Rusty Fears 7 - Roses by Abi Kinsella

I'm here to let you know that Rusty Quill will be attending UK Games Expo at the Birmingham

“NEC this made the 29th to May 31st. We are hosting two free shows, along with our friends”

at Monte Cook Games and in the boards and cards. If you come along to the Monte Cook Games stand at the Expo, you will be able to demo the Magnus Archives role playing game and the Magnus Protocol mysteries game and grab a copy for your stealth. You can find out more about our shows at Rusty Quill.com/Expo that's Rusty Quill.com/expo. You'll need a ticket for entry to the UK Games Expo, but once inside Rusty Quill shows and demos are 100% free on a first

of the game. So, now what's the code? I'm a new host, Lucas Bouldalski. I want to tell you about Karknet 10.

“Karknet is the app with the crypto-entic offer. 100 coins trading, portfolio and”

click-off and the whole million by $19.00. What a Karkmark is that the app is

safe and clear. There must be no financial profile. Karknet.com/polie or app store. No analyzer. The hand-made crypto-vering build for Lustrisian. Payward Europe's solutions limited, 100 as Karknet, bright gested and durch the central bank of Ireland Hi there, Jonathan Sims here, and before today's episode I wanted to tell you about from the Library of York and Leipner, an upcoming the Magnus Archives prequel novel available

for preorder right now at www.rustyquill.com/novel. Return to the world of the Magnus Archives in from the Library of York and Leipner, an official prequel novel written by Nebula, World Fantasy and Aurora Award-winning author, Pray Me Mahamed, with the help of yours truly. From the Library of York and Leipner explores an infamous organization from the Magnus

verse for the first time, the perilous private library of the enigmatic collector,

York and Leipner. From the Library of York and Leipner, will be published on October 27, 2026 and is available for preorder now as a hard-back audio book and e-book. Visit www.rustyquill.com/novel for more information. That's Rustyquill.com/novel, or click the link in the show notes of this episode. Violet Steel, 11 years old, bright under Fresno and cradled in a thousand strong gaze,

holds hands with a ghost. She had landed in Chicago 17 hours previously and slept six since then, curled under a fellow's cloak like a sparrow in a nest. A fellow had not been performed since the previous November, and the cloak smelled stale, but the man who had swalleled her in it had sat kind eyes that shone like a hazy moon and had glinted at the prospect of offering her a place to rest, so she had not complained and had dreamt bleeding watercolour dreams of being

“high up in the treetops. She is Mary Lennox in the secret garden and an unconventional choice.”

The antiquated Englishness she carries isn't soft and rosy-cheeked, not teapotded, nor gingham. She has instead the Englishness of nursery rhymes, those things sung softly and unscuted eyes to dosing babes. Sing a song of six spence a pocket full of rye, four and twenty black birds. Oh, oh that's actually rather dark. She has large brown eyes and hair that oil spill black of corvits, she's clever like them, too.

Calculated in her blocked four eyes through plastic and canvas-built foliage, she needs after all to be careful in her movements, light-footed and mindful of obstacles, and not just for the audience. The ghost does not like passing through objects. In the outstretched palm of her freehand, a tiny polystyrene Robin perches daintly. It is suspended from the ceiling by transparent twine, pulled torts so it bounces and quivers,

and does not fall. A thing stirring down below, in the dark in that garden where he lives,

than the scripted gruntings of her weather staff, a native New Yorker wrestling nobly with the Yorkshire

“accent. Things are always stirring everywhere, but especially in the dark. Violet knots and a flower”

falls from her hair. She stares at it a moment, curling under the lights, the ghost nudges her, and though the line is not quite right, she gasps, roses, there must be roses. The ghost chuckles, and later when she is showered with those very things, it laughs right from its belly. The ghost holds her hand a week on as she is very back across the Atlantic, sipping orange squash in business class. It sits cross-legged in the aisle,

the seat beside her occupied by a man in sunglasses, who she thinks might have given her a ruby scoop to play with once. Maybe in Massachusetts, in June, when she was young cassette, or in Philadelphia, a frigid February, begging Medea to spare me mother, spare me!

“However, she was, it does not matter. She had perched cross-legged on the makeup desk against the”

finger-pointed warning of the shaperone, and listened intently as the ghost told her which ways to spin the colours. She had hopped off the desk just in time to innocently present the completed puzzle to the shaperone and had received a per-slipped hum of appreciation. She had shared a conspiratorial smile with the ghost, who had shrugged sheepishly and scraped its toe across the floor. The ghost is restless and excitable when they land, and tries to pull her through the aisle

the second the seatbelt light flicks off. Its fingers just slide through hers, and it yelps at

the strange sensation. Violet rolls her eyes, and uses the breaking contacts to wrench her belt open, beckoning the ghost back with a small flick of her head. I'm excited too, she murmurs, as the now slightly queasy-looking man in sunglasses, wiggles his earplugs out with a grimace, but we can't go anywhere without the grown-ups. At baggage claim, the ghost pouts, as she reminds it patiently that they won't be going immediately to the theatre, since the living must unfortunately

do such tedious things as eat and sleep. The ghost comments that it forgets sometimes that Violet is among them, and she replies that, yes, she does too. She accepts, however, the cavalry

“snack bar offered by the paternal looking man, who heaves her bag off the translator. Simon?”

She wants to say Simon. "Welcome back to Blighty," he says, "dryly with a wink. She lets the pieces melt on her tongue in the back of a black cap, and concentrates on how her body heats as enough to set them molecules thawing, spreading, coating, running. I'm alive, I'm alive, I'm alive, I'm alive, and there are roses." Violet's mother greets her cross-armed at the door, all red lip and cash-me. She tells her absolutely to remove her shoes, glancing over her shoulder,

and Violet bristles, one shoe already off. The ghost mimes picking it up and launching it at her mother's head, and Violet's face relaxes into an unseen smirk. The carpets are cream and familiar, and the dining table is glass, and not. She knows better than to drop her bag onto it, but her mother still exclaims in alarm when she gets too close. Violet places it on the floor

pointedly, and finally, her mother's size, and opens her arms for a hug. Three silver bracelets

clang on her wrist like church bells, and as they embrace stiffly, long gets tangled in Violet's hair. Her mother picks the strands off gingerly, and rolls them into a ball in her palm, with a French manicured fingertip. The penis sensor operated, and says, "Thank you, in an American accent, the ghost snorts." Dino is things on crackers that smell like the sea. There is fruit for dessert, eaten with forks that look like tridents, and Violet wonders

abstractly if Poseidon had washed them after spearing whatever was on the crackers. She also wonders, less abstractly, if the man with the chocolate is still around somewhere. Sleep does not come easy, however many times she tells the ghost to stop pacing.

"It won't make morning come any sooner," she says. We cycling the line of her first nanny when she

would spin in dizzying circles late on Christmas Eve. "You'll be like me again," it says. "The grandfather clock strikes too. You'll be like me again," it says again, and she smiles into her pillow.

old, to tall, to sharp, but her agent had slapped the press photographs onto the mahogany desk

“and gestured at them sweepingly. In one, she was staring through a two-way mirror with a branching”

cracks splitting her forehead into. In another, she held a dagger with a gentle expression on her face,

corn syrup and food coloring coating her fingertips. A third, she stood on a bed of roses,

crushing them beneath her clenched toes. These were enough. After that photo shoot, she had slipped silently into the wings, a hand on her shoulder had whispered that she'd done a stunning job, and she smiled politely, as she wrapped her arms around herself, the cool air of the theatre chilling her bones. There were roses in the crevices of her icey toes. "Go and warm-up," a lady with large round glasses had said over her clipboard with a chewing gesture.

Violet had padded the crumbling roses through the winding corridors to the room where the lights

“buzzed and frayed etched Carrie Grant smoldered six feet up. She had dug frantically in a bag for life”

for fuzzy socks and sighed in relief when she found them. "You're like me! She had not jumped,

curiously. She had stilled, he'll hanging loosely out of the fuzzy sock, but she had not jumped. She had finished putting her sock on, trembling only little. She had turned her head, slowly. There it was, translucent and abstract and shimmering like a lagoon. Behind it was a mirror. There was pale glitter on her cheeks. She had swallowed. "I'm not a real ghost," she had said calmly.

"You're like me!" it had insisted. She had looked down at her hand, painted veins running purple across her skin. In a gesture like coaxing a wounded fox, she had raised it slowly, the ghost had done the same. A mirror image. The socks were too big, they were not meant for her. "Maybe," she had whispered. "Maybe." The ghost had smiled,

somehow dampied even in its formlessness and taken her hand for the first time.

For the next two years, the ghost pulled her through corridors and coaxed her through wings. It hauled her up staircases and dragged her across car parks, and when her bare-walled bedroom of the night in whatever unfamiliar city became a ballroom, it spun her around and around and around. It pointed out of taxi windows and told tales of when things were different. It marveled at what was the same. It applauded when she deserved it

and grimaced when she did not. It mimicked her mother with a snooty upturned nose. It bounced on the forbidden furniture, it screamed beside her in the clearing behind the house. It asked quietly if her feet were cold and looked sad when she said they were. She had kept the socks that were not for her, and sleeps in them now. Early morning, Violet weave so way through unfamiliar faces. She is one of only two returning

cast members, Duncan giving her a small half-wave as she is blown through the doors by a gust of wind.

“Remember me? He asks cautiously, like she is five years old and he a half-remembered uncle.”

I remember you. She says softly, and immediately feels a steering hand between her shoulder blades. It is the read through today, but Violet's silent role renders her presence useless. She is taken instead to the dressing room and given a robe to change into. The ghost faces the wall politely. The lady does not ask before pouring the brine onto her head. She does not explain nor converse nor check for comfort as she works the salt water into her skull,

massaging with thick fingers adorned with stacked and shining rings. She works tangles out with a wide toothed comb, then teases them back in, with a fine brush. She pears through the dresses, micro-managing a ruin of undead follicles, moving three strands left, four right, back combing hair and smoothing there, an abstract of lifelessness blooming from her scalp, blooming like roses.

Watchfully, the ghost's smile takes root and it grows. It grows as grey as brushed under her eyes. It grows as a shimmer is dotted across her cheekbones.

A spot by her ear. The ghost grins, the ghost glows. The lady with the fringe steps back to

in my her handy work. She stands with her head cocked to one side and her thick thumb, pressed to her lips. She cups violet's cheek and applies one final dash of glitter to her cheekbone.

“Then she knots. Your costume is in the other room. Is all she says before she is gone?”

The ghost shifts and foot to foot, grinning so hard that it looks like it would hurt if it experienced such things. Your back is say softly, your back like me. Violet smiles in return and hops down from the chair. She crosses the room to the mirror and admire herself in the mirror. She raises a hand to tussle her hair, but stops herself. She's perfect, she reminds herself. She is perfect, and their will be roses.

Opening night. Violet's steel, 11 years old. Bright, under Fresno and cradled in a thousand strong gaze. Hold hands. With a ghost. She is Lady Mepeth's once mentioned lost babe.

“Aged, despite its deadness, and gender swapped for the irresistibility of dangling willotree by”

night hair and moonlight complexion. Saltwater is soaked into that hair, and there is glitter dashed across her cheekbones. She feels grit beneath her bare toes, and shivers under the gossiper she is draped in as a facsimile of swaddling cloth. She is a willow-wisp of tragedy, a siren of inevitability, a soundless call to denimate. She is the silk string-news hanging loose around the neck of the piece, tickling, teasing, taunting. She is pale and solid beside Lady Mepeth, as both of their toes

curl over the edge of the plywood battlement. Beside her, the ghost squeezes her hand. She shivers into it, and closes her eyes. It squeezes harder. Then, it jumps.

Violet gasps high and sharp, her first and only sound. She stumbles, but does not fall. The

ghost rough intangible fingers slipping through hers like sandpaper, and guard the director thinks it works beautifully, her gaining a voice then just at the moment of blackout. Why didn't he think of that? But then he has no choice but to think of something else, because startled Lady Mepeth has become uprooted, and the scream that rips from her throat isn't the rehearse turmoil of a tragic heroine falling to her madness. It is the terror of shock, the terror of anticipation, and then

how caught. The prolonged terror of falling. It undercuts the slap of heaviness on the ground, though the sandbag remains high, and sandbags don't crack. The audience has coalesced into a single straight-spined entity. It cannot see what has happened, and remains insured in the rabbit trap of

Violet's gasp. Applaws begins, and Violet makes her second sound of the performers to tell them no.

To the ghost who is not there anymore, she repeats no. She climbs down from the battlements, even more ignored than usual, slipping shivering, shaking through frantic crowds that swarm and dart, and crackle their voices down more pitalkies. She passes Banco, drenched in cornstarch blood, ragged cotton ballooning from his skinny wrists, matted hair, clinging to his cheeks, half a broken crown threaded through the dresses. A false ghost, with a slight stammer that

made his living scenes tight, and taught with the weight of self-discipline, but gave his dead scenes the gift of a spitting walus, his every grief-stricken in dexical jab punctuated with venom and vulnerability. Thou nest revenge. Violet recalls seeing him and Lady Macbeth giggling over toasted sandwiches.

“Cross-legged on the floor. What happened? He's asking over and over again to nobody. What happened?”

The room with Carrie Grant. There is the ghost. Backed into the corner with its palms raised in surrender. It wasn't meant for her. The ghost pleads. It was meant for...

Violet thinks of sterings and how they were always happening, but especially in the dark.

“Are there roses in the dark? In the garden where you live? She asks in a whisper.”

Ghost does not reply. "Colder, colder, colder, colder, are there roses?" She asks firmly. A long, long pause. Then, very small. No. There must be roses. Violet whispers. Somewhere close beyond the door. Echoes are deep and morning sound. 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 Rusty Quill.com. Rate and review us online, tweet us at the Rusty Quill. Visit us on Facebook or email us via [email protected]. Thanks for listening. . So, now what's up? I'm a new host, Lucas Bouldalski. I want to tell you about

“Carcness Diab with the crypto is really worth 100 coins. Portfolio and click on the link and the whole”

million of $100. What a carmark is that the app is over 60 and the cost is no financial service.

Carcness.com/polie or app store. No analyzer. The hand with crypto-wearing build velocity in Payward Europe's Solutions Limited 100 as Carcness. Brightgestellt and durch the central bank of Ireland. Hi, Alexey. Founder and CEO of Rusty Quill Limited. In case you haven't heard, there is now a Magnus Archives novel. The Library of Yogan Lightner is set in the world of the Magnus Archives and written by Nebula Award-winning author, Premima Hammett, with our very own Jonathan

Sims. The story follows Hugh, a university dropout desperate to find somewhere to belong and his new job at an esoteric library. The books he must investigate for the Enigmatic Yogan Lightner are not normal, because the library is not a vault, sealed and silent, but a hive, a live, buzzing, and ready to sting. The Library of Yogan Lightner releases October 27, 2026, but you can pre-order it right now in the US and UK from your local bookshop or by using the link in the episode description.

If you live outside of the UK or US, you may be able to make an international order for this

first publication, but it depends on individual retailers shipping policies.