poem at a stupid time, Aurelio. You always thought it was so funny, 
how mad it would make me. | guess it was kind of funny, looking 
back. It still makes me mad. 


He leaves them then, into the heart of the dead city. | watch from my 
house on the Boulevard of Progress as he winds down the roads to 
the valley floor, where the living in their wisdom made a tomb for the 
future. He's going to the tower alone and | am afraid. What will 
happen when the rest of us pass to the other side of the river? How 
long will that day be, the day where no one is left and every one of 
us is alone, forever? 


Aurelio cut the engine in front of the concrete block house. Le 
Corbusier's shoebox, she always called it. A house looking like 
every other one on the street, except for the two crossed oars 
painted above the front door. All the Barqueros had a color. Hers 
was red. As was his. 


He kicked his boot at the bike's center stand. The goddamn wind 
would just blow it over if he used the little kickstand. Bringing its 
weight to rest atop the stand, he grunted. Getting old, he thought. 
That's going out of fashion. A howling gust of wind raced down the 
Boulevard of Progress, cloaked in dried weeds and white dust and 
whistling by like a man on a train, mocking everything on his side of 
the tracks. Fucking bullshit place, he thought. | should have done 
this at the very beginning. 


The first of the Barqueros, early in their times their leader, now their 
Captain, entered the square cement house through a square steel 
door, little clouds of brown rust spilling out from the hinges to join the 
dirty wind outside. He stepped into the house. Boarded windows and 
impregnable walls ensured complete darkness. He closed the door 
behind him. 


He opened his third bottle of Quilmes. The only thing visible was the 
outline of the door behind him, dusty light filtering into the shape of a 
wan square. He could not see his hands. 


"Deathbed conversions are bullshit." Aurelio addressed the black 
interior of the abandoned house. "This is just really bad 


procrastination. | know you're not there, Jacinta. My mind hasn't 
changed on that." 


God damn you Aurelio. Why did you wait so long? 


He took a drink, wiping his mustache with a hard brown forearm. 
"But you're supposed to conclude your affairs when you do stuff like 
this. So fuck it. I've wanted to do this for a long time. For me." 


So what else is new? 


"| sent off the newer Barqueros. Told them to go end it in whatever 
way they saw fit. Dumbass kids from America and Europe and 
wherever, so hurt when | told them that. As though that isn't the 
greatest freedom that any of us will have. They aren't bred from the 
madness, though. They came to it fully formed. Invaders and 
foreigners, wherever these guys go." 


Oh bullshit. You loved those young men and women, Aurelio. | saw 
it all from here. 


"The older ones just went home. Eduardo and Mariela and Frankie 
and the others. Melted away. | didn't tell them what | was going to do 
but they knew anyway. Friends are assholes like that." 


| saw Eduardo here on his own two days ago. | think he would have 
done it if you hadn't thought of it first, Aurelio. You two always were 
like brothers. This is going to shatter his heart into pieces. 


"So now | have to do it. And I'm scared, Jaci. | have to do this, talk to 
you like you're here, because when the time came for you, you 
stood. Just like you did for Pablo and Roberto and Lana and the rest 
of us in that fucking goddamn jungle so long ago." 


| was petrified, Aurelio. | can't even remember deciding to act. Either 
time. My skin and my blood were ice. | didn't know what else to do. | 
wish | could tell you this, Aurelio. More than you can possibly know. 


"It's not death I'm afraid of. | mean, more than anyone else is, but it's 
descended upon us, that's for fucking sure. Like being scared of the 
sunset." 


I've waited so long, Aurelio. Why did it have to be like this? Where | 
cannot reach you or speak to you or hold you? Every word of this is 
like dying again. It's taking me apart in ways | can't understand. 
Please don't stop. 


"I'm afraid of that top floor. I'm afraid of going back in there. It's 
going to try to convince me to do something else." 


You are Aurelio Rojas, and you've never done a thing you didn't 
want to do, you intractable bastard. God damn it, | wish you could 
hear me now. | wish | weren't behind eternities of space and time 
and void. | wish we had just left everyone else and vanished into the 
streets of Montevideo like we should have. 


"I'm stealing what's left of you. Using it for my own purposes. 
Reconstructing the dead to fit the spaces inside. I'm going to twist 
the shards of what | have of you that remains. Grind your memory 
into something resembling courage. My last crime against you." 


Aurelio finished the bottle, casting it forth from darkness into 
darkness. He heard no sound. 


"God, what a fucking obscenity. | hated it when people would go talk 
to the stones in the cemetery. As good as digging them up. But this 
is worse. Jaci, I'm sorry." 


You damn fool, Aurelio. You can't rearrange me. You never could. 
That's why you liked me. 


He ran his hands up from his forehead into his thin, brittle hair. The 
echoes of his voice in the cold tomb house reflected back to him 
from the walls. The words sounded just a little different somehow in 
the split second it took to reach him again. The darkness was pulling 
his mind too far outward. A familiar feeling to a Barquero. It was time 
to leave. 


"I'm...I'm sorry for all of it. Sorry that you weren't here to see out the 
end of this spiral. I'm sorry that | made it out and not you. But I'm 
going to go fix that shit now." 


Aurelio turned to leave. He found himself standing in place. It fixed 


him where he stood. The allure of the inner consciousness, 
desperately clawing and shredding and tearing its way to the waking 
world, burning everything around it. The allure of death, in service to 
the birth of something, even of something terrible. The longing of the 
tower. Its pull grew further by the hour. 


! am here, Aurelio. And | am with you until the end. A shadow 
maybe. But it's my shadow. | will walk with you. 


Aurelio Rojas, Captain of Mobile Task Force Phi-9, reached his 
hand to the dimly lit square hanging in darkness. The door opened, 
caught by the wind and slamming against the wall outside. The 
boulevard was a tunnel, a private gale rushing between row upon 
row of abandoned concrete houses exactly the same as the one he 
left now. No garbage, no wrappers or papers or cans being blown 
about by this wind, no signs of living human habitation. Just the 
white dust of the dead city, the steady erosion that would one day 
wear down these houses and all others in the world beyond. 


He leaned forward into the maddening, breath-stealing winds, and 
started walking. In the heart of the city lay the moldering ruin of its 
former capital, the place where a group of friends finally found what 
they were looking for, to their bitter regret. By his side was Jacinta 
Araya, co-founder of the Barqueros in life and in death. Unseen. 
Together, they approached the tower. 


The wind has stopped. So still that the earth could shake and 
swallow us whole right on the spot. Aurelio doesn't hesitate, 
unlocking the chains across the main entrance and pulling open the 
great door. Why would he? This place has been his home more than 
any other. The two of us inhabiting tombs next door to each other all 
these years. That's an ending | would have written before | died. 


| follow him across the lobby, and | hear whispers. These things, 
these ideas that live in this place, you don't need any technology to 
hear them when you're like | am. | must be closer to them, now. 
Though they don't speak to me. What good am | to bring anything 
into the world now? They speak to him. Does he hear them with his 
own ears, after all these years? | suppose if he did he would have 
died long ago. Then again, maybe this is something that they've told 


him to do. No, unlikely. He would have turned the place into an 
amusement park instead if they'd told him to do this. 


We step into the elevator. The only pristine, maintained space in the 
building. Aurelio programmed his own voice into the thing, and so 
we hear him mark off the floors as we go up. One, two, three. I'm 
sure he thought that was funny as hell when he did it. Now it's 
making him nervous. 


The whispers surround us as we are carried into the top of the 
necropolis. Visions destined to drive men mad and ignite the vast 
piles of unseen suffering that surround them. This place is a 
monument to the first man, who saw the leaping flames of the 
bonfire and wondered what it must be like to throw himself in. It's a 
mercy, really. A world that had been going mad long before this, 
spared the worst of its excesses, the human mind built with a 
collective failsafe in the middle of one of its many banal errors. 
Somehow knowing that it can always be much worse is a necessity 
of survival. It's the lack of that knowledge that everyone can feel in 
their hearts today. It's how they all know, everyone, that there's no 
going back now. 


Ding. Floor 32. The elevator, having no sense of ceremony, merely 
opens its doors to the expansive space at the top of the tower. The 
Grand Hall. Designed for the meetings of the Ciudad's leaders, a 
grand dais at the far wall, hopeful rows of seats facing the empty 
thrones of the rulers of this necropolis, who never bothered to show 
up to claim their due. It was here that | stopped being and became 
this. The space is strangely unmoving to me. Should it be? More 
questions for no one. 


| am watching Aurelio. His mouth is set, but his eyes light up with 
recognition as he looks out over the hall. | turn to see what he's 
looking at. | expect to see the man, like we did last time, walking us 
through our inferiority and the greatness of his apex predator world. 
Instead it's a woman, tall and stately in flowing purple robes, an 
icefall of white hair frozen down over her bare shoulders. Alabaster 
skin like a Roman statue. She's looking back at Aurelio. Her face is 
wholly unconcerned. But her eyes, so blue as to be white like her 
skin, so cold that | can almost see Aurelio's breath as he stands 
before her. A woman with a gaze like a refrigerated hospital 


basement. Hateful sterility, frigid contempt, a death goddess with no 
hint of humanity. She would be beautiful if it weren't for her eyes. 


Aurelio comes to a realization at the same moment as | do. You're 
from the play, he says. You were here the first time and you were 
there when the world went mad yesterday. Monashir Violetlight, 
Lady of the Tower. Didn't realize that was a literal title. 


In the space of time that it takes him to blink, the woman is ten 
meters closer to us. Walking is apparently beneath her. She flickers 
and reappears. Even before my last night | knew better than to 
mistake something like this for an apparition. She holds the same 
position, same expression. Unlike Aurelio, she does not blink. The 
impression strikes me that we are not important enough for her to 
dignify us by moving. 


Gonna say something, Aurelio asks. You were a minor character. 
Did you forget your lines for this one? 


Not his voice, not his face, not his smell nor his posture change. But 
| sense the terror's avalanche within him, giving way suddenly from 
the rocky cliffs of his mind. One of the abilities | maintained from my 
previous life. | begin to understand what he was afraid of. 


He blinks again. She flickers again. She is right behind us. | half 
expect her to kill Aurelio then and there. But the hateful woman 
statue is looking over his shoulder instead. In front of us are more 
people. These people move, breathe, are alive. In this place, it is 
they who are the apparitions. If there was any doubt, it was dispelled 
by one of the people in front of us now. My self, living again. Ina 
person's time in the strange realm of the Earth, this is the only 
impossibility. 


The scene before us is this. The Barqueros, the old Barqueros, are 
talking among themselves. Things are getting heated. Some of us 
think we've gone too far up in the tower. That we need to leave now. 
Leading the opposition is myself. Others think that this is the 
culmination of our exploration (don't ever call it research). An Aurelio 
with a little more hair and a little less belly is speaking for this group. 
They're all shouting now. | remember this part. You've let yourselves 
be seduced by it. The world is a labyrinth and this is the center. 


What do we gain by knowing any of this shit? What did we spend all 
these years looking for? A gyre of points and counterpoints, swirling 
under our feet as we tried to make sense then and there of the 
decade we burnt up in pursuit of the deeper currents. Then and now, 
| can feel the sharks circling in the waters underneath us. A fish's 
sense. The electricity is all wrong in this place. 


Here is where what is happening diverges from my memories. The 
Barqueros all stop talking. The ghosts before us hold their positions. 
Simulating the movements of breathing, of waiting. This was where 
Aurelio told us all that he was going in and damn the rest of us if we 
didn't. | can see him, the real Aurelio, replaying the moment in his 
hard head. 


The woman behind us speaks, finally, a voice like mist breathing 
from an icy cliffside down onto the rocks below. Cold, slow, half- 
whisper. She says, choose. 


Like an injury, a person learns to live with different kinds of regret. 
Some kinds ache softly in the knees or the wrists, returning for a 
visit when the rain comes down. Some kinds are a pinched nerve, 
pain that from time to time prevents you from turning your neck to 
look back over your shoulder. The wounds we get when we hurt 
ourselves, hurt others for what we think is the right thing, though. 
Those don't close. They fester, infecting every other decision within 
you. This day, so long ago, is a knife that has been sticking out of 
Aurelio's chest. His hand is creeping toward an invisible hilt three 
inches from his heart, even if he doesn't know it. 


The voice of mist behind us breathes again. A little louder this time. 
Aurelio feels it like he feels the wind in the forsaken valley outside. 
She says, knowing all of the things that you know now, Aurelio 
Rojas, what do you choose? | turn back to look at her. The bitch is 
smiling now. 


A neatly diagrammed problem. If Aurelio expresses desire for a 
different outcome, it destroys him. Every death, every one of his 
years after that night at the top of the tower is for nothing. The tower, 
more than anything, taught him what it really is to carry a burden. To 
be haunted. To renounce the mistakes of the past will pull the knife 
out of the wound, but the corruption merely spreads under the 


SCP-526: Valhalla Gate 


Item #: SCP-526 
Object Class: Euclid 


Special Containment Procedures: Armed Containment Area-31 
has been established in a 15 km radius around SCP-526-1, which 
has been officially designated as a military weapon testing site and 
proving ground with a no-fly zone in effect. A company-sized 
element is stationed at Station 526-Alpha to observe and contain the 
appearance of anomalous subjects from SCP-526-1 and is 
authorized to use deadly force in self-defense or in order to contain 
SCP-526.