The pair returned to the bar as the sun completed its slow descent 
past the cloudy horizon and snow began falling in earnest. Egret 
watched as they brazenly walked into the building, and why wouldn't 
they? She was going to have to settle in for the long term to figure 
out what the pair was up to, and more importantly, who else was 
involved. Renting an apartment nearby would be the best start, 
something with a view of the street if possible. Maybe see if there 
were any kids loitering around who could be useful. Egret began 
sorting out plans in her head, ordering them from bloodless to 
bloodiest, and raised her thermos to her lips for the last bit of soup. 


"You are a knight errant, are you not?" asked one of the booksellers, 
appearing from a blind spot Egret never realized she had. Their 
voice was neutral and distant through the mask, but its black glass 
eyes felt firmly fixed on her. 


"Sorry?" said Egret, coughing and wiping away a few loose drips 
from her chin with the back of her hand. "What did you call me?" 


"A sellsword, then?" asked the other, appearing at her other side 
and speaking in the same tone. 


"| don't know what you're talking about. | work at a bank, and —" 
"You are an avatar of violence, clearly," said one. 


"Clearly," repeated the other, nodding smugly. "Blood pools in your 
shadow." 


Well, why shouldn't it be some kind of magic bullshit that made her 
job more complicated than it needed to be? The fact that the two 

wanted to talk at all was a reason for some hope, but it was difficult 
to tell their intentions through the masks. "What do you two want?" 


"We require a bare blade," said the one to her right, "to address 


insolence." 


"A trifling matter," said the one to her left, "for one with a keen 
edge." 


"| don't do ‘trifling matters.’ Go do it yourself if you're going to waste 
my time." said Egret, careful not to make the pronouncement with 
too much finality. She was in a dangerous place, no doubt about 
that, but one with a sliver of opportunity. The two booksellers slightly 
inclined their heads toward each other, pausing for nearly a minute 
before either spoke again. 


"Surely, a grand design may be present," conceded one, "though 
one wonders if your mettle is sufficient." 


"I'm sure you can tell," said Egret, grabbing one of of the pair's 
hooded heads and turning it up toward her face. "Go on. Look into 
my soul again, or whatever you were doing." If nothing else, that 
was a well-guarded place, and unlikely to divulge her secrets. 


"Your shadow is indeed heavy," said the one not struggling in 
Egret's grip. They lifted cupped hands up, presenting her with an 
assortment thin, sparking silver coins. "We can offer commensurate 
rewards." 


Egret gingerly picked one out of the pile. It had jagged edges, a 
somber face pressed into it, and an ominous weight. She dropped it 
back into the pile, and they rang like a hundred tiny bells. "So, what 
needs doing? Or who?" 


"It is difficult for us to speak of it." 
"Our liege will enlighten you." 


Egret followed the two of them through the bar's front door (grimy 
glass, sticky handle,) and through a surprisingly large crowd 
(sweating profusely, unfortunately loud.) One member of it was a 
man she had been doing her very best to kill the year before, but 
she couldn't see any way of finishing that up at the moment. They 
walked past the bar, past a stairway leading upstairs, and through a 
poorly lit stockroom stacked high with sagging cardboard boxes and 


reeking of mildew. One bookseller pulled aside a rusted gate in front 
of a service elevator and the other ushered her inside. If the buttons 
could be trusted, it went deeper than Egret would have expected. At 
least fifteen floors down. Her escort pressed the lowest one, and the 
lift descended with a grinding complaint. 


"We aren't of a violent nature, you see," said one. 


"It's quite apart from us," said the other. The only difference Egret 
could make out between the two of them was the undercurrent of 
smugness in the second's tone. Other than that, even the patterns of 
band-aids across their hands were identical. 


"That's very civilized of you," said Egret. 


"Not in the slightest." Both the booksellers shook their heads at 
once. "Civilization is violent by nature." 


"It's but a means to transmute silver into blood." 


"Sure, sure," said Egret. It wasn't her first time being lectured on the 
topic. The lift hitched on something, jerking a few times, caught and 
struggling like a dying rat before freeing itself and chugging 
downward again. Darkened floors slid slowly past them, each larger 
than anything she would have expected to find below the city's 
streets. 


"Civilization a body too, stuffed with tumorous growth." 
"Groups with ill will and vile means." 


"I've got some experience with them," said Egret as the last, brightly 
lit floor slowly expanded in front of her. 


"Of course you do," said one bookseller as they pulled aside the lift's 
gate. 


"You work for one," said the other as they pushed Egret inside. It 
was a hard shove, harder than could have been expected from their 
slight frame. Egret pushed herself up from her knees and bared her 
teeth. She was halfway through drawing her pistol from her holster 
by the time her brain registered on what filled the cavernous room. 


Countless book pages were hung on every wall, layered on towering 
stacks of books, and strewn across the concrete floor. Annotated in 
red ink, connected by red strings, they formed a wide and bloody 
spiderweb stretching out around her. It had no visible end, and no 
conceivable conclusion. The knotted yarn stretched back into her 
past, just as the text flowed out into her future, and all at once, it 
consumed her present. Egret could feel the the tender tendrils of 
some impossibly vast, perfectly knowable entity wrapping around 
her, caressing her, sliding slowly in through one bunch of optic 
nerves and out through the other like floss around a tooth. She felt it, 
and felt the grooves it left behind in her thoughts. 


"You understand now," said one of the booksellers, appearing again 
at her side. 


"Violence squanders precious resources," said the other, flanking 
her. Egret could feel their glass eyes staring up at her. 


"There remains brush to burn away before you are extinguished." 


"You are to be an inverted blade. Bleed those who once wielded 
you." 


That much was obvious now, as Egret's thoughts followed new 
paths through her mind. Of course the Foundation was the world's 
true problem. How many times had best intentions turned to 
gruesome tragedies under their watch? Hadn't they been the ones 
to toss her aside for something she couldn't even remember doing? 
And the Overseers... 


The long tendril of thought tied itself into a knot around that. The 
Foundation had never been perfect, but she had never served the 
Foundation itself. It was the Overseers who knew best. For the 
Foundation. For humanity. And hers knew best of all. The thoughts 
wound tighter and tighter around that that knot of objection, 
constricting, splitting, and spreading until they reached the deepest 
parts of her subconsciousness. The fraying strings of thought 
snapped as they reached out to complete their net, and Egret's 
subconsciousness quickly brushed their remains away. 


She split her mind into pieces. Amputated the anchors. Carved away 


the memories and cast them adrift into the sea of forgotten 
knowledge. Burned them at the altar of ignorance. Pieced the rest 
back together and forgot that the new holes even existed. The 
symbols around her meant nothing after that, and the scars barely 
ached. 


Egret grabbed the nearest bookseller by the throat in one fluid 
motion. It felt remarkably human under her tight grip. With her free 
hand, she fired most of her pistol's magazine toward the other one in 
a wide spray. They squealed like a wounded animal, and she turned 
her attention back toward her longer lingering victim. Violent 
punches and kicks slowed to feeble clawing, and even that was 
reduced to weak twitches. Egret calmly adjusted her grip, eyes 
focused on whatever lurked behind the mask, and smiled at them. 
Soon enough, the twitching stopped too. She looked to the other 
bookseller and saw that they had vanished, leaving only a puddle of 
dark fluid behind. It was a problem that could wait. 


As to the issue of the room around her, the solution was obvious. 
Fire jumped quickly from her lighter to the stacks of paper around 
her, and it burned fiercely. A bit too fiercely, perhaps. Egret's ride 
back up the lift was a smokey one, and she felt lightheaded by the 
time she emerged back on the surface. The bar's smoke detectors 
were already blaring noisily as she left, and its patrons had 
scattered. 


Outside, a faint scent intermixed with the expanding plumes of 
smoke. It smelled like a shattered fountain pen. Egret followed the 
smell around the building, through a snaking alleyway that was 
slowly filling with snow. Lengthening tracks and darkening splatters 
led her to a figure sitting against a brick wall, flanked by a trash can 
on one side and a bundle of newspapers on the other. Their bare 
head drooped low over the mask in their lap, and their breaths were 
loud and wet. 


"You're going to defy to your last breath, aren't you?" said Egret, 
staying a respectful distance away. "| won't hold it against you. 
There's nothing wrong with going out like that." 


She expected something pithy and biting to come from the mouth of 
her victim. Some dangerous words uttered with the kind of 


conviction that true finality imparted. Bile spat in bold defiance 
against all things. Instead, the shivering figure stared up at her with 
wide, orange eyes, set in an otherwise unremarkable face. "| don't 
want to die." 


"Not much you can do about it at this point." 
"| have value. | have worth!" 
"You have a bullet in your gut. Maybe more than one." 


The bookseller looked away, breathed a long, pained breath, and 
jammed their fingers into the wound. Black blood splattered out as 
they dug in, and ran even faster as they pulled their hand back with 
a tiny bit of metal clutched between dripping fingers. 


"| don't think that's doing you any favors," said Egret, scratching the 
back of her neck as her victim mewled and whined. "I'm not into 
torture, so don't make this any worse on yourself. Close your eyes. 
Think of something happy. | won't miss this time." 


The bookseller stared at her again, eyes still wide and dry, and 
finally managed to snarl. "Hail your master instead of yelping at me, 
dog. Howl for them! Slink to the keep and bark at the gate! Ask of 
the sheep's worth and see me judged!" 


Well, there wasn't anything to lose by it. Nine times out of ten, the 
Overseer would be otherwise occupied and Egret would watch this 
odd little thing die at her feet. She hit the proper buttons on her 
secure phone with one hand, keeping her other on her gun and her 
eyes on the bookseller. Six rings would have marked the end of the 
whole affair, and it reached five before the Overseer answered. 


"What is it, Egret?" she asked, voice heavy with the kind of crushing 
exhaustion that followed sleepless weeks. 


"It's just a small question, Overseer." 


Egret never managed to remember the rest of that particular 
conversation. A few scraps of the following hours survived, frantic 
field-medicine and an incredibly illegal drive to the nearest 
underground clinic. Even those were scant fragments, so innocuous 


as to escape her own meticulous purge. She never remembered 
why she had been told to forget it all either, but that hardly mattered. 
She had more important things to do than fretting. 


Egret lay prone on a long table in a vacant suite of offices 
overlooking the shore of a still lake. The summer air plastered her 
hair to her forehead and left her neck itching, but she didn't look 
away from the scope of her rifle. Through it, she watched an opulent 
gala taking place on a long pleasure barge. 


"So? Dhole?" 


Her companion stared across the lake without a magnifier of her 
own, picking at band-aid laden hands. Even in this heat, she insisted 
on wearing an elaborate wooden mask carved in the likeness of a 
dog. Egret would not have been surprised to hear panting coming 
from behind it. 


"The baron of this land has been heralded. He wears blooded 
diamonds and a royal noose." 


Egret shifted slightly, turning her focus to a scarred man in a white 
linen suit who had just emerged from the cabin of the ship. A purple 
tie hung loosely around his neck, and sparkling rings covered his 
fingers. 


"You're sure?" asked Egret. 
"His coffers are the fullest there." 


"Good enough." She pulled the trigger, watched silently, and smiled 
to herself as a red stain spread across the chest of the 
businessman's suit. Dhole had not been wrong when she said that 
money could easily be turned to blood, but even that was at a poor 
exchange rate. The Overseer's commands traded much more 
evenly with death. 


« Previous Tale | Maim the Sky, Slay the Sun | Next Tale » 


Notes: Photographer waited 5 minutes and 25 seconds, and 
reported being told that using SCP-978 on SCP-698 was pointless. 


Subject: SCP-805 

Photographed Activity: Frolicking in its paddock. 

Photo Result: Being patted and hugged by smiling humans, one of 
whom is astride its back. 


Subject: SCP-811 

Photographed Activity: Looking at the camera. 

Photo Result: A human woman with the same height, build, and 
facial features as SCP-811, braiding yellow ribbons into her hair and 
wearing a blue sundress. 


Subject: SCP-887 

Photographed Activity: Writing in a notebook. 

Photo Result: A list of names and numbers, subsequently identified 
as every member of the Parliament of Lithuania (current and former, 
beginning at independence from the Soviet Union), and their birth 
weight in grams. 


Subject: SCP-887 

Photographed Activity: Writing in a different notebook, later the 
same day. 

Photo Result: A list of names, tentatively identified as the attendees 
of the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival, in reverse alphabetical order. 
Note: When shown these photographs, SCP-887 expressed 
gratitude at these having been transcribed for him, and requested to 
be photographed regularly so as to recover from writer's cramp; 
request is under consideration. 


Subject: SCP-890 

Photographed Activity: Seated at its desk in its cell, reading a non- 
classified medical journal. 

Photo Result: SCP-978 is visible on the desk in front of SCP-890. 
SCP-890 is rolling its eyes and pointing to the door to its cell. 

Note: When shown the photograph, SCP-890 stated that although it 
would never actually "be that rude to a patient", it has "no time for 
hypochondriacs". 


Subject: SCP-905 


This is Only a Test 


Agent Meyers felt something cold on his thigh, rousing him enough 
to realize that he also had a headache. Meyers had been hungover 
more than once before and began to catalog the telltale signs... 
except he couldn't remember drinking anything last night. Flickering 
his eyes open slowly, the dimness of the room began to register in 
addition to the smell of dusty, stale air. 


No, wait, he thought to himself. | didn't drink anything last night. 
Because | haven't gone to sleep and I'm not waking up at home. The 
vague memory of chasing someone down a side street played back 
in his head along with tumbling to the ground. Had he hit his head? 
His face felt hot and bruised, so he tried to move off of the pavement 
and figure things out. 

Except he wasn't on the pavement. His arms and legs strained 
slightly against bonds placed in various locations around him and 
the situation became clearer - he was tied down to a chair.