Hi there, Billy Hindel here, the voice of Alice Dyer in the Magnus Protocol, ...
Magnus Archives 10th anniversary. Rusty Quill is hosting a special Magnus live show at the
“upcoming Crossed Wires podcast festival in Sheffield. Join co-creators Jonathan Sins and”
Alexander J. Newell on the 5th of July for a new iteration of our live show "Statement Begins", where you can hear fan favourite statements such as Anglefish, Red Live and gain exclusive insights into the creation and history of the show, straight from the creators themselves. You can buy your tickets now including limited numbers of meet and greet tickets from crustwires.live, or the link in the description of this episode.
Make a nice and parvy young degance available from Lord Kitchen, the Lord Kitchen,
the leadless way you are in a Zickling event.
Hi everyone, it's a new Shabbat as be here. Today, I'm here to tell you all about not quite dead, a brilliant podcast on the Archie Network. Not quite dead is a gory horror romance podcast from the award-winning team behind spirit box radio, remnants and clockwork bird. Join Alphi, a nurse working overtime when a patient arrives with her throat torn out. This is just the beginning of a terrifying night, as Alphi finds himself caught in a battle
between the living and the undead, saved by mysterious vampire named Casper, they find themselves in a scapebly bound together. Neither of them are happy about it, but the draw of each other's blood is irresistible. Search for not quite dead wherever you listen to your podcasts, or go to
“hangingslothstudios.com or www.rusticwild.com. If you want to support not quite dead in its creators,”
head to www.rusticwild.com/fundraiser. Hi everyone, Alex here, founder of Rusticwild and Nightmare in Chief for the Magnus Protocol. I'm just taking a moment to introduce this latest instalment in our Rusty Fear series. We once again challenged our fans to write short horror stories based on seven prompts and selected winners in each category to have their stories given the full Magnus Protocol
treatment. Each story is read by a different cast member, directed by our producer April Summer and edited by our very own in-house editing team. This series begins our fortnightly really schedule leading up to the premiere of the Magnus Protocol Season 2, part 3, which returns on Thursday,
“July 16th, or two days early on Tuesday, July 14th for our early access supporters. That's”
all for now, so thanks for listening, and we hope you find this as horrific as our judges did. In a good way.
Often. It always feels like speaking out loud might make it happen again,
like describing the shape of a doorway no one else can see and then finding it waiting for you, open and patient. Recently though, it has been pressing at me from the inside, and I found myself needing to lay it out piece by piece. It begins with the peer. When I was a child, my whole world was bounded by the sea, stretching beyond our house. Between them, the beach stretched like a lick of paint on a canvas, full of rock pools,
dry, knotted seaweed, and shell fragments that cut my bare feet. The peer jotted out from the centre of it, an old wooden thing with the rusted railings and gaps between the boards that fascinated and terrified me in equal measure. It was technically condemned, or so my mother claimed, but no one had ever come with tape or barriers, so it just stayed there. It was old, and it was ugly, and it was dangerous, and it was mine.
The planks had their own language. Some fed it solidly beneath my weight. Others gave a subtle complaining creek. One board near the end of the peer rocked on the foot with a soft, hollow clunk, as though it was missing a few nails entirely and held on out of spite. On clear nights, if I stayed out longer than I was supposed to, I would be able to see the stars reflected in the water like shimmering splotches of bright paint.
The town was smaller enough that the street lights failed to drown them completely. On rare occasions, the clouds stayed away, and the wind flattened the sea into a dark glossy sheet. The sky below would almost match the sky above. The peer would become a thin, hesitant line between
Them, and I would feel strange and light.
While looking above, I would shuffle back to the looseboard, listen for its clunk,
“and know I was safe and away from the edge. Years went by, the peer-rotted further.”
I grew taller, less easily impressed by vague reflections, more easily irritated by the people I lived with. My father had left when I was nine. My mother remarried when I was eleven. By 15, the house had become a place of thin walls and careful silences. My stepfather's presence was like a piece of mismatched furniture shoved into the middle of a familiar room. My mum constantly tried to adjust everything else to make it fit, and I was forever bruising
myself for the edges of him. My mother echoed as complaints and tiredness, and suddenly every door and the house seemed to close louder than I had before. When she told me we were moving, it felt like every last boundary of my world had been quietly redrawn without my consent. A better job for him, she said. A bigger flat, closer to the city, a better score for you. She spoke as if she was rescuing us from something, from the damp, the wind, the rust.
While I could see it was the beach, disappearing behind us, like a tide that had decided to never
return. The night before the move, the argument that had been building up like water behind a paper dam finally came. It doesn't matter anymore, now, exactly what was said.
“I just remember it followed the usual shape. Raises voices that were not supposed to be raised,”
my mother's face tightening with every word I threw at her, his heavy steps in the hallway. It built and built until I couldn't breathe in that room, in that house, anymore. I grabbed my jacket and ran. Outside, the world blurred at the edges.
I thick fogged, rolled in from the sea, what we had been turning on on another.
It swallowed the streetlights, leaving halos of damp, weak gold, and the chill that seeped under flingsy clothes. I couldn't even see the outlines of the neighboring houses, just the vague verticals of fences and poles. But I knew the beach, like the back of my hand. I could have headed down their blindfolded, the salty smell growing stronger with each step.
“A sound of the waves was strangely distant, even when I stepped on the beach, as if the sloshing”
of water was happening somewhere else. The pier rose out of the whiteness ahead of me, more a suggestion than a structure, its railings lost in the grey. I climbed onto the rickety steps and began to walk. The planks welcomed me with their familiar voices, wood, wood, creek, wood, creek, hollow, jump, wood again. My mind still buzzing from the argument, fixated on them as if their song could
drown the rage that kept me warm. They told me that at least something in my life was predictable, measurable. No. My footsteps fell into a rhythm. Wood, creek, wood, wood, wood, creek, wood. The fog beaded on my eyelashes and her. I couldn't see the beach behind me anymore, but that was almost a relief. I focused on the planks appearing beneath my feet. The faint shift of weight in my ankles and clunk. My stomach tightened with anticipations, the boards changed home and the foot.
I'm close, my realised. Almost there, out forward to the end approaching, the way you feel when you reach the last step of the stack is. I got ready to feel for the edge of my foot, to kneel and sit at the end. I took another step, wood, another, wood, another, creek, wood, wood, appeared and end. Our next step landed on another plank, then another. The song continued beneath me as if nothing had changed. I frowned, slowed, stopped. The fog pressed in close. The light from the beach almost gone.
My phone was in my pocket and my fingers closed around it with the kind of desperate gratitude you deserve for ordinary objects that feel suddenly life-saving. I turned on the torch. The light scattered, and instead of carving a beam of light in front of me, the dark became just grey. But still impenetrable. Everything was swallowed by the fog, both behind and the head of me.
I couldn't see the end all the beginning.
familiar song. Maybe it had just been another board that came loose. Maybe the pier was just
“longer than I remembered it. Wood, wood, creek, wood, creek, hollow. I stopped and almost fell.”
My heartbeat sped up, a stuttering drum in my throat. I jumped inside a walking fast in a searching, waiting anxiously for the edge to appear. Wood, creek, wood, wood, wood, creek, wood, clunk. I looked down. I recognized that board. The rotten edges in the scars of barnacles on the underside were curved upwards just slightly. Now, I was at the end. I breathed with relief and pointed the light ahead to see the edge. Nothing. Just more rotting wood in metal vanishing in the grey.
I tried to force logic into the situation. fog distorts perception. Distances feel longer when you're anxious. And for the pier was not that long. If I get moving in one direction,
“I would hit the end eventually. These were sensible thoughts. Rational and clean.”
I turned back and moved quickly over the boards. Wood, creek, wood, wood, creek, wood,
creek, wood, jump, creek, wood, creek, wood, wood, and clunk. The first clunk I'd heard.
Almost there. For cold soaked up from the boards into the souls of my feet. My breath became a steady rasp in the silence, louder than the barely there hush of the waves. The beam of my phone showed me the same pattern of warped wood and flaking paint. Wood, creek, wood, wood, creek, wood, jump, creek, wood, creek, wood, wood, wood. I reached the point I should have stepped back onto the beach. Transition from hard wood to the
“soft crunch of sand and clunk. My knees almost gave away. It was impossible.”
Even accounting for panic for the folk, for my memory playing tricks, there was no possible way I could have circled back to the same point on a straight pier and yet the board, underneath my foot looked exactly the same, the same rot, the same wall, the same clunk. I've broken to a sprint. Around until my legs ached. I was certain that if I could reach the end, reach the beach and stand on steady land, something inside me would still.
My ran and ran and jumped over halls and clunk. A froze. I looked up, hoping for anything. I liked sand. Or even the dark edge of the pier welcoming me to its end. Instead, the pier still continued ahead, straight and endless. It's outlines fading into a blurred grey nothing. I continued walking. After a long stretch of identical boards, I heard the loose plank again, under my feet, familiar and wrong.
As I looked up, I realised I could tell I was nowhere near the end. Because the fog was lifting. Suddenly the beam of light illuminated a dozen boards either way,
then more. The fog could start to finally thin. I stood, turned 90 degrees instead into the distance
off the side of the pier. The grey script away from underneath is though a curtain was so lifting before a show. Above me, the same thing was happening. The fog was fraying, unraveling, revealing something beyond. I recognised the pinprix appearing in the darkness with a sigh of relief. Stars. The sky cleared from the top down. The last scraps of fog dissolving into the kind of perfect, endless night that rarely exists near houses in civilization. It was so clear,
it almost felt indecent. Every star was sharp, uncaring, ancient, consolation sat in their habitual positions, familiar patterns that should have been comforting. I looked down. The sea had impossibly stilled to class. There were no waves, no ripples,
No visible movement.
Not her reflection of it, not trembling, distorted mess of the lights, broken and scattered
“by movement. It was the same, identical. I couldn't see where the horizon was because of the sky”
just seemed to continue in all directions. The pier existed between them, like a single uninterrupted line, continuing endlessly in both directions until it faded in the darkness. My house, the beach. They were all just gone. Vertigo closed around my throat. For one horrible, waitless moment, I couldn't tell which way gravity was pulling. My knees locked, my body swayed. I knew with absolute animal certainty that
if I had to go wrong step, I would not have fallen into the shallow water. But instead,
into the unfathomable gap between stars, I would never stop falling. Upwards, downwards,
sideways, directions all felt like lies. There was only a way. I tried to reach for the reassuring kiss of the sea to feel something cold in ordinary on my skin. I lay flat on the pier and stretch my arm down between the board until my shoulder burned. My fingers crashed. That empty air. The water should have been right there. It was high tide and yet my hands stayed dry. I rolled on my back, panting. The stars did not flicker. They look back with all the indifference
of things too large to notice me. More I stared. The more the world reoriented itself around the vastness. The pier under my body felt thinner, less real. As if it were only sketched there, a suggestion some of my arrays in a moment by mistake. I became a cutely, horribly aware of my own size, of the little heat of my body seeping through the wood, of the smallness of my heartbeat, as a finite number of breaths I contained. The universe below and above did not care for any of
my thoughts or worries and hope. Something in my head whispered I ought to move. The crawl back towards shore. Something else told me that there was nothing else but this, ever, in all directions I
“could move towards. And that the safe thing, the only thing I could do was stay pressed to the”
boards as wide and flat as I could make myself this, I slipped and fell upwards and beyond and away. I stayed still, clutching my phone until it's beam of light, small and useless and swallowed by starlight, flickered and turned off by itself. At some point, my thoughts stopped forming proper sentences. They fined and frayed and scattered like the fog had, until all that remained was the dizzy, nauseous sense of my own insignificance, basking in the light of stars that long
died and whose light was only now reaching me. I don't remember falling asleep, but deciding to close
“my eyes. The next thing I remember was the moment I walked to a sound of goals. The sun was pale”
and low. I was lying on sand, the short distance from the start of the pier, someone had thrown a blanket over me. I could hear my mother's voice, frayed and angry yet relieved. My set-father had called an ambulance, something about hypothermia. They said they had found me curled up by the beach,
just beyond the high-tired line, fast asleep. The pier stood exactly where it had always been,
short and stubby and visibly decaying. No fog. The sea moved the way seas do. Everything looked heart-breakingly normal, but my jacket hung tangled by the last loosport wood. We moved house to the next day. I watched the sea received through the car window until it furnished behind the lumpy in the hills. I hadn't been back since. I haven't set foot on a pier again. In the city, the sky is mostly colorless at night,
A muted orange haze that hides anything worth seeing.
the stars, they say. On the rare nights when the clouds part and a few sharp points of light
break through the polluted glow, I keep my head down. I know that if I look for too long
“into those pin-prix of light again, the ground will remember that it's only pretending to hold me.”
The thin line of whatever I'm standing on will narrow, and turn to damp, rotten wood. The world will fall away on both sides, and I will hear a familiar hollow clunk. And this time, when I fall, I don't think I will wake up unsand.
The Magnus Protocol is a podcast distributed by Rusty Quill,
and licensed under a creative commons attribution on commercial share-alike 4.0 international license. To subscribe, view associated materials, or join our Patreon, visit RustyQuill.com, write and review us online, tweet us at the RustyQuill, visit us on Facebook, or email us via
“[email protected]. Thanks for listening.”
Well, for no bad news, visit the RotCapChannelLepeness World in Freiburg with your email, through the Umar, or in the channel, of course, from the name of the world, all the years. And take our interactive exhibition by the EliteNistorm, Artur Guide and a classic, and the next couple of young people from RotCapChannelLepeness World, only a segment is found. To tell you about the latest series from RustyQuill, welcome to Foster's.
Jill Foster, a small-time private consulting wizard, is just about keeping her struggling, magical detective business afloat. With the help of her new apprentice, she must contend with
“powerful faith, dark energies, and feral cats, anything that pays the bills.”
Set in an alternate version of modern-day Sydney, Australia, welcome to Foster's is full of Australian humour, incantations, and the restless dead. Listen now on the neon-ingual podcast feed. Available wherever you find your podcasts. Billy Hindel here, the voice of Alice in the Magnus protocol, and I'm here to tell you about from the library of Yergen Lightner, an upcoming novel available for pre-order right now at
RustyQuill.com/novel. We turn to the world of the Magnus Archives. In from the library of Yergen Lightner, an official pre-core novel written by Nebula, World Fantasy, and Aurora award-winning author Premium Muhammad, with the help of the Magnus Archives, own writer, and lead voice, Jonathan Sims,
from the library of Yergen Lightner, explores an infamous organization from the Magnus first,
for the first time, the perilous private library of the enigmatic collector Yergen Lightner, where occult books are guarded and researched at a fatal cost. Lightner's library keeps the dangers of these books in check, and there would be reader's safe, or so lightner claims. For two of Lightner's employees, the risks are worth it. For Hugh Franklin, the library is a place to belong, for Sebastian Everett, the library is an opportunity to indulge arcane ambitions.
Though their 10 years at the library were years apart, human Sebastian's stories unfold in parallel, and their footsteps echo down the same eerie aisles, caught in a web spun long before either ever heard the name Yergen Lightner. Will they find a way out, or will the library consume them before it's too late? From the library of Yergen Lightner, will be published on October 27th, 2026, and is available for pre-order now, visit Rusticool.com/novell for more information.
That's RustyQuill.com/N-O-V-E-L.
