(Recommended reading music)
See the gray, ash-colored grass. It is drained of color. It is dry, but just as alive as you are. A pale sunlight casts itself over you, but you remain cold as you scale the rising hill, grass silent beneath you. The crest is revealed; a small garden laid bare before you. You let yourself lie beneath the stems of gray and dust-colored petals, your hand finding the stone slab which protrudes from the dry, loose dirt; you lower yourself to the ground. Here, you return to rest.
Maybe i need to lower my standards.
Figure my shit out before i do anything.
When i see other people with their friends,
It's not jealousy; more an anguish.
Deep, deep in my heart-core.
Was there some vital time i missed?
Living with other men places me deep.
Deep in the hegemony that i've always
longed for yet never been a part of.
Yearning.
To heal my inner child.
the othered, the outcast, friendless.
What about myself do i need to change?
Should i want to fuck women?
Should i make comments about their bodies?
Fail to see my flaws in rejection?
That failure i have known.
but love and thought has since
made at least transparent
the veil over my eyes.
A film of retrospective analysis and realization,
where it's always too late to go back.
The gap widens.
And I'm lost and alone.
Content warning: death, blood, non-sentient pain (sapient pain), suicide, interfamilial murder, non-descriptive child rape, child death.
It started in Nevada, in the midday shimmering heat of the desert. A cloud of thick black mist comes billowing up from the bluffs.
When agents of the Serpent’s Hand had deleted the Song of Genesis from the Foundation’s database, they had neglected to consider that its potential applications might have been classified beyond the reach of their informants. Because the Foundation had failed to disaggregate a copy of the Song from its databases, when it ceased to play in the containment chamber at the Navada site, there was nothing to stop the inevitable coming of Death.
Dark clouds ascending into the sun-hot skies of Nevada soon begin to coalesce within the light blue into a conglomerate of pitch-black mist, a kilometer wide. A deep, drawn-out note emerges from deep within the haze.
The first deaths were primarily among the Foundation personnel stationed at the Nevada site, facilitated by the First Tone. A sudden and complete relaxation of all muscle systems accompanied by a cessation of sapience.
Site Director Alan Blake sits with his elbows on his desk, resting his chin on the thumbs of his laced hands, watching as the dark mist of Death spirals up into the Nevada skies through a display in front of him. Hearing the approaching footsteps of a staff member, he looks up as the door flies open, and a man stumbles into the room as he slows from his run. The skin around his neck is necrotic and slowly spreading upward.
The Director stands. “Good God, James… what–”
“The song! It… it–” A deeply resonant tone vibrates across the site, and both men collapse. The director’s knees buckle, and his head connects with the edge of his desk with a crack that would be sickening were anyone to hear. Blood pools from the wound where he lies crumpled on the ground, slowly dying. The other man, the containment chamber supervisor, falls back, colliding harshly with and sliding down the doorframe until he sits lifelessly hunched at its base.
Upon later analysis, members of the Foundation's exclusionary sites were surprised to find that the cessation of ontological plane containment did not result in a restructuring of our reality—as was expected—but in a mere release of the entity within the contained reality.
“We speculate that AD-91819 (The Maze) still exists. The CK-Class Reality Superpositioning/Overwrite Scenario hypothesized to occur if containment were ever to fail has, at this point, proven to be a null theory. This fact is subject to change; the containment breach is actively unfolding. We are in unprecedented territory here. The fact that containment of SCP-001-04 failed at all warrants intense scrutiny. ”
- Dr. Heilda Yramni, Director of Exclusionary Site Nevada.
Within the blackness, the great thing called Death moves and shifts; it resembles a thing curled into itself, wrapped in multiple massive pivoted columns, turning about every so often as one rolls in sleep. Tendrils of cloudy darkness descend upon the bluff; the umbral mist seeps into every crack and crevice, into the seams of the fake desert cliffsides that hide the Nevada containment site. The creeping shades of Death weave across the concrete floors, where they fall upon the still-sentient, limp bodies of personnel.
Enveloping cold. Tingling numbness. Pain. Loss of moisture. Pain. There is tightness. Ache. Ache. Pain. Cold. Dry. Dry. Dry. Hot. Pain. Dry. Loss. Pain. Dry. Cold. Cold. Cold. Numb. Numb. Pain. Numb. Pain. Numb. Tight. Dry. Scrunch. Pain. Dry. Tingle. Dry. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Agony. Pain. Agony. Agony. Pain. Pain. Agony. Agony. Agony. Agony. Agony. Agony. Torture. Agony. Torture. Torture. Torture. Torture. Hell.
Death sluffs off the still-living corpses of the personnel of the Foundation site in Nevada, and slowly resecedes back down the hallways and seams of the complex, emerging from the desert cliffsides, darker, thicker than they were before. Sliding along the hot ground, they leave streaks of stygian water in their wake, spreading out like lichen. The gravid black vines sluggishly retract upward toward the great haze that has expanded, thinning in their absence. The figure within is pale and white. Taught skin stretches across curled bony limbs, moist with stygian dank. Newly vivified, the darkness once again deepens, aggregating to obscure the figure within the great cloud.
In the months that followed, the great darkness would move across the continental United States, with an apparent preference for densely populated regions. It used Tones of the same frequency as the first at each of these locations, and to a similar effect. Video footage quickly began to permeate the news. First locally, then nationally, and then globally. The Overseer Council of the Foundation declared the event a Broken Masquerade Scenario and, that night, issued a global broadcast via anomalous means, appearing on electronic displays globally.
“The following message was composed via consensus of the Overseer Council.
Hello. To those of you not aware of our existence, we are the ruling body of a clandestine organization known as the Foundation. Our goal for over 250 years has been to maintain normality worldwide. For over 250 years, our organization has kept the world safe from that which lurks in the farthest reaches of our understanding. The fact that you are perceiving this broadcast means that we have failed. While there are means by which this calamity may yet be stopped, none of us now will ever come to know the fruits of those efforts. The wheels of recontainment have been hence set forth in motion. There is no hope of survival. Death is coming, and release from pain is not allotted by its effrontery. Make your peace. Goodbye.”
Following the broadcast, waves of suicides swept the globe; some happened individually, others were organized. Fathers shot their children, mothers hung themselves, people jumped from rooftops, and swallowed pills by the bottle. Various cults were erected in reverence to the great horror. Devotion did not save them from their fate of suffering.
At first, the American government, as it is wont to do, responded with force. The pilots of the Immediate Response Force found themselves rapidly dehydrating as they approached the Death cloud. Had the infrastructure and organization remained cohesive at this point in the Coming of Ayakc, the pathologists tasked to perform the autopsies of these brave men and women would have found and ruled the cause of “death” as complete cellular dehydration. Neurons still fired, and existence nevertheless persisted torturously.
Within 3 years, the great black fog had come to cover the world over. It was then that the Second Tone came forth from the skies, and the endless torture without meaning at last concluded. The Earth was dead. It began then to rain. Dark, black drops of stygian water fell to the earth like once-heavenly beings written about so long ago in a text now useless to a dead world. The torrential waters fell from the Nyxian firmament, and the many glistening white limbs, covered in taught skin, unfurled from around the curled form of Death.
Descending from the timeless darkness, that billowing abyss, the limbs like towers fell uncurling towards the earth, parting through the darkness in an eldritch confoundancy known by none. All but one of the exclusionary sites had since detached from this new reality of horror. The final site was manned by a single man. A convict. Charged with the rape and murder of a young girl, and promised a future by the Foundation, left as the last observer of a damnatory judgment, ensuring the archival broadcast persisted.
The hands of this thing called Ayakc collided with the surface of the earth, and great new depths were thereby wrought. Then, it began. The fingers planted themselves within the mountains and valleys, penetrating the carcass of an abandoned world. Clawing and scraping, then, the great limbs leveled the surface of the planet, collapsing the edifices of man which had been built to tower above and display dominion.
The man sat at the terminal, watching the approach of the hand of Death with abject horror and despondency. Nothing could be done.
“This is what I deserve,” he thought to himself. The site was razed.
Above a new, barren earth, pregnant with a great river of Stygian water, a head emerged from the all-encompassing void of mist. Spikes of dark rock jutted out from the skull, glistening with dampness from the waters of death. The colossal, cracked, dead jaw began slowly then to open, and thus forth came the Third Tone, by which the great walls of The Maze were erected from the depths of the planet. And thus came Ayakc, Elemortal of Death.