"Oh?"

Lev drags him away from anywhere Sasha and to a lesser extent Tim can hear, and then says:

"So it started because I was thinking about the old misfiled non-digitizable I found yesterday, the letter from Albrecht von Closen to Jonah Magnus-- did you get a chance to look at it?"

"Some? Not much, really."

Lev summarizes it, and then says, "So this is interesting because Wilhelm von Closen is the great-grandfather of Mary Keay. And of course Gerard Keay is ambiguously benevolent and reportedly has lots of open eyes on his shit. And the Magnus Institute is possessed by probably-the-Beholding, which is ambiguously benevolent and into watching things, which is a thing you do with open eyes. So it seems like Gerard Keay is-- genetically somehow?-- a servant of the Beholding. The family connection is also a thing we see with the Lukases. --Honestly I kind of want to get a giant corkboard and pin things to it and connect them with string, I feel like this might be the easiest way to follow all of it. Or a wiki, a wiki might be the modern version."

"Didn't Gerard say something about the Beholding, too, to the nurse? Better Beholding than the Lightless Flame."

"Yeah, he did! And the eyeless guy said 'you have nothing to fear from the dead' or something like that which is really interesting given the fact that Mary Keay did not, like, stay dead. --So the other interesting thing is that the mausoleum was full of books and papers. Like it's, well, an Archive. And Wilhelm von Closen took a book from the Archive and brought it to Jonah Magnus, who founded the Magnus Institute. And now we're possessed by the Beholding. I think the mausoleum was a previous Archive."

"Huh. That seems... maybe not great, honestly? Though I guess it could be a lot worse than just losing your eyes."

"I don't know if the guy without eyes was ours. The mausoleum is old, the pages were rotted together, it had been abandoned for a long time.  --Which says something about the power of the Beholding, now that I think about it, it's presumably not omnipotent. --And we don't remove people's eyes, we're the open-eyes people, it's totally the wrong symbolism. My guess is that Eyeless Guy is probably connected to the lightless flame, which probably has closed eyes as its symbol? But I wouldn't be surprised if there were three. Open eyes, closed eyes, removed eyes."

"That makes sense. He gave Albrecht the--being-watched feeling, though, didn't he? So... I don't know, honestly. --Oh, unrelated, but speaking of the Lukases, I found something with my research into them the other day. They're, uh, the primary funding source of the Institute."

".........well that's some new lines on my chart."

"Yeah, it's, uh. Nooooot great."

"Wonder if that means the Fog is the same as the Beholding, or just allied to it. --Sorry, skipped three steps ahead. Uh, once I started thinking about the Beholding I started putting the non-digitizables into categories and if you poke it a bit there are three?" He counts off on his fingers. "One, artifacts. Breekon and Hope deliveries, Salesa antiques, Leitner books, Smirke buildings, probably things related to the Circus of the Other-- that's the calliope people. Two, creatures that eat people. The anglerfish, the vampires. Three, evil spirits. I'd put together a couple but once I started looking for them, they were everywhere. Giant spider that kills a guy? Probably the Web that Jane Prentiss referenced. The skydiver who fell into endless sky? The Fairchilds are possibly a family connected to a spirit like the Lukases or the Keays. Guy who nails meat to the walls? Probably possessed in some way like Father Burroughs."

“That... makes a lot of sense, actually.”

"So here's the list--"

-The Beholding *
-The Hive *
-The Web *
-Spirit of War *
-The Lightless Flame *
-Michael *?
-Mentis ^
-Hill Top Spirit ^
-The Fog
-Blue Sky
-Meat

"Ones with an asterisk are confirmed to exist and be distinct from the others, the two with a carat we know definitely aren't the same one. Sort of a macabre logic puzzle."

"Yeah.

...I might have something? I, uh, don't know if it's reliable, but it seems at least possible? --The, uh, the first Hilltop Road statement, Ivo Lensik, his father was schizophrenic, right? But specifically, he was obsessed with fractals and being stalked by a tall man that he says-- 'all the bones were in his hands.' And, maybe he's just schizophrenic, I don't know, but Sasha's description of Michael is a tall man whose body looks weirdly limp except for having these huge, sharp hands. And Jane mentions fractals in her statement, too."

"Ooh, that's a really good point. --And I do think they tend to have distinct aesthetics." He scratches off Hill Top Spirit and draws a line to Michael. "--I guess Michael is his servant. We can call that one Fractal for now?"

"Yeah, Fractal works as a name. Uh, that's all I had, it was--from a couple days ago, when I was seeing if Michael had ever been mentioned before."

"It's really good! I didn't catch that one at all."

"So, I was thinking about ways that people can interact with the spirits. Some people might make deals with them, I think, like Wilfred Owen. Some people just get fucked with by spirits in the short term, like Father Burroughs. I don't know why they bother to make deals if they can fuck with people anyway. There are cults like the People's Church of the Divine Host. There are families-- the Fairchilds, the Lukases, the Rayners, the Keays. I don't know if there's one family per spirit or if they sometimes have two. And there are the servants. Jane Prentiss. Probably Michael. And, uh, me."

"Thank you!" He's glowing a bit from the praise. "...Why do they bother to take servants, either? What do they gain from having humans--or, uh, monsters that used to be human, at least, it seems a bit weird to call Jane or Michael fully human at this point--on their side?"

"No idea. --And I have to say I am not, like, enthusiastic about the implied physical changes here? I do not want to be crawling with worms or to have my bones rearranged. Although I guess it's the Beholding so probably I will just wind up with an inappropriate number of eyes."

"I am, um, glad we're agreed on that? ...Please tell me if you start growing new eyes?"

"I will tell you! You might notice before I do! --Presumably it's not going to make me talk like Jane Prentiss or Michael because that might make it harder to take statements."

"Let's hope not, at least. I'll keep an eye out for any, uh.... eyes."

"Speaking of eyes," Lev says, "have you ever taken a close look at our logo?" He pulls out a scrap of paper with the logo on it. "There's an open eye. The owl's head is the iris, and the three lines are the eyelashes--"