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 Schrödinger 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 Schrödinger, 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.