1. The lesser Olympian Prometheus was imprisoned on a rock and sentenced to eternal torment for giving a newly-formed humanity the Fire of Creation. Zeus, famously understanding and merciful, was not content to stop his punishment there. He and Hephaestus, working with Athena, Aphrodite, Hermes, the Graces and the Hours, created a woman, Pandora, who would descend to the world bearing a gift. The gift bore plague and pestilence, and if opened, would certainly spell doom for the nascent civilization below.
2. Despite the desperate attempts by Prometheus to warn humanity, we opened the box Pandora offered. To his surprise and Zeus’s chagrin, we weren’t wiped out. We did, however, learn to be fearful of the gods, as they appeared to us in the form of natural phenomena we had no way of understanding.
3. Prometheus’s fate, and not his actions, is the first horror story. All others have been colored in one way or another by it and the philosophy it represents: no forward progress, or else. Do not anger the gods.
4. We are afraid of that which we do not understand.
Marginalia is a 2017 walking simulator set to a short horror story by Connor Sherlock and Cameron Kunzelman. You are set upon a path leading away from the main road, toward an old settlement called Kestlebrook, and you have nothing to guide you there except the path, and eventually, some lanterns placed at random along it.
Marginalia is like many of Sherlock’s games; seemingly completely open worlds with nothing but a suggestion of where to go, and the expectation that eventually the player will arrive where Sherlock wants them to. Unlike other open worlds, there are barriers made out of the physical landscape: a particularly high ledge we can’t climb, or the bank of a river we can’t wade into. These are fairly well-hidden in the forest of the game, to the point where you’d have to be deliberately looking for them in order to find them. If you stick to the path, you will find yourself swept along by a river of another sort: the game’s narrative, delivered in small bits, whispered to you as if they don’t want anyone but you to hear them.
First, we hear some facts about the settlement we’re journeying to: founded in the early 1810s, Kestlebrook was originally the home of a family of 8 who fled their original home due to religious persecution. The land they settled did not take kindly to residents; within five years, the family was gone, likely dead; their barn was destroyed and their cabin abandoned.
As we walk we see things. Lights in the sky. Are they figments of our imagination? Naturally-occurring phenomena, like ball lightning? Something else? After all, the lights only appear above a circle of stones near what’s left of the Kestler farmhouse. What were these people getting into?
Eventually, the nature and frequency of what we see changes. We pass through the threshold of a stone archway in the woods; the lanterns stop appearing as lampposts and instead are tied to the trees with string, arranged overhead. The light is a deeper red the further in we go. After a time, we see frozen fire jutting out of the ground; the frequency and nature of this phenomenon changes over time as well.
All the while, the story our narrator tells begins to change. After filling us in on the Atlas Obscura facts of the day regarding Kestlebrook, we hear about Eric, the one who originally collected this information. Eric would write incessantly in bound journals, never showing the contents to the narrator. We’d find out more about him, that he watched his parents’ house burn down. That he thought he was a burden on the narrator, an “anchor.” Then suddenly the narrator tells us, now an active character in this experience as opposed to a dispassionate, discouraging guide: Eric went missing, and that’s why he broke the lock on his drawer full of journals and went running after him.
Suddenly we wonder if we are indeed the ones making this journey, or if this is the memory of the narrator. How much of what we’re seeing, what we’re hearing, is in fact what happened?
The terrain, always sloping downwards, suddenly loses its cohesion. First the path disappears, then the lampposts meant to guide us. Suddenly we’re following jets and streaks of frozen rubescent fire as it escapes from all around us: the ground, the sides of the deepening canyon around us, nearby trees. What happened here? What did Eric, and the residents of Kestlebrook, and the Kestlers, find down here?
When you reach the end of the path, the droning soundtrack, which up to this point had rarely deviated from the low hum of a synth, has screwed itself up into a digital scream, organs have introduced themselves, the narration sounds distorted and unhinged, and you continue your forward momentum, the current has turned into a wave, and suddenly –
5. All seeds want to grow.
We do not know much about Eric or the narrator. We can infer things about their relationship, some of them more strongly than others (it’s all but confirmed they were involved romantically, though that point matters about as much as what the narrator had for breakfast this morning). We can infer that Eric was troubled by moments in his life, that he obsessed over all sorts of little facts he was collecting, not just Kestlebrook, and that the narrator was surprised by his sudden exit.
It is not for us to question the nature of their relationship, or its quality. But when we enter the portal at the end of the path, and find ourselves there, in that seemingly unholy place where the temperature and pressure is too high for our monitors (therefore, our bodies) to withstand, we see a body ensconced in crystal at the final terminus. It is not writhing in pain. It is serene, the only thing in sight that is. Eric told the narrator not to follow him, said he felt like an anchor around the narrator’s neck, finally cut him loose, and then went to Kestlebrook. And evidently, this is what he found.
In the story of Prometheus, the young trickster god gives humanity the tools to make something of themselves, and is captured and tortured by Zeus. His fate is cruel and horrifying. The citizens of Kestlebrook found… something. Maybe it’s an ember of the fires Prometheus stole – a pathway to a new stage of human life. Maybe it’s the result of an arcane ritual gone wrong, and the gate we enter has been left open as a lesson to humanity to finally, ultimately, leave well enough alone.
Or maybe it’s an avenue of escape. Maybe Eric, evidently locked in that crystal on the peak, has found a way to be an engine, instead of an anchor.
All seeds want to grow, after all. Sometimes they need to be replanted in order to flourish.
It’s a genuine pleasure to have you here reading our work. Please consider donating to Black Lives Matter, the NAACP and other local organizations doing anti-racist and anti-police brutality work. If you enjoy the site, follow us on Twitter. If you’d like to read a bunch of work like this, you can check out this book-esque object over at itch.io and the Apple Books store!
Additionally, we now have a Patreon (again) and a Substack newsletter you can sign up for. Doing so supports the site and helps us reach our goal of being able to pay other people to come say hi sometimes.