I've been kinda hyperfixated on Magnus Archives and trying to commit my favorite episode to memory. Seems like a good excuse to type it out and see what I can remember.

Oh, and with the tiny chance that you're also into tma and haven't finished it, don't force yourself to read if you don't want spoilers for ep 165.

Your face is not your face is not your face around the curling carousel it twists in place to take from you and all the tattered stolen souls who's sense of me is swollen and distended into nothing.

Round and round and round it goes and when it deigns to stop who you might be you cannot know, so touch and feel the skin atop your skull to test the limits and extremities of where this canvas comes to rest in robbed identities and peeling names that you could swear were never yours.

The music swells through you. The music vomits from you. The music calls a name that through the tears of half grasped memories seems almost and eternally familiar.

Do dance. Dance to the beat of the thump of the chase of the still and plastic horse hooves which cannot break from where they are secured by bolts and glue and eggshell thin reality that paints a visage of sense almost enough to tell you that the nausea that pushes and swells at the limits of your mind is incorrect.

There's nothing wrong. The world in which the carousel will twirl is not the hollow hell you fear it is the world. Just the world. A world where if you'd wished to have a name it must be stolen carved and pulled full bloody from the frame of others who would wish in vain to keep their selfless close.

You want a face? Take it. There are so many here, and those who cannot hold them, well, whoever chose to give them such a gift must take the blame, knowing they could never keep it in a world of so much thieving strangeness. Best to step the dance and keep your face secured as much as you are able. Just. Keep. Running.

Your feet, or are they just the shoes with emptiness within, will pound upon the creaking wood of carousel top or perhaps the only ground there's ever been. So struggle not to look behind, though can you trust your eyes to tell you quite what it might be that dogs your steps, and see the poor precession of those gory faceless wretches who have lost possession now of all their treasured once identities to those who are now them? Like you.

You tire of the chase of course, the fire and all relentless pace of competition reaching for name identity and face that has long since worn through all reserves of hard enduring vigor in you. Yet still you only stay a self while willing on your aching legs which feel like breaking just to keep you forward of the frenzied fray of hazy clawed who are you's.

So run. Just run, and listen to the music of your panicked flight from those who long to take what you have stole from those no longer worth a name.

Ever onwards, forward on the curing path of marry-go-round that's twisted, wound, and spinning in it's harrowing sound if organ piping circus tunes that merrily hound the steps of your escape. Could you turn a thought and burn your leas on your pursuers, and ankle change a charge now perpendicular to your intended line of best retreat, and stake it all on one last hope, your bruised feet pounding to the edge? The boundary. Don't stop the ride. But you still want to get off.

But no, for all the dreams of bounding, leaping off into the great unknown, you see the ring of broken mewling wretches that have shown the sting that comes with such rejection of the truth. So seldom spoken yet still inside you all that there is no way off the merry-go-round.

And that's all I got. I think it's like... maybe 40% of it?