Approximately 30 minutes before dawn, all containment teams must 
be at full alert and must remain on alert until sunset or such time that 
all instances of SCP-526-2 have been terminated or otherwise 
rendered harmless. In case of overwhelming hostile contact, 
additional reinforcements may be requested by ACA-31 Command 
from Mobile Task Force Sigma-9 ("Valkyries"), including artillery 
strikes and close air support if necessary. 


Description: SCP-526-1 is a hill in the near ; 
Norway, centeredat . °N, . °E. SCP-526-1 is easily identified by 
a ring of nine (9) stones approximately 2 meters in height, with 
numerous runes inscribed on their inward surface and placed in a 10 
meter radius centered on the top of the hill. 


Every day at sunrise (+15 minutes), a group of individuals will 
appear on SCP-526-1, designated SCP-526-2, fully armed and 
combat-ready. These individuals usually appear to be temporally 
displaced, but all individuals within a single instance of SCP-526-2 
will be from the same time period and appear to in fact be from the 
same military unit. Instances of SCP-526-2 have numbered from ten 
to three hundred, and have varied from primitive humans armed only 
with stone weapons to modern special forces units with 


healed skin. The pain is so great. | can see it in him every time he 
comes to this goddamned place. But without the burden, the journey 
becomes pointless. A question to rip a man's soul from his body. 


If Aurelio makes the same decision again, he undersigns their 
decision to call us back to their hell. We had an advance screening 
of the performance that ended the world yesterday. Knowing what 
we all do now, does he choose to witness again? To call others to 
it? He can stand by the certainty which has led him to where he is 
today, but the ground on which he stands is falling away by the 
second. The possibility of his curiosity being akin to complicity with 
the atrocity being visited upon everyone is one that threatens to 
crush him. This question, posed by the tower, is forcing a 
Clarification of his situation. Utter annihilation, or unforgivable 
collaboration. 


| watched their performance in awe on that night. Visions more 
powerful than anything we had ever gotten with the herbs that we 
went so deep into the jungle hell to retrieve. A society of 
indescribable beauty. The inescapable damnation of the Planet of 
Hands. The eviscerated, nightmare love with which they regarded 
us. An experience speaking to the deepest levels of human 
expression, unspeakably alien to anyone with a speck of humanity 
left. It's no wonder they've tried to drive that from all of us. 


| was the first to be called. To them, it was a reward, for finding them 
first. Come back home, the spectral man told me, eyes beaming with 
tears of twisted happiness. It seemed the only option, really. The 
only sane thing to do when faced with such magnificent beauty was 
to surrender. | could see it in all of us, transfixed. | saw it in me too. 
What they saw in me was a way to eliminate the last threads of 
resistance holding us all back. And behind that part of me open to 
the beauty of the world and its fine systems was something else. 
Something older, and wiser. Something that walked hand in hand 
with the darkest fears that we hold. Something red. 


Through tears of ecstasy and joy, my hand found the long knife 
hanging from my belt. And in one fluid motion, passed down to me 
through what is dismissively referred to as the reptilian portion of my 
brain, | opened my own throat. Deep enough that my hands were 
not enough to stanch the curtain of blood pouring out of me. Blood 


enough to wash away even the visions crafted by this post-human 
non-humans. | fell to the floor, weakening instant by instant, my 
breath stolen by the impossibly gaping wound | had made. The cold 
of the room passed directly into me. Then the freezing cold of the 
night outside. By the time Aurelio got to me | was filled with the 
blasting chill of the black spaces between the stars. 


Here are the last moments | saw in this life. Half of the Barqueros 
running like hell back to the door. Half of the Barqueros weeping 
with joy as their hands piled up in front of them, one after the other. 
Aurelio holding his coat to the ruin of my throat, praying aloud to the 
only saint he recognized, as though this were not something guided 
by her hand as well. The cold being followed closely by its brother 
darkness. 


And then no more. 


The sight of Aurelio faced with this choice makes me replay these 
moments in a way | have not done since they happened. And | 
would sooner cut my own throat a thousand more times than have 
him assaulted with this hideous suffering once more. | would do it 
ten thousand times more to be able to help him. | don't know what to 
do. 


Aurelio turns away from the past arrayed before us and toward the 
gloating, icy face of the future. His hand is in his pocket. 


You should have tried this in America somewhere, he says. Or some 
other place where they think they have this shit figured out. 


He's been replaying the last time we were here too. | see it now. His 
hand is moving around whatever is in his pocket. 


She replies. That you don't make the choice doesn't make it cease 
to exist, Aurelio Rojas. A dynamic state in the system is still well 
within its bounds. We accounted for your truculence, in any event. 


Aurelio's hand moves slowly out of his pocket. From the way his arm 
is trembling | can tell that the movement is involuntary. There is 
nothing in his hand. A second later, a small metal box with a steel 
switch floats out of his pocket of its own accord. Aloft on a stillborn 


wind, it drifts away from Aurelio, stopping in front of the woman. She 
sneers, finally finding something worth her contempt amongst her 
cattle. She even goes so far as to raise her hand up. Closing it into a 
fist, the detonator is crushed into a tiny, jagged point of metal. It 
clatters onto the ground. 


Who is more God, Aurelio Rojas? The cow, squeezing out more life 
into its putrid field, unreasoning, vacant? Or the overseer, tending to 
the survival of that cow, adjusting the conditions in which it waits to 
serve its purpose, mending its organs and its flesh when the 
purpose requires it? 


The hatred is not warming her voice. Is this what we are, truly, when 
the mask is off? 


She continues. Surely even you were not so stupid as to think that 
we did not notice your kind attaching the explosives. You must have 
known that your actions are clearly laid out before you even made 
the decision to pursue them. Meaningless, empty gestures. Ill- 
considered. Petty. Much in keeping with your forebears, long ago. 


The woman in the purple robes raises her other hand. Aurelio rises 
slowly into the air, held in place by the forces governing this skyward 
monument to futility that we had been so eager to discover. She 
spreads her arms, and thus are Aurelio's spread open as well now, 
a hovering Christ mockery. But his face. A beaming calm has 
overtaken him, a face at home on this impossible cross. The 
mockery is instead homage, somehow. The subtlety is lost on the 
mistress of the tower, the symbolism of the livestock beneath the 
contempt of the master. Here are where the final moves of his game 
are beginning to come to me. 


His turn to speak now. So much effort, he says. To thwart a 
meaningless gesture. What does it say, oh great Monashir, that you 
are in this tower with us? 


Cracks begin to appear in the ice cliffs of her face. This is angering 
her. Before she can reply he continues. 


They must have been surprised, eh? To find something of 
themselves in here? Why hide this place, why let us hide afterward, 


if this is such an enduring symbol of your fucked up paradise? And 
why do you protect it by meeting me here? 


He laughs now, and she loses control. With sudden violence, she 
lowers her hands, and Aurelio is thrown to the floor, slammed into 
the dust and debris beneath him. He lands on his side, bones 
cracking from the force, the breath driven from him by the impact. 
He coughs as he struggles to breathe again, heaped on the floor, 
blood beginning to drip from his lips. He laughs again. 


Still trying to figure it out. The shit you're playing with didn't start with 
you, did it? 


His words struggle out through his laughter and blood, no less clear 
from the effort as his life begins to leak out. 


No, you've been right here with us, trying to figure out how you 
ended up on the top floor. Why the laws that govern this tower apply 
to you too. What the flaw in your system is that buried you along 
with all the other corpses. Scratching and clawing at your coffin lid. 


The purple woman flickers and appears over him as he lies on the 
ground. Guttural fury leaking from her crumbled face, the hate now 
fully formed in her, dead eyes lit with pyres of rage. Her arms 
sweeps out, and Aurelio is thrown in the air away from her, striking 
the dais at the front of the room, wood splintering, his laughter 
making room for the groans of pain, unstoppable now. 


He wheezes now as | rush to him, dead or not. I'll save you some 
trouble, he says. You thought you banished death. But all you did 
was forget about her. You thought you enslaved madness. But you 
merely brought him into your house. And you think saving this tower 
from us will let you solve the one problem you can't figure out. But 
I've got the answer for you. You belong in here with us. And you'll 
never know why. You can't understand. 


She's over him again. | look up at her from my place next to Aurelio. 
She is going to end it. 


He spits blood up at her with ragged breaths. As she moves to finish 
him, he returns the favor. 


You forsake death, and death's wisdom is lost to you. You push 
madness away into this world, but it lives in my heart instead, and 
you are defenseless. You've blinded yourselves, but the grave 
awaits you all anyway. Fuck your mother. 


Horrifying, terrible force comes down from above her, now 
channeling the fury that has driven her beyond all reason, striking 
moments too late before Aurelio has laid bare the chasm at the 
heart of the perfect world that now must reckon with its hidden 
cracks. Hatred wells out of the fault lines in her self and her realm, 
spewing out like a geyser. No pushing it back in now. 


She strikes Aurelio with her fists, crushing his chest, silencing him. | 
scream with no words or breath, such things forever beyond me 
here. Something catches my eye through the ruins of his shirt. 


A freshly sutured wound on his sternum. The glint of exposed metal. 
The last halting breaths, a smile still plastered on his bloody lips. | 
feel him looking toward me through darkening eyes. From deep 
within him | swear | hear something. 


She hears it too. The terror of something impending, building within 
her at Aurelio's words, now seizes her. The madness lives in his 
heart. It lives in all of our hearts, decaying every system they touch, 
even from our living tomb in the stars. They will never outrun it 
because we are they and they are us. 


Dead man switch. Wired in his chest. His heart stops beating. She 
has just enough time to bellow like a cow in the slaughterhouse 
chute. 


Here is the last moment. Deep rumbling. The walls and the ceiling 
and the floor buckling. Fire. Smoke. Gouts of dust and bits of metal 
and plaster and stone rushing all around us. Aurelio borne aloft ona 
great pillar of flame as the great tomb at the heart of the world's 
necropolis comes apart, the winds and the sunlight and the 
wreckage all suddenly of one composition. The purple woman 
burning for a second before being rent asunder by the uncertainty 
and death that lay at the heart of humanity. A mortal wound that will 
be felt a million miles away, perhaps in a million years. Perhaps 
tomorrow. A funeral pyre that will burn away the dead and make 


room for the living. Even if the dead do not acknowledge it yet. | feel 
myself rising with Aurelio. What does it matter when the truth lay 
outside of time? There is us. There is madness. There is death. In 
these things we proceed in all directions, blasted apart by the first 
and last forces, and settling back again. This monument to colossal, 
unimaginable error has stopped existing. Eventually, one of these 
directions must take us to something closer to the truth. Closer to 
balance. Death shows her face once more and guides us to mercy 
again. She shows her face to me at long last. 


| am with him in the end, in the sky of a world giving way to whatever 
the next may be. 


| know no more. 


Wrong Proposal: The Consensus 


NOTICE FROM THE FOUNDATION RECORDS AND 
INFORMATION SECURITY ADMINISTRATION 


Biannual Security Update: Item Number Randomisation has been 
initiated. Until security update is complete, all files are locked. For 
emergency updates, please access Emergency Data Archival 
System (EDAS). 


— Maria Jones, Director, RAISA 


Item #: SCP-001 


Object Class: Euclid 
Clearance Designation: Level 5 


Special Containment Procedures: SCP-001 cannot be secured or 
contained conventionally, and it is unknown if it may occur in the 
future. As such, a reactive approach is to be adopted. Said 
approach consists of the following Chapters of the Forbidden City 
Convention: 


1. Prevention and minimisation of the conditions conductive to 
the possible occurrence of SCP-001 or its equivalent via 


Forbidden City Convention Chapter I. 

2. Management of organisational transition and unity following 
implementation of Forbidden City Convention Chapter I, via 
Forbidden City Convention Chapters II and III respectively. 


All above mentioned Chapters of the Forbidden City Convention are 
not to be altered, unless via a unanimous vote by the O5 Council. 


Description: SCP-001 is a successful occurrence of a CK-class 
restructuring scenario, which generated the current reality via 
alteration of a previous iteration of reality. Based on first-person 
accounts, SCP-001 occurred on the 1st of June in the year 1900 
Anno Domini of the previous reality. The nature of SCP-001 is such 
that all causes, events, references and memories of Occult War / 
(referred to as the 'Fifth Occult War' in the previous reality) are 
omitted and replaced with various anomalous and non-anomalous 
parallels in the current reality. 


Foundation documentation regarding Occult War /is obtained from 
anecdotal accounts of thirteen non-anomalous human beings who 
retain their memories of the previous reality via a phenomenon 
coined as ‘partial SCP-001 immunity’. However, the mechanism 
behind partial SCP-001 immunity is unknown and will not be 
assessed, as decided by the O5 Council. Efforts to identify 
additional individuals (if any) with partial SCP-001 immunity are on 
indefinite hiatus, as decided by the O5 Council. 


Below is an abridged list of events during Occult War / and plausible 
analogous events in the current reality; see Document OWi for an 
expanded list. 


+ View List 
Occult War i Description Analogue in 
Phenomenon Current Reality 
Referent to the | A global war A conflict in 
term 'Fifth Occult occurring Northern China 
War' throughout the concurrent with 


19th century Anno the Boxer 
Domini, coalesced Rebellion, 
from three whereby members 


Coronation of 
Napoleon | 


separate conflicts 
in Europe 
(Napoleonic War), 


of the Brotherhood 
of Harmonious 
Fists allegedly 


East Asia (Daevite utilised unnamed 


conquest) and 
North America 
(American Civil 
War). It is also 
notable for overt 
use of anomalous 
objects, leading to 
an IK-class Global 
Civilisation 
Collapse scenario. 


After his 
coronation, 


anomalous 
objects.