his design. The Eyes of Darkness were cast across all mankind, and 
threatened to pull it all into the shadows where the Scarlet King 
reigned supreme. 


In response, the Foundation joined with its friends and foes, and 
found themselves helpless against the King and its supremacy. In 
an act of desperation, the captors of the world released their 
captives, who turned in kind either against the King or for him. 
Regardless of their intent, the King swept them up in a sea of blood 
and returned them to nothingness. The King had not lingered in 
twilight for so long to make friends with mortals. 


Finally, in the light of dusk on a cold November evening, a group of 
men of the Foundation brought forth the most powerful force left in 
their control, and left them to grow away from the power of the King. 
They prepared for him a most vile feast, and then fled. 


It was a month until the King arrived at the feast, and realized that 
he was undone. Before him was a mountain, greater and more 
terrible than any in the universe, a mountain that would grow and 
move and smother the Scarlet King and his fires. A mountain of 
endless cakes. 


It was the cakes, in the end, that were the undoing of the Scarlet 
King. The gift that the mysterious Adephagia gave to the King of 
Crete, in those days was called SCP-871. If left uneaten, the cakes 
would multiply, and multiply, and multiply again, until nothing 
remained but cake. 


Beneath this mountain of cake, the Scarlet King became trapped, 
powerless again in the face of magic more powerful than himself, 
and beneath the mountain he suffocated and his fires went out. The 
Left Hand was broken, and his conquest of the Earth and of 
humanity was finally ended. The work that had begun by Hevel-Ab- 
Leshal was finished, under the growing strength of cream and flour. 


But the men of the Foundation saw their own folly, as the might of 
the cakes grew exponentially and threatened to destroy their 
country. Out of fear, they then dropped the bombs, hoping to scorch 
the cakes into oblivion. Fire rained for thirteen months, and when the 
flames subsided the skies darkened and the cold winds began to 


blow. This was the beginning of the Winter That Will Not End, and at 
the dawn of that cold season all of the bombs were spent, and an 
entire country had slipped beneath the seas. 


Thus ended the Feast that the men of the Foundation had prepared 
for the Scarlet King, Left Hand of Destruction and He Who Came 
Before. 


"What happened to all the cake?" 


Sky looked up, realizing he had had his eyes closed for the last five 
minutes. The children were eyeing him with curiosity, desperate for 
a truth that they did not need to know. He smiled at them, and 
tossed the hair of one to his right. 


"The fires melted the cake, of course. There was no more cake after 
that, and hasn't been any cake ever since." 


Another child across from him piped up. "But what about all the 
potatoes?" 


A chill caught Sky unprepared, and the smile became false. He 
remembered a time, it could have easily been a day before, when a 
council met to discuss the devastation they had not avoided, the 
multicolored apocalypse growing once more on the horizon. He 
remembered a woman in a white lab coat, who presented the group 
with a burlap sack of potatoes. He remembered how she had 
described, in detail, the greatest deus ex machina he had ever 
heard: of how her team had been able to deduce, scientifically, that 
potatoes were the opposite of cakes and that exposing the two to 
each other would cause them to cancel out, thus ridding the world of 
the infinite cakes by means of the infinite potatoes. 


He remembered a time when they all nodded and shook hands and 
agreed to the plan of action, a time before they learned that the 
potatoes were a hostile, extradimensional entity at odds with the 
concept of infinite cakes, locked away once in ages past to prevent 
the destruction of the planet in a food-based Armageddon. He 
remembered now that that probably had not been the smartest idea, 
and in the back of his throat he tasted potatoes. It almost made him 


vomit. 


"The... potatoes were nourished by the sugar in the ground. 
Obviously the potatoes began to grow because there had been so 
many cakes, and..." he looked up, eyes searching for an excuse. 
"Hey, it looks like breakfast is ready! Come on now, let's get to 
eating." 


The gathered children sprang to their feet and rushed off to the 
waiting food line, and Sky Martin stood slowly, now feeling the aches 
in his bones. He ambled over to the entrance of the mess hall, 
where another older man stood waiting. 


"| feel like there are fewer cakes every time you tell that story." 
Monroe said, his southern accent warm against the biting cold of 
Havenhall. 


"Yeah, well, here's hoping." Sky pulled the thick curtain aside, and 
exited the hall. He turned towards the barracks, desperate for rest. 
"Wishful thinking, if anything.” 


Monroe snorted. "Wishful thinking, yeah. Probably only that. You 
heard the latest scouting reports?" Sky replied with silence. "Figured 
not. Echo team saw a couple spuds, bout thirty miles to the 
southeast. Didn't disturb em or anything, and they think they got out 
without being seen." 


Sky grunted. "Did they investigate any further south?" 


"No. Rads were too high for safe travel, and they were already low 
on fuel. They placed a couple of Scranton Starch Dispersion 
Anchors in the area, might be enough to ward them off." 


"Does Marshall know about this?" 


"Aye, he does. Caught him after they had already gotten back, 
though. He was busy with Delta Team, who went north." 


"Don't tell me." 


"Yep. The Kant Pan-Dimensional Glucose Counters we had up 
there? All overloaded. Travel north of White Side is nearly 


impossible, it's too sticky. Rads were really high, there, too. Both 
sightings were more than we've seen in-" 


"In about five years, | know." Sky rubbed his temples and pushed 
through the doorway to the barracks. It was warmer inside, but only 
just. "We need to make certain we're seeing what it looks like we're 
seeing, because if we need to get everybody out, we don't have-" 


Monroe stepped in front of him. "There won't be time, this time. We 
don't have the firepower for another appearance of either of them, 
let alone both. We might be preparing for a full cryogenic lockdown, 
Sky." 


The old man sat down to rest in the common room, and his friend 
joined him. "Sky, nobody else knows how to work those freeze 
tubes. If we need to get everybody in them and lock it all down, we 
might need you, you know... to handle it from the outside." 


He knew what Monroe meant. There were plenty of cryotubes 
beneath Havenhall, in the ruins of Site-52, but only one operator left 
and that was him. If push came to shove and they had to retreat 
below, the only one capable of turning the machine on and making it 
work was him. After so many years, the automatic function had 
broken down, as well. It would have to be done manually. It was not 
exactly a death sentence, but Sky could not think of a better word for 
it. 


"Yeah, | know." He shrugged. "Guess we'll cross that bridge when 
we get to it." 


Monroe left him then, and Sky retired to his bunk. Within a few 
minutes, he had fallen asleep beneath the bundle of blankets 
afforded to him. In his dreams, he smelled the sickly sweet aroma of 
death on the horizon, accompanied by the quieting of the winds and 
the sound of rushing ca- 


He awoke with a start, as the dull emergency klaxon blared 
throughout Havenhall. Struggling to his feet, he threw on a jacket 
and his boots, and hurried towards the sounds of people. 


As he burst out of the barracks, he saw the whole population moving 


quickly and silently into the tunnels of Site-52. His tired eyes 
searched for any sign of his compatriots, and stopped when they fell 
on Max. Sky ran across the courtyard and grabbed his friend by the 
shoulder. Max spun and knocked his hand away, but his face 
softened with recognition. 


"Max, what is it? Marauders?" 


Max's face, worn deep by age and long nights in the fields, creased 
into a sad smile. He motioned towards the watchtower. Sky moved 
towards the ladder, and when he turned back Max was gone. He 
quickly scaled the height of the structure, with the sounds of chaos 
now ringing around him. 


"Into the tunnels, quickly!" 

"Spuds to the south! Spuds to the south!" 

"Ready artillery, take aim!" 

"Women and children first, bring the sick over here!" 


He reached the top of the tower, pausing only a moment to catch his 
breath. He looked down at the panicked mass below him, and then 
up towards the horizon. The wind was no longer blowing, and a 
shadow passed over Sky Martin's eyes as he saw it. A cascading 
tidal wave of potatoes, trillions of potatoes, cascading across the 
highlands like a loosed sea. The horizon of the Earth had 
disappeared, and in its place was starchy death. 


He stepped back, steadying himself against a railing. It was then 
that he smelled it, the saccharine stench evil. He turned, and in the 
distance behind him he saw the rainbow terror of the infinite cakes, 
a moving, heaving, roaring river of cream. As his eyes passed over 
the scene before him, he noticed a small, running figure outside of 
the walls of Havenhall. A ways away from it was another figure, a 
dog, running after some unseen rabbit. He moved as he recognized 
the first, the girl, Amelia. 


Throwing latches and pounding through doors, Sky Martin burst into 
the frozen openness of the highlands, and he began at a sprint 


towards the tiny dot on a nearby hillside. From behind him he could 
hear his fellows shouting his name, but he paid them no mind. His 
mind was single-focused on his goal, and he could not be deterred. 
He was like the wind, then, swift and howling in the wake of the 
opposing waves of food around him. 


Sky grew close to the little girl, then, and she turned to see him and 
saw the cakes over his shoulder. Her eyes grew wide with fear, and 
the small dog she held clutched to her chest barked and whimpered. 
In a single move, the old man grabbed her and the pup, lifting them 
to his shoulder, and fell into a full run towards Havenhall. Behind him 
were potatoes, and he saw them falling around him, their fat, souddy 
bodies making a thick, wet, splashing sound as they struck the hard 
earth. 


A single, solitary figure stood at the open doorway to Havenhall's 
south side. It was the Marshall, still and silent, holding the gate 
open. Sky's eyes met his, and the Marshall shook his head. He 
slipped back inside the structure, the door closing behind him. 


Fear gripped Sky's heart, and he heard, distantly now, the little girl 
screaming. He looked back, then, and beheld the starchy death that 
awaited him. 


Sky fell to the ground, holding Amelia and the dog beneath him. 
Potatoes began to pound at his back, breaking it. 


Then there were potatoes everywhere. 


Then there was darkness. 


And potatoes. 


Part Two: A Council of Culinary Mishaps 


The man who was once known as O5-11 sat quietly behind his 
computer screen, eyes flitting across it. He squinted, and then 
hammered out a string of text. 


Video feed access: SCP-076 


The screen flickered slightly, and then displayed a live stream of the 
interior of a dark chamber. Most of the lights had gone out, but from 
the flickering headlight on the observation camera, he could make 
out a number of colorful pastries being pushed past the lens. The 
on-camera mic picked up the dull sound of rumbling confections, as 
well as the muffled grunting of an unseen man, suffocating again 
and again in the increasingly compacted cake-based prison. 


He sighed, and shook his head. His fingers found the keyboard 
again, and he pounded out another command. 


Video feed access: SCP-1193 


Another flicker, and then a shot of a dark basement, strewn with a 
great many delicacies. In the far corner, a hand was waving a small 
white flag, and a phone was ringing. The cakes continued to pile in 
through the basement stairway, until the camera was completely 
obscured. 


They were all about the same, at least in North America. Most Safe 
and Euclid class objects had long since been buried, either under 
sugar or under rubble. A few angry Keters had gotten loose and 
tried to wrench themselves free from the sticky mess of foodstuffs, 
but all had succumbed and sunk beneath the sickly sweet sea. He 
laughed while remembering the great fucking lizard, choking to 


death in its vat of acid on a cream pie that it could not adapt to. 


There were exceptions. SCP-1867 had made it out, and SCP-662 as 
well. They had fashioned some sort of improvised sailing vessel for 
themselves and, laden with supplies no doubt pulled from the 
Site-16 storehouses, had struck out on their own. Current estimates 
put them somewhere over southwestern Nebraska, in pursuit of a 
peculiar absence of a shark. 


Most of the staff had gone the way of the skips, too, all valiantly 
maintaining their stations until the very last second when the cakes 
came pouring through the windows and up through the plumbing. A 
few had escaped, no doubt. The east coast had gotten word of the 
oncoming devastation in time, and he was certain there was no 
shortage of deserters then. 


Jack Bright was still ok, it looked like. He had checked up on him 
earlier, out of a morbid curiosity. The amulet was firmly anchored 
within a conscious trail of mold, growing itself out of the mess one 
millimeter at a time. Clef hadn't been seen in months, though that 
was less of a surprise than anything. Much of the rest of the senior 
staff had either perished or deserted, or moved on towards safer 
sites elsewhere in the world. 


The other organizations were taking it well, all things considered. 
The Global Occult Coalition had established a quarantine around the 
United States, Canada and Mexico, and were initiating large-scale 
carpet bombings of border areas, to keep the tide at bay. It helped, 
for a time, but the cakes would always come tumbling back. They 
were, of course, infinite. Not as infinite as they had once feared, 
thankfully. It appeared as if there was an upper limit to the amount of 
cakes that would reappear every day, and while the number did 
seem to be rising, the threat of an exponential cake apocalypse 
seemed to be avoided, at least for the present. 


Marshall, Carter and Dark had long since disbanded. Much of their 
anomalous wares had been housed within the United States, and 
with its full-scale destruction most of the shareholders had headed 
for higher ground. The remaining warehouses had been emptied, 
and the paperwork burned. Not that it really mattered, the cakes 
couldn't read. 


The religious groups, the Broken Church, the Fifthists, those holding 
on to their Abrahamic religions, were all doing what religious groups 
tend to do in apocalyptic scenarios. Neither machines, nor the stars, 
nor Jesus Christ seemed capable or interested in staving off the 
cakes. Little surprise, there, too. 


In the end, the ones who had made off the best seemed to be the 
Hand. At the first sign of global annihilation, they had all 
simultaneously left for the Library, and locked the Ways behind 
them. Maybe, somewhere, they thought this was kind of funny. 


As for the Foundation, Overwatch Command remained resilient, 
hunkered deep under the ice and snow of the frozen Antarctic. The 
distance gave them time, anyway, to formulate a plan or jettison 
themselves into space and hope for the best. He smiled again, 
laughing at the thought of the senior Foundation command passing 
the Hateful Star on their way to Pluto, unaware that all that remained 
of the world it despised so thoroughly was buttercream.