Divine And Conquer - SCP Foundation

Temple of the Feathered Serpent, Teotihuacan, Mexico

0200 Local Time

SCP-4959 paced within its stone chamber, waving its wings at the Foundation personnel monitoring it. Flames danced around the skeletal Quetzalcoatlus as it turned its attention to the Site Director observing it behind the thick polymer window.

“I sense… unease in you. Your people. A great many things stir beyond the confines of this temple, I am sure of it.”

Director Juana Xitlali stared at the creature through the transparent partition. “It’s not really your problem, is it? You’re not going anywhere anyway.”

“Ah, there it is. The arrogance of your kind. I’ve quite missed hearing it from you. As much as you may be loath to accept it, there are things in this world far greater than you.”

“And there are things far greater than you. Yet we keep them in check."

SCP-4959 laughed. “Greater than I? Amusing. But your voice betrays you, small one. I sense your grasp is looser than you think, looser than you hope. In the interest of illumination, I will tell you about your predecessors.”

The great reptile spread its wings, and flames spread out from its body forming moving shapes and figures. Director Xitlali briefly turned to see the temperature monitors rise before settling back to the baseline.

“I have lived a very long time, whitecloak. And in that time no species or life has been quite so interesting as yours. After the Great Disaster, I remained in the skies for centuries, keeping myself fed on the sunlight above the clouds and storms and ash. I cared not to search for my companions; I had cast them aside long before I reached my current state, and I suspect they left this world entirely. I came to this land, or what would become it, and slumbered for many eons, hoping that when I awoke, life would have reclaimed the ruined earth.”

Director Xitlali kept one eye on the monitors.

“And oh, what a sight I awoke to. The land was lush and teeming with life. Animals roamed the land, and were tamed by your ancestors. They were cunning and clever, building great cities and temples, like the one we sit beneath. They studied the world, the skies, the stars. And in them I saw an opportunity. For all their wonders, I knew they would see me as above them.”

The dancing flames formed images of the Pyramid.

“They revered me as their deity, worshipped me, built me this pyramid. And for a time it was pleasant, seeing the natural order at work. After centuries a group of them rose up and rebelled, and attempted to trap me within the very stone structure built to commemorate me. They employed magical wards and defenses, and I chose to play their game, pretending they had bested me. I bided my time, waiting for them to finish their petty squabble. I suppose I slept too deeply; by the time I awoke, they were gone, and then your lot found me shortly thereafter.”

The director furrowed her brow. “That’s all well and good. But what is your plan now? You know we’re neither letting you out, nor worshipping you.”

SCP-4959 laughed. “You flatter yourselves. But I will indulge your inquiry. The worship of your kind is beneath me now. I had time to think during my burial, and I reached a singular, driving question: what is a god? If your predecessors thought of me as one of theirs, I should like to meet one of them and compare myself against them. Perhaps I shall task myself with gaining their worship.”

The director ignored the philosophical comment for the time being. The skeleton stared directly at her. “I know I won’t get anything from you. You tell yourselves you worship no gods, and you think that that makes you somehow above them, above your past selves. In your arrogance you catalog, and measure, and assign arbitrary values that you dare to assume are absolute.” It grinned, the eye sockets of its skull filling with a sickly green light. “And while you spread your eyes across creation, you too are being watched. To borrow from another of your people’s many stories: you have been weighed, and found wanting.”

A klaxon began to sound, and a researcher sat straight in his desk. “Director, the sun is rising.”

“What?! That’s impossible, it’s 2 in the morning.”

Xitlali walked to the researcher's station. He tapped a few keys and the camera feed from outside showed the sun rising in the distance. Strangely, the sun appeared to be in coming up in front of a hill in the distance. Director Xitlali turned towards SCP-4959.

“Is this you?”

"I suggest you all get as far as you can.” SCP-4959’s flames bristled, and previously unseen symbols on its bones glowed a bright white. The ground shook as cracks splintered through the stone chamber. Ghostly snakes, spiders, and birds streamed from the cracks and circled around SCP-4959. It opened its beak and released a stream of green plasma burning vertically through the Temple.

Personnel scattered from the room towards the evacuation routes and hurried towards jeeps and helicopters. As they fled the crumbling temple, they saw the ‘sun’ rise higher into the sky and float over the column of smoke coming from the pyramid.

SCP-4959 looked down at the ground and spat fire at the small creatures filling his chamber. He noticed the Site Director, trapped under a piece of rubble.

“Juana… come with me.” SCP-4959 gently moved the stone and took her in his beak, then crawled out of the hole in the pyramid with his wing claws. Exiting the ruins, he set the Director down on an outcropping of stone. She groaned. Her arm was broken, and she wondered if a rib had been as well.

“W-why save me?”

“The rest of your people have fled. Someone should be here to watch this. When the dust clears, then you may run back to your superiors and tell them all you have learned about the divine.”

The ‘sun’ unfurled itself, legs and claws and tails extending from the center of the light. Juana felt lightheaded, whether from the brightness or the apparent divinity she couldn’t tell.

The entity appeared as a jaguar, a man, and the moon, somehow all at once. The patterns on its skin shifted between jaguar spots and lunar craters and gleaming obsidian. Flames and blood spontaneously erupted from the ground directly beneath it.

The light from the entity faded slightly. What mouths could be visible on its form opened, then closed again. A brief moment of perfect silence, and then a burst of light and a deafening BOOM filled the Avenue of the Dead.

As the sound reached its peak a mass of spiders rose up from the crumbling stone beneath SCP-4959 and enveloped him. The spiders formed the shape of a hand, and the hand rose from the earth to reveal the arm it was connected to, then the rest of the body. A gigantic humanoid shape made of spiders climbed out of the ground, and stone from the Pyramid was carried up into its 'head', creating a face like the Teotihuacan art. The face frowned.

CRUNCH!

The spiders entity crushed SCP-4959 in its hand and dropped the bones to the ground. An unintelligible sound echoed from the ‘head’ of the mass, in a softer pitch than the BOOM earlier. The unceremonious pile of bones on the ground abruptly caught fire and began to reassemble themselves.

“You’ll have to do better than that, my dear.”

The voice of the jaguar-moon entity boomed again, but this time the rises and falls of its inflection were more pronounced.

SCP-4959 finished reconstituting its form. “Yes. This is where you built the world. This was once one of the most populous cities on this planet. But now what will you do? The people were conquered, the great murals faded, the frescos gone. Even the original name of this place is lost to all but you and I. And yet, even after centuries without the hearts and the rituals, the sun keeps rising.”

The entity made of spiders shrank slightly, its face becoming more lifelike. She spoke in sounds and echoes and winds that felt a little bit more like Nahua.

“Surely you have felt the cosmic drums begin to beat across the world. In this ball game to end all things, you are not the only player on the court. And in your absence, I've taken the liberty of joining the game.” SCP-4959 dragged its toe claws on the ground to make symbols, then blew fire onto them.

The ground shook again, as great masses of stone upheaved themselves and thousands of skeletons came together, green fire in all of their eye sockets.

“Granted, you have their souls. But the bodies I’ve collected over the centuries prove useful on their own.”

The reanimated bodies of centuries of Mesoamerican civilizations joined hands, and both they and SCP-4959 blazed with white fire. The prehistoric skeleton took to the skies and opened its beak to blast a bolt of lightning at the spider entity. She remained unfazed. The skeletons channeled more energy into SCP-4959, and it flew higher.

“Now behold!”

The unnatural daylight was darkened. Ash clouds spread and out of nowhere, gigantic meteors appeared in the sky and fell down to earth in fiery glory. The spider goddess looked up and held out her hand.

From deeper underground, a great golden serpent shape broke through the earth, casting skeletons aside as it emerged. Its body sprouted prismatic, ethereal feathers that swayed and carried it out of the ground like centipede legs. It raised its head, and great wings burst from its back, lifting it into the sky. The entire Avenue of the Dead was illuminated in the golden light.

The Serpent looked to the sky, and flew straight through each meteor, pulverizing them into dust. When SCP-4959 turned to face the new figure, its skeletal wings were instantly disintegrated and it plummeted towards the ground. Before it could land, however, the Serpent gripped the pterosaur's head and neck in its foot claws, dragging it along the ground before unceremoniously throwing it into the ruins of the Pyramid of the Moon.

The undead servants quickly rushed to SCP-4959's aid, dismembering itself to build their controller new appendages from their own bones.

The Feathered Serpent, Quetzalcoatl, Kukulkan, Q’uq’umatz, descended towards SCP-4959 and spoke, shifting from one Mesoamerican language to the next. “Impostor. I could wipe you from creation right now. But yet… your tenacity and ambition fascinate us. You survived one extinction event before. Perhaps we may adopt you so we all may survive the one that is to come.”

SCP-4959 readjusted its skull on its neck bones and bowed. “O Great Serpent, I-”

“Remember well. As you regard the people we built, so the gods regard you. Know your place, and in turn you may rule over this earth once we have reclaimed it. This land we tread on holds centuries of our subjects. Call on them for us, and we shall arm them with obsidian and might.”

The Mesoamerican gods marched down what was once the Avenue of the Dead, behind their herald formerly known as SCP-4959.

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