Rupinder raised a hand. The sphere separated into four. The 
quadruplets tumbled around each other, spiralling in and out, over 
and under, coming within inches of collision but always dipping 
away. Again the water split, and sixteen droplets danced. 


“It may look impressive,” said his voice beside her. “But compared to 
creating being from nothing, it’s a children’s game.” He raised the 
other hand. The droplets slammed back together. Amy flinched back 
as water sprayed her. “You would easily prove capable of it, givena 
few days. Now, what do you think was the payment?” 


She glanced down. The rose-stem still lay on the wood. 


Rupinder flicked a wrist, and the water sped towards her. It stopped 
just in front of her face, and she saw what he meant. Corpses of fish 
floated in the bubble. 


She almost asked how that was possible before remembering she 
was supposed to be the stubborn one. “I don’t need your help.” 


“If you insist.” The sphere drifted back to join the others. Rupinder 
remained in place, propped up by the rail. Amy tried to ignore him. 
Drawing in a slow breath, she closed her eyes. Piece by piece, she 
began sort the thoughts cluttering her mind, tucking fears into the 
drawers of subconscious, sweeping worries from the corners of her 
memory, until all that remained was the dark. 


Now. Form the image. Thousands of green flecks appeared and 
turned slowly, growing closer together until they formed a single 
strand. The stem. Thorns began to curve out. A dot of red poked 
through the tip, hesitated, then burst into a rose. 


A rose with a thin beard and smug eyes. The pupils turned towards 
her, and she heard giggling. Gritting her teeth, she forced the image 
away and started over. This time she didn’t even get to the thorns 
before Rupinder’s face forced the whole thing away. 


Her eyes snapped open. “Stop doing that!” 
Rupinder raised his eyebrows. “Is it a crime to stand here?” 
“Not that, asshole. Stop making me imagine shit.” 


“I’m not doing anything. If you’re imagining anything, it’s a product of 
your own mind.” 


Amy snorted. “Whatever.” She shut her eyes, inhaled, and began 
again. This time the image formed with little trouble. Holding it in her 
mind, she lifted her hand, and spoke. 


Green sparks sprayed from her palm, fizzling as they hit the wood. 
Amy screamed in frustration and slammed her hand against the 
deck. 


“It would be an excellent party trick. Makes for poor magic, though.” 
Rupinder had moved closer as her eyes were closed, and now stood 
only a few feet away. “There are two mistakes here. The first is 
preparation. The other is payment.” He moved his finger through the 
air. Red light trailed behind it, and a diagram began to take shape. 


When he was finished, an elaborate system of lines and circles 
lazed in the air. “You are talented. Talent has limits. Attempting a 
summoning rite with so little experience is one of them.” 


He flicked his finger. The diagram separated into three symbols. He 
directed his finger at the rightmost, which looked like an angular 
peace symbol. “One of the marks for Existence.” The finger moved 
left, to a series of layered spirals. “A giving of thanks.” The final one 
was a Straight line, from which three squiggles rose up. “Growth, or 
alternatively, light.” 


Amy watched, silent. 


“There are, quite literally, thousands of runic combinations for any 
ritual you would want to enact. Finding the best is a matter of trial, 
error, personality, and prior knowledge. This will be the best for your 
purposes.” He wave a hand, dismissing the symbols into embers. 
“You should be able to figure out how to form the light.” 


He was right. Extending a hand, she began to draw. She wasn’t 
halfway through before Rupinder swiped a hand through, destroying 
it. “Wrong.” The second attempt provided similar results. The third 
earned silent approval, and she drew her hand back. The markings 
were a bit sloppier than Rupinder’s had been, and they trembled 
slightly, but they held. 


“Touch your hand to the runes. Gently, you don’t want to disturb it. 
Now, try the rite again.” 


Amy closed her eyes, formed the image, and forced it into existence. 
At first she felt nothing. When her eyes opened, the rose floated in 
front of her, the runes gone. 


“Holy shit,” she said, before she could stop herself. 
Rupinder smirked. “She can listen. Wonderful.” 
Amy looked away. 


“Now, the second missing piece is the price. The cost of which for 
summoning can be daunting, if uncontrolled.” 


She plucked the rose from its bed of air, examined it. “It didn’t feel 
like | paid anything.” 


“Your spare clothing downstairs is burning.” 


Amy didn’t bother asking how he knew that. “Thanks for the 
warning.” 


“Now do you understand how important it is to manage cost?” 
She glanced at her arm. “Pretty sure | already knew that.” 


Rupinder ignored the comment. “What do you understand of cost so 
far?” 


“That the universe really likes to fuck with us.” 


A grin spread across his face. “A succinct way of putting it. A 
common metaphor used is a financial system. It’s clumsy, but apt. 
Reality as a predatory lender. When you try to receive payment, it 
doesn’t intend to let you break anywhere near even. Thus, like all 
good servants of capitalism, we negotiate.” 


“Okay,” she said. What the hell was he talking about? She’d slept 
through most of Economics class. She still wasn’t quite sure how 
you took out an actual loan. 


“A method you've already discovered is to simply bring appealing 
payment with you. Easy in theory. Maddeningly impractical in 
reality.” 


Amy nodded. 


“Some spellcasters will simply enact their rites and hope nothing too 
harmful comes of it. These tend to rest on the lower end of the 
lifespan bell curve. What rational casters do is pre-negotiate. Set up 
a system of rules for payment, one that tends to favor themselves. 
Most start simply, then build up to a complex web of terms and 
limitations as they gain experience.” 


“That sounds uh... complicated.” 


“Itis, at first. | trust you'll learn quickly. I’m sure your friend would be 
willing to lend a hand.” 


Nothing he says is uncommon knowledge. 
Well, you should have told me earlier. 


She refocused on Rupinder. “Why are you telling me all of this 
stuff?” 


His expression grew serious. “Because it’s been a long, long time 
since anyone deserved it.” He stepped away, motioning for her to 
follow. “Come. Time to barter with existence.” 


For the next three weeks, they practiced. Rupinder used every 
moment not spent sleeping, eating, or sailing the ship the ship for 
lessons, running through drills, theory, tests almost faster than Amy 
could learn. The entire first week was used to determine the prices 
of spells. A room was set up in the cabin, small, lightless, where she 
would sit and commune with the world. The first day gave few 
returns. The second, the same. On the third day, after five hours of 
meditation, it spoke to her. Four hours of vicious negotiation 
followed, and by the end of the week a system of three rules had 
been established to stabilize her casting. 


The second week was used for runes. Hundreds of them a day 
before noon. After lunch, she would invoke the same castings over 
and over, never allowed to repeat a ritual’s combination. They 
practiced bending the air, calling flame, manipulating the sea-life, 
summoning increasingly arbitrary and complicated objects. From 
there, they moved to transporting objects through space, illusions, 
reshaping solid materials. Rupinder barely gave her time to grasp 
one form of casting before bounding to the next. Every day she fell 
into bed, tired beyond the point of movement, and it seemed she 
barely blinked before it was time to rise again and begin practice. 


In the final week, they practiced impromptu casting. For the first few 
days, as before, she could barely call forth a flower, barely teleport 
stones a few meters while retaining their shapes. Rupinder stalked 
circles around her, yelling advice disguised as beration. Slow down. 


observed in the pit. Despite the impossibility of this, this behavior is 
consistent with objects accelerated solely by gravity through an 
airless corridor crossing the Earth's extent. However, an 
investigation of area within a 100km radius of the site opposite 
SCP-685 revealed no topological anomalies, so even if the pit does 
descend past the earth's crust, it does not emerge on the other side. 


The hole itself is under constant video surveillance. A list of objects 
dropped or released into the hole since observation began can be 
found in Document #685-B. Since June __ , all objects greater than 
10 cm in diameter emerging from SCP-685 have been tracked by a 
high-sensitivity RADAR system, caught by an automated robotic arm 
suspended over the pit, and placed in containers for study by on-site 
staff. Specimens cataloged in this manner include: 


34% Rock debris of indeterminate origin 
31% Rock debris from around the site 
27% Organic debris 

7% [DATA EXPUNGED] 


The organic debris retrieved from the pit usually consists of [DATA 
EXPUNGED]. A full listing of all objects observed emerging from the 
SCP-685 are listed in Document #685-C; those cataloged by the 
automated system are cross-listed in Document #685-C-1. 
Additionally, a catwalk is occasionally extended across the pit to 
gather smaller objects which emerge from SCP-685. A report of the 
composition of the debris may be viewed by Level 3 or higher 
personnel in Document #685-D. All objects retrieved from the pit and 
deemed not to merit further study are returned to the pit. 


Human exploration of SCP-685 has been limited to the lighted 
portion of the hole to reduce the incidence of injuries from collisions 
with objects emerging from the pit. These limited surface studies 
have detected no deviation in the wall of the pit from known local 
geographic strata. In 19 aclass D personnel was lowered to a 
depth of 1.75 km before being incapacitated and retrieved. Before 
contact was lost, subject reported that the temperature remained 
approximately the same for the entire descent past 30 m, and that 
the pit slowly widened the farther down it went. This was 
subsequently confirmed by an unmanned observation probe lowered 
on November 20 , which was lowered to a depth of 9.45 km 


Speed up. Move your hands. Keep your body still. Don’t speak. 
Mutter under your breath. Think carefully before you act. Release by 
instinct. When she collapsed into a pile of soasming muscles, he 
forced her to her feet and demanded she begin again. 


“What the hell is wrong with you?” she said through desperate gasps 
of air. “You can’t give me one piece of fucking advice that’s simple?” 


“The methods for each crafter are different. It is through 
experimentation that we learn what best suits us.” 


She sighed. “So what about those other methods of casting? Not 
just rites and rituals and stuff. When do we experiment with them?” 


Rupinder wrinkled his nose. “Perhaps learn the basics first. They will 
come, eventually.” 


So the voyage passed, and by the time they reached the island, it 
seemed that no time had gone by at all. 


Land was a sliver of sand peeking from the waves, gray and stale 
and beckoning beneath a slate sky. Thin fog blanketed the strip. The 
water grew darker the closer the ship drew towards coast, and the 
sea surrounding shore was the shade of wet tar. The tide lapped 
eagerly at the ship’s bow as they drifted onto the beach 


The travellers gathered at the front of the ship. One of the Nish-hyet 
(Amy had given up trying to distinguish the two) lowered a rope 
bridge. The silent woman descended first, followed by the 
shapeshifters. Rupinder was next, Amy last. 


She landed ankle deep in the black water, and it stained her skin 
even when she made it to shore. The others had gathered at the 
edge of the water, and watched her with expressions of anticipation. 
Moving forward felt like approaching the edge of a cliff, bottomless, 
black. 


“Lead on,” said Rupinder when she reached them. 


Amy nodded, swallowed. Just straight, right? 


Yes. 


She began to walk. Even away from the beach, the sand was 
saturated with water. Her feet sunk half an inch deep into the sand. 
Within minutes, her feet were heavy with mud. She didn’t slow. She 
couldn’t slow. It was far too late for that. 


The fog thickened as she walked, until she was moving through a 
veil of white, the path ahead hidden. 


Keep going. There is only one path to follow. 


What was that noise, in the distance? Unintelligible muttering that 
touched her ears like poison. She could hear footsteps behind, too 
many to just be her fellow travellers. Were they still there? Had they 
left her? Had they disappeared? Was this a trick, a simple ploy to 
get rid of her? She took another step and almost stumbled into a 
pool of frigid water. It grew deeper, past her ankles, her calves, her 
knees. It reached her hips and she felt movement against her legs, 
thin shapes snaking across her skin. 


And then the fog lifted, and she was looking at the sea. There was 
sloshing in the water behind her. Out of the corner of her eye, she 
saw Rupinder moving by her side. The other three joined him. The 
pool they stood in was as clear as the open ocean, the bottom red 
sand. They were the only movement within it- if there had been any 
creatures at all, they remained in the safety of the fog. 


A jagged, pale stone rose from the beach. A woman hung limp from 
iron shackles. She was naked, skeleton thin. Her black hair hung to 
the small of her back, the bangs curtaining her face. As they group 
approached, her head rose. A single brown eye studied them, and 
Amy realized that despite the woman’s state, she was still a knife 
that cut. 


Nobody moved until the silent woman stepped forward. She moved 
to the stone and began to work at the shackles with practiced 
method. After a minute, one clicked open. The second soon follow. 
She caught the chained woman before she could fall, lowered her 
the ground, steadied her. The two stared at each other. Studying the 
two, Amy realized they were identical. 


“| told you we would come, Sister,” said the first. 
The freed woman smiled. “I’ve missed you, my Queen.” 


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True Places Never Are 


Amy couldn't sleep. She wasn’t sure she wanted to. She lay on the 
mattress, staring into the void of the night. Starless, moonless, 
cloudless. Nothing but darkness, surrounding her. Glowing shapes 
moved through the water, shining too dimly to illuminate her nest. 
Amy was glad for that. The darkness was like a wall, separating her 
from the siege of the world 


They would be home, soon. And when they were, she would be 
safe. Rupinder would perform the ritual to mask her from the gaze of 
the Foundation. She would go home. What would her family think, 
when she returned? When she was taken, her brother was just 
starting middle school. Would he be at college, now? As a young 
boy, all they had been able to get him to talk about was history. He’d 
devoured books at a rate she would never match, poring over 
knowledge of Rome, Greece, Egypt. Did he still have that passion? 


And her parents. Her mother had been in school, working towards 
her doctorate in psychology. Dad had been the sole breadwinner, 
working as an appellate lawyer for the city. It frustrated them, Amy 
had always thought, for two people like them to have such an un- 
intellectual daughter. She chuckled. What would they think of all 
this? 


She heard a flapping of wings, felt the air stir, but as soon as the 

sensation appeared it vanished. Impossible to see where it came 
from. Whatever creatures made it, they seemed to appear only at 
night. During the day, she’d seen no life above water.