For whatever left that little cell-turned apartment wasn't me 
anymore. | was never more than an earthworm, distinct from all the 
rest only in that | had a little more control over the soil in which | 
crawled. They never thought me more than a minor reality bender, a 
bundle of introverted powers and neurosis that was very unlikely to 
ever pose any serious threat. And they were right. The person | was, 
SCP-1915, as they called me, never was anything other than that. 
But 1915 died that day, watching a fallen star. The thing that then 
swatted the guards posted at its cell like they were less than gnats, 
that razed Site-17 into this fine white sand that is now so warm 
beneath the feet, that was something else. Not an entity, for that 
would imply a personality, and this thing surely has none. Nota 
purpose, for there was no purpose behind its action then, nor will 
there be for any of its actions to come. Nor was it a will, for it wants 
nothing. Not vengeance, not dominion, not freedom, not even simple 
power. No, if | had to describe that thing as anything at all, it would 
be an... an absence. A void where the entity should be. A lack of 
purpose. An imbecile force devoid of all will. An Absence. 


The sand is still warm to the feet. That means the sun still burns, 
high above. | wonder why it lets it remain, when all else was so 
quickly erased. When it could so easily just reach and pluck it out of 
the sky. Had it been another, I'd suspect it was to mock humanity's 
memory. To mock that sliver of me that still persists in the flesh, 
stubborn like a buried tick. But this is the Absence. It does not mock. 


After Site-17's destruction, retaliation soon followed. Standard 
containment teams at first, though certainly still enough to meet any 
anomaly the Foundation imagined could be contained in Site-17 with 
overwhelming force. When those men failed to return, failed to even 
report their arrival, more serious measures had to be taken. Site-17 
has always been isolated, and so they could act freely. Gunships 
and fire teams, aerial bombardment and artillery barrages, the 
Foundation came down on what it still believed to be SCP-1915 like 
a fire god's fist, all heat and sound and bluster. Had it still been truly 
corporeal, | doubt even ashes would have remained. But whatever 
the Absence truly was by that point, the tattered semblance of my 
flesh hanging around it had very little to do with it. It simply stood 


there and took it all in, and the Foundation's initial fury was soon... 
spent. It then began to walk, and not too quickly either. For days, it 
simply leisurely strode on while the Foundation threw everything it 
had at it. | watched from within my deadbolt as it walked unfeeling, 
uncaring, and this desert followed in its wake, as inscrutable and 
unstoppable as its harbinger. 


We are not quite alone here. Some stubborn immortals persist, 
wretched creatures. A continent away, an ancient man still walks, 
tormented by three mocking voices. He believed that once he was 
the only one left, he would be allowed to rest. He was wrong. 
Beneath the ground is a soul, suffocating as the earth slowly grinds 
its sanity to mulch. From its prison of gold and rubies, there would 
be no release. Elsewhere lies a once-smiling god, as the sands 
cover his prone figure. He does not resist. He had once promised 
the world his love, promised humanity the stars. Sand pours through 
his fingers as he tries to gather his flame together. His people. But it 
is dying, and they are dead. Extinguished. 


When someone walks, they are bound to reach somewhere 
eventually, despite everyone's best efforts, and so the Absence 
arrived at its first city, the sands at its heels like an obedient lapdog. 
Oh, there have been villages and towns before that, but the 
Absence didn't seem to care enough to bother with them. It simply 
walked by, leaving them to the whims of the sands, which were only 
ever singular in their intent. But through the streets of the city it 
strode, as Mobile Task Forces fought and fell to buy the civilian 
population just a few more minutes to evacuate. By this point, hiding 
what was truly going on became impossible, of course, as street 
after street sank beneath that gentle crawling tide. The Foundation 
had of course attempted to evacuate the city once it realized there 
would be no stopping the Absence, but if I've learned anything in 
my... eons as a corporate peon, is that organizing an operation of 
that magnitude is something that takes a lot more time than the 
Foundation had. It's a wonder they managed to save as many as 
they did. As for the rest... 


It had waited until night fell. | imagine it was an eerie sight, that lone 
figure standing beneath the frozen light of other worlds in that empty 
intersection between financial and residential districts, where train 


tracks used to be before the old steam locomotives went out of 
service and were never replaced by newer ones. Yes, it waited until 
it could see the stars. Then it burned. Without heat, without light, 
without life. It burned a hole through the city, and there was nothing 
to fill it in. Reality cannot suffer a vacuum, they always said, but the 
Absence had shown how little it cared for reality. So It was gone, 
just like that. How does one explain something like that? How do 
you describe what isn't there? Where one moment was a city of five 
hundred thousand, the next it wasn't. To the place it was even the 
sands wouldn't come. It was just a scar. It was nothing. 


It was then, | believe, that the Foundation realized it could not stand 
alone. The next few months of the Absence's march saw them turn 
to their sometimes allies; Coalition Magekillers and thermonuclear 
strikes, Initiative Paladins and holy relics. Sniper rifle or sacred 
sword, burning inferno or divine retribution, the Absence did not 
care. And soon, the Foundation had no allies left to turn to. It then 
called on its once vicious enemies; Ink Eaters wove their art in 
maddening patterns, to break the minds of the infinite. Archivists and 
Librarians poured from the Ways, bringing with them the knowledge 
of a hundred thousand worlds. Clockwork Titans shook the barren 
whiteness of the sands with the thunder of metal. The Absence did 
not care. And soon, the Foundation ran out of enemies. In a last act 
of desperation, they then committed their final, most painful betrayal. 
The wardens unleashed upon the world their prisoners. Of these, | 
have made note, though | doubt the Absence did the same. 


On the blasted wasteland that was once Boston, it was assailed by 
two brothers. One savage, the other somber, one violent, the other 
reluctant, they nevertheless fought with a graceful unity to take the 
breath away. In their eyes, | saw that they did not know each other 
for a very long while, and that they fought so that they could have 
the time to rectify this. | saw regret and hope, rage and desperation, 
but most of all | saw a simple need to be. | would like to believe that 
you and | would have been like them, had we met, brother. They 
fought with the fury of a thousand years of solitude. It did not suffice. 


In a wounded valley that had once been part of the Black Sea, we 
came across a self-proclaimed god. There was nothing but 
confidence in his eyes as he threw reality itself into disarray, bent 


and twisted its most fundamental laws to bring upon the Absence 
untold destruction. The earth froze and boiled and heaved, the air 
screamed with blighted glee and the god he strode draped in a cloak 
of lightning, as time itself clawed at the Absence with talons of utter 
unbeing. Until the god came to meet the Absence's lack of a gaze. 
Until his eyes rested on a nothing that lasted forever. Until he did not 
suffice. 


Before the walls of Acre, as the ancient city was drowned by the 
desert, two figures approached us. One was four legged and 
horned, its crown was ice, its eyes galaxies, its whole was power 
absolute. The second was a man, simple, humble, but possessing a 
love of being that extended to the edges of the universe, 
compassion to pierce the deepest of hells that had nothing to do 
with weakness. Of the two, | could not tell you which was more 
glorious, which was more terrifying. They met the Absence with will 
alone, and when | felt it fall on us | thought | would weep. Surely 
nothing could withstand such a presence. Surely, nothing would 
want to. But the Absence was less than nothing, infinitely less. | 
have told you what became of kind Pangloss. Of the other, even 
less remained. 


For months they came. For years. For decades. Alone or in groups, 
with ferocity or with a blank stare, the Foundation's prisoners threw 
themselves at the Absence. | could not hope to imagine the reasons 
behind the actions of every individual anomaly, but if | could guess, | 
would say that the idea of sharing existence with a... thing like the 
Absence galled them to the point of madness. | do not blame them. 
But by the end, the prisons ran empty, as the world dried up, as life 
was drained from it inch by inch, grain by grain. Until only one city 
remained. 


| do not know by which power | was allowed to send my senses 
ahead of us, as the Absence marched towards that tottering bastion 
which held in its quivering embrace the very last of humanity. As the 
sands around us buried the last of the trees that will ever grow in 
this land, | felt each tiny mote of life in that sad place like the flame 
of a cheap candle, moments before the typhoon. In these moments, 
as twilight danced in lurid reds and oranges on ivory, | sensed them 
all. For you, brother, | witnessed. 


In a low, narrow room a woman sat hunched at the foot of her even 
narrower bunk and couldn't bring herself to pray. She had lost her 
mother when she was but a babe, and though she was no longer 
young, her features still displayed to all the violence of that incident. 
Her mother stood before the eater of children and did not budge, 
and when they both fell down she sang still the praise of her Lord. 
She lost her father in the first days of the war against the Absence, 
as the Paladins marched with holy fervor in their eyes. Her father 
had been a believer, had always been a solid presence in her life, 
an anchor immovable by anything but regret. He had promised her 
he would be back. He did not mean to lie. But his god had forsaken 
him, when it counted most. Forsaken all of them. And now Naomi 
knelt at the foot of the ever narrowing bunk and could not pray. So 
she cursed instead. 


Below, in a series of dank cellars which might have at one point 
stored cheeses a woman of about forty tinkered with broken toys. 
When she was young, she made wonders. Such wonders. In every 
line etched across her prematurely old face | saw what could have 
been, had it not been for the Absence. For me. In the dim light and 
the soft noise of rotting wood crumbling beneath calloused fingers, | 
saw the death of potential. The death of all possibility. Though Isabel 
was stubborn as she always was, she knew that this toy would be 
her last. Just as well, she thought. After today, there would be none 
left to play with it. 


On the roof top of the highest building still standing, an elderly man 
watched the world come to an end. He was once an agent of the 
Foundation, once one among a hundred thousand, ready, prepared 
and collected. His duty was to instruct new agents what was proper 
for an agent to do, how it was proper for an agent to think. And he 
had been very good at his job, since generally, his recruits survived 
for long enough to thank him. But what was he now, he wondered, 
as he watched the sands pour over the paltry last line of defense 
that a few defiant fools erected the day before. His lads and lasses 
were all long since dead, and all that he knew, all of his years of 
training and experience, in the end they amounted to less than 
nothing. No longer an agent, for there was no longer an agency. No 
longer a teacher, for the students were gone. No longer a man, 
since... well, it would not do to repeat that, now would it? No longer 


anything, and that was the cruelest joke. It no longer mattered if the 
Absence arrived, he thought. They were already within it. A noise 
behind him, and the old man turned to see a small, mousy man ina 
wrinkled grey suit and a deflated hat that at one point was likely a 
fedora. He looked at the old man, but said nothing. Lombardi looked 
back, and didn't know if to laugh or cry. Soon, it ceased to matter. 


Such was the end. Quiet, small, bereft of heroics and great deeds, 
free of pretensions of great meaning. One night, there was human 
race on the planet Earth. The next, there wasn't. And that was that. 


The stars did not wait for you, brother. When you took my power, 
when you burned yourself in the skies above, they looked upon you 
and felt nothing. The stars did not wait for humanity, for all of the 
promise it showed, for all of the promise others saw in them. But 
what of the Absence? What of me? 


We are, | am, by all accounts and possible qualifications, the 
greatest monster this world has ever saw. Perhaps that any world 
saw. And yet, brother, | see now that the stars wait for us. For me. 
Where is the justice in that? Seek it not, for there is none. But the 
fact remains, brother. The stars do not wait for you. But they wait for 
me. To take them into my embrace. 


| suspect | shall not be long. 


kit, The Storyteller 


The Duvet Queen, Kit came to realise after being stuck in his home 
with ‘flu, wasn’t all that bad. 


She wasn’t big, or scary, or unexpectedly angry. She didn’t have the 
paws like a lion, a face like a rat’s, and teeth as sharp as daggers. 
She had an image that flickered like a VHS on pause — a short, 
ageless figure, always covered from shoulders to feet in blankets - 
and sometimes she just hid as a big lump under her duvets in the 
hallway, not emerging for hours. Mostly, though, she pulled cats out 
of portals, but none really stuck around, apart from Peaches, who 
had decided that Kit’s home was as good as any. 


She was a weird cat, really. 


And the Duvet Queen was a weird person. She proudly announced 
she could go ‘anywhere in the world’ but, when Kit challenged why 
she was in a council flat in Brighton, she went very quiet and hid in 
her duvets for a day and a half until Kit said sorry from his bedroom, 
tucked in his own duvet, sweating out a fever (he was pretty sure 
that was what you were meant to do with a fever). 


The Duvet Queen couldn’t do much for him, but she was nice to 
have around, once Kit had learnt not to ask why she was here and 
not anywhere else in the world. She seemed to feed on stories, 
explaining that she couldn’t read things properly anymore, and she 
missed that. So, she perched on the end of the bed and listened to 
Kit ramble, a deep wheeze in his chest, whilst her flickering head 
rested on what he assumed was her knees. 


When Kit was feeling a little better and could sit up without the world 
spinning, she found him looking out of the window one day, looking 
unusually thoughtful. With none of the tact in the world, she asked 
what he was thinking about, and settled in for a story, because there 
was always a story behind Kit’s thoughts, even if it was disordered. 


“It’s an anniversary, of sorts. Not a particularly big one. | think it’s 
been over ten years now. | think. But, if | don’t think about it, | may 
forget it forever.” 


He paused to cough chestily and pop a pill into his mouth, 
swallowing dry. 


“However long ago, there was this... girl, Maria. She was dumb. 
Well, not really dumb. But she was too pig-headed, goddamn 
stubborn, to realise that people cared if she lived or died.”