The Magnus Archives - RQ Network Feed Drop – “Burned by a Paper Sun” – Ep. 1

Episode Date: December 17, 2025

Today we are sharing an episode from a brand new podcast launched on the RQ Network, Burned by a Paper Sun.Burned by a Paper Sun is a brand new, chilling, horror anthology podcast from the same brilliant creators of The Gentleman From Hell, Maeltopia and The Sleep Wake Cycle. In Burned by a Paper Sun, shadows come in a thousand shapes—some drawn long beneath a dying sky, others drifting and lost beneath a wandering cloud. Yet one certainty has always remained: every shadow must have a caster. But what if that isn’t true? What if darkness could stand on its own? In this first episode William is a rational man, but even rational men are left broken by the Great Darkness of 1999. Despite his sceptical outlook, he is haunted by dreams of the most horrible and macabre variety. Most of all, he is terrorised by a single harrowing figure - the Elevator Man.Introduction and outro by Billie HindleYou can listen to the next episode of Burned by a Paper Sun by clicking on this link, or by searching for Burned by a Paper Sun wherever you find podcasts, or on the Rusty Quill website--Cast:Written by Mark AnzaloneEdited by Walker KornfeldSound mastering by Steven J. AnzaloneNarrated by Aubrey AkersIntro music by Steven Anzalone, Lou Sutcliffe, and female vocals by Harper TacentMusic and Sound effects are licensed from third party providers including Envato, Epidemic Sound, Artlist, Soundstripe, Melody Loops, Pond 5, Soundcrate, Music Vine, Youtube, Melodie, Slipstream, and StoryblocksContent Warnings:Amnesia, Altered Reality, Compulsions (supernatural), Existential Threat, Gore, Graphic Violence, Torture, Human Remains, Sleep Disorders, Psychosis, Anxiety and Panic, Compulsive Thoughts, Therapeutic malpractice, vehicular accidents, Environmental Collapse, Human Butchery, Falling, Elevators.Mentions of: Alcohol, Suicide, PTSD, People Going mission / abductions, Cults, Mass SufferingSFXGore/blood, Screaming, Beeping, Car Crash, Misophonia, Storms, SquelchingFor ad-free episodes, bonus content and the latest news from Rusty Towers, join members.rustyquill.com or our Patreon. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi there, this is Kareen, the voice of Simon Fairchild of the Magnus Archives. Today, I wanted to tell you about our adorable collab with U-2s. If you've listened to a lot of the Magnus Archives, you may be familiar with the Admiral, Georgie's friendly attention-seeking pet cat. Now available for a strictly limited time, you can purchase your very own plush of this cuddly cat, exclusively from U-2s, available to pre-order at rusty quill.com slash U-2s. The Admiral Plush is nine inches tall and combines both Jonathan Sims and Alexander Jane Yaw's visions of what he might look like.

This interpretation is a perfect orange tabby with a cute, friendly face and a hoodie inspired by Georgie's podcast. What the Ghost. The Admiral is available to pre-order until the 22nd of December, so order soon to avoid missing out. Pre-order by visiting RustyQuil.com slash U2s. That's RustyQuil.com forward slash Y-O-U-T-O-O-Z. That's Y-O-U-T-O-O-Z.

Have fun. See you later. Hi everyone, it's Billy Hindle here. Today, we are sharing an episode from a brand new podcast launched on the RQ Network, Burned by a Paper Sun. Burned by a Paper Sun is a brand new, chilling horror anthology podcast from the same brilliant creators of The Gentleman from Hell, Mealtopia, and The Sleepwake Cycle. In Burnt by a Paper Sun, shadows come in a thousand shapes, some drawn long beneath a dying sky,

others drifting and lost beneath a wandering cloud. In this first episode, William is a rational man, but even rational men are left broken by the great darkness of 1999. Despite his sceptical outlook, he is haunted by dreams of the most horrible and macabre variety. Most of all, he is terrorized by a single harrowing figure, the elevator man. Find other brilliant episodes in this series by searching for burned by a paper sun wherever you listen to podcasts. Click the link in the show notes

or find more information at www.maltopia.com or www.RustyQuil.com. Have fun and enjoy the episode. We're gonna be able to see them. We're scared of the beginning to the surface that got to get in. We're gonna be seen. H. Ah.

Ha, ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Yes, I said it. Ah!

Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha

Ha Ha Ha ...you know... ...their... ...their... ...their... When William awoke from his year-long amnesia, he found himself standing in a metal room.

He was dressed in a butcher's apron. Its construction of cob job of stitched together human leathers. A large room, perfectly square and stained with stiff pie. of spoiling human remains appeared nothing less than an avatar. William gasped at the human wreckage, his memory little more than a web of vanishing echoes. Yet he had a faint realization. He had done terrible, horrible things.

A glance into the room's darkened corners revealed strange machines, their sharp edges and mechanical arms stained a dark, stale red. His fingers twitched, with the residuum of practiced and obscene dexterity that still lingered in their memory. They itched for the legions of knobs and levers scattered across the encrusted devices. He stared dumbly at the dripping meat hook in his right hand.

Almost as much blood as metal, the iron tool fell to the floor with a wet thud. Ceiling lights reflected off it dully from the recesses in the rusted ceiling. The illumination felt dirty. glowing aerosol of urine. With a few strong tugs, the door to the room peeled open, cracking a black, flaking line of congealed gore

that coated the separation between door and jam. Darkness mixed with flecks of light, floated into view, a bile of illumination and shadow, flooding the throat of an endless hallway. He waded into the shadows with the confidence born of habit. William had walked it many times in the service of unknown, likely wicked impulses. A familiar rhythm became the sound of his footfalls. His eyes prepared to seize upon some impending sight,

a light in the dark, a beacon. A tiny red light bubbled up from the swirling gloom. At first, it seemed animated, flitting about the shadows, determined to stay out of reach. As William's eyes adjusted to the pocket of untried darkness at the end of the hall, he could make out an elevator door. The light was its call button, fixed into the framework of its corroded steel. When he made to push the glowing device in the hopes of summoning a way out, a memory broke free from forgetfulness. A smile of perpetual starkness, white, curving teeth like an indifferent wall of porcelain, unreflective eyes black as amnesia.

Something altogether unpleasant lurked behind the door. William took the stairs. As he ascended the steel staircase under the glare of conscience and blood-caped lights, he heard the elevator doors open. The sound of old machinery straining to perform its prescribed and never-ending chore echoing through the building. A terrible voice filled with all manner of a lapsed obachery came at Williams in the lower darkness. Going down! William sprang awake from his usual nightmare, no less composed for the practice.

He'd been seeing a therapist for it since he first woke in the metal room over two years ago. He was one of the lucky few who could afford counseling after the great darkness of 1999. Most of the world had to settle for alcohol and religion, with an ever-growing number opting for suicide. Every man, woman, and child on the planet, those who had the misfortune of living through it had suffered from some form of post-stress syndrome or malady. While no one could clearly remember what horrible things they'd done or had been done to them, everyone suffered the nocturnal echoes of the worst event to ever befall humanity. William, a grain captain of industry, fancied himself a true rationalist, always preferring the science of things.

As such, he took no stock in the belief that the entire world had been driven crazy by some kind of supernatural event. Even if, given the actual facts, the scientific justification seemed wholly inadequate. The official line of reasoning concerned a strange, heretofore for unknown cycle of the sun, emitting mind-altering electromagnetic waves, which in turn disrupted the sober functioning of the brain. In short, it was the star wheeling overhead what drove the world man. If nothing else, it was a tidy understanding of things. Yet it brought no relief for the unfathomable things man had done in the absence of his mind, and did nothing to spare him the aftershocks of those deeds when contemplated in sleep. And yet science persisted, every bit

the punch-drunk fighter unwilling to quit after the towel's been thrown. The relics of the great darkness were everywhere, generally due to the lack of funds for their proper disposal. Not to mention, some structures were the size of small mountains, having been raised by the lunatic ambitions of entire cities, While others persisted as religious symbols, co-opted by the new mystery sects and cults that grew up in the wake of the darkness, a collective, desperate scrabbling for meaning in the madness. The building housing the office of Williams Therapist sat situated directly across from a towering bronze bull. Hundreds of feet high, hollow, and once chalk full of countless charred remains. A giant version of the ancient Grecian torture device, the brazen bull, but scaled to the size of prehistoric idelons.

It seemed that the Maddened had a penchant for architecture upon the grandest, if bloodiest, of stages. Every Tuesday at precisely noon, William parked beneath the shadow of the giant brass bull, coffee in hand, prepared for a lengthy and ridiculously expensive head shrinking. The therapy sessions, however, were going nowhere. William's nightmares persisted, scaling the tallest wall of pharmaceutical dreams, present and tunneling beneath the best-laid hypnotic suggestions. But most concerning was that in every dream, William came closer and closer to pushing the glowing button, coming face to face with whatever lurked in the hellish elevator.

And yet, William wasn't entirely in the dark, so to speak, with regards to the identity of his hidden tormentor. For Great Darkness folklore had given the creature a name, the elevator man. practically all of the stories of the red-clad lift operator originate within the madness manufactured city of Tartarus an unearthly metropolis of hanging black skyscraper suspended from the ceiling of a vast underground cavern projecting down into a pit of undiscovered depth the pit itself an infamous setpiece from the great darkness is accordingly referred to as the hellhole ranging from the spurious to the remotely crucial The incredible, various witnesses to the elevator man had been spotted collecting particular persons,

all of whom had awakened into the blackened innards of the aforementioned hanging city, into his red-hot elevator bound for hell. Going down! Or so the story's claim. What made the specter of the elevator man so looming for William regarded the specific. specific and infamous location where he awoke from the darkness, the hell scraper, the largest building thrust into the blackness of the hellhole. The actual bottom of the hellscraper, or the hellhole for that matter, has never been determined.

Williams' therapist, a secretly superstitious man and unofficial adherent to supernatural explanations for the Great Darkness, exuded the sincerity and rich skepticism of a man born to the nuclear age, and confronted his patient's anxiety with detached aplomb, deftly navigating the elevator man legend with prescriptive recourse to unresolved childhood stress and radiation-induced hysteria. And yet, all the while, the hoary doctor of psychology could only pity the man marked by the devil. Even if it meant lying in earnest, everyone needed to scratch out a living in the ashes of the darkness, shrinks included. Tuesday after Tuesday, the shrink deflected the grim reality of his patient's fate, burying the man's fears beneath piles of clinical jargon, prescription

medications, and breathing exercises. Nothing worked, of course, but it kept the coins rolling in and his doomed patient reasonably sedate. A trick that generally carried the day when nothing else would was the analogizing of recurrent symbols to a patient's day-to-day life, and then tying everything together into a neat little metaphor. With William, the trick was a success, transforming most of his sessions into an hour-long meditation on the nature and meaning of his work. It was, in the main, determined that the repetitive and bloody business of William's dark awakening had become the symbol for his sense of purposelessness, unconsciously appointing the task of underscoring his disdain for his career. Thus, the nightmare was a metaphor

concerning his sense of action without purpose, the mindless swinging. of a hook into dead meat for no apparent reason. In no time the idea formed the basis of a windy dissertation concerning the essence of William's life, which he was only too happy to indulge. Doomed men, he believed, should be given their way. Over the course of many sessions, various other symbols and themes were discovered, each shedding revelatory light upon William's many unresolved subconscious conflicts. One of the most important symbols came when William described his high-yield salary as mere repayment for feeding devils. His work as a stock market analyst was just a way to keep the monsters happy. And so the phrase, feeding the damned, became conversational

shorthand for William's professional life and his recently uncovered resentment of it. William sat at a cafe just next to Coffin Park, a post-darkness recreational space made from giant empty caskets that once piled into the sky, wondering about his strange dream. He discovered a moment of clarity, a space more often encountered while showering were just waking up, contained within the naked revelation that had been waiting for him at the bottom of a year-long pile of rationalizations,

both purchased and homemade. How had he elbowed aside all the tales of the elevator man? The missing persons alleged to have been taken back to hell and the police warnings of a maniac abducting and possibly killing anyone who'd found themselves in the city of Tartarus. Of course, his therapist had answers for all of it and the meds to back them up. But at the moment, next to a park better suited for the dead,

the truth was laid bare. He would be called upon and taken. It was upon the end of the It was upon the eve of the third anniversary of man's darkest hour when William dreamed of pushing the call button, triggering an awful departure from the dower routines of his recurrent nightmare. After the button summoned the elevator, he watched as a new lighted fixture emerged from the darkness, a glowing dial indicating the current position of the incoming elevator. The floor numbers were indistinct, red and blistering, giving off heat as they denoted the elevator's approach.

William broke into a mad dash at the pretentious ringing of the car's arrival, making for the stairwell at the other end of the darkness. The words spoken by the elevator man were no longer assembled into a question, rather arranged into a statement of fact, if not a command. William erupted from sleep, screaming and clutching the air. Unfortunately, he hadn't escaped from the nightmare. He felt the rumble of an approaching elevator car in his bones, heard the straining gears and winding lengths of cable clanking and wheezing between the slats of his closet door. A glowing button appeared where the handle should have been. The lights of an open lift car began to shine past the wooden labs.

At last, the lone tinny note of an arriving elevator. William was already running for the stairs, screaming. From behind, he heard the elevator doors open, and an all-too-familiar voice now raised in a obvious irritation. Going down. After nearly falling down the flight of stairs, William raced for the front door, snatching up his car keys along the way. He reached out to open the front door, but only a glowing red button stood out from the wood. And above the doorframe, a rusted floor indicator dial, its red hot hand indicates.

the car's current elevation. Steam hissed into the room through the spaces around the door, gears growled from underground, but determined, if antiquated, machinery approached. William understood the going theme well enough not to try another door, and instead exited his residence by smashing a chair through his dining room windows. Oh! Go on.

Huh! Huh! Oh! Oh! What you? Once seated within the relative safety of his vehicle, he sped into the darkness, straining his eyes for an isolated red light, his ears pricking for the sounds of droning motors and turning years. He placed a number of frantic phone calls to his psychologist trying to remain composed through each breathless message so as not to warrant confinement to a mental hospital. an altogether different species of post-darkness hell.

The aging head shrinker received and reviewed every message, but only after letting each settle harmlessly into voicemail. His hands shook at the awful implications, the horrible truth that fueled his decidedly non-Euclidean faith. While hoping his well-paying client a painless death, he realized with a primal certainty. Hope had no place after the darkness. Whatever became caught in the headlights as it crossed the road, causing William to

swerve out of control, he would never run. The car flew from the embankment like a missile, corkscrewing from its uneven launch pad of pumped moss and tuna's pavement. He cranked the wheel uselessly, tires spinning like black moons in the cold, open air. He didn't feel the impact. Ah! Ah! Ah! Bhopr!

Bhopr! When the world When the world regained focus, William was strapped to a hospital gurney, Rolling through narrow hallways, hospital noises everywhere. In the limbo between waking and sleeping, he remembered the heft of a meat hook and a monstrous smile upon his soiled face. The sound of a jagged hook tearing through meat and bone, scream, taking of lives for food,

feeding the damned their gruel of human agony, pain within and without day after day after day, preparing the meal cart for hell, Served with some bidders made from lives poorly lived, William toiled in hell's endless galley. As often as possible, an overflowing cart disappeared into the depths at the push of a glowing button. The blurry hospital corridor moved in and out of his vision, but William's ears picked up the sound of automatic doors. Going down. The words were civil, polite.

Yes, chimed a nurse's voice, just barely audible above the din of a frantic heart monitor. And William knew it was time to feed the damned. Burned by a paper sun is a Maltopia production. Today's episode was written by Mark Anselone and performed by Aubrey Akerz. Sound editing was completed by Stephen Anzlone and script editing was conducted by Walker Cornfeld. Be sure to rate and review us on iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. And follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at Maltopia. unique art and animations of Maltopia's stories, visit our YouTube page, or click on the link

in the show notes. And for more exclusive content, such as additional lore, stories, and art, be sure to check out our Patreon at www.com forward slash Maltopia. To listen to the next exciting episode, you can click on the link in the description, or search for burned by a paper sun wherever you get. to your podcasts. Or you can find more information at www.mailtopia.com or www. RustyQuil.com. Thanks for listening.