“It’s not going to stop hurting,” Emma says. “Closure is a load of 
horseshit.” 


The bone-dry desert, orange and pink, flashes by. 
“I’m sorry, Isabel.” 
Episode 202: Pit Stop on the Borderland 


The swine-things at the window are detailed, rotoscoped, hideous in 
comparison to the friendly pastels of the rest of the diner’s patrons. 
They snort and squeal and scream in the night, clawing at 
windowpanes, gnawing at the doorframes. Emma leads the building 
of barricades. Isabel hides under the counter. She has barely said 
anything this episode or the last. The barricades hold for the 
moment, but they will splinter before dawn comes. Emma looks 
exhausted, for the first time that can be remembered. 


Something is going on inside Isabel’s head, no viewer privy to it. But 
she acts without prompting, and concocts a plan far more sober- 
headed than most. Battle plans are drawn on the counter in ketchup 
and mustard. Salt shakers are marched through their paces in 
preparation. A counter-attack is designed, striking the swine-things 
where confusion might drive them to retreat along with the coming 
sun. 


She’s never been like this before. There’s no going back after it. 
Episode 203: Red Planet Blues 


There is a funeral on Mars. No one was invited, but two guests show 
up anyway. Emma carries an umbrella, though the blue-white sun is 
weak in the Martian morning. Isabel cleans the sand off the solar 
panels and wakes Opportunity up for one last time, to send the girl 
off. 


Episode 204: Maximizing Prophet 
A fellow in a red turban and black bathrobe mans a stand of bootleg 


toys. His name is S.D., and he scratches his scraggly beard as 
Isabel inspects his merchandise. He admits to no wrongdoing. His 


words coat the ear in snake oil. You hate him and love to hate him. 
Smarmy, silver-tongued, razor-eyed bastard. 


The pair keep running into him, all over that cosmic crossroad 
marketplace. Each time he’s selling something new. He balances 
scams like spinning plates. 


A comet falls to earth, and from its core steps the DEER. It will not 
be the end of this world, but no one knows that now. The market 
town scrambles to escape its path. Isabel's attempt to delay or 
redirect it go nowhere — Emma is forced to drag her to safety. 


SD is vaporized when he challenges the god. Not out of bravery or 
self-sacrifice, no: pure self-aggrandizement. Without a sound, ina 
flash, he is gone. 


Hanging in the metallic fog, a moment before the wind wipes it clear: 


YOU AIN’T GETTING RID OF ME THAT EASY. 
Episode 205: Hard Times in the House of the South 


The Empress is dead! Utmai C-jen VI is dead, murdered in her own 
sanctum, murdered in her own Summer Palace, murdered with her 
daughters and sons and consorts! Murdered and cast down by the 
northerners! Treachery! Treachery! They come under the banner of 
the five-pointed star, the crown of their Red Emperor, those black- 
clad men of the land of Géc! 


They all forget the little bastard, sired by a commoner in a village far 
away. The simpleton-princess. As the bombs go off, and the gas fills 
the streets with corpses, as the firing squads execute each block in 
turn, the gamboling black-furred brute Zhos-Who-Makes-Wonders 
steals the girl away. By hidden paths and a secret Ways, the 
tinsmith takes the last Empress out of her burning kingdom. 


In his vest pocket, he has a Library card. 
Episode 206: Disaster on the Way 


Dust from the DEER’s arrival rises still on the eastern horizon. 


An upturned car, crumpled like paper. 


The corpse of a Leviathan collapsed across the highWay, its belly 
swollen and split open. 


The stench of rot, oozing and choking. 


Brown slime, coagulating in the grass, knotted with tumorous 
blackened fibers. 


Emma, drowning under a tide of Rotting Ones. 


Isabel clutching Jeremy to her chest, thrown into a gap between 
worlds. 


Episode 207: Among the Trash Gods 


See the very beginning, a memory of a memory. All was dark, then 
split by light. The Brothers Three and then the Tree. All the cosmos 
in cosmic order, all boundaries set down, all gods above and below 
born of light and shadow, and last and loneliest of all, Emma 
Aiselthorpe-Brown. Nobody important. 


She wakes up half-buried in a landfill, beneath a bronze dome. She 
wades through plastic and glass and interplanar detritus to a 
porthole: she is in a bathysphere, descending into the Abyss. 


Take a universe, and cut it open. Make it bleed. Spill its guts out. 
Tear the corpse into chunks. Mix it with another, and another, on 
and on through thousands and ten thousands until it is an ocean on 
the face of the cosmos, and that is the Abyss. The bathysphere’s 
lights barely illuminate the crimson depths. Shadowed figures, teeth 
sharp, swim about in the ethereal viscera. 


Emma turns to see her captors: three men with magpie heads and 
grotesquely fit. Trash gods all, collectors and sellers of worlds not 
yet digested by the Abyss. 


They know a good prize when they see one. They know enough that 
you can find a buyer for nothings and nobodies down in the Court, 
and so they go. Down, down, to the Court of the Scarlet King. 


Episode 208: Isabel Alone 


Isabel is lost. Just when it seemed that there had been a new 
stability, her work was torn out from underneath her. She is aimless. 
She does not know where Emma is. She is afraid. She passes 
through Ways and worlds of increasing hostility and strangeness. 
The people here have a cold and hungry look. Jeremy is small 
comfort to her here. 


She is found out. People talk down here in the Way-warrens; she’s 
been recognized. Reggie’s girl. Worth a pretty penny to some 
parties. She is pursued. She runs. She runs and runs and runs and 
the worlds blend together and the Ways overlap. The maelstrom 
sweeps her pursuers away, sweeps her away. 


She is in the mountains, winter is here, and she has nothing left. 
She curls up in the snow and cries. 
Episode 209: Sins of My Father’s Hands 


There once was a toymaker named Reginald Westinghouse who 
came to America to seek his fortune. He took a job at the Anderson 
Factory, where they chained him to his desk. He drew up toys in that 
sweltering steel coffin till his fingers bled and his nails cracked and 
the carpal tunnel crippled his wrists. 


He filed through his chain and clawed his way to freedom, he ran far 
away, changed his name and his face, started again. The Anderson 
Factory slunk into the shadows, and he built toys just as he 
dreamed. All was not well, but it was well enough. He began thinking 
of an heir. 


His son came out wrong. Despite all the care that was put into his 
making, he came out all wrong. He was all sharp edges and cruel, 
twisted thoughts. Reginald tried to teach him, but Redd refused to 
learn. He tore off the bars of his window and fled into the night. 


By now, the good doctor was old. His finances were falling apart. His 
memory and his life were fleeing him. The spark of creation was 
dimming. He built a machine to keep himself alive, to stretch his life 


over as many years as he could. He hired a maid, to take care of 
him when the machine could not. He handed his company to a 
board of Executors, to care for it while he withdrew to his secret 
workshop, and began again on preparing an heir. 


His daughter, too, came out wrong. Not like his son: she had the 
spark, she was joy and wonder within, but there was a veil of 
ignorance cast over her. Too much of an innocent, stuck inside her 
own imagination. He could not bear to be near her, so crushing was 
the acknowledgment of his failure. 


He faded there, in the dust of his hiding place, as his daughter grew 
up happy and ignorant, and the executive board fossilized in their 
places. 


The maid stayed with him until he passed, and then was on her way. 
Episode 210: Wonder-Maker 


There is an old man and a wolf there, shin-deep in the snow. His 
face is weathered and kind, his furs flap in the blustery mountain 
wind. He knows a secret, and has come to lead the girl. 


There is a cave up on the mountain. 


He wakes Isabel. He leads her up the mountainside. He can go no 
further, but the way will lead home, he says. He does not say 
goodbye, vanishing in a swirl of snow when Isabel’s head is turned. 


In the cave, there is darkness. 
In the darkness, there is nothing. 


It is not the absence of light; it is the dark of the absence of 
everything. 


Voices rise from the darkness. A chorus, a chant, an old song rising 
up from nothing... 


And Isabel whispers... 


“| raised up my hand... 


...And there was fire.” 


The flame dances, and in its light, there is Isabel and the multitudes 
of memory. Each Wonder-Maker and Fire Bringer back to the 
beginning, unbroken and unforgotten. She is of their number, and 
they are of her. She knows the secret now. Behind all things that 
exist, there is existence. 


She will save her friend. 
Episode 211: In the Court of the Scarlet King 


Imagine now, the deepest point of the Abyss, the rotting Qlippothic 
tree, the Pit of Benthos' Hell... 


A sun of black iron, pocked with eyes of sickly fire. Septic smoke 
and glistening ooze pours from its mouths. The water is thick with oil 
and flesh-slurry. Shards of bone and the corpses of old gods rise 
above the ice-crust, fashioned into crucifixes for the deities who 
were spared. Icebergs, filled with thousands of bloodied souls, melt 
slowly. Below its obsidian surface, there are faces, bodies packed 
together tight enough that each bone has been broken. Jellied eyes 
spin about in crumpled sockets; crushed jaws mouth agony without 
sound. 


The air, cold and empty, thrums with the constant moans of pain. 


Emma is dragged out of the damaged bathysphere in basalt chains. 
Teeth missing, eyes blacked, nose broken, lip split. The trash gods 
do hasty business here, exchanging her for a handful of souls to a 
beetle-headed duke. 


Darkness overwhelms her as blind-idiot servants cart her off. 


A cell, some pit carved from frozen flesh. The door vanishes as she 
is tossed inside. Motes of soul-residue cast a leprous light on the 
place. The duke will be with her momentarily; the whole business 
with Moloch needs to be taken care of. 


One second turns to five, turns to ten. She has yet to struggle. 


Then! With a jerk of the wrist, she snaps her chains. Pulls them 


apart like so much old thread. Stands up. Stretches. Wipes the 
blood from her nose and spits out a tooth. 


Nobody would ever want to be here. 
Nobody would be able to do what she is about to, either. 


She presses her left palm against the wall, gauges its firmness. 
Curls a right fist one finger at a time, pulls back... 


and... 
THOOM 


The beetle-duke’s palace shatters. Emma erupts from the crater in a 
bolt of sakuga, eyes set on the throne, the Throne, the THRONE of 
the King adorned in scarlet. She sprints atop the water, a blur. 
Faster, faster, faster, arms pump, a razor of slurry-water. 


The monster designers have a field day. Characters barely stay on- 
model. Bones vaporize. Heads are ripped off, limbs torn from their 
bodies. Impacts shatter mountains and throw up tidal waves. 
Brimstone blood splashes paint the screen in monochrome. Dukes 
and demons and Leviathans throw themselves at her and her name 
is hyperviolence. 


Her punches have shock collars, her jumps feel like they clear 
continents. 


God as my witness, that man was broken in half. 
Holy fuck, she is red-shifting. 
Jesus H. Christ is that a NUCLEAR FUSION PUNCH? 


The King sits on a black throne with seven red spears, which pierce 

the brides that lay bloodied at his feet, from whose wombs spew the 
great Leviathans that teem around that dread mountain’s base. A fist 
tightens around his lance. 


Emma tears a Leviathan in two from jaws to tail and launches 
herself forward; not at the throne, but just off-center. Towards the 


smallest bride pinned to the barnacles and bones. She lands on the 
smooth grey flank, digs her fingers into the spear, and with the one 
cry of strain of this entire sequence, pulls it out. The seal is broken. 
The seventh bride is freed. The spear drops to the stone with the 
sound of tectonic thunder. 


The King rises from his seat. 


“Go!” Emma cries, dropping to the ground. The seventh bride is able 
to stand; she clutches the hole in her stomach with one hand, and 
takes up the spear that pierced her in the other. She forms a sign of 
Waymaking with a bloody hand, and vanishes in a swirl of darkwater 
and whalesong. 


Emma leaps at the King with a scream fit to dig into his chest and 
tear out his heart... 


...and is swatted away by the back of his hand. She skips across the 
water like a doll thrown at concrete, clouds and sea cleaved as if by 
a sword. 


She struggles to pull herself up from the broken ice, as the King 
steps down from his throne, and wades towards her, spear in hand. 


Fade to black. 


Far away, the seventh bride spirits the girl out of her chamber, steals 
her away to a land across the hills so quiet. There is peace there, for 
a moment. 


The seal is broken, the cloud of fire rises up above Montauk Point. 
The center cannot hold. 
Episode 212: Dawn of the Final Day 


A man in a tattered lab coat, stands on a high cliff by the sea. In his 
hands, he holds a book bound in leather: blackened, weathered, 
human. He lifts his sigil-carved arms high, blood drips onto his face 
and chest. He cries out to the storm with keening, formless sounds, 
and casts the book into the sea. 


computer within the corridor in the first 
iteration. This experiment differs from 
Experiment-03, as it intends to relay 
information to the first iteration, whereas 
Experiment-03 passed information down to 
further iterations. 


The film displayed approximately six hundred 
hours worth of footage, approximating to 
[REDACTED] iterations. Analysis of the 
recording has shown the following iterations to 
be of note: 


¢ 213 - the first immediately-noticeable 
difference (Dr Jung is wearing a red tie); 
¢ 704 - Researcher Taylor is absent, and 
does not appear again until: 
¢ 1061 - Researcher Taylor reappears, but 
her identity pass declares her a doctor; 
[REDACTED] - the research team 
appear to be under attack; Dr Jung has 
been shot in the chest. 
[REDACTED] - the research team have 
disappeared; the wall is covered in 
blood. The following symbols can be 
seen in the blood: [DATA EXPUNGED] 
¢ [REDACTED] - the research team 
[DATA EXPUNGED] facial features. 


| do not believe that anything can be established by 
further experimentation. - Dr Jung 


Addendum 970-02: Following a nervous breakdown, Researcher 
Taylor has been admitted to the psychiatric ward. Other members of 
the research team have undergone similar, though less severe, 
reactions. The footage from Experiment-04 is believed to be the 
cause of the problems, and all affected personnel have been 
administered Class-B amnestics as part of their treatment. 
Experimentation on SCP-970 has been ceased for the immediate 
future, and the security on affected sites has been upgraded. 


Listen... 


Can you hear the footfalls of the brokentooth’d march, sweeping up 
through the past? The Daevites are coming. They are eating history. 


The walls of Uruk crumble. 

Harappa is devoured by demons. 

Ramesses lies vivisected open atop the Great Pyramid. 
Cyrus is paraded through the streets atop an iron spike. 
Athens meets a relativistic kill vehicle. 

Qin Shi Huang is flayed and torn to pieces, and still he screams. 
Jerusalem is swallowed by a pit of cinders. 

Rome chokes on chlorine gas. 

Byzantium drowns in blood. 

Charlemagne is crucified in the Palatine Chapel. 

William’s men hang him from the mast with his own spine. 


The Great Khan strangles his sons in their tents, and runs out into 
the steppe alone. 


Baghdad is buried in the ash of its citizens.