you can use your assistants as human sacrifices to stop the end of the world, and it will change nothing. you can use your assistants as lab rats to work out the closest thing to a magic system a fear-based universe contains, and all your work will be undone in a single night. you can ruthlessly sacrifice your friends, and it will make no difference. or you can do anything to save the people you love–you can send them away before you get out the axe, you can get stabbed mid-ghost bullet extraction, you can crawl straight into hell and spend days digging yourself out for a woman whose majority of interactions with you have consisted mostly of police abuse–and all it will do is end the world. and if you cling too hard to the one you love, you might just end all the worlds. & that is how you know the magnus archives gets horror.