SCP-7375

Byㅤ Prismal

Published on 25 Oct 2023 03:16

Item #: SCP-7375

Class: Hiemal

Progenitor: Arcana V̅CLXXV

Usage: Forbidden

Sacrae Causā Prōcēdendae: As with all Arcana chained through Arcana-DCCCXXXV, SCP-7375 is mutualistically self-containing; standard contagion hazard protocols are to be respected in its presence.

The progenitor Arcana, V̅CLXXV , was kept within the Arcana Institute of Xerophylla's Volatile Magnitions Vault until a worthy wielder could be identified.

On the new moon of Thermidor, in the year of Salt and Cypress, Arcana-V̅CLXXV vanished.

Genesis: The progenitor Arcana-V̅CLXXV was a blade of burnished Hinimoto steel, folded upon itself a thousand times hence. A warrior spirit of great and malevolent power was bound to this blade.

History of the Arcana System

In the dark nights after the Raging of Yvith, the brave men and women of the Fundamentum — Merchant-Orators, Scholar-Priests, Warrior-Poets all — carved for themselves a fiefdom of their own, the Arcana Institute of Xerophylla.

They did this through the ultimate innovation: Arcanic Binding made manifest through the Tripillar Configuration.

By balancing the Sanctity, Control, and Paradigm of the Universe, phantasmagoria and witchcraft could be transmuted into weapons of reason. Arcana Cards.

Every monster of the night could be bound, its essence stripped away and stored in an Arcana Card, a tool so safe even the young could be trusted to carry them.

That the young could take them to War.

Herein lies the transmutation of Arcana-7375 from V̅CLXXV .

Night 1: First Blood

Arcanalamp Muscription

Waxing Crescent, Thermidor

Year of Salt and Cypress

Scene: a murder foul.

Blood spilled upon barrack stone

Thin in red moonlight.

A young boy lies dead

Hair wild, neck cleanly cut.

Resolved. Terrified.

A blank Card in hand,

Arcanic Salt spiderwebs

Across stones pristine.

Cuts made sharp and clean

More execution than fight

But far too much blood.

Arcanalamp monitoring whisper

Waxing Crescent, Thermidor

Year of Salt and Cypress

DLW (Tentative)

Unidentified

DLW: Who's there?

Unidentified: Honor… exists outside emperor and country…

DLW: How can that be? I have studied the chivalric codes of old Dezmond. When they were dallying with alchemy, I studied the blade. When they were fornicating with their fellow peasants, I studied the blade. When they were mud wrestling and making merry, I studied the blade. When it comes time to save the princess, none shall be worthy as aid for me.

Unidentified: I too… studied the blade…

Potential Candidate

Asset Profile: D-DLW057

Damien Lawrence Woodcock

Phlegmatic; Orphan

Current Arcana Portfolio: None

Asset is currently being controlled via Knightly Chivalry Archetale; he believes he is a lone wolf who will single-handedly turn the tides in Darkest Evropa and be rewarded with land, title, and coitus/progeny. Expected deployment is as a solo warrior to disrupt enemy lines and enable incremental advance of strategic assets.

Recommended Arcana Exposure: Asset is recommended to be granted medium-power, low-skill high-burnout, self-vulnerability Arcana. If possible, asset should be paired with a Controller unit.

Life expectancy upon deployment: 0.35 years

See below asset's self-assessment:

The Deeds of

The Chosen

Damien the Mighty, A Knight of Great Renown

I, the great hero Damience Lawrence Woodcock, pen these words so that future bards & scholars may learn of my great deeds, heroic beginnings and destiny firsthand, that they may aspire to greatness as I was through the Fundamentum's Illustrated Tales of Chivalry.

Chapter One: Humble beginnings

My first memories are of the Orphanage. Every meal a battle, every day a test, underestimated and misunderstood by the other children. My only moments of peace reading the tales of the Fundamentum's great heroes and training in the woods.

But even then I knew I was different, that I wasn't like the other children, that I wasn't like those sniveling cowards, I was better than them. I knew I had a great destiny, and I was righteous and true.

All of us were orphans, but I was an Orphan. To be an Orphan is something that is the birthright of the foundling, the changeling, the future hero. They engaged in their petty schoolyard fights, carving out their meaningless hierarchies, while I found my truths in tales of knights and castles and chivalry, from a time long forgotten, a time before the night.

When the Ghastly Men came, those thieves of children in the night, the other striplings would flee and make themselves small — but I knew in my heart that they were not thieves. They were the watchers of the gates of adventure, and so I presented myself — frail but sprightly, foolish but resolved — to them. And they took me.

They were the Fundamentum, those who Guarded at the Foundation of All Things, and they told me my true heritage. My father had been a scion of the ancient and noble houses of Dezmond, who had given his life in service to Xerophylla against the Ogre King Ferdinand, and I had been exiled to an orphanage by avaricious and conniving relatives. They offered me a choice:

They could restore me to my station and vanish from my life like ghosts in the wind, or they could teach me, train me, make me lethal — and I could exact such terrible revenges myself.

I chose the latter.

For there is a sword in a stone awaiting in my dreams.

Progressing towards level.

Approved by Professor C.O. Gears

Anderson-Mab Pactborne Dream Theft

Requisition: #3296202

Victim: Damien Lawrence Woodcock

That night, I woke. Soon, I found myself before a great door, not having remembered gone there.

It is a curious thing, the waking dream. I knew, perhaps, that I was crossing into something forbidden. That I was breaking some great and ancient taboo.

That is the first step every hero takes. To break the laws set forth by a society too foolish to understand him.

Beyond that door was a great many artifacts. Suits of armor and statues and gargoyles, all indistinguishable from each other. Tens of cursed necklaces, hundreds of cursed rings.

And thousands upon thousands of swords. But only one drew my eye.

It was a curious thing, in a style that I had never seen. Not the shifting blade of Professor Light, nor the greatsword of Professor Gears. No, this blade had the slightest curve to it that gleamed in the moonlight, and symbols I could not recognize embroidered upon the hilt.

There was an air of portent around it. I cannot describe it except to say it is as it always was in my dream. There was no stone, but there was a sword. And so I went forth to grasp it.

Yes, the sword whispered to me. This is true. This is right.

And as I held that hilt between my hands and raised it to the moon, I knew this was what had always been my lot in life. What I had always been meant for.

This was a world of death, short and cold brutality. But through it all, there would be one who was noble, honest, and good. One who was true. One who knew death as his friend and lover against the unjust, yet fought for those who were noble.

I, DEATH KNIGHT.

Meeting Minutes

Professor Sophia Light, Phlegm

Headmaster Charles Gears, Bile

S. Light: Neil Leinnes is dead. Choler class, first year. The murder, I think, is of Blood.

C. Gears: Unfortunate. Is revival possible?

S. Light: No. He went down Heroically. Defending the interests of Xerophylla from an infiltrator.

C. Gears: Or fighting like a beast of the earth for his own life. But not an ambush. No cut to the throat from silent night. This entity is unlike the Stricken — it does not act with subterfuge.

S. Light: Perhaps — or it knows us far too well. Perhaps it knows this is one of the few ways to kill us permanently.

Night 2: Fear

Arcanalamp monitoring whisper

Waxing Half, Thermidor

Year of Salt and Cypress

DLW (Tentative)

Unidentified Spirit

DLW: There is a lost princess of Xerophylla, stolen by the hordes of Darkest Evropa. I must save milady, and be rewarded with an honorable knighthood. Else I cannot redeem myself.

The spirit: The taking of artifacts is dishonorable?

DLW: Indeed, so I have dishonored myself.

The spirit: Did those who stole me from Hinimoto have more honor than the hero who I speak to now?

DLW: They were wiser than I.

The spirit: By whose account? The thief's?

DLW: Would it not be theft if I took this blade?

The spirit: Was it not theft when they took me from my liege?

DLW: If it was, then I have taken you. I am no better than them.

The spirit: I am no idle hunk of steel. I chose you. In your hands, we can both grow in honor.

Arcanalamp Muscription

Waxing Half, Thermidor

Year of Salt and Cypress

Scene: A Coward, dead.

His back to the red moon,

Died on his belly.

A rare appearance,

Paid with the wages of sin,

Which of course are death.

Anderson-Mab Pactborne Dream Theft

Requisition: #3296396

Victim: Damien Lawrence Woodcock

The coward fell beneath my blade, his skull split in twain as he tried to run.

I knew him, but only in passing. Wozny, he was called. A Professor of the Blood class. His name was attached to a thousand petty trifles, the sorts of feats that make small men feel big. The Wozny Meal Rotation System. The Wozny Mural for the Class of 76. The Wozny Draft-Beast Side-Saddle Riding Recommendation.

It was no small wonder that he had been fully corrupted as an agent of the Ogre King Ferdinand.

The Fundamentum was at war. It had been at war against the forces of darkness long before my birth, and it would be at war until it finally won. The Arcana Institute was a hidden beacon in the endless night and the first line of defense. The best and brightest of the world's minds in the Bile Class. The orators and diplomats that held society together from the shadows in the Blood Class. The mages and artificers of glorious futures in the Choler Class. And heroes in the Phlegm Class.

The Ogre King was one of many great evils of Darkest Evropa, a beast of Gallic origin. It was jealous of the civilization of Xerophylla, of its great cities and great culture, of glory it could never be a part of from the harshness of Darkest Evropa. Ever since its birth, it had laid waste to Darkest Evropa, and made it a place where only the bravest dared tread.

One day, I would sojourn forth and slay him, and avenge my father, and bring light back to the world.

The Professors had sealed him, so he could not physically invade our glorious nation, but even still, his influence had seeped into the Institute. It had turned the noble men and women of the Fundamentum into plunderers, willing to steal a sacred sword from the distant eastern shores of Hinimoto. It had made saboteurs of students, like the first blood I ever drew, and even of Professors.

Of Wozny.

It made an awful lot of sense. Why else would someone be so enamored with pointless glories, when they could instead serve and find true glory? To distract, to mislead, to confound. To turn the minds of others away from the great war to pointless self-enrichment.

I wondered, looking at Wozny's blood, if this was what heroism meant. To kill the right people — not even a person, really, one of Ferdinand's creatures — and feel no remorse.

For I knew I was doing the right thing, purifying the Arcana Institute from within, yet my stomach felt clenched. My hands were cold around the hilt of my blade, and the distant stars swam in my vision.

Yes, a voice said, from deep within. This is how things must be.

It was not my voice. It was, perhaps, the voice of destiny.

And yet I still felt ill.

And then, the great voice of the sword appeared before me.

Arcanalamp monitoring whisper

Waxing Half, Thermidor

Year of Salt and Cypress

DLW (Tentative)

Unidentified

DLW: You are the sending of a spirit!

The spirit: You had not realized?

DLW: Last night, when I slew the ogre, I thought your arms the wind, your mask a trick of the light upon my face. I drew your blade to strike and sheathed it when my task was done. But now I see you for what you are.

The spirit: You do not seem shocked.

DLW: There is a student, James No-Name. He tells us of a Joshua, son of Joseph, who I call Jojo and am told it is heresy. I do not understand this Jojo. James No-Name tells me that it is a part of a whole and yet also the whole, or perhaps the projection of a great artifact at the heart of the world; you are hardly more surprising.

The spirit: I am no distant vision. I am here.

DLW: Truly?

The spirit: I am within the blade and have been there since I was stolen. Trapped within that prison, unable to act or to repair the harms I have done. Can you imagine what hell it is to be confined in such a way, with no sense or feeling but the cold of death and your own thoughts? Could you imagine what it is like to be without body, left only with purpose? To be left in a moonless room, waiting, hoping that whoever next calls you forth might be in the slightest way willing?

DLW: I shudder to imagine such a fate.

The spirit: Know that I chose you. And together, we shall make things right.

Meeting Minutes

Headmaster Charles Gears, Bile

Mr. Jeremy Filia

C. Gears: Filia. This soul is to be restored.

J. Filia: Of that I'm aware, old friend. Wozny of the Blood died neither Heroically or Justly.

C. Gears: You tell me what I already know.

J. Filia: It died like a coward on its belly, squealing like a pig, unwilling to fight in the slightest for its life—

C. Gears: Silence.

J. Filia: Feeling perhaps terror in its final breaths— or do you think perhaps it cried for the mother it promised it would come home safe to? Or was this a stolen child that couldn't remember its mother, because you erased it—

C. Gears: Cease. You know nothing!

J. Filia: The irony being, of course, that such base cowardice is life itself, yet you have taught these lambs to the slaughter that they ought to fight to the very last for Xerophylla herself, and hoard Arcane immortality for the lucky coward few.

C. Gears: Enough! Give me the soul.

J. Filia: Will you teach it life?

Meeting Minutes

Professor Sophia Light, Phlegm

Headmaster Charles Gears, Bile

Professor Gears touches his hand to the earth, cleansed by Filia's passage.

C. Gears: Again, death.

S. Light: Is there any truth to his delusions?

C. Gears: You know there cannot be. I sealed the Ogre Fernand myself; his Arcana card sits in my deck right this very moment. Even now he dances at the edge of my mind, a loyal vessel waiting to be called to war.

S. Light: And that Woodcock knows of Fernand — the Ogre King Ferdinand, so he says — at all?

C. Gears: The stories we told him took a life of their own. The spirit cried of the corruption at our foundation, and he chose to believe it was the doing of the same Ferdinand that took his father's life.

S. Light: Did his father die for us?

C. Gears: Of course not.

S. Light: Your verdict?

C. Gears: …Their force is too strong to waste.

S. Light: What are you proposing?

C. Gears: We seal their minds as one with the Lament Configuration, and throw them directly into Darkest Evropa to fight until underwhelmed. The blood sacrifice of Leinnes can be redirected from their ends to our own.

Light waits in silence until it is clear Gears shall say no more.

S. Light: Troy never would have wanted for that ritual to be his legacy.

C. Gears: And yet he serves even in True Death, as we all will.

S. Light: We have none with the Arcana power to seal. None dare wield the power of MMDCCXVIII. Few are foolish enough to think they can escape its touch.

C. Gears: Then what of XCIII?

S. Light: I could not; I remain Unclean from my last use.

C. Gears: Then I shall not ask it of you. The Spiral Path?

S. Light: Mann is too comfortable at Yarsborough; he would demand a greater price in blood for his aid. You know this.

C. Gears: Of course I do. But if the task falls to me, perhaps DCCCXXXV.

S. Light: Charles, that is foul.

C. Gears: And yet, necessary. Sanctus Santorum, as it were.

Night 3: Forever

Annotated Combat Log

Professor Light walks through a corridor of the Arcana Institute. The light of the moon shines in through slit-like windows.

Outside, a second set of footsteps matches hers.

She palms an Arcana Card in her hand.

The corridor opens to a courtyard.

Damien Lawrence Woodcock stands to face her, beneath the light of a full moon.

He draws his blade.

A dead thing appears around him, with pleated scale-like armor.

She opens her hand. Her Arcana Card erupts into light which fast shapes into a gladius.

Damien Lawrence Woodcock lunges, his arm above his head, ready to fall.

She parries.

The shadow of a second blade falls upon her. The dead thing, too, swings for her neck.

Her blade flares with holy light, blasting it away. She leaps backwards.

The two face each other again.

She points her sword at the corrupted knight. He raises his blade to guard his face, as if afraid she might shoot a lance of light at him.

She charges, her blade aimed at his heart.

The dead thing folds in front of him; her blade pierces it. Its texture is like mud, slowing her blade.

She feels his arms moving from beyond the deathly avatar.

Her blade becomes a card again, and then a blade, just in time to stop his from piercing her skull. His arm is flung away, and he scampers back.

He raises his sword, eyeing her with newfound respect. The first true challenge, she must be. He raises his sword, as if awaiting her next move.

The clock strikes twelve.

After-Action Report

Headmaster Charles Gears, Bile

The creature was bound by its own set of rules — that much was clear — but I believe the true weakness was the story we had fed to its host.

We teach all the Phlegmlings some version of a rags to riches story. Something to hope for instead of a guaranteed painful death. Some form of hero's journey so that they might have hope — the Greatest of Evils, as they say in the lands of Greaze.

For Woodcock, that ideal was the lost codes of Knightly Chivalry, abandoned ever since Night fell. The idea that a social class of authorized killers should follow some form of code in deciding when to mete out death is universal, but the constraints from the times before are so simple as to be quaint. And he thought the Arcana Institute was one of the last bastions of such ideals, the sole shining city on the hill in a world of darkness.

So he had no preparation for our subterfuge.

—C. Gears

The Sanctus Santorum is come! A rigid prison of coral polyps. It has grasping tentacles and has a taste for human flesh! Beware its bilious phlegm!

Professor Light jumps out of its range.

The Sanctus Santorum engages Woodcock. It tears at him with its tentacles. He strikes at it with his sword and the dead thing, but it has endless arms and he and the ghost have only four. It bites and snaps at him.

And then it heaves. Its slurry — a bilious and phlegmatic substance, foul in odor and thick yet lumpy — splatters across his visage.

His face is red and patchy and infected. Soon, he shall turn, and they shall be rid of him. He shall be made one of the Sanctus Santorum, and he shall be sealed.

The earth and air tremors.

S. Light: Charles. Do you feel that? A mutation.

C. Gears: How fascinating… that this bilious affair might reveal a deeper truth.

S. Light: Are you prepared?

Professor Gears draws a quill pen and flourishes it through the air.

C. Gears: Always.

A magic circle erupts, a smaller circle within an outer triangle, with Damien Lawrence Woodcock and the Sanctus Santorum at the center.

Three spears strike at them. The first of flowing quicksilver that melts about him and encases him in sleek metal. The second of white salt that locks the shifting metal in place and purifies the essence of the Sanctus Santorum. The final of burning sulfur that wreathes the man and ghost within with divine fire.

C. Gears: You are a dead thing without form save in living hands, and you are a boy with dreams of knighthood without title nor armor. You are a parasite of warped and twisted flesh.

S. Light: You are abomination to the Burning Gods, in their Hollow halls. Apostate, Traitor, Childslayer. But we give you purpose.

C. Gears: We give you form and function, and draw from the relics of the Last Universe the Number that defines you.

The red welts on DLW's face burst into tentacles. They coil around his body like kudzu vines before hardening into bulbous plates of enamel. They wrap around the Hinimotan sword and encase it in bone. The dead spirit howls, drawn into the coils of bone, becoming imprisoned by the infection of the Sanctus Santorum. The only hint of it that remains, that of a face, twisted and enraged upon the belly and breast of the armor in sharp bas relief.

The circle closes. The light shrinks inward, inward, inward, circles becoming concentric. The three arrows flash again and again, their echoes formed through magic and time.

A card appears in Professor Gears's hand. On it, the figure before them.

A knight encased in bone, driven by a noble mind and a restless spirit. Stoic and still.

Description: SCP-7375 is a statue of bone and phlegmatic enamel, sealed within the Sepulchrum Santorum of the Arcana Institute of Xerophylla. It wields a blade of bone and steel. It cannot move on its own, but can be commanded to do so by one with the sufficient Arcana.

Its temperament is bilious and phlegmatic.

From time to time, screams of disgusted agony can be heard from its core. These can be safely ignored.

The current Derived Arcana of SCP-7375 allow its wielders to command a suit of armor made of bone, skilled at swordplay and capable of imparting a deathly plague. Further research is ongoing.

Arcanalamp Muscription

From the timelessness of Sanctus Santorum

Proud and noble knight,

Clad in suit of teeth and bone,

Turned away from war.

In belly, churning,

Self-devouring humors,

Bilious phlegm soup.

Noble dreams transformed,

A knight is but a weapon.

Honor? Agony.

The Chariot

ANTHOLOGY 2023

Seven of Cups