It wasn't long for him to become a believer, though. He remembered 
some of the odder occurrences, such as the walls expanding as if 
they were breathing and the refrigerator randomly throwing itself 
across the room. And true, he remembered being somewhat 
frightened at the time. However, after discovering what was causing 
the phenomena, he was more than willing to ignore the occasional 
bleeding ceiling. During his short stay, he began to experiment 
heavily, to the point he knew he had almost reinvented the craft of 
cooking. And through it all, he knew he was going to change 
everything. After all, wasn't he promised the best restaurant in all the 
world? 


The loud beep of the kitchen timer snapped Jean-Pierre out from his 


fantasy, and he hurriedly ran over to the oven to remove his fresh 
soufflé. For a moment, it seemed that this time the soufflé came out 
flawlessly. However, within seconds the puffed top of the pastry 
gave way to reveal yet another colony of flea infested rodents. The 
king was not going to like this. Sighing, Jean-Pierre grabbed the 
soufflé and walked over to the cellar door, taking care to step over 
the mostly meatless body of his former head chef. If nothing else, 
Jean-Pierre could take pride in knowing that such a waste of flesh 
could still be cooked into something worthwhile. Jean-Pierre opened 
the door and stepped inside. 


The air was deadly still as Jean-Pierre stepped onto the white salt 
pan of the other world. He cautiously approached the circle of pillars 
directly ahead, his hands only slightly trembling as he approached 
the center. He set the soufflé on the ground, backed away, and 
began to speak. "Ahem, sir, there seems to be some issue with the 
oven. It's not holding up its end of the bargain, and unfortunately it 
keeps ruining my soufflés.” 


Jean-Pierre shifted to hold himself steady as the ground beneath 
him rumbled angrily. Jean-Pierre cleared his throat and said, "Yes, | 
know, | understood what you told me the first time. A beautiful meal 
made from the flesh of a man | despise, baked in an oven haunted 
by a sinner, and | did all of that. That's not the problem, the problem 
is in the ov-" Jean-Pierre fell over as the ground shook violently. 
Suddenly, a small black knife appeared in front of Jean-Pierre, and 
the rumbling of the ground eased. 


Jean-Pierre looked at the knife, then said, "I...surely you'll give me 
another chance. There are plenty of other men out there deserving 
of my hate, and | can replace the oven to a more reasonable model. 
Please, give me one more chance!" The ground shook angrily again, 
and for the first time since he arrived Jean-Pierre swore he heard a 
roar behind the rumble. He sighed in frustration. Clearly there wasn't 
anything he could do to persuade His Majesty not to force him to 
pay tribute, and it would be foolish of him to press his luck any more 
than he already had. He knew what the king could do to his soul 
should he disobey further. 


Jean-Pierre grabbed the knife, turned his gaze to the sky, and slowly 
dragged the blade across his throat, slicing through his thin, delicate 


skin. Jean-Pierre instinctively clutched his now bleeding throat and 
fell to the ground, the blood seeping into the ground beneath him. As 
his vision blurred from lack of oxygen and his body convulsed from 
the life seeping out, Jean-Pierre reflected upon the events that lead 
him to where he was now. Culinary school, moving to America, 
working for the bastard, becoming a chef for the Scarlet King...all 
moments that wove an intricate web that he could call his life. With 
his final convulsion, Jean-Pierre felt at peace with his decisions, and 
his final thought was that of the last, almost perfect soufflé. 


Sounds of Anger 


The skies split open. A great blackened hole dissipated the clouds 
and chilled the thin mountain air. A hollow clanging emanated 
through the range, scattering the wildlife and singeing the flora's 
edges in a searing, dry heat. The ringing built up to a deep 
crescendo, rattling every bone and rock in the valley with a hollow, 
angry roar. In a flash of light, the entity that called itself Iscilthe 
exploded into existence in the realm of man, plummeting towards 
the earth in a fiery mass of steel and flesh and stone. The mountain 
ranges crackled and hissed as great plumes of flame and ice jutted 
from the once-serene cliffs and valleys of the gorge. The entity 
savoured its descent into the disorderly world, feeling the weakness 
of the billions of un-enslaved souls, so close now to their shackles. 
The shockwave of its presence tore through the cloudline as its 
great hooves cracked into the dirt below, sending out ripples of 
energy and rage into the very core of the great peaks surrounding it. 
This was the day of reckoning. This was the day of mankind's 
liberation from its own will. Their god had finally come. 


Miles away, deep within the valleys of the range and far from the 
roar of earth's new guest, a solemn team of researchers and 
soldiers aligned the last of a hundred great cannons, targeting 
flawlessly the sight of the guest's arrival. There would be no 
conquest of the earth today, General Collather mused. He allowed 
himself a smile as the last of the great munitions locked into place. 
"Prepare firing order zero one zero, Adam Delta Charlie. All stations 
engage, stand by for munitions all-call." 


Sailing through the shattering cloudline, the first of earth's great 
battleships mimicked perfectly the earthbound preparations. 
Countless batteries of glowing engines rotated seamlessly in place, 
aligning the great spires of the SCPAS Schrédinger forward to the 
guest's coordinates. A hundred trillion calculations flitted through the 
ship's great processors, as the monstrous conduits began their slow 
energetic ascent. The admiral's hands remained clenched behind 


his back, not a hair on his body betraying his apprehension. "All 
hands, battle stations. Ready main dispersion units and prepare for 
full-band emissions alpha through iota". His commands were met 
with confirmations and movement on all sides, as the crew executed 
the steps they had practiced daily for almost a year now. The 
admiral allowed himself a small upward tilt of the lip, a smile only by 
the most liberal standards, as his great flagship prepared to fire. 


Within the dessicated husk of a former temple, the oldest of a line of 
mages raised his hands in prostration, his head bowed in reverence 
to his great and powerful god. This man was, however, no 
worshipper of fiery demons descended from tears in the skies of his 
beautiful terra, but of much older beings; gods whose love and 
admiration for man were matched only by their kindness and 
forgiveness for man's many sins. The mage clapped his hands 
together, and his hundred followers did the same, as a ray of bright 
light shone from each among them into his body, feeding into him 
their faith and their hope, and their deep love for all the things of this 
earth. He felt his eyes drift open, and a single tear rolled down his 
cheek as their warmth and affection touched his weathered heart. 
He released a scream of euphoria, and a blast of energy shot from 
deep within his lungs into the night sky, speeding towards earth's 
angry guest with a ringing, piercing fury that could only come from 
true, undying love. 


O5-4 glanced at the confirmations flowing past his screen. All 
countermeasures were being deployed, and their timing thus far was 
flawless. Around him, the other members of the council began to 
fidget and tense, but he could afford himself no such luxury. With a 
nearly imperceptible series of keystrokes, he engaged the last of the 
great defences; a gargantuan flower, only miles from the moon, 
began to turn to the atmosphere and spread its incandescent petals. 
In a flash of light, the stamen ignited and a laser-like stream of heat 
and light rocketed towards the earth. O5-4 leaned back in his chair 
and allowed himself to begin feeling nervous, for the last of his work 
was finished. 


Sand became glass. Dirt became battered stone. What life had been 
able to withstand the onslaught of the entity's auras dissipated into 
dust. Iscilthe's advance was inexhaustible, its footsteps brilliantly 


radiant against the crude world it had graced with its arrival. It 
hungered for man's armies, eager to clash with whatever challenged 
it. It wanted to savour again the sweet taste of their hopelessness in 
the face of its booming presence. It remembered still the way their 
swords and axes and catapults battered so futilely its body, with 
crumbling metals and fragmented stones, oblivious to their pathetic 
stature. With a thought, Iscilthe felt out upon the mountains, trying to 
find the crude formations and armies, the rows of hardened soldiers 
alongside brittle, callous machinery prepared to fight a foe beyond 
their comprehension. It felt nobody. No soldiers, no priests, no angry 
captains. For almost ten leagues it felt out, but could not sense a 
single wretched soul. Had mankind gotten so timid, so cowardly, 
so...wise, as to know it was beyond challenge? 


The entity released a roar which emanated through the 
mountainside, refracting and shattering the earth around it. From 
miles away, several much louder roars similarly obliterated the 
skyline from which the beast had fallen. The volleys of Site 53-alpha, 
the destructive waves of the SCPAS Schrddinger, the prayers of the 
GOC white petal order, the emission of SCP 3261; all of them bore 
down, the thousand arrows of man, upon earth's short-lived guest. 
Iscilthe, steeped in the gore and intimacy of battling mankind's 
medieval armies, was barely able to process the magnitude of the 
incoming barrage, and could not have guessed that it was mankind 
that held the bow. How could it have known, after all, that within so 
few millenia the same primates it had dominated and subjugated to 
near-extinction would master so thoroughly and completely the 
world around and within them? How could a god of ancient 
dimensions and faraway lands have predicted the explosive 
potential of the weaponry mankind had brought to bear, or the 
penetrating power of the missiles that carried it? How could it have 
known that the mystics and madmen of the species would have 
been able to channel so effectively, so precisely the dark energies 
that swirled about their world? Iscilthe had barely a second to muse 
on its ignorance, and then the great god was no more. 


Far from earth, within a realm of mist and smoke and great spirals of 
energy, a slow, rumbling scream echoed throughout the ether. The 
vengeful, spiteful, malicious sound echoed from one great peak of 
potential energy to the next, as the being called Iscilthe began to 


rumble back into consciousness. The annihilation had reverberated 
through to its core, jarring it out of its ethereal stupor. With a great 
pain, it let its consciousness drift into the new corporeal body, this 
one much weaker and less energetic than the former. With a 
wheeze of shock and anger, the new Iscilthe's limbs began to gyrate 
and bend, and after heaving the bile of reincarnation from its form, 
the entity began a shameful walk towards the conclave chambers. 
The other great ones glared down at its shattered form, feeling the 
crippled spirit and sapped energies, processing intimately what had 
happened to their once insurmountable peer. Some reacted with 
emotional outburts of shock, anger, scorn, amusement. Others 
began massive calculation efforts, sapping energy from the ether to 
process how such a rout had come to be. Still others ignored the 
development, spending their time on their own thoughts or in actions 
far away, their limbs and energies hanging dormant as their 
consciousness was devoted elsewhere. Iscilthe experienced a 
compulsion to speak, to justify its defeat, to dissuade them from its 
impotence. 


"Mankind has changed. Mankind is strong. We must reconsider. We 
must attack." 


The members paused briefly as they processed the outburst, and 
the full computational power of their minds was put to work. Even 
those busied with other tasks found themselves swept up within the 
group's thoughts as they pondered the proposal. Many quiet 
minutes passed as the monumental beasts silently contemplated. 
Then slowly, creepingly, the members of the conclave began to 
laugh. What a concept it was after all, that the race they saw today 
was the same race they had known so well in the millenia past. It 
was an angry, harsh laugh, a vicious sound that would indeed have 
shattered the minds of the humans below. What a mockery it was to 
presume that such a frail, backwards scrap of a species could have 
routed so completely one of their own. The conclave's laughter 
roared through the dimension, cascading in a great wave of sound 
and light as it devoured the local ethers and displaced the countless 
auras swirling within their world. Each member then released in turn 
an outpouring of sound and thought and sensation, expressing their 
incredulity, their amusement, their mirth at the concept of mankind 
as a victor in their battle with Iscilthe. To many, the mere concept of 


such a battle was ridiculous beyond consideration. So the conclave 
laughed. 


As they laughed, the entity called Iscilthe felt within it a strange 
sensation. There was something else returning from the scattered 
ashes of its corpse within the human realm. Something that was not 
a part of its consciousness. Within the depths of Site 53-alpha, 
Doctor Savorrus hurriedly piped the remains of the radiation that had 
emanated from the entity back into the portal, feeling a rush of 
elation when the hole in the sky ripped open once again. The 
researchers around him finalized their calibrations, and all faces 
turned to the launch screen, where the first of the Class-K Cerberus 
rockets begin its ascent into the black fissure. Savorrus felt himself 
fall back into his chair as the stress of the past year began to boil 
away from him. The plan had been executed to the letter. He 
reflected on the magnitude of what they had just accomplished; the 
contents of that rocket would release a nuclear blast laced with an 
anomalous cocktail, which (if the Mount Sinai boys had done their 
job right) would "de-etherealize" anything within the explosive 
radius. He'd heard hushed whispers of a conflicted O5 council for 
months, outlasting even the whispers of the "fishbowl" they had 
used to peer into the realm he'd just bombed. Somehow, the council 
had been able to reach into the plans that the rest of those things 
had and through some metric, they'd known that with entities of this 
magnitude there could be no containment. Savorrus felt himself 
begin to relax; whatever the consequences, it was out of his hands 
now. 


Within the conclave chambers, yet another powerful member raised 
its many voices, mocking Iscilthe's defeat. The entity listened, even 
as it felt the foreign tube of metal and minerals materialize within its 
bloated gut. In its beaten, weakened form it had neither the time nor 
the energy to process the intrusion, and was too taken in the 
conclave's mirth to make the attempt, instead joining in the 
chamber's roaring laughter. As the nearly 6000 megaton nuclear 
warhead began to fully coalesce, Iscilthe felt a compulsion to feel 
out to the nature of the device. As the atoms read themselves to it, 
the entity's laughter ceased to be mirthful, and instead turned harsh, 
cackling, and pained as the extent of the conclave's miscalculation 
began to dawn upon it. 


The materialization completed, and the booming laughter of the 
ancient chambers came to an unremarkable end. 


Spark of Creation 


1Before there was anything, there was a 
great Nothingness. And in this Nothingness 
there was neither light nor darkness nor 
time.