#also i know traditionally they would be working together/two people same person bu t dp/web and architect/extinction is just too good

[fredgolds]

ladies and theydies, my best go at wrangling a plot out of kttk/tma aka the keys to the archives (w thanks to @whotellsurstory)

the architect is a lifelong student of the fears, studying them all without binding herself to any. her big plans of founding a dynasty beyond fear are dashed when each of her sons finds his way to a power of his own—sunday to the stranger, the mariner to the vast, the piper to the end. the old one starts working more directly against the fears and the family finally splinters

seeing her failure and keen to punish her arrogance, the entities spend the next few decades taking any opportunity they can to hunt and taunt her. she’s beaten them back every time, but she’s getting old now and knows that they won’t allow her any kindness in death so she returns to her old notes on a potential 15th fear and gets to work.

years later, arthur penhaligon nearly dies in the course of An Encounter which he would quite happily never talk about again, except leaf saw the whole thing and very much does want to talk about it. she’s always been sensitive to the entities and her grandma was eye-aligned so even if she doesn’t have all the answers she’s definitely got some of em (though as far as she knows the entities are all just different avenues to getting Cool Powers)

‘i’m good, thanks,’ says arthur, and then people start getting sick. enter dame primus, aka mother of spiders, and an offer to help him cure the plague in exchange for a favour. she is definitely definitely definitely definitely a monster, but arthur accepts.

dp’s help essentially amounts to ‘go find this dude. stop him unless you want the world to end.’ her favour is ‘do that six more times.’ in order, that’s: monday/corruption, tuesday/buried, wednesday/flesh, thursday/slaughter, friday/eye, saturday/spiral, and sunday/stranger. the piper is an ongoing inconvenience but the mariner’s mostly chill

suzy’s an avatar of the end along with thousands of other kids snatched from untimely deaths by the piper, who has some (deeply misguided) Ideas about a ritual. until he comes to claim what he’s owed most of them just wander through history paying their dues to death until eventually suzy takes to wandering around arthur. he decides he can probably trust her after she saves him from the buried, and he likes fred too much to leave him to the slaughter.

leaf cleans out her garage and borrows every occult text in the library. arthur gets snacks. suzy and fred pop in between attending deathbed nightmares to help with research and/or eldritch road trips, and dp comes to pull strings when she has to. what’s really tasty about tma to me is that it unfolds over such a long period, slowly unspooling all this deep lore and intricate connections and evolving relationships and we don’t have time to get into it all now but just Imagine

(dp/suzy/fred have all heard of the architect and the old one, and leaf finds bits and pieces of their work, but as far as anyone seems to know they both disappeared ages ago. no-one has anything to say about a 15th power.)

the not-them replaces arthur at some point and no-one notices except for leaf. she manages to get rid of it but it brings her closer to the eye, much to arthur’s dismay. it’s not until she goes up against the flesh (already a very bad time for a vegetarian) that she fully understands what the powers are Really about, but by that point it’s too late and in the course of defeating friday leaf becomes a fully-fledged avatar of the eye herself

this endgame is unforgivably vague but. in taking down sunday arthur manages to put enough clues together to figure out that the architect is still alive and, figuring she has to be a valuable ally if not a friend, goes looking for her alone. he finds her! it’s not good.

the architect, as it turns out, has spent the intervening years embracing the extinction. violating all sorts of environmental laws, encouraging harmful policies, splashing terrifying statistics around wherever she can. she’s the first and only avatar of the extinction, and all she wants now is to die so she can embrace what happens next. (taking the rest of the world, and the rest of its fear, down with her is an added bonus.)

she picked arthur because he was scared—of sickness, of loss, of death, of a meaningless universe, of being controlled, of not being human anymore—and because he was kind—he wouldn’t let the world burn if he could stop it. she orchestrated his Encounter herself and had him marked for the extinction from the start, so that every blow he dealt and every piece of his humanity he supplanted was all for the extinction. she let the web know she was interested in him and let her get there “first” so she could stay hidden while he learned the way she’d hoped her sons would learn before they got distracted. obviously he still had a little way to go, but 8 out of 15 ain’t bad and now’s as good a time as any

so the architect kills herself and ushers in the extinction. there is catastrophe and cataclysm, but instead of nothing there is Something Else—and arthur, second avatar of the extinction, post-human and post-apocalypse, is the only one left to inherit it.