at the endless sky, dreaming of floating there and thinking of nothing at all.

By year 11 things got worse. My parents had been contacted several times by the school and confiscated everything I had that wasn’t necessary for school. I didn’t care. My head felt so heavy from everything I wanted to say but couldn’t. I got into fights with people and lost, but that didn’t matter. There was no pain. At night I would climb out my window onto the roof and stare at the sky, wishing I could disappear into the void. And I did.

My thoughts were racing so fast that night and my head felt like it was hurtling through a wind tunnel at hundreds of miles an hour. Climbing out my window, I noticed how far the ground seemed, how the horizon seemed to touch the sky, how I was surrounded by nothing and everything at the same time. I stood in the centre of the roof, and spun circles on it, round and round, the horizon was endless. I should have been able to see the edge of the village where I went to school from the roof, as well as the lakes to the south, but there was only sky. It reached for me, and I reached back.

I fell asleep on the roof, and when I woke up there was no doubt in my mind as to what I was going to do. I never saw my parents again. Upped and left, changed my name, came to London. There’s a lot of exhaustion in London, a lot of pain and a lot of fear. I made my way around schools, convinced others that nothing they could ever write would make a difference, and if it did it would be a mistake. Slowly the void reached for them, the promise of all mistakes and accidents forgotten against the time span of the universe. But most let it consume them until they were shells, unwilling to embrace the freedom of being worthless. Instead they trudged on with their miserable lives, knowing that they didn’t matter but continuing regardless.

When I got to old to hang out with secondary school kids, I moved to the sixth formers, then to the uni students. I fed off their feelings of inadequacy and failure, tempted them with promises of liberation from the unbearable pressure, and abandoned them to the far reaches of nothingness, where they were emptied of any worth they might have had. Some crawled away, broken but breathing, whilst some vanished without a trace. No one noticed they were gone.

No-one, that is, except your archivist, who hunted me down for two bloody years trying to find the source of the disappearances only she remembered. And she succeeded. I don’t know what she did. I don’t know how she did it. All I know is wherever I go, I am being watched. Everywhere. I am constantly seen, reminded of my existence, tortured by the knowledge that someone out there is interested in me. I want it gone. She wanted a statement? Here it bloody is.

[the-magnus-backlogs]

Statement of Jasey Grey, regarding nothing of importance.

Statement found in an envelope labelled “Tell your bloody archivist she can have it” outside archive entrance on 19/2/1995.

  I never thought I’d feel this way again. The sinking hopelessness of a blank page that goes on forever. Ink on my lips from chewing a pen. I suppose for this your boss is giving me a hand, but there’s only so much eldritch power can do for me here. Still. It works for a trip down memory lane.

Do you remember your schooldays? Mine are scattered and shattered between moments of joy and despair, but the only reliable memory is of blank pages and ticking clocks. Round and round the hands would spin as I desperately tried to find something worth putting to paper. It didn’t matter that it was just another essay, I had to find the perfect words or it wouldn’t work. I always did eventually, getting stellar grades each time. My parents were so proud of me.

My parents… I wonder if they noticed when things started to change. When the perfect words didn’t come so I stopped speaking for days at a time. When my thoughts whirled so fast I had to sit down and put my head between my knees to sort them. When nothing I thought of seemed good enough so I wrote nothing, and my grades started to slip as I handed in nothing for my lessons. I went to each detention and did nothing because nothing was worth doing. I told no-one because no-one was worth telling. In classes I stared out of the window at the endless sky, dreaming of floating there and thinking of nothing at all.

By year 11 things got worse. My parents had been contacted several times by the school and confiscated everything I had that wasn’t necessary for school. I didn’t care. My head felt so heavy from everything I wanted to say but couldn’t. I got into fights with people and lost, but that didn’t matter. There was no pain. At night I would climb out my window onto the roof and stare at the sky, wishing I could disappear into the void. And I did.

My thoughts were racing so fast that night and my head felt like it was hurtling through a wind tunnel at hundreds of miles an hour. Climbing out my window, I noticed how far the ground seemed, how the horizon seemed to touch the sky, how I was surrounded by nothing and everything at the same time. I stood in the centre of the roof, and spun circles on it, round and round, the horizon was endless. I should have been able to see the edge of the village where I went to school from the roof, as well as the lakes to the south, but there was only sky. It reached for me, and I reached back.

I fell asleep on the roof, and when I woke up there was no doubt in my mind as to what I was going to do. I never saw my parents again. Upped and left, changed my name, came to London. There’s a lot of exhaustion in London, a lot of pain and a lot of fear. I made my way around schools, convinced others that nothing they could ever write would make a difference, and if it did it would be a mistake. Slowly the void reached for them, the promise of all mistakes and accidents forgotten against the time span of the universe. But most let it consume them until they were shells, unwilling to embrace the freedom of being worthless. Instead they trudged on with their miserable lives, knowing that they didn’t matter but continuing regardless.

When I got to old to hang out with secondary school kids, I moved to the sixth formers, then to the uni students. I fed off their feelings of inadequacy and failure, tempted them with promises of liberation from the unbearable pressure, and abandoned them to the far reaches of nothingness, where they were emptied of any worth they might have had. Some crawled away, broken but breathing, whilst some vanished without a trace. No one noticed they were gone.

No-one, that is, except your archivist, who hunted me down for two bloody years trying to find the source of the disappearances only she remembered. And she succeeded. I don’t know what she did. I don’t know how she did it. All I know is wherever I go, I am being watched. Everywhere. I am constantly seen, reminded of my existence, tortured by the knowledge that someone out there is interested in me. I want it gone. She wanted a statement? Here it bloody is.

[the-magnus-backlogs]

Statement of Suzanna Harkness regarding a manuscript she reviewed for publishing.

Statement taken direct from subject, 27th December 1993.

You wind up stumbling down a lot of weird rabbit holes when you work for a small press long enough. Niche genres you’d really rather remain oblivious to, arts majors trying to break the mould by submitting something they swear up and down you’ll have ‘never seen before’. Never mind if it’s actually legible, but that’s…that’s another matter, I guess. I’m not here to talk about the subpar sci-fi erotica or whatever, I’m here because I found something weird.

I’d like to say right off the bat that I’ve got a strong stomach. Wouldn’t have lasted this long in the company if I didn’t. We only publish a couple hundred books a year, but we take in all sorts around here. Sometimes it feels like our only real submission requirements are ‘unmarketable to the general public’, and it seems like anybody with a half-baked idea is willing to try their luck at tossing their unedited manuscript into the ring.

That’s where I come in. Wading through the mountains of unusable garbage, hunting for hidden gems. I’ve even found a couple, but mostly it’s just about finding something readable. Or something we can pass off as being readable for those rare readers capable of ‘comprehending the author’s artistic vision’. Yeah, the marketing team winds up throwing phrases like that around a lot.

Maybe I’m being unfair. I was a lot more patient about that sort of thing when I started. So preoccupied with not coming across as judgemental, but I’ve worked in publishing over ten years now.

It used to be more common for us to get manuscripts sent in through the post, back then. Nowadays it’s pretty much all done online. A couple we get from literary agents, but most are just emailed in by aspiring writers who stumbled across our site, usually after receiving their rejection letters from the two dozen publishing houses that show up above us on pretty much any search engine.

Every once in a blue moon, though, a manilla envelope will find its way onto my desk. Some bright spark who thinks they’re above using a laptop decides to send their manuscript in the old fashioned way. Sometimes it’s just a precaution in case we somehow miss the half dozen emails they’ve already sent out to every listed staff member on the site. Hell, sometimes it’s written by typewriter.

You know typewriters require special paper to print? Special ink, too. They probably spend more writing the damn thing than they’ll ever see in royalties, but to each their own, I guess. I even got one handwritten, once. The idiot sent a follow-up a month later anxiously asking if he could have it back if we weren’t going to consider it because it was his only copy. Can you imagine? Mailing off the only copy of your handwritten manuscript to some backroom small press without any insurance.

By comparison, this manuscript was relatively normal. It had been typed, I think. The paper was…I guess it was sort of crumpled, but I didn’t think much of it at the time. The postal service isn’t always the most careful about this sort of thing, and it wasn’t really packaged properly. Just shoved loose in a box and shipped out.

It was pre-bound. Just a bundle of papers held together with a few strands of red string. A little unusual, but not exactly throwing up any red flags. Even when I started reading it, I didn’t know. How the hell could I have?

It was good, though. Maybe that should have been my first clue. The prose dragged on a bit, but hey. There are plenty of successful writers out there who probably could have benefited from a harsher editor. They made up for it, in my opinion. Even just skimming those first few pages, I was hooked. Didn’t even really realise it when I was due my lunch break. I was so focused on that damn book.

The visuals were the thing. Plenty of writers can pour out half decent prose, but something about this writer…they had a way of making it feel real, you know? All the little touches, the scenes they crafted from the ground up. It felt…it felt like I couldn’t stop reading. Even if I’d wanted to, and trust me, back then I didn’t.

I didn’t leave my office that day. Barely noticed it when the phone rang, ignored all my emails. I really, really thought we’d accidentally stumbled on a gold mind. Not just a passable debut novel, but an honest to god genuine talent.

The funny thing is, I can’t even really remember what it was that drew me in. Couldn’t tell you what genre it fell under. The plot itself was practically non-existent. A girl who dreamed of being a dancer and crept out of her house to practice under the moonlight in a clearing in the forest behind her house.

Then, one blissful night, illuminated by the full moon, the forest provided her with a partner. The partner.

Nothing too out there, right? Your basic fantasy-romance type stuff. Pretty tame compared to a lot of what we publish, but I was enthralled from the first description of their first dance. Barefoot and so light on her feet her toes barely skimmed the dew-slick grass. They loved each other, and in that moment, I think I understood that. Really knew what it was to love someone so much you’d offer them your still beating heart if it would mean holding onto them for just a second longer.

Except it wasn’t love. Not really. It was an obsession.

I couldn’t stop devouring page after page as their budding romance grew and spiralled, twisting into something unrecognisable. Those whispered words of I can’t live without you became their mantra as they clung to one another so tightly they left bruises on one another’s skin. Soft kisses turned sharp as they came to understand what it was to need to consume and be consumed. They needed one another in a way neither could truly provide. Not really.

In their despair, they begged the forest to offer them a solution, and it gave them one. A way to lie in the sweet summer meadow forever, and in their glee they didn’t think to ask what it would cost.

Not until they began to rot, anyway.

My memories around here get a little hazy, or maybe the words were just less clear. The writing seemed…hurried towards the end, but the couple didn’t seem to mind much when the insects began to burrow through their skin and make their homes inside. They had so much love to give, literally brimming with it. As sickening as it was, it sounded almost…fond. Like the writer truly wanted to give them the happy ending they deserved, but somehow couldn’t think of anything more befitting than allowing their decaying corpses to be infested with creepy crawlies.

It was sick. The concept was sick. Everything about it was sick, but even now I can’t truly convey how vividly they described it. The picture they painted was so clear. Even the affection the insects lavished upon them as they crawled and burrowed through their decaying flesh. It was…God, it used to make me sick just thinking about it, you know that?

Because it wasn’t enough that I had to read it. That I physically couldn’t tear my eyes away. I had to see it. The idea of it…It got its hooks in deep.

By the time I got to the end, I was at a loss for what to do with the manuscript. On the one hand it was probably one of the best written pieces we’d ever received, and there are plenty of twisted readers out there looking for something to churn their stomach.

Somehow it didn’t feel right to publish it, though. I’ve read body horror before, but this…It wasn’t right. I couldn’t…I couldn’t just inflict that on people. How do you make someone understand, truly understand, when they’re signing up to read something that won’t ever let them go? How do you make them understand that the words they’re paying you to read will imprint themselves against the backs of their eyelids? That they’ll grow and spread and fester.

I dream about that dancer in the moonlit meadow. The descriptions of her actual appearance were relatively scarce, but I can still see her face when I close my eyes. I see her intertwined with her dance partner, caked in a mossy fungus that failed to disguise the living hive crawling beneath their skin. I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins, anymore. Not even sure if I could tell them apart looking at them, what with their withered skin being so covered in filth and grime.

That damned book made it sound like something beautiful, but their beauty decayed with their childish notions of romance. They chose to become hollow husks of themselves to make room for the love they could no longer contain, but that’s…that’s not love. It can’t be…right?

So why can’t I stop thinking about the way their fingers intertwined before rigor mortis set in and cemented their bond forever?

I can’t concentrate on anything else anymore. At first it was just a niggling seed of doubt at the back of my mind, but it’s grown so much since then. That image burrowed so deep inside my mind turned its hungry mouth towards the parts of me which were most vulnerable, eating and eating and eating and eating until I could think of nothing else.

I don’t know why I never thought to burn it. Maybe I was worried it would make it worse. Maybe it felt too much like sacrilege. I never read it again after that first time, though I considered it often. It sat on my desk while my other assignments lay scattered around it, disregarded without a second thought. After all, there was no room left in my mind for anything else anymore. Every other passage I tried to read just seemed so…dry. So false. I used to get so invested in the lives of paper people, but now I know what true love is, how could the half-baked notions of romance ever compare?  I tried at first, but by the end I just…stared at it. Waiting.

Maybe if I’d tried to destroy it…Too late now, I suppose. I never let it see the printing presses, but I did let it go in the end. Some old man came in asking for it specifically. Something about it being a collectable.

I don’t know how an unpublished manuscript could be considered a collector’s item, and frankly I didn’t ask. I’m not sure if I even really cared about what he’d do with it by that point. Did it bother me that I might be condemning him to share my fate? It doesn’t now, I know that much.

It’s…I was hoping this might help me clear things up, but I just couldn’t see any of it straight. I can’t see anything, anymore. Not really. It may have started in my dreams, but once I let her in…They’re everywhere, now. I saw him in the faces of my colleagues before the press finally let me go… I don’t remember how long ago now. I think the power company cut the power at some point. It doesn’t matter now.

The funny thing is, I really thought they cared about me. They did, at first. I think. It all sort of blurs together, but I remember how they used to talk about me when they thought I couldn’t hear. The nervous looks they’d send me when I zoned out at my desks. Then they staged their first intervention, and I saw it. I saw her. It was the man I saw painted across the features of everyone I knew, in the arches of eyebrows and slants of cheekbones, but it was her I saw reflected in their eyes.

It was her I saw in the mirror, before they ran out of space inside my skull, and the maggots took my eyes…or maybe I imagined that part too.

I’m pretty sure it’s too late for me now, but when I heard about you guys I figured it was worth a shot. I’m full of it. Whatever that feverish contagion that claimed the couple was. That sickly, rotting thing they mistook for love. I can feel it now. I can understand it now and it’s so much. Already I’m on the brink of bursting with it, I think.

I just can’t wait to share.

[the-magnus-backlogs]

I'm not sure if it's just cause I'm on mobile but the link to the "statement submission forum" just leads back to the main page of the blog? Could I ask more about restrictions regarding what we're allowed to write? Obviously the show canonically goes pretty hard with a lot of statements, particularly flesh and corruption and hits on some pretty heavy topics with the spiral and the web. Are there any clear-cut ratings and restrictions beyond the excessive profanity warning?

Oh, of course. Just.. Avoid sexual content and, of course, the profanity warning (You may mention that sex has happened or something offhanded, just don’t be explicit about it). Otherwise, feel free to go as hard as the show proper. The admins will add any content warnings, though we’re gonna add in more common content warnings on the submission box for self tagging. The Statement Submission Form is just the submission box

[the-magnus-backlogs]

Statement of Mia Richards regarding a woman with galaxies in her eyes. Statement taken directly from subject 30th November 2020.

I was out cycling down the roads near the house. I do it quite regularly, and it’s my main source of exercise. Anyway, I’d been cycling for quite a long time so I figured I’d go into a rather lovely café in the next town that helpfully had cycle racks outside and grab a bite to eat and something to drink. When I arrived, I got off my bike and locked it to the rack, then headed inside. I ordered a hot chocolate and a slice of chocolate cake and took them back to a table.  I don’t know how long I’d been sitting there when the woman sat down but I don’t think it was very long. I was having a drink of my hot chocolate when a woman sat down at the table in front of me. I didn’t know who she was, and I didn’t understand why she’d sat there.  It wasn’t like the café was particularly full. In fact, looking around, it was almost empty. She was beautiful in a very wild way. I don’t really know how to explain that untouchable, untamable beauty of hers. She was beautiful in the way wild landscapes untouched by humans can be beautiful. Anyway, she sat down opposite me and I didn’t know why. I asked her and she simply laughed and asked me how I felt about space and the stars.  Now, I’ll admit that I’ve always had a certain fear of space. It’s not space itself that scares me, exactly, more the feeling of insignificance that comes with the void. I think I told her that, or some of it. She laughed again and looked up from the table from the first time, allowing me to see her eyes. They were bright, and seemed to be full of infinite stars and galaxies. I stared into them for a while, I have no idea how long it was. Fear started to seep into my bones. After a while, she rose and invited me to come outside with her. I did. It was dark.  It had been late afternoon when I left, and the sun sets early in winter, but I hadn’t realized how late it had gotten. She pointed out all the constellations to me, naming each one. I was captivated, terrified and utterly entranced. I came to awareness some time later, probably quite a long time, although I have no idea how long it actually was, and she was gone. I got back onto my bike and cycled home, but I couldn’t shake that terror of the void. That was about a week ago, and I haven’t seen her since. Somehow, I don’t think I’ll see her again. I’m not entirely sure how to feel about that.

[the-magnus-backlogs]

Statement of Alice Whittaker, regarding a sudden snowstorm.

Statement given November 22, 2020.

It just seemed like a regular day, y'know? Woke up, headed outside, there’s untouched snow on the ground, and it’s simply peaceful. There wasn’t much for me to do, you know how it’s been lately, so I thought I would head into the woods for the day. I’ve been doing that a lot recently, just enjoying myself in the wilderness. See, I haven’t been able to keep in touch with many of my friends, but being in the woods was… it’s hard to put into words, “peaceful” isn’t quite the right one. “Fulfilling”, maybe? 

Oh, I’m getting off topic. Anyways, I went into the woods, intent on exploring my usual haunts and excited about seeing them in the snow. There’s just something magical about fresh powder coating everything, the silence filling the air and the cold on your skin. I love just wandering through and seeing everything just slightly changed, looking at familiar trees, with the snow adding something more.

I… I don’t know how long I was out there, actually. I vaguely noticed when it started snowing again, filed it away in the back of my mind, but I was more focused on my trek through the woods and taking it all in. At some point though, it started falling faster and heavier, and when I couldn’t see my footprints after backtracking I knew I was in trouble. The forest I was in wasn’t small by any means, it’s a good 30 miles in any direction, and I didn’t know where I was. I just had to pick a direction and hope. So, I did.

It was difficult to tell what I was doing at some points. The wind had picked up, tossing flurries in my face and I had to constantly squint. It would blow so hard that I’d stumble backwards into a tree that I had passed, and I had to concentrate solely on putting one foot in front of the other. Time passed, and I had no way of telling it, other from the soreness of my feet and the stinging in my eyes. 

At some point I noticed that I wasn’t seeing any trees anymore. Eddies of snow were curling across my vision, so I couldn’t tell if I was just missing them or if I’d stumbled onto a neighbor’s field. I was exhausted, though, and I just stopped where I was. The storm could take me for all I cared, I couldn’t do it anymore. 

And then the wind and flurries were gone. All I saw around me was snow. Pristine, untouched, for miles and miles. Which simply wasn’t possible. None of my neighbors had a field this size. There was just a flat surface to the horizon. Not a single tree in sight, not a single plant breaking the surface, not even my footsteps that I had just taken.

I was alone.

I’ll admit, I was scared. Completely. I had been walking for what must have been hours through a storm, and now it was unnaturally gone. There weren’t any signs of civilization. There was just me, and the snow. I had a gut feeling that staying and hoping someone would appear was useless, and trying to find someone myself was equally useless. Whatever had happened, whatever was playing tricks on me, I just had to wait and see what would happen next.

I think it really hit me then. Just how alone I was. Not just being away from other people, but how far I was from everything in the world- no, in the universe. We don’t understand much of our world, do we? So how can we expect to know the universe? We’re ants, scurrying over the playground of giants. That’s what I had stumbled into. I was just an ant, cowering in the middle of everything. Insignificant in the course of the universe.

And I was strangely alright with that. I’d been scared just moments before, but it just felt right all of a sudden. Like a switch had flipped. I was tiny, but so was everything else. Just a constant variable in the equation now. Where before the endless snow had been frightening, I now took comfort from it. 

I stood there for a long time. The vast emptiness made me feel strangely at home. The endlessness of it all was like nothing I’d seen before, quiet overtaking everything and leaving nothing in its wake. The sky was dull gray, but open and welcoming nonetheless. I lost myself in the view, feeling that it was mine, and mine alone.

I don’t remember much after that. The wind picked up again, snow eddied from the ground, and when it cleared I was back in the woods. I recognized the old split oak I was next to as being a few minutes from my family’s house, and just went home. The rest of my day has seemed normal. Although, I don’t know how I found this website, but it felt right to write everything down. There should be some sort of record of my experience.

I think I’m going to go back to the woods today. I have a feeling I’ll learn something new.

[the-magnus-backlogs]

are you guys actually active?

Yes, we are! Still sorting through the archives, so to speak. (We started a couple days ago and haven’t gotten any submissions)

[the-magnus-backlogs]

How should we submit them? Via asks?

Through asks or the submission box! We prefer secondhand tales (fiction) through the submission box, however. Statements that /you/, have, however, are very welcome in the ask box.