Item #: SCP-7636

Object Class: Safe

Special Containment Procedures: All SCP-7636 instances are to remain sheathed and kept in designated storage sites except when approved under EGRESS protocols.1 At least one Foundation-affiliated expert in the following fields must be informed of SCP-7636 containment needs and remain available for consultation:

Modern and historic blacksmithing

Metallurgy

Exotic matter principles

Insect, avian, and marine biology

Applied philosophy

Any unsheathing of an SCP-7636 instance must be recorded to ensure EGRESS compliance.2

Description: SCP-7636 is a collection of thirteen sword-sheathe pairs that exhibit anomalous properties when drawn (see Addendum 7636-B). Each ranges from 45-155cm in length and 12-26cm in maximum width. No other stylistic elements, materials, or properties are consistent across instances aside from an engraving on each sheathe that suggests circumstances under which its blade can be drawn.3 No attempts have been made to circumvent these restrictions due to concerns raised by FORESIGHT-4 and Foundation legal scholars with backgrounds in thaumaturgy.

All thirteen instances were recovered from now-inaccessible areas of the Slănic salt mine located in central Romania.4 SCP-7636 instances have been unsheathed a total of 45 times since recovery in 2039, causing an estimated 3,210 deaths among anomalous entities, borderline humanity, and baseline humanity. This includes personnel who expired after using instances for authorized purposes (surviving 5 hours on average).

Surveilled area of Slănic salt mine.

Addendum 7636-A (Original Discovery): Ms. G. Baciu, a spelunker employed by a Foundation front company, was sent to inspect noises within Slănic mine after unusual seismic activity on May 18, 2039, uncovering what appeared to be smaller, unmapped chambers in its lowest levels. She entered the first such chamber after filing standard reports and notices.

Note that some individuals experience lingering hallucinations after viewing footage from Ms. Baciu's camera.

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Something thuds, metal on metal. Surprise sends your foot slipping across a gray slab damp with saltwater that should have been pumped out years ago. One glove catches an outcropping while the other feels for new support. Light from your shoulder torch reflects off equally gray walls where it isn't disappearing down their gullets. Tiny chambers led to small tributaries, which led to the vascular network now stumbled through, each step more misplaced and worse remembered than the last.

Something thuds, bone on bone. A double-beat this time, a pulse that penetrates your skull as easily as a railroad spike. Thudthud as you slip down a gentle incline. Thudthud as its grade becomes perilous. Thudthud as you tumble—no, plummet—between stone teeth rimmed with luminescent moss and pulsating blooms. A sudden, crushing death wraps itself around your heart, squeezing tight even as breath struggles to escape overfull lungs. Yet, no collision comes. No fatal impact. Only what feels like a forever of falling into tracts laid out below.

When that steady rhythm returns you to consciousness, it is at the foot of an iron door encrusted with rust, lichen, barnacles, and all manner of unidentifiable biofoul. Its three heavy hinges look impossible to shift. Its single slat overflows with salt deposits. Yet the thudding continues, metal on metal on bone on stone.

"Oh, imperious bent," comes a rumble from behind it that shakes grains free from every encrusted surface. "Oh, knuckle and knee. Make thy vision manifest once more. Once more…"

Salt overflows from your lips as the snow continues. As the thunderous pounding does. Like solution pressed from an IV, you cannot help but feel drained as thick droplets stain sweatshirt and cargo pants. Wiping them away with the back of one hand only frees space for more to bud.

"Cancer of cancers, malady of maladies, know this form now. Learn it anew."

Your fingers finally find the handle, glove long since lost. Flickering light illuminates desperate pawing where rust flakes and saltwater drips. Only when your left hand joins your right—applying its open wound directly—do long-ignored mechanisms give way. The screech they elect is by no means pleasant, nor is a sudden fall inward onto stones warmer than skin. Static fills your vision while crawling back up.

Of the small room beyond: cramped with items so neglected that they ceased functioning as such. Crumbling furniture. Petrified fixtures. Central is a vertebrae-made-anvil larger than any creature could possibly bequeath.

Of its occupant: obscured in noise that fails to reach corded arms or trailing beard. Both are equally matted with salt, with barnacles, such that any hammering seems done by a living statue. Its worn tool pounds at the worst of the static again, and again, and again, battering distortion into form. Eyes that solidified eons ago do not so much as swivel, so transfixed are they on the work before them.

"Count the blows, know the beating, see it done. One upon one until thirteen await thirteen. Such is my work, courier. Such is your missive." A final blow connects with whatever lays shrouded by static on the anvil. It surges worse than ever, engulfing everything in abrasive noise as you finally manage to utter a dehydrated "what–"

Ms. Baciu was recovered near the entrance of Slănic mine approximately 47 days after her disappearance alongside all thirteen SCP-7636 instances wrapped in yet-unidentified leather.5 Efforts to identify PoI-5584 or locate LoI-404 as depicted in video footage have proven unsuccessful to date.

Addendum 7636-B (Instance Details):

# / EGRESS Designation
Physical Summary
Anomalous Effect

7636-1 / PYRE PYRRHIC
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Any inflicted wounds are replicated across the subject's living relatives within a variable range of genetic distance.

Video records not available.

7636-2 / CALLOW ELECT
Blade of contiguous amber that preserves 983 insects. None perfectly match non-anomalous species, but many resemble flies, mosquitos, centipedes, wasps, and earthworms.

Inscription: Lay the tired to rest.
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Video records not available.

7636-3 / TEPID MANGE
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Video records not available.

7636-4 / LAMENT SUNRISE
Blade of unidentified black metal inset with eight large pearls whose discoloration appears to represent lunar phases.

Inscription: The hunt gone awry.
Prevents all external light from entering an ~1 km area around the wielder when drawn.

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Spin toward the sound of crunching leaves. It distorts in that otherworldly forest, each smooth trunk reaching at least a mile skyward without splitting, twisting, or breaking. Too soft for one of your scattered squad, each encumbered with armor meant to obscure how much more advanced the Foundation was than its "regional partners." Another crunching footstep, but buzzing microdrones detect no motion. Nothing on other scans either as you click through them with your molar implant. A few stray sounds become a dozen. A dozen become a hundred. They're closing fast from every side, drones be damned, and there is nowhere left to flee.

Strike one temple to engage the ocular implants. Crack a thumb joint to warm up darkvision. Envenomed arrows strike chainmail with the force of bullets, and you scramble from trunk to trunk without luck or cover, bleeding already. More woodland magic, and none that was in the brief. There is finally no choice but to draw that symbol of peril rather than lose it outright.

Night falls like a hammer. It takes barely a second to adjust, to see the black sword swallow its own pearls whole. A thin wooden blade polished past conventional sharpness lashes out, gouging a sliver from the tree behind you. Pale, unblinking eyes peer back from a near-human face. Elf. Your implants click, click, click as the world sharpens to near daylight. You thrust LAMENT SUNRISE into their armored chest, strength borne of an internal furnace burning fast. Ducking a different whipblade, you swing hard, carrying the first body along until it flies free; the sword cleaves true this time, severing forearm and torso in a single bifurcation that sprays blood into artificial night. Hundreds of elves bay in their usual manner. Howl. You can only howl back as the hilt in hand pulses with each shared heartbeat, stealing what vital essence runs within.

There won't even be bodies left by the hunt's final hour.

7636-5 / DERIVE SUBLIME
Blade of interlocking ivory segments held together by a contiguous golden edge. Emits a 25 db hum at all times.

Inscription: Stroke the traitor cheek.
Inflicted wounds seal with textured keratin regardless of severity. Beheaded individuals will indefinitely continue most duties assigned to them.

Video records not available.

7636-6 / PERIL PROFESS
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Active effects unknown. When sheathed, its use as a ritual focus adds significant processing gain.

Video records not available.

7636-7 / NICKEL MUSE
Steel blade engraved with honeycomb patterns that are affected by heavy scaling. Fluids spontaneously emerge from empty combs, including water, oil, grain alcohol, and unprocessed nectar.

Inscription: In days of deadlock.
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Video records not available.

7636-8 / BRANCH BEREFT
Blade comprised of a semi-permeable mass of deciduous leaves in autumn colors. Consistently sheds leaves while drawn, which are replaced via internal processes.

Inscription: On callous fields.
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Your chassis flies over grassland on stiff wings, loitering high enough to not yet fully expose the Foundation's hand in this otherworldly place. Focus tripartite eyes, bringing lenses to bear on the battlefield below. VISTAG calls it the contested territory of Cherinmark. You call it a bloody mess.

Look to where a squad of MTF Nu-39 fires rifles three world wars out of date. Arrows fly back in thick clouds. Their bayonets are all bent or broken, and the molted orks at their feet twitch yet, motion heralding the release of symbiote worms. Refocus to earthen barricades where partner forces have already held off two assaults by fellow humans. Both sides call themselves loyalists. Neither are left with pity after seven years of bloodshed. A grenade explodes nearby—blast calculus tags it as a FEO-9, either pilfered from improperly destroyed caches or snatched from a body on this very field. Too much power for anyone but wizards to wield.

Rotate the lenses with another click. Observe that bastion of Alpha-85, purpose-made for fighting in a world where the Foundation's full might cannot be brought to bear. They expect no PGMs falling where directed, no air superiority or orbital support, and yet suffer for that absence when set against knights raised in such abject poverty. Five fall. Twenty. The eastern flank seems sure to crumble in short order.

To their rear, a woman whose uniform is shorn of sigils lifts a rust-colored scabbard overhead and, after pausing, pulls its blade free. Climate sensors register the change instantly. Humidity and temperature drop in tandem. Winds shift, bringing drizzle with them, but her shout cuts through the squall regardless. "Oh, fleeting stars!" comes that mania given shape. "Oh, tortuous fates! Witness now this daughter of yours!"

With one swing of BRANCH BEREFT, a pressurized jet of rainwater shoots down from on high, easily cleaving through several armored bodies. Meat splatters. Blood sprays in jets of its own. With another sweep, she blasts back several more, raised shields sparing their forms only minor mangling. What the Foundation lacks in orbital weaponry here, it provides by other means, no matter the consequences of grasping them.

Battle lines shift like an organism feeling the pain of a hundred soldiers as its own. Curling, contorting, redoubling, the loyalist army (not to be mistaken for the loyalist army) brings its immune system to bear. Clicking through filters again, you confirm thaumic energy gathering in a rear area—sorcery by one name or another, though your CONTAG library only flags it as CONFIRM RED.

Onboard explosives promise to leave no wreckage behind after this most terminal dive.

7636-9 / OPAL EVERGREEN
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Video records not available.

7636-10 / INFER ANNEX
Rectangular blade of highly compressed sodium. Impressions of fish skeletons are visible on its surface. Scabbard is made of matching material.

Inscription: More wrong than right.
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Video records not available.

7636-11 / REDOUBT SERENE
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Touching an individual's spine with the reverse edge causes a shift in worldview that aligns them to the wielder on all observable axes.

Video records not available.

7636-12 / PHEASANT FOUL
Approximately 8 cm of opalescent alloy that ends in a jagged edge with three irregular prongs. Tendrils of light emerge from the breakage in 20-second intervals.

Inscription: When needed least.
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Maybe it went wrong from the start. Maybe this was a fight that couldn't be won cleanly, or even a fight that couldn't be won at all. Five NUZ-21s streak through clear skies toward Fort Gräd, that impenetrable bastion from which Foundation support once flowed into this world—unmarked, unacknowledged, and apparently unable to preserve loyalist forces beyond ten years. Its spires now bristle with weapons cobbled together from your own technology and fueled with nuklear magiks. Lightning arcs out to swat one fighter-bomber from at least a kilometer away before the rest veer into evasive maneuvers, but no matter. When resolved to sacrifice, your weapons still outrange that.

Dirty fingers scratch a week old beard as the newest member of Alpha-85 ascends the mound of bodies already forming. Step by step onto backs and faces. Climbing normally, then on all fours, stopping only to pluck PHEASANT FOUL from its prior wielder in one final moment of human contact. Your vest camera captures no farewells, no salutes—nothing to acknowledge this sacrifice as surpassing those made prior.

Standing astride that mound of friendly corpses who have yet to decompose, the young man cuts a terrible figure. Wind plucks at torn sleeves and ragged pants. Organic matter leaks from a vest that barely withstood familiar weapons in unfriendly hands. He slowly raises the broken blade, orienting it toward where the Fort's sheer black walls have been bruised and broken by your singular standoff munition.

Tendrils of light bud from hilt and blade, unfurling to flutter in an ethereal breeze, then converge on a point just beyond broken alloy. A bead forms there, a throbbing concentration of witchlight that drains colors from its surroundings—forms, swells, and with a calamitous silence, discharges in a finger-thin ray that crosses kilometers in an instant. The impact is audible even from that distance, but no more so than the thud of another body collapsing like a puppet with strings cut.

Your own trudge upward goes just as uncelebrated. The hand holding PHEASANT FOUL is still warm, as is the setting sun's embrace. From that mountain atop a mountain, witness countless acres of former farmland tilled by fighting. Witness those warriors named orks and elves, those knightly menaces that ride drake and dragon, that ruin stemming from what had once been a mere influence operation. "Oh, malevolent gale," you murmur under alien forces, aligning the blade along the same vector as hundreds had already. "Bear me wherever you will."

As witchlight beads at great personal cost, you cannot help but notice another budding atop Fort Gräd's walls. A bulb of static. A swelling most cancerous. There is no diverting your arm's angle though, nor dimming gathered light, leaving nothing to do but watch as a throbbing wedge of noise parts the battlefield. Gain and loss, compression and decompression, its totality obliterates you on first contact. You, the mountain, your remaining comrades… yes, wrong from the start indeed.

7636-136 / TAPEWORM TANGIBLE
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