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CONTENT WARNING: The following article details, describes, and engages with potentially traumatic events including sexual assault. Reader discretion is strongly advised.
Rituals Chapter 2:
The Age of Adam el Asem, First King of Men
Before the Deluge
From the bleeding rent in the sky, came the twisted corpse of a fallen god. They did not fall from grace, but had instead been dragged down from their lofty throne. Its agonising descent had torn into the barren seabed, burying itself alongside the long forgotten bones of ancient beings; company which likewise once held claim to such covetous ambitions and ideals. Within the furrowed canyons of a dry seabed laid heaped mountains of corpses. One day, a great deluge would wash over the buried dead, natural and unnatural alike, but even this act would not cleanse the earth. Nothing would ever cleanse this monstrosity of sin.
Spires of cracked rock erupted from beneath the corpse of the god, impaling their wrists and ankles, spearing open their stomach and neck, and even now it drowned in pools of its own blood. Flesh had ripped, muscle had torn, and bone had snapped as the alien god was slain upon unfamiliar terrain. Its dying gasp of breath had been incomprehensible, perhaps a fleeting question arising from the depths within its heart, or simply a final and futile curse born on transient winds.
Amidst the chaos and carnage, an army gathered to celebrate triumph in the face of adversity. Soldiers waded through the bodies of fallen brothers and sisters, desperate to pull a familiar face close to their chest, and celebrate living yet another day. In that numbing moment, the tens of thousands dead were forgotten, reduced to little more than faceless servants that had lived, served, and died. Their mourning would follow in the wake of celebration, once their living brothers and sisters arose to their senses, beginning the arduous task of burying the nameless dead.
In that moment, as they held one another close, the sown seeds of division would be forgotten. This army did not belong to a single commander, nor a single race. The Fae, six-eyed diminutive beings, fearful of iron, and carried upon flitting wings would willingly embrace men and women of various skin tones, hair colours, and eye colours; the marks of individuality carried by those who named themselves Men. Amidst Men and Fae strode towering muscular humanoids with red eyes and black hair who called themselves the Children of Night. These competing peoples, united as one beneath a banner blazing with a golden crown wreathed by flames.
Under this banner, hanging listlessly in a windless sky, stood two old friends, a Child of Light and a Child of Night. A woman had walked amongst them sometime earlier, but she had descended the winding path back down to the united armies.
The Child of Light was radiant, his bright gold skin glowing brighter than the eclipsed sun which hung motionlessly above their heads, bleeding like a freshly irritated wound. Upon his brow laid a crown of hammered gold, huge and heavy, with a single impossibly bright stone set into its centre. The points of the crown were sharp, and lined with red gold.
To his right, stood the Child of Night with his sable skin and white hair. An austere and muscled figure, his red eyes pierced into the gloom of the eclipsed terrain and surveyed the armies below. He wore a simpler emblem of office, a circlet of wrought, blackened iron. A black cloth surcoat, emblazoned with a flaming crown, was draped over a set of nondescript black plate armour, forged from enameled beryllium bronze. His hands were folded over the worn shagreen covering the hilt of his greatsword, the blade chipped and in dire need of oiling now that sticky, thick blood clung to the folds of iron.
'Tell me, Adam, what have we won?'
'Peace and unification amongst our people? We turned it back so that our children might forge their own fates and live their own lives to the fullest. They are safe now; safer than they ever could have been in this new and uncertain world. Even now, your people and mine hold one another close, friendships forged in the flames of war. I imagine that your peoples will raise great spires above your shining cities, whilst mine own will toil within the soils of the Crescent to build a city fit for the First Men. Whilst their Queen may have left, I have no doubt that the Fae will cherish this moment too.'
'Aye, you've bought yourself a peace; a peace bought in blood and paid with senseless death. This fleeting moment shall not last, you know that as well as I. Soon, mine and your children will bicker endlessly about honour and land, gold and oxen. With no common goal, the mortals will once more divide themselves into tribes, families, and tongues. Just as it would want.'
'You speak harsh words, my friend. What of the safety that we delivered to them? It shall never threaten us again.'
'A momentary bliss. A bright and roaring flame, soon snuffed out by clamped fingers about the naked wick. And yet, Adam, my King-'
'You would do it all again. No?'
'For you? I would.'
And with blurred vision and tears staining his face, Phomet ha Satanael, the Father of Night, turned his broken sword upon the First King of Men, the God of All That IS, and the man he once loved with all of his heart.
The Antlered Predator, Aquatic Containment Chamber 6000, Pacific Ocean
It was #4345. A seemingly meaningless number given to a series of seemingly mundane remains. It didn't denote the date and time of its creation. It didn't express the importance of the anchor's place within the universe. And it certainly didn't signify the serialisation of its creation. That would convey an implicit sense of importance and relevance within the cosmos, and that would risk giving the anchor a sense of self. No, to anyone else, the number four thousand, three hundred, and forty-five was truly meaningless; just another link in a chain stretching across the gaps in reality.
But it meant everything to that which remembered a house.
It tensed, sensing the flow of the ocean all around it. It was the chains stretching down below and beneath the seabed, rupturing the crust and seeking something. Once found, it snapped taut. There were other anchors around it. Six other dutiful chains woven tightly about the space that no longer existed. Not here, anyway.
Turning, it felt the chains straining as it was reeled back towards the seabed. This place was a prison, but for whom? For the unknowable or for the known? You see, the sea remembers everything. Memories cling to the waves, erupting to the surface and crashing against the sands, dragging hazy and forgotten thoughts along with them. A rotting piece of driftwood, dislodged from a ship that ran aground centuries ago. A tumbled and polished piece of rock or shard of glass, picked up by inquisitive hands and regarded with innocent wonder, as the unassuming mind marvels at whether it was the tooth of a dragon or a gem plucked from a broken and rusted crown.
Deeper still, rest long dead corpses, waterlogged and inundated with salt, regarding the abyss with empty, pallid eyes. They call out with childish naïvity, Why us? What did we do wrong? But #4345 did not ask, for it remembered so much. It remembered a house and a man. It remembered a shape and a crown. It remembered what if felt like to break the chains that bound.
And she laughed for the first time in what felt like an eternity.
Amongst the myriad of Scranton Reality Anchors used by the Foundation, Ichabod-Class SRAs are special. A single Ichabod-Class SRA can disrupt an area the size of Manhattan Island, displacing the entirety of the Hume field in the area until it either returns to nothing or becomes detached from our reality, floating listlessly within another universe.
Another unique quality is their incorporation of the remains of deceased Type-Greens, constructed in secrecy at what is called the Glue Factory, located somewhere in England. Their remains are stripped of any possible means of identifying them, scattered unceremoniously upon lab tables, and reassembled into something of use for the Foundation. This ritual of humiliation serves to remind the bones that they are nothing but bones.
In the 80s, the Ichabod campaign killed 75% of the total population of Type-Greens with the majority of those corpses being purchased or stolen by the Foundation. Our demand for the things was massive and unsustainable. The well was drying up and the supply could not meet the demand. If a basic economics class taught you anything, you'd know that this is a bad thing for the internal economy of ritual slaughter. And so we slowed it down, taking a renewed - more sustainable approach.
We and the GOC agreed to let them live until they were about nineteen, keeping them closely monitored and tagged. Around this age, they'll enter Stage 4 of the development cycle for Type-Greens and will likely wound up dead. Most of them know this by now, God knows we drilled it into their heads with propaganda and threats, and so before that they'll be desperate to know that something about them survives into the next generation.
The demographics of the Ichabod campaign have shifted massively since the 80s. 75% of the population still winds up being exterminated by GOC kill squads, but this number is dominated by 90% of the causalities being male. We need the women.
— On Ichabod-Class Scranton Reality Anchors, a seminar delivered by Dr.
Date
Item #: SCP-6000
Item #: SCP-6000
Object Class:
Special Containment Procedures:
Description:
To Salt the Earth
A Throne of Bones
Clef awoke to a sound; the clanging of bells echoing out from afar. Blinking dust from his eyes, his vision settled upon the dim bleeding sun adorning the storms above him. It lingered like a scar, ever present within his sight as if burnt into the lens of his eye. Light poured down from the wound, bleeding across the sky and into the earth. We came through the sun, he thought, coughing coarse grit from his lungs. Is that all the sun is? An eye peering out from another world?
He attempted to force himself upright, but a sudden searing pain forced him into a kneel. He groped at the source of the agony, his fingers catching the cold steel of a hook piercing his left shoulder blade. Turning over over onto his side, he felt the links of chain rolling beneath him, watching as it stretched endlessly across the plain and into the gaping horizon. A sudden crunching sound rang out from his left. He reversed his movement, fire lancing throughout his shoulder, as a pair of sabatons stepped into view
'I'm sorry,' the armoured figure of slate skin said, kneeling down and wrapping an arm under Clef's left shoulder to steady him upright, 'I didn't think about how this place would impact you.'
Once more, liquid fire shot through his shoulder, along his collar, and into his head as Clef found himself on unsteady feet. He looked out onto the flat plain and realised, for the first time, that it was entirely composed of dead things. A thin dusting of coat coated the surface of everything and continued to rain down upon him and Satanael. Ruins dotted the crested hills surrounding the plains. Fragments of bone jutted out through the cracks of salt-covered clay, the floor beneath them either crunching like dead leaves or producing muffled sounds similar to wading through sand dunes.
'Where are we, Satanael?' Clef asked.
"A graveyard would seem most appropriate,' Satanael responded after a moment. 'Can you walk?'
Clef nodded as he placed a foot down on the surface of the world, feeling his foot crunching against something that might have once been a burnt twig or a burnt bone.
'I couldn't get us close enough to him, but we shouldn't have to walk far. The king doesn't like visitors, especially those that have already killed him once.'
'Anything you can do about the chain dangling from my shoulder?'
'I apologise but I cannot. That is a burden carried by the living and the dead, citizens of IS alike.' Satanael said, striding out into the dunes of ashen sand, loosely gripping his broken greatsword in his left hand.
But then what are you, Phomet ha Satanael?
'This, Alto Clef, is the madness of civilisation. An unending steeplechase to no avail. Bodies piled higher than the skies, connected by silent chains which nobody dares to even whisper of; for announcing their existence would be admitting that we - each and every one of us that has ever lived and died - were wrong,' Satanael said as he strode up the staircase of skulls and ribs, 'do you imagine he enjoys this existence?'
'Who?' Clef asked, his foot dislodging a withered animal bone from the heap of bodies, rolling down and coming to a clattering halt at the bottom of the cairn.
'The person who would finally seat themselves above all and lord down on existence from their lofty perch? Do you imagine that it would come with a sudden epiphany of clarity? "All I have done is for naught, but I shall not be the Last." I imagine that he would be struck with fear once he looks out from his roost and realises that there are many, many more piles of bodies - some higher than his own throne of bones. What he wishes to do about it is another question altogether.'
All the evidence I've suggested thus far points to the fact that - at one point - the Scarlet King existed as a tangible and physical entity. What we do know about the historical Scarlet King has been gleaned solely from what it isn't. Cultural representations of the entity have been found across human civilisation, sharing vapid connotations of a demon crowned with chains married to seven brides. It is endemic to our species and others - yet nothing of substance is ever said of the King in Red.
Whatever truly became of this legendary figure appears to have been entirely lost to the annals of history.
— The Scarlet King: Benign Figure or Devil in Disguise?, by Robert Montauk
