TABLE OF CONTENTS
Addendum:
Popular Artistic Rendition of SCP-001 on buildings throughout Eurtec.
Special Containment Procedures: Personnel interacting with SCP-001 directly must refer to it as “Seeress”. Those engaging with SCP-001 are expected to be professional at all times, never raise their voices, and practice slow and methodical movements in its presence. Disciplinary measures to ensure continued anomalous activity from SCP-001 are unnecessary and actively detrimental. Suggestions of punitive measures for undesired outcomes or inaccessible results are unacceptable. Attempting to force SCP-001 to exert prescience without electronic assistance is unacceptable. Failure to follow any of these instructions will result in revocation of access to the Silicon Nornir and SCP-001, and referral to the Ethics Committee for disciplinary review regardless of seniority, office, or internal standing.
Utilization of SCP-001’s anomalous capabilities for all relevant purposes are restricted to Department Heads, Site Directors, the Ethics Committee, and the O5 council unless explicit permission was received one year in advance. SCP-001, the Nornir, and Eurtec are remanded under O5-07’s domains of operation at this time.
Researchers interested in conducting projects and initiatives involving SCP-001 are required to submit applications to join MTF Omega-77 as part of the broader Department of Prescience and Predictive Sciences.
In the interest of maintaining the techno-thaumaturgic Nornir Cult and the Silicon Nornir’s Foresight Matrix Array’s operation, SCP-001 has been granted level-5 humanoid anomaly privileges. Level-5 privileges have continued since 1970 when the Foundation assumed operational command and control of Special Anomalous Free Port-03 (Eurtec) following the collapse of the GOC. These privileges are as follows:
- A private residence within the greater city of Eurtec, free of active monitoring and/or containment measures in recognition of excellent behavior.
- Freedom of mobility throughout Eurtec without armed escort.
- Access to leisure activities upon request and within reason.
- Disability accommodations for blindness.
- Remote and direct access to monitored personal electronic equipment capable of interfacing with the Nornir Foresight Matrix Arrays at all times.
- Access to artistic and creative materials for Trojan Events where personal electronics are insufficient.
- Approval for extra-Eurtec excursions accompanied by field and combat trained elements of MTF Omega-77 (Fortune Tellers) submitted with six months advanced notice.1
The organizational structure2 of the Silicon Nornir at the time of its absorption by the Foundation consisted of SCP-001 and what is now MTF Omega-77.3 It is in the best interest of SCP-001’s anomalous capacities to continue to maintain this social structure.
SCP-001.
Description: SCP-001 is both a single Class IX4 humanoid prescient anomaly and a Class VIII5 reality-altering entity. The techno-thaumaturgic Nornir Cult believes SCP-001 is the last surviving member of the Norns or Nornir.6 It is referred to by the Cult of the Nornir as “The Last Norn” “The Seeress on High” “Destiny’s Fingers” or “Name Unspoken.” SCP-001 presents as a 1.79 meters tall woman of Mediterranean descent which appears to be in its early thirties, with this appearance remaining in perpetuity due to its functional immortality. Notable bodily features include a utilitarian block-needle tattoo on its left arm reading “4444” and blindness.
SCP-001’s anomalous properties involve the onset of prescient ‘visions’ which frequently occur at all times of the day, regardless of its stage of consciousness. It describes its abilities as “uncontrolled sight”, referred to as “Trojan Events”7 by research personnel. These events consist of possible past, present, or future events of varying magnitudes and importance. Trojan Events are normally random, unfocused, and often undirected, though some specificity arises from contact with specific triggering items, topics, or words. Use of the Nornir Foresight Matrix Arrays (NFMA)8 or exerted prescience can focus SCP-001’s capacities, but it prefers to avoid exerted prescience.
Continuous efforts are ongoing to maintain, replace, and increase the number of empathetic individuals with strong moral direction working with SCP-001 in order to improve its predictive capacity.
Despite having been in Foundation remand for more than half a century, personal details regarding SCP-001 are sparse to nonexistent. Its true given name, if it has one, remains undisclosed.
Addendum 1: Discovery Documentation
RECOVERED GOC FILE
PTE-001
“Oracle of the End”
Foreword: The following excerpts are from summary reports and personal logs obtained from GOC archives concerning the Allied Occult Coalition’s efforts in the liberation of Obskuracorps Occult Facilities in Norway following the end of World War II.
On 12th May 1945, four days after the capitulation of German-Armed forces within Norway to the Allied Military Mission sent to Oslo, the Allied Occult Coalition and Interim Norwegian government were notified of a major subterranean Obskuracorp facility at Hegra Fortress refusing to surrender. Its small garrison had been complimented by the assimilation of a much larger local German garrison from Trondheim, both of which were refusing to acknowledge General Bohme’s capitulation order.
Entrance of Hegra Fortress.
As a component force of Operation Doomsday, the 1st and 2nd British Thaumic Corps, the 32nd American Thaumic Battalion and the Norwegian 4th Thaumic Division were deployed to Trondheim via troop transport with orders to capture the facility and any anomalous research or tech contained within. As Hegra Fortress’s fortifications were extensive, with 300 meters of tunnels and halls, 75 mm and 105 mm half-turrets, and multiple field guns, prior to its capture by German forces in 1940, the AOC detached additional support in the form of ground artillery detachments of the US Third Army. Close air support from nearby Royal Navy and US Naval carriers were on standby to assist for softening up surface targets.
Additional aerial reconnaissance efforts revealed the presence of elemental gun emplacements, and several unidentified esoteric and ontological thaumic weapons emplacements, resulting in additional commitment of nearby Allied forces.
At 0600 hours on May 14th, 1945, the perimeter regions in the forests around Hegra fortress were scouted for enemy activity before Allied forces encircled the stronghold and began preparations for assault. Signs of occult ritual were present in substantial quantities, but no active effects were immediately detected. A messenger was sent to the fortress with a small scouting party to assess enemy strength, fortifications, and deliver a final capitulation demand from joint German and Allied command.
Oral transcription of Dillon Hopkins, Courier 2nd British Thaumic Corps
Will be hard to forget this day. It was a bloody steep hill, forest was thick, and quite a bit of chill in the air. Still a bit of snow on the ground, and signs of recent jerry foot tracks. Command’s reports said there were supposed to be only 1500 garrisoned in the fortress, but there were 3500 jerries missing from the Trondheim garrison, SS type that refused to demob and brass hats thought they ended up there in that hilltop.
Was full of stew meself when we started climbing the hill, not a grand flat stroll through the garden that either. Making matters worse, was surrounded by a few jocks, yanks, and good old chaps whispering and glowing with all sorts of magic. Certainly pulled the lottery.
We saw the walls long fore we saw any of their stag’s, like they had skyvied off and abandoned all patrols. Squaddies knew something was up soon as I did. It was quiet, not the kind of normal quiet you expect in a forest with chittering birds, crunching branches, and underbrush. Dead silence, coulda heard a branch crack miles abreast. Laid down in the brush, all of us, and waited, listening.
Front gate was dead ahead, could see some of the turrets and fireposts up on the higher ridge of the fort. No movement, no officers shouting orders, no metallic dings and pings of ammo being moved around. Nothing. Not even the chirp of spring birds.
Hairs started standing up on my arms.
Lieutenant makes a few hand motions next to me, next thing I know we’re trekking around the edges checking for movement, sound, any signs of life.
Still nothing. We backtrack and they get the bright idea, these blood yanks, for me to just walk up and announce myself. So, what’s a lad supposed to do, risk his life or risk jankers. Well, I’m bloody daft, aren’t I?
So, I waltzed on up to the gate, ready to bolt at the first sound of a loading gun. I had the flag raised, as if that would do much good against Obskurkorp or bloody SS. I shouted—hells, I don’t remember what I said, the usual drivel of message for such and such commanding officer of such and such in the fortress of Hegra.
Nothing. Now it was bad enough the silence in the forest, but right next to the gate like that after shouting? Well, every instinct was bloody well screaming to ditch and run.
Being the bright lad I was, I instead waited a minute or two. Tried again. Then I knocked on the bloody door, and it opened. Slammed open. There was this sudden breeze whipping at my back. What was inside? Well, it wasn’t the gen any of us were expecting. Maybe a hundred, two hundred squareheads, rifles, tools, boxes haphazardly scattered on the ground at their feet.
I about relieved myself, frozen and watching. They swayed back and forth as if to some unheard marching drums. Closest ones I could make out? Their pupils were just huge and unfocused. Nobody home. I take a step inside starting to call out to them with message raised—
And then I was home. Home and yet, not home. I belonged; it was like an abode that could have been or might have been. Nothing but a young’un again in a thousand thousand different bodies both my own and yet not. There sitting at the dinner table with a spoon full of sweets in my mouth, sometimes not, sometimes elsewhere. It was like witnessing yer whole life spiraling out before you in ways it could have gone, might have gone, did go. The endless tree of possibilities of life, Yggdrasil or some such. Don’t know how long it went on. Years flowing by in an endless river of maddening possibilities.
And then all of a sudden there were stars raging against a hostile void above gently rolling hills flush with green grass. Grand stone walls tore the ground, a palace of gold and gems and sprawling marble columns. Flame. Everything burning, screams echoing in the night, a colossal horse of timber backlit by the infernos.
Then I was awake in the woods and that was it.
At 1000 hours, the scouting party reported a large-scale thaumic effect had encapsulated the entirety of Hegra Fortress and its garrison, rendering them incapacitated but the fortress unenterable.
Subterranean halls of Hegra Fortress.
Careful review of regional power grid records revealed a massive utilization spike in the days leading up to the task force’s arrival. Suspecting malfunctioning experimental thaumotech, power was abruptly cut to the fortress at which time observation parties reported the simultaneous collapse of Obskurakorp and SS garrisons.
At 1100 hours, coalition forces stormed the fortress, discovering the entire garrison in a comatose state. Thorough exploration revealed that in addition to the known tunnel systems, an extensive subterranean bunker complex had been constructed by the Obskurakorps.
Oral transcription of Sullivan Morrow, American 32nd Thaumic Battalion
Coming into the fortress was something else. All these men on the ground, equipment and paper and boxes scattered everywhere. Like they had all dropped on the spot for bunk fatigue. We’ve seen a lot of weird shit with Obskurakorp’s experiments gone awry over the years, but this was by far the largest.
It got to the point that we ran out of rope to secure them all after we cleared the courtyard, had to start using spare bootstrings just to bind them up.
Command’s first priority in the stacks was a soiree in spooning up the fortifications underground. Standard stuff, blocky concrete hallways and dirt tunnels, except littered with SS on magic shutters and all this thaum-tech pulsing with light in the dim fluorescent bulbs. You’d almost figure it was a normal Obskurakorp base.
Our first indication this wasn’t the case was at the bottom of a dugout shaft. We stumbled on the doors at the bottom of a widened-out tunnel, thick metal surrounded by poured concrete with all sorts of thick wires running into huge holes. They weren’t even trying to hide it either, no illusions or rune traps like in France. Weren’t on the blueprints at all, which is standard fare for Obskurakorp, but I wasn’t about to head in there with three greens and a handful of M1’s.
So I sent a runner up topside. He came back with orders to hold position, so I guess they weren’t the only doors. Or they were just checking to be safe so we could bottle up whatever was inside. 10-15 later, I get a bunch of old files and peep sights sent down with some harried looking mages scrounging around in their packs for scrolls and components. Told I’m leading breach, and that’s about when we figured this was where the Obskurakorp’s raunchy shit was going to be.
So, we all pull out our enchanted frog-stickers, glow charms, good ammo and start thinking up Mother McCrea’s for if we make it out of the meat wagon.
Through those doors was not a bunker. It was a Nazi palace. The floor was carpeted red and gold, antique wood shelves and benches lining the walls. Not a combat fortress at all. There were these opulent paintings on the wall, Van Gogh’s, Pissaro’s, Monet’s, even Picasso’s. We started clearing rooms, finding shelves of books, stages with half-finished rituals, storerooms with gold and precious gem encrusted furniture and jewelry.
Multiple rooms with desks and filing cabinets thrown open, fires burning in drums with comatose Obskurakorp at their feet. One of our translators read out what he could recover. Detailed lists of dates, changing numbers. Took us awhile to figure out they were stock market trends and values from New York.
Why the hell were Obskurakorps in the middle of the Norwegian Wilderness tracking American Stocks? It wasn’t the only thing either. Dates and times and locations. Major battles during the war, typed up and dated years in advance of them happening. What were they doing here?
Couldn’t get bogged down with it when the whole place was still throbbing with magic. We went down a floor, frog stickers primed and a scatter gun at the front.
Second floor, the hallways were still luxurious, but the instincts were off, and my hair was stood on end.
One of our sergeants kicked open a door and there was this grisly scene. Bone and blood and guts in a circle of runes. Awful stench of decay and sulfur hit us like charging sherman’s and made us all gag.
Human ritual sacrifice. We just stood there for a bit staring and gagging. Frozen at the horror of it all.
Deeper in the halls we crawled, the worse it got. More and more taboo rituals, thaumic exchanges in blood and organs. Twisted necromantic horrors scattered across diagrams and glass sealed rooms. Typical for Obskurakorp, but never any less stomach twisting. I’ll be seeing it in my nightmares for ages.
Well the whole time we’re walking, this Norwegian lad Eddie, who was our translator, he’d been looking over the documents we’d managed to salvage. Wasn’t much more than torn and singed scraps really, at least I thought at first. Well, he stops us near the descent to what must have been the last floor and tells me “Sir, these are predictions. Forecasts of the future. But half of them are wrong. I think that’s what they were doing. Trying to predict the future.”
These sick Nazi fucks were sacrificing people, probably locals or Jews, to what? Get rich? Control the outcome of the war? Control fate? Monsters. The mundanity of it all was shocking.
I’m just reliving the camps in Southern Germany all over again. How fucking scared they must have been in the final moments before these devils stole their last breaths. I hope whatever they saw in their last moments, before their occultic abomination went wrong, was horrifying. Almost glad I wasn’t able to stop Richard and Mike from slitting the comatose bastard’s throats.
I thought we were getting pretty close to what I figured was the entry point for the lowest floor, but we had been going for awhile and still hadn’t found it. That’s when somewhere off behind us to the right, there was an explosion, and the whole bunker shook. Shouting, and this blood curdling scream. Didn’t last long but sounded like another party from another angle. Did they set off a trap? Accidentally finish a ritual? Unleash some monstrosity?
Command never told us.
So, there I am, leading a bunch of vets, vets who still looked like kids, straight into the abyssal unknown. We start down these stairs, swallowed one by one by the hungry dark with not a damn clue what was at the bottom. They were steep, harsh compared to the gentle small slopes of the first two flights of stairs between the upper floors. We go slow and careful; jumping at every noise. Already on edge, but now we were downright spooked.
What sort of nightmare was on the bottom floor of this palace of horror?
We came down those stairs into a big square room. Barren, utilitarian, no hint of luxury as our flashlights barely cut the dark. If there were lights or backup lights, they’d been fried in the initial power surge. On the far wall, a set of double doors, and it was quiet other than that. Just our breaths, and the scent of wet dirt and mold.
There were twelve of us, and we lined up on the walls either side of the doors. I give Seargent Richt hand signals, flash grenade, max charm, breach and clear. Counted down, three, two, one.
Grenade pin popped, door opened, in it went. It bounced good, Richt had a supernatural ability for that. The next few seconds were utter chaos. The grenade went off; we surged in and fanned out. Eddie was shouting in German, “Get down, drop your weapons!”
We’re shouting it in English, our charms are at max thaumi-lumiter setting to rub salt in the wound. It’s such a mess of dancing lights and people shouting that I couldn’t hear myself think or see beyond the strobing lights and shadows.Then, all our charms go out, like someone blew on a lit candle. All at once. Chatter, confusion. Then, one by one the flashlights crack and burn out until only mine is left. Everyone shuts up real fast.
My flashlight beam was illuminating a large blocky machine on the far wall. There were a few chairs there, Obskurakorp officers with what almost looked like sonar headphones on. They were slumped over onto some sort of slanted metal desk with mechanical buttons and gauges. Blood trickling on the console from their noses, dripping down on the floor. Only sound other than the buzz of the flashlight and the breath of my men was a continuous “plop plop plop.” Some were closer than others.
I traced the flashlight beam up, this machine was huge, stretching to the ceiling of the room, and there were hundreds of tubes and wires coming out of it. Stood out against the white-grey of the concrete ceiling. Everyone was still quiet, and I could feel’em edging back towards the door. I followed some of the wires. tracking them across the ceiling until they hit a sort of disc in the middle of the central support beam. Coming down from that disc in this peculiar scaffolding, the tubes kept on winding and curling.
Someone called my name, but it was like I was caught in a tide that was calling out to my very essence. Magic maybe? Nah, I think something else. I had to find out what was in there. What was so damn important to them that they refused to surrender, built a whole concrete bunker down here and were predicting the future.
I certainly found out.
My flashlight traced down of its own accord. There, maybe a few feet in front of us, was a sight that still makes me sick to my stomach.
A woman. Or well, sort of. Still not really sure. There was… I’ll hold my tongue out of respect. Lets just say she was a woman. She was half slumped in a kneel, dozens of tubes and wires embedded in skin across her body. Blood, there was a lot of blood dripping from gaping raw wounds around the contact points. The palms had fat tubes coming out of the center, others at the forearms, elbows, shoulders, all coordinating to keep her arms suspended above her head. It was something straight out of a moving picture horror.
She was rail thin. The skin was sallow and sunken, ribs visible through the tattered rags that barely clung to her shoulders. Her head was shaved bald too.
I stood there in the dark, stomach churning. Couldn’t tear my eyes off her. She had these recent welts, old scars, new bruises all over. Surgical marks everywhere, some raw and fresh. I’d seen enough of the German’s to know what that meant. She’d been tortured or beaten, maybe constantly but definitely recently. Maybe they’d even taken flesh out of her? Maybe that’s what they were sacrificing…
On the left forearm, block tattoo numbers like photos we’d seen from the Soviet liberation of Polish camps. I felt rage. Hot fury crawling up my neck. I wanted to beat someone, wanted to drag one of those comatose bastards from an upper floor and force them to wake up and see what they’d done. Watch her while we broke every one of the bastard’s limbs.
No time for that, still needed to extract and report back. Thought she might be dead. She was so still and there was so much blood. Was about to turn around and tell one of the younger guys to book it back topside.
Then, she moved her head, looking up slowly. Past me. Hazel eyes, faded and dull and washed out. She was blind. Blind and looking into nothing. No, looking straight at Eddie, or through him with those sightless eyes.
Don’t know how long she stared, how long we sat there frozen as she gazed through our Translator. It felt like an eternal stalemate where neither side knew what the other was going to do.
She opened her mouth, and this rattling gasp of air came out that shook her whole body. I raised my weapon on instinct, in case she was about to try to vaporize us all with some sort of spell. In the clearest, most authoritative voice she spoke. She spoke so loud that it rattled in my bones. No, not spoke, she commanded.
“Cut them out. Cut them all out.”
At 1607 on May 14th, a messenger from one of the advanced exploratory expeditions returned to the surface and notified operational command of the discovery of PTE-001-Oracle of the End. A detachment of field surgeons was deployed into the fortress at which point PTE-001 was extracted from an eigenmachine of unknown purpose. Both surgical personnel and the exploratory expedition reported initial healing of the entity’s wounds at an abnormally rapid pace once extracted from the eigenmachine.
Member Organization Petitions
PTE-001 was extracted from Hegra Fortress to Trondheim. It was then extracted by air to Oslo under heavy guard to receive intensive medical care, prepare the entity for interrogation to determine the extent of its anomalous properties and begin its Threat Assessment. During transport, the entity did not communicate with AOC personnel but was still cooperative.
Before the determination council could interrogate PTE-001, a petition from a registered, member corpo-religious organization, the Cult of the Nornir, was submitted to block extradition and full threat designation.
Threat Assessment Negation Petition 
Concerned Member Organization: Cult of the Nornir
Filing Member: Edvard Hägglund (4th Norwegian Thaumic Division, Speaker), Ella Haugen (CEO, Speaker).
Purpose: Avoidance of Threat Assignment and Liquidation Protocols
Entity Concerned: PTE-001-Oracle at the End
Asset Condition: Severe malnutrition and injury from long term abuse.
Argument Against Assessment: PTE-001 represents a protected person as laid out by coalition guidelines for post-war liquidation activity signed at the Malta Conference of 1945. She is a Type-Black entity of substantial cultural, thaumic, and historical significance to Norse traditions and beliefs in religious and mythological contexts. Based on observed contextual evidence from Obskurakorp activity, we of the Nornir are certain that PTE-001 is a Norn, the last surviving Norn. This certainty has arisen from her predictive capacities, which the Obskurakorps obviously took advantage of with new experimental thaumic-technology that enabled them to hijack PTE-001’s divine properties to facilitate their attempts to manipulate material wealth outcomes and the strategic and tactical course of the war with the Allies and the AOC.
This conclusion is further supported by the fact that on 12th July 1940, Obskurakorp forces of Hegra Fortress utilized thaumic rituals to disrupt the divine mists in the deep mountains near the Swedish border to access the roots of Yggdrisil and the Well of Urd in a pocket space. Resistance forces attempted to intervene but failed with massive casualties. Obskurkorps mages stormed the Hall of the Norns and killed all but PTE-001 who they captured for inhuman and cruel purposes. When resistance units recreated the access avenues, the hall was destroyed, and the roots of Yggdrisil were partially burned. At this point the Cult of the Nornir were unable to track or locate our namesake until PTE-001 was rediscovered in Hegra Fortress on the 14th of May this year.
It is clear PTE-001 has been demonstrably tortured and subjected to extreme dehumanizing conditions at the hands of the Nazi Obskurakorps and must be allowed the dignity and grace to recover in a place and context of significant worship and compassion.
Beyond PTE-001’s significance to our organization, she is Culturally important to the religious and mythological history of the Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic, Faroese and Swedish peoples. She represents one of the final remaining mythological links to the spiritual traditions of our ancestors. She likely possesses intimate knowledge of mythological and cultural underpinnings which defined the day to day lives of our ancient predecessors. Her loss would impair our people’s ability to fully repair the damage done to the Norse peoples by Christian syncretization, putting the full body of our history, and any potentially beneficial anomalous locations or relics, forever out of our reach.
In addition to cultural, historical, and mythological significance, PTE-001 could prove to be an economic, political, and strategic boon for the GOC. Her passive and extorted predictions while in German captivity led to the substantial personal enrichment of Nazi officials. In volume, they utilized her predictive capacity to alter troop movements, offensive and defensive thrusts to increase their successes, ultimately falling to the biases of German High command in interpretation of her words.
In summary: If treated with the care and reverence she deserves, we believe that PTE-001 will be a fundamentally transformative asset to the elimination of future hostile threats to humanity and the growth of the AOC. We therefore petition the larger governing council and the Threat Assessment Committee to return PTE-001 to the Cult of the Nornir with obvious stipulations for oversight.
Petition Issues: Obskurakorp records on PTE-001’s origins were fragmented and heavily damaged, providing little coherent insight or corroboration to the Cult’s assertions. Scouring of broader German records indicate it was transported from processing points in Southeast Europe to a concentration camp, at which point it was identified and moved from the same concentration camp where it had been documented as Roma. PTE-001’s appearance is more suggestive of Mediterranean origin, though the possibility of it escaping capture and fleeing south does not rule out a potentially contentious Vanir origin and the possibility of shapeshifting.9
The Cult was notified of these factors in the official AOC response. The subsequent counter-response was insistent that the Norns have many potential origins and shapes, sometimes disguising themselves as foreign divinities or mortals to avoid scrutiny. Furthermore, the Cult suggested that the Nornir are shy and prefer to be undisturbed by mortal petitioners and even the Aesir. The Cult suggested that PTE-001’s appearance may in fact be evidence of this avoidance tactic, thereby suggesting she may have disguised herself as a member of the Moirai10 or another blind prescient entity, such as Tiresias, when she initially escaped Obskurakorp capture.
Despite the Cult’s assertions, the fact remains that the majority of recovered documentation from Hegra Fortress are of divination, prophetic overtures, and predictions for events of financial, political, and strategic concern that either did not occur or were incorrect. Given the difficult to confirm nature of prescience, these miscast fortunes, and the unclear history of the entity, the logical presumptions of the Cult of the Nornir’s petition cannot be properly validated or rejected at the time of this evaluation.
Given PTE-001’s state at the time of submission, confirmation of the Cult’s arguments are impossible until the entity has recovered sufficiently. The Cult of the Nornir was informed of this fact and were insistent that its recovery would be accelerated in their care. This request was denied in light of the severity of its condition and will continue to be denied until proof of its beneficial nature can be demonstrated. Contrary to the Cult’s protests this is a safeguard measure put in place after interference from member organizations with threat entities in the Burma theater.
In the intervening period, AOC technicians have assessed the eigenmachine discovered in Hegra Fortress and determined that it was designed for invasive insertion into PTE-001 and has been tuned to its biothaumic signature. Efforts will promptly begin to deconstruct the device for further study.
Following the initial petition response, and the official founding of the GOC in tandem with the United Nations, the Cult of the Nornir submitted a second petition reasserting PTE-001’s significance and subsequently suggested a future project proposal submission for the creation of a large-scale predictive matrix to enhance PTE-001’s unconfirmed properties.
The Cult of the Nornir were subsequently reminded that only one open petition per member organization per entity was allowed at a time.
Addendum 3: Four Month Medical Evaluation
On September 14th, 1945, after four months in a secluded ward of Oslo University Hospital under heavy observation, AOC medical staff were required to provide an up-to-date medical evaluation of PTE-001 for record keeping purposes as a prelude to beneficial asset assessment in order to resolve the Cult of the Nornir’s pending petition.
Patient Name: Unknown
Patient Identifier: ████████-████
Admittance Date: May 17th, 1945.
Height: 1.79 meters
Weight at Admittance: 36.3 kg
Current Weight: 72.5 kg
Oslo University Hospital Central Wing.
Condition Upon Admittance: Patient arrived in Oslo on the 15th of May, 1945 by air transport in critical condition. She was in and out of consciousness, relatively unresponsive to initial cognitive assessments on landing, skin was pale and clammy. Patient had sustained lacerations to more than 45% of her body, including deep surgical gashes which exposed bone and nervous tissue. Said wounds had been hastily stitched up with field grade surgical sutures which were insufficient for long term healing. Multiple fractures and complete bone breaks were present in limbs and torso. Patient was regularly coughing up and excreting blood, indicating severe internal bleeding and trauma. She was severely underweight and suffering from catastrophic malnutrition. Initial prognosis was poor and admitting nurses and physicians were extremely skeptical about short term survival.
Physical Description: Patient is an unusually tall female individual with strong Mediterranean features and moderately tanned skin. There were initially some questions raised about sex identity due to the presence of certain anatomical features, but otherwise, is anatomically and mentally a woman in her thirties.11 Was initially bald upon admission. With proper nutrition, hair has shifted to brown with natural red highlights. Patient’s eyes are hazel with strong sunburst affectations that are washed out. Patient was admitted with substantial scarring across large parts of the torso and limbs. Other identifying features include a natural halo around her skin, producing a glowing effect noticeable in dimly lit or dark environments. Patient has not shapeshifted during residence.
Medical History: Familial history unknown. Subject is completely blind in both eyes as measured by ophthalmometer, opthalmoscope and retinoscope, and tonometer. Complete lack of response in the pupils to light stimulation. Hallmarks of congenital disease. When pressed about familial history, she was non-responsive. Has supernatural wound-healing capacities, minor lacerations and bruises disappeared within minutes after beginning to receive proper nutrition, major lacerations, broken bones and torn ligaments healed within days. Several wounds of a mortal nature resolved in under two weeks, including severe internal trauma and bleeding. Within three months all scar tissue was healed and no longer visible or detectable. She is prone to occasional nose-bleeds, vomiting fits, and seizures.
Mental State: Patient is currently responsive and aware of mealtimes and day/night cycles. Initially, patient communicated through tapping simple pattern responses to indicate a need to use the restroom, when she was experiencing pain or when she was hungry. Exemplifies frequent cravings for milk mixed with chocolate powder. Positive responses and emotional engagement with nurses and physicians that are gentle during examinations and bring her chocolate milk, sweets, or savory foods. She has demonstrated some capacity for speech, using simple words to get staff attention, but only when its apparent tapping is not working. Strong fear response to guards in uniform. Mentally and socially presents as a woman. According to American psychologists attending to patients, subject may be a sexual deviant and should be monitored closely.
During attempts by medical personnel to encourage social engagement, we encountered persistent non-responsiveness and silence even when provided aforementioned items. Some signs present that the patient actively ignores staff. She either refuses to engage with or doesn’t understand attempts to administer cognitive tests and intelligence quota measurements. May be suffering pronounced delusions about gender and sex. Combined with a tendency to descend into dissociative episodes mid action, sudden onsets of aggressive behavior, emotional instability, and rapid descent into screaming and even weeping, it’s highly likely that the patient is afflicted with a form of insanity or hysteria and is likely an invalid incapable of taking care of herself. Whether this state has come about because of her time in German captivity or was present beforehand is not clear.
Supporting Incidents: This list is nonexhaustive but exemplary of many individual incidents across PTE-001’s time in AOC medical care.
Incident 1: Nurse Oglethorpe attempted to engage patient in conversation, addressing her by her number identifier. Patient became visibly agitated and pressed her hands over her ears. Oglethorpe continued to attempt to get the patient’s attention using her number identifier. Patient descended into hysterics and had to be sedated.
Incident 2: Dr. Burnhart attempted to engage the patient in an intelligence quota examination. Patient was handed several tactile puzzles built specifically for the blind. Patient’s nose began to bleed less than a minute into the test; her hands visibly began to shake. After several minutes of verbal encouragement, patient began weeping, and threw pieces of the puzzle indiscriminately, seemingly without provocation, striking a nurse and Dr. Burnhart. Patient had to be sedated.
Incident 3: Patient was given a glass of chocolate milk in the hopes that this gesture would make her more cooperative for cognitive testing. Dr. Gearing administered the exam given previous positive responses by the subject. Initially subject was responsive and engaging with the opening test of fitting objects through shaped holes. The exam broke down when she abruptly dropped an irregularly shaped pyramidal object and clutched her head while rocking back and forth. Dr. Gearing attempted to deescalate what appeared to be the onset of an episode when the patient began convulsing, screaming, and then devolved into projectile vomiting. Patient was only able to be sedated after several nurses and doctors managed to crawl to her bed after repeatedly slipping and falling in pools of vomit. The room had to be cleaned and sterilized. Patient refused to engage with the test further after she awakened.
Incident 4: Nurse Hesteul, one of the subject’s favored staff, left her a large amount of chocolate after a particularly difficult series of attempted tests and engagements. At some point in-between the nurse’s departure and the arrival of the attending physician, another nurse overheard two physicians and a nurse discussing the patient with little discretion for their proximity to her room. Dr. Lugen, the attending physician, arrived five minutes later and found the patient curled into a ball in a melted puddle of chocolate and other unidentified fluids. The walls of the room were smeared with chocolate lettered text reading “I am not insane. I want to go home. I want my [Unintelligible]. STOP CALLING ME INSANE. I’M NOT A MAN. I’M NOT MAD.”
Despite the patient’s full physical recovery, we have retained her in the critical isolation wards. It is our opinion as physicians that the patient should be moved to an asylum where she can be closely monitored and kept away from normal society for the good of her health.
AOC medical staff forwarded the evaluation report to the Threat Assessment Committee. The Committee, initially, did not review the report or forward it to interested parties due to ongoing post-war spikes in threat assessment volume. It was another two weeks before the Committee returned to the matter. On September 28th, 1945, the report was finally reviewed and forwarded to all parties of interest.
Both the contents of the report and its delay prompted immediate outrage and submission of multiple rights violation reports and medical misconduct petitions from the Cult of the Nornir. They pointed to a number of precedents and historical cases12 of PTE-001’s physiological responses and behavior being consistent with common manifestations of prescience, precognition and sight affliction. They asserted that the constant attempts to get the entity to engage socially, participate in cognition tests and measure its intelligence were demeaning, humiliating and degrading. The Cult argued that the liberal use of sedation employed by AOC medical staff exacerbated the entity’s state of elevated distress.
After review of both the cited cases and PTE-001’s medical documentation, the AOC Rights Oversight Body partially agreed with the Cult of the Nornir on the front that the entity was exhibiting emotional and physiological hallmarks of prescience. The Body disagreed with the notion that the patient’s rights were being abused or that there was ongoing medical misconduct, given the available conduct reflected best practices of standard care at the time.
The Rights Oversight Body instructed both medical personnel and the Threat Assessment Committees that PTE-001 must be granted immediate relief in the form of a delegation from the Cult of the Nornir being allowed 24-hour access to it to ensure treatment was conducive to the best care for individuals with precognition. At the same time, the Cult of the Nornir was denied the ability to move PTE-001 to a facility under their care.
The Threat Assessment Committee acquiesced to these requirements but reasserted that proper assessment was still needed to evaluate the entity’s anomalous properties. They also asserted that medical case history and historical precedent alone was insufficient to meet the burden of proof required for determination of prescience.
Addendum 4: Removal of SCP-001 From GOC Medical Care
Abuse Report and Immediate Extraction Petition
Summary: The following is a comprehensive report consisting of firsthand oral testimonies from ‘speakers’ of the Cult of the Nornir and select AOC medical personnel in regard to the treatment of PTE-001 prior to the arrival of the Cult of the Nornir at Oslo University Hospital on September 29th, 1945, and the observed instances of abuse and neglect discovered in the following weeks.
Evidence of Mistreatment and Neglect:
Oslo University Hospital from afar.
On September 29th, 1945, the Cult of the Nornir’s delegation arrived in Oslo and was checked into a local hotel for the duration of their observation period. Speaker Edvard Hägglund,13 who was present for the discovery and liberation of PTE-001 from Obskurakorp control, took a streetcar to Oslo University Hospital to make an initial assessment of PTE-001’s condition and establish a baseline for her current treatment. Reports have been translated from Norwegian for ease of reading, potentially removing period and region specific contextual language intricacies and terminology.
Internal Firsthand Observation Report 1: Edvard Hägglund, September 29th, 1945.
My arrival at Oslo University Hospital was unremarkable and yet remarkably unwelcome in the eyes of AOC medical staff. The coalition had commandeered a substantial section of the Hospital in the days following capitulation and moved many patients suffering from anomalous or Obskurakorp thaumic afflictions to our mostly untouched capital. It’s my understanding that the Americans, as strange as it is to speak of the people of my country of birth as such, are airlifting pacific combatants suffering from Japanese thaumic weapons to European AOC wards due to their vastly more informed experiences.
I cannot blame medical staff for resenting the presence of an eccentric occultist from an obscure member organization in their halls. The horrors and afflictions they must have seen struck upon soldiers by men described like me in my tunics, cloaks and glowing runes must have been many. Yet the look from the secretary could have boiled ice.
I presented my badge and stated my purpose, and well, that too did not improve things. I almost missed her little sneer of disgust as I was checking my bags. She pointed towards a pair of double doors and said, “No magic while you’re here. If the staff suspect you’re trying, you’ll be thrown out in the snow.”
With that pleasant introduction out of the way, I entered the wards proper. It was cramped, smelled of sweat, ash, ozone, and blood. Dozens of people on cots lining the hallways. They were clearly overwhelmed with long-term cases of thaumic injury or worse.
The building was a maze of hallways and stairwells, some of which did not sensibly connect to others in places they should. I suspect there were some spatial magics being used to expand this wing of the hospital. It’s what I would do.
The medical staff I encountered were friendly enough until they saw me in full. Their shift to borderline hostile in cold, short, and severe exchanges was sharp and dramatic. In their eyes I might as well have been obskurakorp.
It took the better part of half an hour to find the critical isolation wards. I asked a nurse at a service desk in the area after the Seeress, and they pointed me down a side corridor and gave me a room number after a quite brief grimace.
She came out from behind the desk and gave me her name, Moen. Nurse Moen had to unlock the door of the room they were keeping The High Seeress in, apologizing to me the whole way.
“The patient can’t be allowed to wander the halls, she tried to make an escape attempt a few weeks ago, so we’ve been monitoring her closely since.”
My expectations were already low given the rather pronounced anti-occult disposition of the medical personnel, but nothing could have prepared me for what I found.
Stepping in was an exercise in horror. Dried and half-chipped orange vomit flakes clung to the tile floors on the edges of the room. The walls were stained with brown lettering of dried chocolate and something else. Small pools of dark standing liquid in one corner of unspeakable content. The smell was terrible; I had to use the collar of my tunic just to breathe properly. It was immediately clear that thorough cleaning and sterilization had absolutely not occurred like the reports said. In fact it seemed after the last incident they had had a janitor come in, mop up the vomit, at best maybe do some light scrubbing of the walls, then they’d locked the Seeress inside.
Then there was Name Unspoken. She huddled in one corner of the room, shaking violently. She was staring in the general direction of the doorway in which I and the nurse stood. The room wasn’t large, so I could see her clearly. Dried blood polluted her nostrils and upper lip. She wore a torn and fraying hospital gown that hadn’t been washed or changed in weeks. The bed towards the right side of the room was stained red and yellow and brown, the sheets having apparently never been changed or put through laundry. She was filthy, caked in dust, oily grime, and what might be dried chocolate or something else. There was dried food, vomit, and matted blood clumping in her hair.
I stood there for a long moment in utter disbelief and disgust. How could this happen? How could anyone let a fellow human wallow in filth to this degree for Mimir knows how long.
In a fit of fury, I grabbed the wrist of Nurse Moen and pulled her out into the hallway. She protested but cowered beneath the anger in my eyes. I raised my voice.
“How long has she been locked in there?”
“Not more than a week. I think.”
“You think? You think? Did you look in there and see that room, see her? When was she last bathed? When were her sheets last changed? Her gown? Are you even fucking feeding her?”
“I-I-I don’t know. There’s so much going on, so many other patients and—”
I shook her, cutting off her excuses.
“You expect me to believe you have unintentionally neglected a patient of high importance for weeks? That not a single person has bothered to make a note of how squalid that room is and do something about it?”
I released her and stood there glowering at her. She stood awkwardly, shoulders slumped, rubbing her wrist, and avoiding my gaze.
“Go get me fresh bedding, fresh gowns and get someone to give her a proper bath.” I paused, considering how they might actually manage to make a mess of that as well.
“No, actually, don’t on that last one. It’s clear that none of you can be trusted to treat a patient with the dignity she deserves.”
She stood there, frozen like an elk caught in a spotlight.
“I didn’t know.”
“Hel’s frigid winds you didn’t. Let me see your other patients, right now.”
For a moment she seemed torn by my dual instructions, unsure which to tackle first. Eventually she sheepishly shuffled over to another door and opened it. Room to room we walked through and I looked over the other patients. I would never violate medical privacy like this normally, but if this was systemic, I had to know. There were signs of neglect, bedsores, some poor hygiene events, just enough for plausible deniability of being overwhelmed. But nothing, nothing like with the Seeress.
“This is unconscionable.”
“I didn’t know,” she repeated.
“It’s your responsibility to know! Where’s the nearest payphone?”
She pointed down the hall, not far away.
“Good, now, you had better go and get the linens and everything we’ll need to bathe her before I start making calls that will end your career.”
She scurried off mumbling “I didn’t know.”
I closed the door of the room, and immediately made for the payphone, refusing to give them time to cover up this unconscionable abuse.
Ella picked up the phone after two rings once the operator and hotel desk put me through. Initially I had been against her making the trip with us, so she could stay atop any bureaucratic wrinkles the Threat Assessment Council might throw our way, but now I was quite relieved she was along. I did not want to be the decision maker for what came next. I was already considering burning every bridge.
“This is Ella?”
“Ella it’s Edvard. The situation is far worse than we anticipated. Bring everyone and the cameras and hurry. I am going to keep them from covering it up.”
“We will be there within the hour.” The phone clicked and I hung up heading back to the room.
By then Moen had returned pushing a fresh cot, sheets, and a stack of gowns. Her haul of fresh garments had drawn the attention of a few other nurses who were trailing at a slight distance. They saw me and well the looks on their faces said everything I needed to know about who was responsible for this.
I commanded Moen to wait in the hallway and stepped into the room after grabbing the clipboard and its chart out of its metal holder next to the door. The Seeress was still huddled in the corner, and she shrunk further into it upon the hinges of the door squeaking.
I approached slowly, shielding my nose from the stench with a washcloth I’d snatched from Moen’s cot. Before I could reach her there was a dramatic change in her body language, her spine straightening up.
“Child of the silicon Cult, I know your steps,” she said aloud, her voice nearly a boom that filled the whole room.
It caught me off-guard, stopping me in my tracks. It wasn’t hard to see she was caught in the throes of destiny.
“You were there in the abyss.”
“Nameless One, you must forgive me for us meeting like this again. Did they tell you we were coming?” I kneeled next to her, taking in the whole of her grime covered shape.
A simple shake of her head and then in a tiny soft voice she spoke.
“I have been alone with the ticking hours in the rise and fall of the autumn sun for ten turns. Only the clink of metal food trays with expired bread, undercooked chicken and cold greens of souring taste have cleaved the abyss and with great inconsistency. Each time with the prick of a sharpened point with the roughness of a bull in a porcelain vault.”
She rolled up a sleeve of the tattered gown to reveal the red welts on her skin, already fading.
“Always followed by the dulled, listless senses robbed of dreams and consciousness. They think me mad for bouts of commandment by the threads of fate and sight ever spiraling in the midst of tasks triggering flights of history and future unwound.”
She shivered and drooped, purple bags under sightless eyes and she looked for a moment three or four times her age. It was as if all the weight of what she had seen caught up to her.
“I saw your coming, but you came far later than expected.”
Felt a sharp pang in my chest. The Last Norn looked up past me with hope and deep sadness in those sunburst eyes. I knew that this indignity could not go unanswered. There would be hel to pay, there had to be.
“We are here now. Your clergy and speakers are on the way, and we are going to make sure this can’t happen again. You just need to wait a little longer while I go meet them, and then we will get you cleaned up and moved to better accommodations.”
I began to stand again, feeling as though I should ask her many more questions but soon everything would be made clear. She grabbed my wrist before I could fully stand and move back to the door. It was then I saw the liquid trickling down her leg, pooling at her feet as she sat in it. There were open sores on the underside of her legs, from the floor or from the rotten bedding, wasn’t sure. This was an older room and there was no bathroom attached like in the newer wards.
They had locked her in here, forgotten her for more than a week except for meals, where she couldn’t access a bathroom. Couldn’t bathe or clean herself.
“Please do not leave me alone with them.” Her voice shook like the earth when artillery shells were screaming from the sky.
I sat back down next to her.
“Okay. I won’t go anywhere.”
Following the initial assessment of PTE-001’s condition by Speaker Edvard, the Cult of the Nornir’s entourage arrived at Oslo University Hospital and proceeded to document the abysmally unsanitary conditions of its room, the lack of clean clothing and bedding, and the profound neglect of regular bathing and other hygienic practices. Photos have been redacted from this more accessible document due to the extreme nature of their contents. They are available to higher clearance personnel upon request.
PTE-001 was taken by Ella Haugen to a room in a different ward with more modern accommodations, including a private bath. Several nurses attempted to stop the entourage from removing the Seeress from her current quarters. They were ignored or instructed to move out of the way by members of the Cult entourage. By this point, several guards had arrived, were brought up to speed, and elected to assist the Cult in preventing medical personnel obstruction. They returned to their normal posts after PTE-001 had been successfully moved.
Further interference occurred while Speaker Ella was hand-bathing PTE-001. A physician entered the room and then the private bath, invading the patient’s privacy and yelling at Speaker Ella. He asserted that she had no authority to move a patient and interfere with ongoing treatment. Speaker Edvard overheard the commotion and entered the room to escort Dr. Fisker out at which time he was informed of the full context of the situation.14 Dr. Fisker was appalled, and approved the room transfer as a temporary measure to allow the Cult to secure movement of PTE-001 from the hospital into monitored organizational care.
While this was occurring, PTE-001’s chart and schedule were reviewed by other members of the entourage. In the meantime, the photo evidence was developed in a dark room studio on the other side of Oslo. It became clear that the Seeress was scheduled for three meals daily, was supposed to be visited by a physician at least once a day, bathed every other day, have bathroom visits logged, and be allowed recreational and monitored socialization. In the prior two weeks, she instead had only 22 meals logged, compared to the required 42. No baths were logged, no bathroom visits, and she had not been seen by a physician in eleven days and had not been granted recreational time in weeks.
At this time the Cult identified ten nurses who were assigned to the ward and three regular physicians. Nurse Moen, Nurse Hesteul, and Dr. Lugen approached the entourage when it became clear that there was ongoing investigation. Members of the Cult entourage were shown patients in other rooms within the ward confirming that PTE-001’s situation was unique. They then gave individual testimony on the behavior of other nurses.
Nurse Hesteul
A few of us were here when the patient was initially brought in for treatment, but not all the nurses reviewed her reasons for entry. It’s very clear in her chart that she was bald at the time because she had been in Obskurakorp imprisonment and was so malnourished that her hair had all fallen out. But I never saw Oglethorpe or Nieminen or Hilda look at her chart other than to skim details at the beginning. They saw the shaved head, that she was a special condition patient, had some anatomic abnormalities and just ran with rumors and conclusions. Thought she was a collaborator or some sort of voluntary Nazi occultic experiment.
They were rough with her, grabbed her arms hard here and here. I walked in on them verbally belittling the poor woman for needing to use the restroom or asking for pain medication. The ward was so busy that we were all swamped taking care of patients that we started rotating between them less frequently.
When I had her, I’d bring her sweets or chocolate milk when she asked, but when I tried to change her sheets or bring her clothes a situation would start up elsewhere in Oglethorpe or Nieminen or Hilda’s patients and they’d need help, and I’d have to go running. By the time that was done I was exhausted, or my shift was ending, and I never got back around to her. I thought the nurses on the next shift change would attend to her.
Half the time I had her, when I came into the room she was sedated, or barely awake like she’d been drugged. When she was awake, she was sharp and aware, but quiet and withdrawn. About a month before now, she started being very scared whenever I’d walk in before she heard my voice.
I tried to report it, write up what was happening, but nothing ever came down from it. Then I stopped getting her on my schedule altogether. I didn’t think about it much till now, but it seems deliberate.
Nurse Moen
I was rotated into the ward about two weeks ago and she was a patient and room on the list, but I never got her. Oglethorpe pulled me aside after asking a few of the other nurses and one of the doctors about her. Said she was a volatile patient, insane, suffering from hysteria, and delusions. She said that the more experienced nurses were assigned to handle her until she was transferred to a mental facility. Shouldn’t worry about her. Well, Hilda is the senior charge nurse, and she handles all the schedules and makes sure everything gets logged.
About two weeks ago I started noticing her room was getting fewer logged visits for her normal schedule. I thought we were just packed, and Hilda was forgetting to log it. Then I also started noticing noises coming from that room, bangs on the door, weeping, screaming and I started to get concerned and asked Oglethorpe about it. Well, she just said that the patient was having an episode and that she’d take care of it. She’d go walk off, find Hilda or Nieminen and go in there with a tray of food and it would stop.
I noticed a small discrepancy in our medication inventory a few days ago, we’d gone through more sedatives than we should have, but I didn’t think much of it until today. I’m just horrified. This is not what we’re about.
Dr. Lugen
PTE-001 was an odd patient. 50% of the time she was cooperative, alert, and highly aware. The rest of the time it was like she was living in an entirely different world and registered nothing else. Magic and the occult is disturbing, especially after what I’ve seen it do to people. But she never seemed like one of those.
I’d dare to say she was in good spirits after she got here, and her progress was incredible. Her recovery was astounding in the first month she was here, mentally and physically. But then about a month in, she started declining. She was having episodes of aggressive behavior, shouting, weeping. She started withdrawing from me socially during evaluations and tests. Had pronounced nose bleeds, vomiting, and these really pronounced disconnects from reality.
I caught Oglethorpe and Hilda in the hallways several times, talking about her in a way that I would see the Germans talk about Jews or the French and English talk about the Roma. Subhuman, unstable, insane and suffering from hysteria. Obsession with the anatomic abnormality, insisting she had to be a man despite everything else suggesting otherwise.
They were very insistent she was a drain on hospital resources. Sometimes it was right outside the patient’s door. I reprimanded them and they stopped doing it, but they probably just moved it elsewhere or continued when I wasn’t around. PTE-001’s condition just kept getting worse from there and I should have put the pieces together. But there were so many patients, and then I stopped getting her during rounds. I didn’t realize until today that none of us had her on our rounds and it had been that way for nearly two weeks.
I thought they had moved her to an asylum after we wrote up her medical summary. I was wrong.
Deeming current circumstances to be unacceptable, Ella Haugen arranged, with the help of Dr. Lugen and Dr. Fisker, for PTE-001 to be immediately discharged and placed in the Cult of the Nornir’s monitored care on September 30th, 1945. Complaint petitions of medical abuse, medical neglect, and rights violations were submitted with the AOC Threat Assessment Committee, the Rights Oversight Body, and the AOC Medical Corps. The Cult’s entourage remained in Oslo for another month while awaiting higher body decisions.
In the face of overwhelming evidence, on October 23rd, 1945, the Rights Oversight Body found that PTE-001 had been subject to both medical abuse and neglect. They demanded explanations and investigations from both the Threat Assessment Committee and the Medical Corps and officialized the transfer of PTE-001 into custody of the Cult of the Nornir with oversight from the Threat Assessment Committee.
Due to the formation of the United Nations and the subsequent large-scale structural overhaul resulting in the formation of the GOC, explanations from the Threat Assessment Committee and Medical corps were never submitted. No substantial investigations were ever conducted and implicated medical personnel were either transferred or reassigned to different departments within Oslo University Hospital.
Addendum 5: Beneficial Asset Assessment BAA-001
Assessment of Beneficial Properties of PTE-001-Oracle of the End
Entity of Concern: PTE-001
Stated Beneficial Capacity: Precognition/Prescience
Evaluating Body: Threat Assessment Committee
Organizer: Colonel S. Bowe of Pentagram
Sponsoring Organization: Cult of the Nornir
Foreword: On December 25th , 1946, a little less than two months after PTE-001’s transfer to the Cult of the Nornir’s care, the sponsoring organization filed a Beneficial Properties Assessment motion asserting that the entity of interest had recovered sufficiently and was ready for proper assessment. The Committee reviewed the documentation, approved it and set an evaluation date for January 2nd, 1946. The following document is a composite of PTE-001’s interrogation by the Committee, its predictions, and the subsequent outcomes of said predictions.
<Begin Audio Log>
The recording takes place in a meeting chamber with a raised dais containing twelve seats and a single table for the assessment council at the back of the room. The GOC logo is on the wall behind them. The assessment council, with the exception of Colonel S. Bowe, are anonymized by thaumaturgic shadows. In the middle of the room is a table with seven seats which are occupied by PTE-001 and the Cult of the Nornir delegation. Behind them are multiple rows of empty courtroom style pews. People talking at a low volume can be heard.
PTE-001 is in a simple dress and is silent but visibly nervous. She is holding a 2-meter-tall staff in one hand that leans against the table. It is wood gilded and coated with gold and silver. The top has been shaped into a lyre and is encrusted with precious gems. The staff was recovered from Hegra Fortress shortly after PTE-001’s discovery and confiscated by the Cult of the Nornir as a religious artifact.
A gavel bangs close to one of the microphones, and the low chatter in the room ceases.
Colonel Bowe: This first meeting of the GOC Threat Assessment Committee will be brought to order.
A brief pause of silence.
Colonel Bowe: Very good.
[Extraneous material regarding GOC standard protocol, introductions removed for brevity.]
Colonel Bowe: The stated purpose of this motion is to evaluate threat entities for beneficial characteristics that can be used to aid the GOC’s greater mission of identifying and removing threats to mundane humankind. As this is the first such evaluation we are executing under the GOC charter, the Threat Assessment Committee has come to agreement that we will also be doing a Threat evaluation in addition to the previously submitted motion.
Speaker Ella: This is outrageous! You cann—
Colonel Bowe: Silence! The Cult of the Nornir are here as observers. You may interject only when called upon to do so or if the subject is visibly incapable of doing so themselves. This is not a court of law; this is a tribunal to evaluate a threat to humanity and will be treated as such. Further outbursts will result in your removal.
Several seconds of shuffling papers.
Colonel Bowe: Now then, it is clear in the last year that PTE-001 has been subject to exorbitant circumstances. To ensure that our assessment is as accurate and fair as possible, PTE-001 do you feel able to be evaluated properly through a Threat and Beneficial Assessments today?
PTE-001 flinches and sags in its chair. It speaks, but the words are unintelligible.
Unnamed Committee Member: Please speak into the microphone PTE-001.
A shaky breath is picked up by the microphone. PTE-001 speaks softly with a tremble in its voice.
PTE-001: Yes, I am lucid and capable of presenting myself before this strange gathering of self-proclaimed judges, jury and executioners.
Several seconds of whispers.
Speaker Edvard places his hand on PTE-001’s shoulder. Colonel Bowe is smiling.
Colonel Bowe: You understand that at this time, your sponsors within the Cult of the Nornir are asserting that you are the last living Norn, shaper of mens fates, and keeper of the record of all lives?
PTE-001: Yes.
Colonel Bowe: Good, with these basic understandings out of the way, let’s begin. The assessment will be split into two parts, first we will begin with questions to examine the entity’s history, especially in the context of this claim that she’s a Norn. In the second portion we will examine any occult abilities the entity might possess. All responses will be monitored with detection thaumaturgy which will tell us if PTE-001 is attempting to deceive the Committee or not. Any deception will be heavily weighted in assessment outcomes.
PTE-001 looks down at the table to avoid eye contact with Colonel Bowe. Its hands continue to shake.
Colonel Bowe: PTE-001, what was your occupation prior to your internment with the Obskurakorps?
PTE-001 visibly flinches again and grips the staff tighter. Speaker Edvard and Speaker Ella briefly look at each other.
PTE-001: With a pronounced tremor. An old hermit staring at the sky and endless swirls of stars and beauty.
PTE-001’s voice breaks and she pauses. Heavy breaths can be heard on the microphone. Speaker Ella says something to it that is not picked up by the microphone. The entity’s shaking lessens.
PTE-001: Lost in the threads of time and remembrance in an ancient place of forest and streams yet untouched by modern machinations. In simpler terms, I was a blind hermit living in mountain woods. Sometimes a fortune teller for young lovers and small children who came up to my cabin from the villages. It depended on the person who stepped into my abode.
Colonel Bowe looks down at the papers on the podium and stops smiling.
Colonel Bowe: So, would you say you were a part of an occultic organization prior to your capture?
PTE-001 tilts its head.
PTE-001: Less shakily than before. No. Such things have not been appealing to me for a very long time.
Colonel Bowe: Strange, one would think a Norn as you are claimed to be, would be associated with a coven of sisters. Is this not the case?
PTE-001 is still for several seconds before slowly tilting its head.
PTE-001: I was with a coven of sisters of many natures, of fate, of thread and weave of man’s inspiration and make and yet not all the same. Tied and bound to the strands of destiny in ways both our own and yet not.
Colonel Bowe: So you were with the Norns? Why did you tell the committee you weren’t with an occultic organization?
PTE-001: They went by many names, but they were never a structured hierarchy of grand sprawl as mortals weave in modern days.
Colonel Bowe pinches the bridge of his nose.
Colonel Bowe: I’m certain that both my peers on the Committee and the Cult of the Nornir are aware that the Norns are very well characterized as beautiful women. If you would all please turn in your folders to the medical documentation, and read the report submitted by the staff at Oslo University Hospital.
Several minutes of pages rustling and silence as all parties read the indicated documents. Cult of the Nornir representatives become visibly agitated.
Colonel Bowe: Now, I don’t think anyone in this room will contest that PTE-001 is certainly beautiful. However; here in this medical report it indicates that PTE-001 possesses atypical anatomical features inconsistent with a woman. In other more direct terms, PTE-001 has male genitalia. Are you in fact a man PTE-001?
PTE-001: Shakily. No, I’m a woman.
Colonel Bowe: Even with the anatomic abnormality you possess? Don’t you think it’s a little odd? Just about all the perfect features, except for this one part. Maybe you’re ashamed of what they did to you? Or maybe you’re a deviant, or maybe you’ve been struck with hysteria.
PTE-001: Voice cracks. No! I—
Speaker Ella: I must object! How can you sit here and lecture us on what shape the divine might take? How can you know that they don’t take whichever forms they wish, no matter how strange they may seem?
Colonel Bowe: That’s precisely my point, Speaker Ella. How can we know that the Norns, or any of the divine, will take the shapes we expect? Wouldn’t that open the door for our enemies, or worse, the very things we seek to prevent from destroying humanity? Allow them to mime the very shapes we put our highest faith in?
Speaker Ella: This is beyond the realm of speculative! How is any of this relevant and not discriminatory?!
Colonel Bowe: It could be relevant if he’s the result of some twisted Nazi engineering. An imperfect Nazi weapon to topple us from the inside. Or maybe he's a member of the Serpents Hand? Or maybe he's some otherworldly anomalous force looking to ingratiate and plant himself in our midst to bring about the GOCs end. An imperfect infiltrator. Maybe he’s a shapeshifter desperate for attention who got lucky on some predictions. A shapeshifter that molded himself into what he thinks a Norn would look like to prevent being gassed and burnt to death by Nazis. A very good liar, but an imperfect imitator. Imperfect in all ways because he can’t remove the deepest truth about himself. That he is and always will be a man.
PTE-001 flinches.
Colonel Bowe: Can you shapeshift PTE-001?
PTE-001: N-n-no. I—I don't know.
Colonel Bowe: See! Even he doesn't know if he can! Why don't you try, right now for all of us. Be the man you're meant to be.
One minute passes in silence with all parties looking at PTE-001. Nothing happens.
PTE-001: I can't.
Colonel Bowe: You can't, or you won't?
PTE-001: I can't!
Colonel Bowe: He says he can't, but what if he won't? Won't because he knows the moment he does, he will be targeted for liquidation for being a duplicitous liar!
One of the Committee Members bangs their gavel as the room's occupants begin to talk and shout all at once.
Unnamed Committee Member: That’s enough! Quiet, all of you or I will have you removed. Colonel, this has veered into the realm of thinly veiled speculative fiction. Keep your questions focused on the evidence we have.
Colonel Bowe: I’m simply addressing what the whole Committee was thinking about him. But I think I’ve hammered home my point enough, let’s move on. PTE-001, How old would you say you are?
PTE-001 spends several seconds staring at the table, while physically shaking. Colonel Bowe repeats the question. PTE-001 sits up straight and speaks in an abruptly raised voice, slamming the butt of the staff against the ground. Multiple members of the Cult’s delegation and the Committee jump or flinch. Several guards shift closer to the Committee.
PTE-001: Too old. Old enough to remember the world aflame, the sky torn asunder with bleeding light, and the great battledrums hammering against a raging sea. Older than I should be, should have ever been, younger than I will be when the sky fills with the lights of a place and time reborn. When the thunder of creation shall begin its ascent once more to the hateful stars.
PTE-001 sags back down in its chair, shaking vigorously. Several seconds of whispered silence.
PTE-001: I am old. Very old.
Several more seconds of silence. Colonel Bowe taps a pen on the podium.
Colonel Bowe: Can you give us an exact age?
PTE-001 shakes its head.
Colonel Bowe: Please state your response into the microphone PTE-001.
PTE-001: No.
Colonel Bowe: Moving on then. Obskurakorp records are few and far between when it comes to you PTE-001. You were mistaken for a [Slur Removed]15?
PTE-001 place one hand on the side of her head, staring down at the table. It shakes for several seconds before answering.
PTE-001: Yes.
Colonel Bowe: Was that the real reason they took you to the concentration camps? Or was it because you’re actually a deluded, shapeshifting transvestite?
PTE-001: Breathing heavily. No it wasn’—it was because they believed me Romani. I’ve seen what they did, again and again. So many lost to gas, bodies rendered ash and hastily buried in the ground. Children screaming for their mothers, families pulled apart, men shot and beaten and lost to time and reason.
PTE-001 breaks down into heavy sobs. A brief thirty-minute intermission occurs at the Cult of the Nornir’s request. Upon returning, PTE-001 is more composed. When the Committee reenters, Colonel Bowe’s face is red and he is frowning.
Unnamed Committee Member: For the record, before we resume, lets hold a moment of silence for all those lost to Nazi cruelty.
One minute of silence.
Colonel Bowe: These questions might be difficult for you, but we must ask them. Where did the Obskurakorps capture you?
PTE-001 stutters several times.
PTE-001: Outside a sacred place that cannot be spoken of to the whispers of the mortal world for they will drown its pools in blood and leave it barren. A fate repeating again and again and failed to be stopped. Always failed, always binding an innocent other to a arduous path.
Several seconds of whispers. PTE-001 breathes heavily into the microphone, releases her staff and rubs her face.
Unnamed Committee member: She’s telling the truth, Bowe.
Colonel Bowe’s frown deepens. He looks towards the Committee member, opens his mouth, closes it, and then looks back to PTE-001.
Colonel Bowe: Can you give the Committee an exact location?
PTE-001’s voice cracks.
PTE-001: No.
Colonel Bowe rubs his brow.
Colonel Bowe: Even if we are already aware of the Well of Urd and the roots of Yggdrasil?
SCP-001: Shakily. The answer would not change.
Colonel Bowe’s frown deepens. He looks down at his podium.
Colonel Bowe: You’re not exactly giving the Committee much trust in your willingness to cooperate, PTE-001.
PTE-001 does not respond.
Colonel Bowe: Here, I’ll throw you an easy question. What is your name? You should be able to answer at least that.
PTE-001’s head tilts up from the table and stares in the general direction of Colonel Bowe.
PTE-001: Many different things to many people. She Who Saw the End, the Mad Storyteller, The Blind Wanderer, Bringer of Doom, Twister of Fate, Sister of the Damned.
Colonel Bowe clenches his fist against the podium with each additional title.
Colonel Bowe: And what about your given name, the one you use to describe yourself? Surely you have one of those you can tell us? One of the Norn ones? Or maybe you had different names for yourself. Or is it Tiresias? An Orcale? One of the Moirai? Something surely?
PTE-001: More confidently. A true name has power. Holds sway in the minds of those who seize it. It was spoken many times, long ago, but… now it is spoken only in history and whispers in games of fiction and myth. I prefer it that way. It’s better that way. It shouldn’t be spoken elsewhere, not to mortals like you, not to the masses who would wash in it. If you seek a title to properly refer to me, Seeress will do.
Colonel Bowe rubs the bridge of his nose.
Colonel Bowe: I am asking you a simple fucking question. Either you give me a proper answer, or you don’t have one. Who the fuck are you? What is your given name placed on you at birth?
Unnamed Committee Member: Language, Colonel.
PTE-001: I cannot tell you that, because I have none that I recognize as mine in your eyes. You look for something that cannot be given to you. Something you wouldn’t believe if told. Only to a few who remain will it be believed.
Colonel Bowe throws his hands up and then bangs one fist on the podium.
Colonel Bowe: How are we supposed to trust you when all you do is run in circles around us verbally with this cryptic speech?
PTE-001: Trust is earned.
Colonel Bowe growls. PTE-001 is sitting up straight, both hands holding the staff.
Colonel Bowe: Who are those few who remain?
PTE-001: In time they shall reveal themselves to you without ever knowing their connections, yet against you they’ll remain until it ends in flame and red-lines. They will stand against your children and children’s children onwards everlasting.
Colonel Bowe sighs, and holds his hands up in the air.
Colonel Bowe: Well, this is getting nowhere. It seems he both knows everything and yet knows nothing and can say nothing of worth at the same time.
PTE-001: There is one thing I know of that I can speak about.
Colonel Bowe: Enlighten us, please.
PTE-001: You are wearing a black tie, a blue navy jacket and straight legged pants that are slightly too large; bought when you were twenty pounds heavier. Your hair is gelled back and dyed to compensate for the grey spreading on your scalp. Your shoes are too tight. Most discomforting, your stomach is still acheing from a particularly ancient sausage you had this morning.
Several seconds of silence, followed by whispers and then light applause. Colonel Bowe stares at PTE-001.
Colonel Bowe: How did you know all that?
PTE-001: I can see it in the way you’re squirming in that chair, obviously.
Colonel Bowe: But you’re blind.
PTE-001: Yes, thank you for explaining the joke. I can read it off the transcriber’s paper again if you like?
Colonel Bowe frowns and narrows his eyes while the rest of the room descends into several seconds of chuckling.
Colonel Bowe leans forward over the podium and speaks aggressively.
Colonel Bowe: PTE-001, you were moved from a Nazi Concentration camp shortly after Obskurakorp discovered your self-claimed occultic properties. Were you ever an Obskurkorp collaborator?
Several of the speakers make as if to stand or shout while baring teeth. They are stopped by other members of the delegation. PTE-001 flinches at the question. Its mouth is open, and it appears distressed.
PTE-001: No! I would sooner throw myself into the sea to be killed at the hands of kraken. Those monsters did unspeakable things to me!
Colonel Bowe: But you did assist Obskurkorp forces with the use of your ‘claimed’ occultic properties? Did they promise you fulfillment for your sick and twisted sexual fantasies if you cooperated?
PTE-001 begins shaking vigorously.
Speaker Ella: I must object! Colonel, you have read the reports of the condition she was found in. It wasn’t assistance, it was coercion!
Colonel Bowe: That’s precisely my point, Speaker Ella! PTE-001 claims he was coerced into providing assistance to the Obskurakorp and the Nazi regime. What’s stopping that from happening again in the hands of one of our enemies?
Speaker Ella: Nothing right now, but if the GOC gives her adequate protection and lets us assist her in her divine duties with little interference, it should never be an issue.
Colonel Bowe: But the possibility remains nonetheless, no?
Speaker Ella: Hesitates. We can’t completely rule it out.
Colonel Bowe: What if he’s lying and we’re letting a wolf in sheep’s clothing through the door?
Speaker Ella: Hesitates. She would have done an incredible job in fooling us all.
Colonel Bowe: That’s what I thought.
Colonel Bowe turns right then left looking at the rest of the Committee.
Colonel Bowe: My peers, the fact that this anomaly can be forced to assist another party means it is a threat, just one that isn’t active right now while he remains under our thumb. But who’s to say how long that lasts? Who’s to say he won’t turn on us internally? Important thing to remember and develop countermeasures for if it’s of any benefit to us, assuming its occultic properties are even real. But let’s face reality for a minute, the fact that it refuses to tell us its real name, its age, and where it even came from throws serious doubt on whether it is actually prescient or even a Norn. Furthermore, the fact that it is a he, and not a she as so many of you seem to be defaulting to, is indicative to me that he cannot be a Norn. We have photos!
Colonel Bowe holds up medical photographs of PTE-001’s anatomy.
Colonel Bowe: We must stop playing along with the mental derangement of this clearly extremely ill man. He is in need of desperate assistance in an asylum, where he cannot threaten our global mandate.
Several seconds of raised voices and exchanges rendered unintelligible by the number of people speaking or shouting. A gavel is heard banging.
Unnamed Committee Member: We will come to order!
All yelling stops as the gavel banging continues. An unidentified Committee member speaks with a layered thaumic voice modulation.
Unidentified Committee Member: Thank you, Colonel Bowe, for proselytizing on the nature of the entity. I’ll remind you that this isn’t a military court, it’s a committee tribunal. This discussion is for the Committee to have behind closed doors, and you know this. And for the last time, stop dragging your frankly disgustingly primitive American perspective on women into official matters.
The unidentified committee member sighs for several seconds.
Unidentified Committee Member: Now then. I’ll remind the Cult of the Nornir that this is a tribunal, and that we will not tolerate such outbursts again. I am not above having you all dragged out of this room kicking and screaming. Please take your seats and let’s move forward to the second part of our assessment.
Colonel Bowe’s cheeks redden and he sits. Speaker Ella places a hand on PTE-001’s shoulder. The latter is still shaking and has its head in its hands.
Unnamed Committee Member: Speaker Ella, does the entity require another short recess?
Several seconds where Speaker Ella and Speaker Edvard are quietly whispering to PTE-001.
PTE-001 slowly sits up and removes its hands.
Speaker Ella: The Seeress is ready to continue, Ma’am.
The Committee member nods their head.
Unnamed Committee Member: Speaker Ella would you please state for the record PTE-001’s occultic properties as you best understand them?
Speaker Ella stands.
Speaker Ella: The Seeress possesses powerful precognition, prescience, and sight affliction which are random and uncontrolled. It’s our understanding she can actively control them, at physical cost to herself.
Several seconds of whispers from the Committee. Colonel Bowe both appears skeptical and rolls his eyes.
Speaker Ella: She also is blessed with an abnormal healing ability and we believe after some discussion, she is immortal and much older than she appears.
Unknown Committee Member: That seems clear by the earlier exchanges. Does she, as far as you know, have shapeshifting capacities?
Speaker Ella: No. Nor have we detected any of the hallmarks of the different shapeshifter subtypes in her magic or physical presentation.
Unknown Committee Member: Do you have any idea how old she is?
Speaker Ella: She has not been more forthcoming with us than she has with the Committee. But by my best estimation, thousands of years old.
Unknown Committee Member: Alternatively, if she is as powerful in prescience as claimed, she may see far into the past, giving the misleading impression of being older than she is. Regardless, let’s move on. We will set aside the question of her anatomy. Despite Bowe's assertions, I have sincere doubts about their relevancy. Of these properties, which does the Cult of the Nornir believe to be most beneficial to the GOC?
Speaker Ella: Her prescience, ma’am.
Unknown Committee Member: Sensible. Thank you, Speaker Ella.
Speaker Ella sits and the Committee turns their attention back to PTE-001.
Unknown Committee Member: “PTE-001, we are going to ask you to demonstrate your prescience. Are you capable of doing so at this time?”
PTE-001 stands slowly, shaking and hesitates before speaking.
PTE-001: I will do what’s needed.
The Committee members nod. Colonel Bowe crosses their arms.
Unknown Committee Member: Cooperation is good. We would ask you to predict as many major events that will occur this year as you can, to the best of your ability. We will track how many of these predictions come to pass, though not necessarily the granular detail at this stage. After one year, we will evaluate all your predictions and conclude this meeting. This seems a long time, but you will be allowed to remain in the care and custody of the Cult of the Nornir while being made accessible to us as needed. You may take your time in making these predictions, but we will all remain in this room until they are finished.
PTE-001: It is a very short time in the great sweeping tides of life. I will do my best.
Several seconds of silence as the Committee members watch PTE-001. The entity sways while leaning against its staff.
PTE-001: May I make a request for some items to assist me?
Several seconds of murmuring.
Unknown Committee Member: It’s unusual, but we’ll entertain it if you can explain why you need specific items.
PTE-001: Whatever is necessary.
Unknown Committee Member: Go ahead then.
PTE-001 sways again for several seconds before speaking.
PTE-001: May I have a glass of chocolate milk, some water, soda, candy, a sandwich with roast beef, and a bucket.
Unknown Committee Member: …why the chocolate milk?
PTE-001: Chocolate milk helps the temporal strand headaches.
Unknown Committee Member: And the roast beef sandwich and bucket?
PTE-001: The roast beef is for iron to replenish lost blood. The bucket is for vomit.
Several seconds of whispers. Colonel Bowe frowns, appearing incredulous.
Unknown Committee Member: Well, not the strangest explanations I’ve heard in my tenure. Would one of the assistants please retrieve those items.
[Idle conversation removed for brevity]
Unknown Committee Member: You may begin at your convenience, PTE-001.
Instead of a single glass of chocolate milk, PTE-001 has been given an entire pitcher. Colonel Bowe is apoplectic.
PTE-001 grips its staff tight, sitting up straight in the chair. Its voice becomes layered in the audio recording, commanding attention similar to an audio-hazard but with no observable lasting effects.
PTE-001: In a land once swept by Immortals and grand emperors of Xerxes and Darius, the earth shall split in the North beneath the bend of hammer and sickle and a man of steel’s resolve. The land will bleed, the valley shall burn, and a red tide shall break at the whims of an eagle balding beneath a branching globe.
Summary of Predictive Outcome: Iran Crisis 1946
On 21st November, 1945, the regions of Iranian Azerbaijani and Mahabad seceded from the Iranian state after the end of World War II. British and Soviet forces had invaded Iran during the war to secure supply lines to support the Soviet war machine. Joseph Stalin refused to relinquish influence over these regions following the end of hostilities.
Pressure from the United States at the UN and through material assistance to Iran eventually forced the Soviet Union to withdraw support. Iranian troops stormed both breakaway regions and retook them over the course of late 1946 and early 1947. An estimated 2000 people have died as of June 1947.
Predictive Assessment as of January 2nd, 1947: Though vague and somewhat cryptic, PTE-001 predicted the event and outcome.
A small trickle of blood leaks from PTE-001’s nostrils. The head of its staff is glowing. It pauses to pick up the pitcher of chocolate milk from which it drinks.
Colonel Bowe glances at his watch and begins tapping his foot.
PTE-001 abruptly gasps before speaking with a trembling voice.
PTE-001: Swirls of black in noxious fumes deep in the flesh of the earth. Three, three repeating in the marks on wooden beams and metal struts in the light. A spark, a single spark deep in the dark. Fire, bodies—
PTE-001 stops abruptly. Tears are running down its face.
PTE-001: Bodies, so many bodies crushed and choked in the abyss, burning, flame and smoke and columns of black. Rising rising, falling chunks of heavy earth and boulder. So many bodies in the ground beneath that city in the south of the streaming Lippe.
Summary of Predictive Outcome: Bergkamen Coal Mine Explosion February 1946.
On February 20th, 1946, Bergkamen Coal Mine experienced a “firedamp explosion” when mine gasses escaping from the surrounding deposits mingled with coal dust in Grimberg Shaft 3. A spark ignited the mixture and the pressure and heat waves set off a wave of coal dust explosions which collapsed the shaft and killing 418 miners.
Predictive Assessment as of January 2nd, 1947: PTE-001’s prescience identified the cause of the disaster, and the shaft number but not the location, but it wasn’t pressed on details.
PTE-001 staggers against its staff and is supported by Speaker Ella and Speaker Edvard to prevent it from falling over.
It speaks again, while being held.
PTE-001: A man standing against the rolling thunder of the west, a fortunate son in the eyes of a loving mother. Mocked and dismissed in a palace three tens before in the eyes of men of paling skin. Scorned twice, enough is enough and agreements signed by bloodied pens for cooperation ultimately fail in search of self-identification. Elected to lead his people, colonizers and exploiters everywhere, total war extends and jungle and rice fields burn. In a valley fortress surrounded by jungle, those who claim what is not there will meet the end of an empire in a night of blood and fire.
Summary of Predictive Outcome: First Indochina War
Ho Chi Minh is elected president of North Vietnam On March 2nd 1946, and signs an agreement with France recognizing Vietnam as an autonomous state in the Indochinese Federation and French Union as part of a larger series of negotiations following the French overthrow of the DRV government in the south and advance northward. This created a temporary peace between the DRV and the French that lasted until November of 1946, when tensions exploded following the Haiphong Incident. Open hostilities broke out in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh along with his government went underground, fleeing to the forested mountains and hills to the west.
Predictive Assessment as of January 2nd, 1947: PTE-001 referenced the snubbing of Vietnamese self-determination at the Treaty of Versailles in its prescience and predicted initial negotiations and their breakdown ultimately leading to war. We remain uncertain about her final words given the current success of the French campaign.16
PTE-001 audibly gags and is handed the aforementioned requested bucket. She gags three more times before picking up the glass of water and then the pitcher of chocolate milk from which she drinks.
PTE-001 breathes heavily into the microphone for several seconds. Blood is now dripping from its chin onto the table. Speaker Ella attempts to wipe its face, but the entity pushes her away.
It speaks again, shouting louder than it had before. Its voice fills the recording and the room, twisting shapes of color begin floating in the air.
PTE-001: Five times the earth shall quake with tremendous fury in the eyes of creation. First in a place of ice and snow on the edge of a ring of fire far in the northern wash of islands! Great walls of water will rush the gap to a paradise, and scores of bodies shall be swept in its reign!
PTE-001 bangs the staff on the floor. All present are startled by the motion and noise.
PTE-001: Second shall split the earth on an island south and east, where grand timbers stand in sheets of rain. A third shall sweep a place of great poverty once rebelled against the ire of pale skin of the old flames. It shall smash the homes of tens of thousands. Fourth shall strike in mountains and plateaus high where a great empire once reigned, upon which grand slides of earth and rock shall rain and thousands suffer beneath its plume. The fifth and final shall strike a war-ravaged land with quaking earth and a great wall of water that sweeps all away.
Summary of Predictive Outcome: Earthquakes, 1946.
Five major earthquakes occurred in 1946. These included the Aleutian Islands Earthquake which created a tsunami that killed more than a hundred in the Hawaiian Islands. The Vancouver Island Earthquake which had little impact. The Dominican Republic Earthquake which killed around 100 people and destroyed tens of thousands of homes. The Ancash Earthquake in Peru which created massive landslides and killed more than a thousand people, and the Nankani earthquake which created a huge tsunami that killed more than a thousand and swept away thousands of homes.
Predictive Assessment as of January 2nd, 1947: Predicting one major earthquake in a year would be impressive, but all five major earthquakes and their relative region descriptions? I believe we’re hitting the point where it’s obvious she has powerful prescience, but the details are somewhat vague and she’s not giving us relative timeframes. One wonders if we could convince her to give timeframes more properly. Addressing the details may require a different approach. Did Obskurakorp figure out how?
PTE-001 vomits into the bucket several times. Her nose is bleeding copiously, and her hands shake vigorously. She begins screaming.
PTE-001: In sprawling fences of barbs and chains with wooden towers bread shall be baked, and baked, and baked. In its doughy flower green flame to extinguish the patters of rats shall be mixed and many will fall ill and die by the hands of Avengers on high. And they will deserve it for the pain they inflicted upon millions more, and yet punishment shall come for systemic weight falls on all our shoulders. Many will stand before the world’s eyes, one shall embrace their cowardice in full and ten shall dangle from the crooked man’s rope.
Summary of Predictive Outcome: Nakam Bread Plot and Nurembourg trial, 1946.
Sh’erit ha-Pletah, a group of Nakam AKA “Jewish Avengers”, baked arsenic into bread loaves at Stalag XIII-D, a prisoner of war camp containing 15,000 members of the SS. Hermann Goering committed suicide by poison prior to the conclusion of the Nuremburg trials, and the remaining ten convictees were hanged.
Predictive Assessment as of January 2nd, 1947: This seemed personal.
PTE-001 vomits directly onto the table, provoking shouts from the Cult of the Nornir.
Speaker Ella: Seeress, you can stop!
PTE-001: On the shores of the foundation of Rome, great screeching metal horses shall ride faster than any has ever dared. A tradition will be born of daring danger and feats of speed!
Summary of Predictive Outcome: First Formula One Grand Prix, Italy, 1946.
Predictive Assessment as of January 2nd, 1947: Accurate.
PTE-001 is screaming, its arms nearly convulsing as it braces itself against the table. Blood is pouring from its nose and beginning to appear from its eyes. Colonel Bowe is leaned back against his chair while the rest of the Committee is now on their feet.
Speaker Edvard: Seeress, you must stop!
Unknown Committee Member: Someone get medical personnel in here!
PTE-001: A DEMON OF WAR SHALL BE CREATED IN A GRAND SPACE CALLED ALAMOS. THE DEATH SHALL BE UNSPEAKABLE, THE FATE CRUEL IN THE EYES OF THE ELDRITCH GODS WHO GOVERN THE FABRIC OF ALL.
Summary of Predictive Outcome: Criticallity Accident Los Alamos National Laboratory, 1946. Demon Core.
Predictive Assessment as of January 2nd, 1947: Accurate.
Speaker Ella: Seeress they have enough!
PTE-001 nearly throws Speaker Ella, causing her to tumble over the table onto the floor.
PTE-001: TIME CANNOT BE STOPPED. THE MARCH OF FATE EVER WHIRS, THE THREADS OF REALITY UNWINDING BEFORE ALL TO REVEAL THE MOTHER’S BEATING HEART ONCE MORE. A MUSHROOM RISES IN THE CORAL ATOLL OF A DEEP BLUE SEA, THOUSANDS EXPOSED TO BOMBARDMENT FROM A THING THEY WILL NEVER TRULY KNOW AS ASHES CLIMB IN THE SKY FROM A PRIMORDIAL FIRE.
Summary of Predictive Outcome: Nuclear Airburst Tests, Bikini Atoll.
US Military Tested fission Bombs at Bikini Atoll to evaluate atomic weapons usage on Naval Assets.
Predictive Assessment as of January 2nd, 1947: Accurate, but we remain unsure what the entity meant by bombardment.17
PTE-001 abruptly stops shouting, and sways dangerously from side to side.
PTE-001: A final warning, a great coalition wields in their birds of metal sweeping the sky inadequate securements. Thousands will die in coming crashes if not attended to in full.
Summary of Predictive Outcome: Advent of Airline Seatbelts in GOC Craft, 1946.
Thousands of fatalities avoided when high ranking GOC personnel immediately demanded replacement and refinement of airline safety measures through rushed mass production. Multiple personnel have been reprimanded for interfering with Threat Assessment of an entity by acting on privileged information.
Predictive Assessment as of January 2nd, 1947: Accurate, and it saved thousands of GOC personnel.
PTE-001 collapses and is caught by Speaker Ella and Speaker Edvard. Colonel Bowe stands.
Colonel Bowe: Well, with that I believe we can call this meeting adjourned. We have been given a substantial number of predictions to evaluate for the year, and I think it’s obvious to everyone that PTE-001 is incapable of continuing. Thank you, Cult of the Nornir, for your time, and we shall be in contact.
<End Log>
Postword: After one year’s time, PTE-001’s prescience is considered confirmed as predictions were able to be correlated with events that occurred throughout 1946. As such, PTE-001 has been approved as a beneficial asset and remitted to full custody and care of the Cult of the Nornir with GOC oversight. This comes despite the protest of Colonel Bowe and other evidence that was initially suggestive of threat potential. As a compromise to ensure PTE-001’s continued cooperation, Pentagram and Colonel Bowe have been assigned to oversee and coordinate PTE-001’s use of prescience for GOC purposes.
Addendum 6: Project Proposal Eurtec and the Silicon Nornir P113-445
Project Proposal Eurtec P113-445
Title: Project Eurtec
Submission Date: January 15th, 1946
Petitioning Bodies: The Cult of the Nornir and 17 other member organizations.
Purpose: To establish a GOC controlled under-veil settlement to relocate and provide tightly controlled habitation and employment to occultic communities to preserve the veil from threat entities. To create a colossal scale Foresight Matrix Array to facilitate the Last Norn’s prescience and precognition to a higher degree than currently possible.
Abstract: The Cult of the Nornir has identified a site at the mouth of the River Lethe and has been coordinating with 17 other member bodies to prepare ritual and thaumatological executions for the purposes of creating a large scale nexus by which occultic communities may migrate away from normalcy into a controlled GOC space where they may be provided secure housing, employment, and livelihoods that would otherwise be targeted by GOC operations for liquidation. This nexus, which we have preemptively named Eurtec, will be a largely vertically stacked urban arrangement bordered by high walls and the River Lethe and maintained by GOC para-military detachments.
As a component of this new settlement, following our extensive study of an Obskurakorp eigenmachine discovered at the end of World War II, we are proposing the construction of a large scale thaumo-computing complex at the center of Eurtec. This structure will consist of two 333 meter super-tall skyscrapers which will contain the Nornir Foresight Matrix array. Please find attached more in-depth engineering documents. This complex will facilitate the utilization and amplification of BCE-001’s precognitive and prescience capacities to fundamentally transform GOC strategic, economic, and political approach to the Veil and its maintenance. We estimate full construction of the complex will require twenty-four years’ time as of this project proposal submission. In line with organizational goals, this new technology will be non-invasive for BCE-001, making cooperation easier and less physically and emotionally demanding.
Response: Project Proposal Eurtec and the Silicon Nornir P113-445
The Council of 108 has unanimously approved this project proposal with the following stipulation: Oversight of Eurtec construction and security will be maintained by Pentagram under the direction of Colonel S. Bowe.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Addendum:
Addendum:
NOTICE: CHANGE OF ROLE DETECTED. PLEASE ENTER NEW USER IDENTIFIER AND ACCESS CODE.
THE FOLLOWING FILE REQUIRES DIRECT APPROVAL FROM O5-07 TO ACCESS. MEMETIC KILL AGENTS ARE PRIMED FOR UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS.
USER CODE: LIGHT EVERLASTING.
KEY PHRASE: WE DIE IN THE LIGHT SO NONE MAY SUFFER IN THE DARK.
KEYPHRASE ACCEPTED. WELCOME O5-07.
Incident Report I-001-01
GOC Incident of Note: GOC C-47 Crash, December 8th, 1948.
Location: Scandinavian Mountains, Norway
Passengers: Two pilots, eight passengers.
Casualities: Two injured, four dead.
Description: At 0840 on December 8th, 1948, flight 11284 lifted off from Oslo Gardermoen Airport into a bank of heavy clouds. At approximately 1020, the pilots realized that their altitude gauges were malfunctioning and they were at a much lower altitude than expected. This realization came too late to stop the resulting collision of the right wing and engine with a nearby rock outcropping on an adjoining mountain, resulting in the loss of the engine and severe damage to the wing.
The pilots immediately announced evacuation of the plane, and abandoned the aircraft, where they would suffer mild injuries. Four other passengers successfully escaped the fuselage before the plane collided with a nearby summit at speed.
When search parties reached and recovered the fuesalage forty-eight hours later, they found the four remaining passengers had survived the initial impact but succumbed to extreme low temperatures. Passenger seatbelts had defective latches which resulted in deformation of the metal in the buckle, preventing the passengers from unbuckling the straps. In addition to the defective latch, the pulley which allowed lengthening or shortening of the strap material was also defective, resulting in sliding back/tightening of the straps when pulled on.
The combination appears to have resulted in the passengers exhausting their energy from panicked motions trying to unbuckle the straps and eventually trapping them against the seats. It’s estimated they were still alive for fifteen hours after the crash and one by one succumbed to exposure.
The four passengers who died were GOC medical personnel who helped treat patients suffering from occult induced conditions at Oslo University Hospital during the post-war period.
Last Names of victims: Oglethorpe, Nieminen, Hilda, Burnhart.
Director’s Note: I spent some time digging through the GOC archive materials and tracked down manufacturing notes. Flight 11284’s safety features were hastily replaced in 1946 with newly manufactured designs created in response to SCP-001’s prediction.
Addendum 8:
Personal Diary of Speaker Ella Haugen, CEO of the Cult of the Nornir, September, 1949
Here we go, I picked up a new little pocket diary, and I’m determined to finally make use of it. It’s only the what, fifth time? But this time I’m sure it will stick.
I’m happy to say after three years, construction has finished on the first residential complexes within Eurtec. Surprisingly, the construction itself wasn’t the biggest barrier. It took a year to completely clear the local flora and fauna out of the entire area, the mages needed to anchor the whole space for proper human habitation.
Took another year to erect the perimeter walls once everyone figured out that anchoring alone wasn’t enough to keep the underworld out. This is the problem with using a foreign conceptual entity’s pocket space.
We initially stayed in Oslo, the GOC built us a temporary complex but we eventually decided to return to the country estates with the Seeress in tow when it became clear Eurtec’s construction was a more complicated matter than initially projected.
In other circumstances I might have been livid, but the Seeress’s predictions were already paying dividends. We’ve quintupled our yearly profits through her passive divinations. They’re going to emblazon my name on every piece of corporate property for the rest of the Cult’s eternal existence for recovering the Last Norn.
But despite our indicators of success, these early years have not been easy. The Seeress’s time with the Obskurakorp and then her time in Oslo University Hospital had a profound effect on her psychology. We tried to give her her own room at first, and that did not go well. She’d end up outside my door or Edvards in the early hours of the morning, shaking in fear at having been left alone. So we started rotating letting her stay in our apartments while we tried to find a psychologist or shrink that wasn’t going to throw her in an asylum.
Its heartbreaking really, at first she couldn’t sleep lying down. She’d sit on the couch or prop herself up against the bed, and I’d walk in and find her with her arms raised above her head. Like all those depicitions of Jesus suspended up on the cross. Nazi fucks must have kept her in that position with that vile machine’s wires tied up in her nervous system for years without letting her move or change position. She’d jump whenever the phone rang, get up and run to the farthest room in the apartment from the wall mount and curl up in the corner. Edvard’s told me she does much the same in his apartment. Couldn’t bathe herself for months without breaking down into sobs.
We never were able to find a psychologist, but thankfully the Seeress started improving after about six months bouncing between us night to night. Slow at first but steadily she started being able to lay down in the bed for a few hours before she’d be up in that position again. Stopped jumping at the phone, stopped getting skittish whenever I mentioned the words sedative or medicine. I stopped having to help her bathe, though admittedly that may be the part I miss most. Bathing her in part reminded me of my daughter, but it also inspired some new feelings that I don’t think I’d ever had before, something deep. What I don’t miss is the weeping. She still needs chocolate milk though, that hasn’t changed. It feels so strange for a sacred divinity like her to be so surprisingly, well, human.
Then there’s Colonel Bowe and his intrusions. He’s a smug one that man, always in that uniform. Rude, never asks if he can come in, always pushes in the door, him and his seven or eight men with guns. It started as a once-a-month visit, and we would just send a runner or telegraph with the Seeress’s latest predictions otherwise. He’d come in with his list of questions. Not much I or the other speakers could do but bring the Seeress a bucket and milk and have beef or cabbage on standby for iron replacement. It is infuriating how this man calls the Seeress he or it, never she.
At first, he’d ask his questions, and she’d answer as many as she could before the physical cost got to her and she collapsed. If he didn’t like an answer, or thought she wasn’t answering in full, he’d just make a face, write it down, and it’d come up again the next time he barged in along with whatever she didn’t answer.
Right about the time she started recovering and started feeling safe is when the Colonel decided that the Seeress was not being as helpful as she could be. He got physical with her. Started grabbing her wrists, would yank her out of the chair, holding her arm in uncomfortable positions until he was sure she was giving him everything he wanted. The first time it happened Edvard was there with me, and I tried to physically get him off of her. His man points a damn rifle at my skull and yells at me to back up.
He turned to me letting go of her wrist and said:
“I am conducting business on behalf of the Council of 108 that is of the highest priority, speaker. Interfering is grounds for disciplinary action.”
And I could do nothing or say nothing because he held all the power of oversight. When he was gone Edvard went ballistic, and I had to calm him so we could think rationally.
We spent hours agonizing over the complaint forms and rights abuse conditions to make sure we documented everything, photographs of the bruises, eyewitness accounts between us and the other speakers and then we submitted the forms. Nothing happened. The Rights Oversight Body said we didn’t have enough evidence. The Ethical Conduct Board told us it was a he-said she-said.
So what could we do but minimize the amount of time that the Colonel could be alone with the Seeress? The Seeress started regressing and that wasn’t good for anyone. When it became clear Eurtec construction was going to be delayed, we moved back to the country sanctuary of our order. This had the benefit of forcing the Colonel to travel for his visits, and limited contact, at least for the years that followed.
Then the Seeress predicted that the Russians would detonate their first atom bomb. Bowe wrote it off as a rare misfire, the Russian’s didn’t even have a program.
And then it happened. August 29th the Soviets detonated a Hiroshima style device. After that the man went ballistic. He accused us of being Russian spies, he accused the Seeress of leaking nuclear secrets she’d seen to the Soviets! His visits increased from once a month to two regular visits a month, and anytime one of the Seeress’s predictions seemed even a bit suspicious, the phone would ring and we’d get bombarded with accusations and questions. We lost two speakers to suspicions of Soviet sympathies in the first few weeks alone!
Then there’s Edvard, I think after the events at Oslo University Hospital and the Beneficial Assess Assessment, he became disillusioned with the GOC as a force for good. He has expressed a growing belief that the GOC are increasingly human supremacist. I worry that he may leave, or do something rash that will get us all in trouble.
I’ve had this conversation with him multiple times, but he’s insistent that he’s not going anywhere. In spite of that promise, he’s become more reclusive and started acting more secretive. There have been a few times now where I have caught him with strange mirrors in his quarters or I have gone for a walk in the late evening after a difficult night with the Seeress and run into him. He would be returning from the direction of a dead end or an empty wall and would tell me he’d been out when asked. Before I could press, he’d made some excuse and go inside. Sometimes I’d catch him leaving his quarters with envelopes.
Where is he going? Into Ways?
A house in the Silicon Nornir’s countryside sanctuary.
Personal Diary of Speaker Ella Haugen, CEO of the Cult of the Nornir, December 1950
So much for committing to using this every day to put my thoughts to paper. I think it’s just that I am so spectacularly busy handling everything that keeps me from remembering to pick up this little book and write in it. This time, I’ll stick to it.
The move into the Eurtec Residential complexes had the unfortunate effect of putting us back within regular physical access of General Bowe. Surprise, the bastard got promoted. He’s transitioned from his headquarters in Oslo to a newly built administrative facility here in Eurtec. He continued to appear for his bi-monthly visits to the Seeress up until June when the Korean Conflict began. Oh, he’d still appear randomly whenever the Seeress predicted something suspicious, just to interrogate her over details. But as soon as the war started, he was here every week, grilling the Seeress over details of the war, and the Pusan front as the situation deteriorated.
He’s still physical with her, still pushes her to her limits with interrogations. We’ve given up on Rights Oversight Body complaints. I suspect Bowe has gained more pull with the Americans putting forth substantial amounts of funding for the GOC strike teams, so any complaints end up dead in the water. To make matters worse, everytime we get an official document from the scum-fucking raven starved coward, they’re calling the Seeress a man. I’m beginning to hate the Americans.
Thankfully, the time in the countryside seems to have given the Seeress space to breath and rebuild self-confidence. She has her own independent quarters. She sleeps, eats, and baths in them now without Edvard or I having to be there. I should be happier about this recovery in self-sufficiency.
But I feel lonelier now without her constant presence in my quarters. I have to admit—this is hard to write about. I think I have a crush. The Seeress makes me feel like a schoolgirl all over again, pining over a cute boy or cute girl who just exists. Me, a grown woman of 45 with a fully grown daughter. Its embarrassing. Her humor is striking, her philosophical underpinnings deep, and she takes such great joy in small things when she feels in a place of comfort. I get lost in her voice, her eyes with those sunburst colors and lines. Worse, beyond our chemistry, she is physically striking, beautiful and radiant like the sun.
Is this sacrilege to think about? Should I act on it or let this childish infatuation die? I’m not sure.
Personal struggles aside, Bowe was apoplectic in late October and November. Something happened on the political and strategic end that resulted in near daily visits with the Seeress. This was right after the first bits of foundation for the Foresight Matrix Array were laid. He seemed frantic… almost desperate in some ways with a much shorter fuse than normal. I’m not sure what to make of it, especially the initial accusations that the Seeress had misled him. Maybe I should pay more attention to what the Seeress is predicting for him.
On the other hand, Edvard continues to grow more secretive. He pays rapt attention to the Seeress at every opportunity and always seems to be there when she is making major predictions. This wouldn’t normally be suspicious, but he writes everything down on notepads and is remarkably unwilling to let me look at them.
Personal Diary of Speaker Ella Haugen, CEO of the Cult of the Nornir, May 1955
So that was a lie. I have not in fact stuck to writing my thoughts down. It’s everything, everytime I think about sitting down and committing pen to paper, something else comes up. It’s impossible to remember. Perhaps I should set an alarm to force me to do it. Certainly that will work.
We have a small problem. Or rather, a big problem that is also smaller than expected when it should be huge. With the silicon conduction system now in place in the two tower’s frames, and the base cores slotted into their manifolds, we began the intricate process of anchoring the pure conceptual ghosts of our divine namesakes, our Seeress’s sisters, into their new housings. This process was going smoother than expected when we encountered the problem.
There were three ghosts in the Ethereum Astral Space. Not two. In theory, this would not be an issue, mythological contexts are fluid, and it is possible there was a fourth Norn that was unaccounted for.
Except the Seeress’s bio-thaumic spiritual and conceptual signal don’t match our divine namesakes. The only speaker of sufficient skill to have noticed other than me was Edvard, and he was distracted with other work at the time. This is both a confounding circumstance and an opportunity for immense profit if I play this right. I will need to adjust our engineering plans to add a third tower; I can barely imagine the margins we’ll achieve now!
That is, if General Bowe would stop abusing the Seeress and forcing her to exert prescience at his and the council’s whims. He’s here two times a week now on official business. We’ve had to institute an official policy that he can’t access her if there isn’t another speaker around. The Seeress opened the door for them when none of us had been warned they were coming, and it was only two hours later that one of us knocked on the door, and discovered they’d been in there alone with her for hours without any speaker support.
They ask for everything, major and minor events, pushing her to her physical limits. Like they want to control Desitny itself outright. The Rights Oversight Body continues to look the other way as well. I’m worried this will all backfire terribly like it did for the Obskurakorps.
That concern aside, after sitting on it for nearly half a decade I finally approached the Seeress and confessed what I had been feeling. She listened and I could not pick up how she felt about it at first. When I was finished we just sat there at the kitchen counter of her residence as a clock ticked somewhere in the room.
Then I asked if she felt the same. She admitted she might feel something too and I could feel my heart soar into my throat. I asked if she wanted to explore this together. She got up, walked over to the window looking out onto the sprawling construction sites of Eurtec. She didn’t answer for a long time.
Finally, she said no. I forget the exact wording, as it is still hard to face, but her explanation impressed onto me that it would be a fleeting feeling. That loving her, dating her would be like trying to hold onto a puff of mist, or a cloud I could never truly grasp. This discovery that she isn’t what we thought has added wrinkles.
I think she was afraid of what I would learn. That when I found out, it would change everything. But it changes nothing for me emotionally. Nothing when it comes to romance. Maybe now she might be more open.
I’m getting off track and lost in the possibilities of romance. There are so many lingering questions. Who the hell have we fought tooth and nail for, for the past 10 years? Who is this stranger who we call Seeress?
A Moirai?
Another Goddess?
An Oracle? Tiresias?
One of those would surely make sense right?
Should I interrogate this further with her or leave it be?
No, I don’t think anything good will come of trying to nail it down.
Best to bury this so no one ever knows. Best to let her know I know and then let it die.
Personal Diary of Speaker Ella Haugen, CEO of the Cult of the Nornir, December 1963
The alarm failed. I threw out the clock and completely forgot this existed and now look at it, the cover is thick with dust. I’m beginning to think the problem is not everything else, it’s just me. Maybe I’m just terrible at keeping a diary. Beuracratic paper work? Sure. Keeping an eye on the Seeress’s schedule? Absolutely on it. Writing in the diary? This time. This time for sure I’ll stick to it.
So much has happened so quickly that we’ve not had time to breathe. The NFMA is 60% complete, the third tower has lagged a bit behind the others just because it was a modification to the original designs and blueprints, but we estimate the framework and the Seeress’s penthouse will be finished by mid-1964, if not sooner. It will make it easier for us to control Bowe’s access to the Seeress during non-working hours.
Our profits are unbelievable. The corporation is private, so we have no public trading, but accounting estimates that our income streams from Fortune 500 corporations looking for predictive applications and new industry investment opportunities are raking in nearly a billion dollars per month.
And we desperately need that after everything that has happened. The GOC has been getting slammed from every side. The Serpents Hand, the rag-tagged and fragmented thaumic-freedom fighters, seem to be everywhere. They are taking coalition strike teams and security assets to pasture and crushing them like insects.
Bowe is here every day, and if he’s not here, he’s at the Silicon Towers in the still half completed focal chamber harassing the Seeress for every detail she can give. He’s desperate and gets more desperate every day because he’s now in command of GOC security forces and strike teams.
He, Pentagram, and the Council of 108 are taking the blame for the disaster that was the American attempt to overthrow the Cuban communist government, nearly plunging the world into nuclear apocalypse in 1962, and now the death of the American president. On top of that, he’s also taking the blame for the Serpents Hand’s success.
While the blame appears to solely rest on Bowe’s shoulders, I admit that at first glance it almost appears like the Seeress was leading them right into the meat grinder of mistakes that have led to these blunders. But it’s not deliberate, its simply prophecy being filled. That’s the risk with heeding all predictions as if they are absolute truth, what is seen can be a warning of what could be if things don’t change, it could be a prediction of something that might happen or an absolute truth.
Whatever the case, the funding for Eurtec has been substantially reduced in light of recent GOC failures and struggles. So instead, we are dedicating more and more of our private revenue streams into building the city ourselves. GOC security forces persist of course; Bowe couldn’t have us protect the city ourselves. He can’t even manage to correctly identify what the Seeress is. They sit on their high walls, pointing their thaumic-rifles down at the residents like prison guards. I even heard some of them are cyborgs now.
The Seeress, as much as it pains me to admit, has been steadfast to her principles. I have tried many different things, and I’m sure I’ll try many different more, but she continues to gently tell me that we simply wouldn’t work. We sit together, walk in the city together, eat meals by candlelight, and do just everything short of crossing that threshold that I desire. Is she truly only happy with just this?
Or maybe she already has someone. Nearly every year she has been allowed a single trip out of Eurtec. Nearly every year she goes with me and a few others to a quiet place that I’m unsure of, sworn to secrecy. A forest at the base of a mountain. I’m sure it’s in the Mediterranean based on the position of the sun, the warmth, and the stars.She goes up the mountain alone, we’re not allowed to follow, and we camp out at its base for two-three days before she returns. She’s never spoken to any of us about what’s up there, and it feels far too deeply personal and sacred to ask after. I don’t think any of us can complain either, the wilderness is beautiful. The only reason I can really think of for these trips is that she has a lover who dwells there. Or maybe this is where she originally lived. Maybe one day, she’ll tell me everything.
Then there’s Edvard. I have been covering up for him for years now, and I’m certain I know what he is doing. He’s handing the Seeress’s predictions off to someone. Who, I’m not sure. I suspect it’s Serpents Hand. Maybe the same people who’ve been hitting GOC strike facilities so hard. After all these years, the mistreatment the Seeress receives from GOC high command, and the very clear Human Supremacist attitudes coming from the most powerful members of the council? I can afford to look the other way.
Personal Diary of Speaker Ella Haugen, CEO of the Cult of the Nornir, October 1969
The problem is me. I can’t do it. I can’t keep up a diary. This is to be my last entry, there’s no point hiding from the truth that when it comes to addressing my own needs through writing them down on paper, I am simply the worst.
Oh well.
The GOC is done. General Bowe has been removed from his position, and all see the writing on the wall. Now the sharks are circling.
We are funding Eurtec’s construction all by ourselves, and the Council of 108 is falling apart. Pentagram is on the verge of completely pulling out, GOC Strike Assets are basically gone. The city’s residents have stepped in to fill their place in security upkeep. We have basically been on our own for months, but Bowe was still here, falling apart and desperately begging the Seeress nearly every waking hour he could access her in the focal chamber for some sort of sign.
When the spiral really began to accelerate, she simply decided to stop exerting prescience for his asks. It was the first time I had ever seen her stand to her full height and tell him no.
The brute then tried to physically assault her, and before any of us could intervene she smacked him in the face with her staff. She beat that 6’4” 230 lb pillar of a man like a ragdoll and all we could do was just sit by and watch. I didn’t know she could move like that, or that she knew how to fight with a staff. It really begs the question if this entire time, when he was physically manhandling her, was she was acting?
But that was the last time General Bowe stepped inside the Silicon Nornir. Right after that, the Seeress turned to Edvard and I. She asked us to come up to the penthouse with her. So we did, walking with her to the elevator, and then into the penthouse.
She asked us to sit, and we did, and then she turned off the cameras we had installed for security purposes in case something happened up there.
She sat down across from us and sighed. In that tiny span of a few minutes where it was just us and her in there, by Thor’s Hammer, I think she aged two hundred years. Just this positively ancient goddess across from us weary of the world.
“All these years, you have fought for me tooth and nail. You have sat with me in the darkest hours and guided me along the narrow paths back to a place in the light. My gratitude is eternal and our trust unbreakable.”
We, of course didn’t know what to say. The Seeress has expressed gratitude many times across the years, but not like this.
“You have loved me as a brother, a sister or a spouse,” she said, staring straight through me as if she weren’t blind.
“It is time I trust you with the truth, and only you. A secret so profound that I have spent 25 years obscuring it from you. I will tell you who I am.”
Then she told us what I already knew, that she was not a Norn. Then she said the answer to the question Bowe had been so frustrated about all those years ago. She told us it. She isn’t who I had come to believe she was. How could I be so far off?
I love her. In my heart of hearts I love her. But in full, I now know why she cannot love me back. I understand that such love would never be enough to fix everything that was taken. That I’d never be able to fix all the things she considers a curse. But I will keep trying until the day I die. But I still sit here and wonder, now that I know, will it take hold? Or was that too a lie.
Still reeling from the truth nearly an hour later we stepped into that elevator. I stopped it mid descent and turned to Edvard. He looked at me with the weary eyes of someone who had learned the worlds secrets and wished to forget.
“No more.”
“No more what?”
“Giving the Hand information. Whatever comes next, we can’t keep doing that.”
He just looked at me for a long time.
“I’ll stop if what comes next is better for the Seeress.”
And on that, we could agree.
Art of SCP-001 inside the Silicon Nornir composed by the Speakers of the Cult.
Addendum 9: Transition of Eurtec and the Silicon Nornir to Foundation Oversight
On November 15th, 1969, the United Nations Global Occult Coalition collapsed when the Council of 108 was dissolved by the UN General Assembly following the withdrawal of Pentagram and NATO funding for the organization. Dissolution came after a nearly twenty-year long string of strategic, political, and economic blunders, scandals and failures which reached a breaking point following the revelation of the My Lai Massacre to the American public.
Internal factional conflicts were amplified by the rise of Marshall Carter & Dark, hypercompetent militant Serpents Hand cells and the reemergence of long underground anomalous groups such as the Sarkics, Church of the Broken God, and the Fifthists.
The Serpents Hand in particular inflicted severe infrastructural damage on major GOC facilities across the globe, destroyed or absconded with para-technology prototypes, major anomalous artifacts and made effective use of pro-anomalous and occultic propaganda to successfully and accurately paint the GOC as human-supremacists seeking to genocide or ethnically cleanse the Occult from the ‘normal’ world.
The more moderate, scientifically driven Foundation stepped in one month after the dissolution of the Council of 108 following unanimous votes from the O5 Council, Site Directors Council, and Ethics Committee. Fully cognizant of the GOC’s fatal flaws in addressing the anomalous world, it offered the United Nations its vast resources and private funding mechanisms as a stable alternative not linked to State actors. The Foundation advocated for scientific study and containment of dangerous anomalies over liquidation as a replacement for the GOC on the world stage.
The United Nations General Assembly debated the measure for the next month before agreeing to negotiate terms with the Foundation to replace the GOC as the UN sponsored paranormal organization. These negotiations resulted in required provisions for oversight through integration of former GOC personnel in the Foundation governing bodies. This resulted in the addition of three seats on the O5 Council bringing it to 13. It also resulted in structural changes to the Site Directors Council and the Ethics Committee.
Former member organizations of the GOC were absorbed and integrated into the Foundation through the creation of new departments, regional sites, task forces, and the expansion of the Site Director Council and Ethics Committee.
As part of this process, GOC controlled Nexuses and Free Ports came under Foundation control, and were evaluated for funding, sustainability, and ethics.
On May 15th, 1970, Foundation personnel took command of Eurtec and conducted a census of the city’s population. They began the process of folding Eurtec security forces, the Cult of the Nornir/Silicon Nornir and city administration into the newly formed Department of Prescience and Predictive Sciences located within Eurtec. This new Department was placed under the newly formed joint Ethics Committee and Site Director driven Committee of Para-Natural relations overseen by O5-07’s office.
The Cult of the Nornir corporation was bought and integrated as a private shell company within the Satisfied Consumer Products corporate umbrella front company. MTF Omega-77 was created to preserve the social, religious, and corporate structure of the Silicon Nornir and minimize disruption to ongoing work. Current head of the Department of Para-Humans, Madeline Light, was promoted and assigned as Director of Prescience and Predictive Sciences in addition to becoming Eurtec Site Director.
At this time, SCP-001 was evaluated by Director Madeline Light for database entry and transition to Foundation oversight.
Addendum 10: SCP-001 Interview Audio and Video Log 1 IVA-001-01
Interview Log IVA-001-01
Interviewer: Director Madeline Light
Date: June 15th, 1970.
Location: Silicon Nornir Tower Three Penthouse
Foreword: Director Madeline Light pulled all documentation on SCP-001 from GOC archives and Foundation databases. She spent a month and a half researching the subject’s known history and capabilities before electing to interview it.
Director Light arrived at the Silicon Nornir on June 15th and was escorted to the penthouse accommodations in Tower Three by Ella Haugen, CEO of the Cult of the Nornir and current head of Omega-77. Director Light was left alone with SCP-001 to conduct her initial evaluations and interviews.
<Begin Log>
Director Light is seen standing just outside of the elevator inside of the penthouse. She is holding a box and several opaque paper bags. Images are far higher detail than other camera technology available during the time period. The living space covers the entire floor and consists of a blend futuristic architectural and interior design with advanced thaumo-technological appliances and devices. Said features are combined with neo-classical columns and decorations. Strips of neon lights run in channels along much of the floor, walls, and ceilings. They slowly rotate through multiple color channels as Director Light moves further into the residence.
SCP-001 stands at the far end of the penthouse in front of 4-meter-tall glass windows that look out onto the other towers of the Silicon Nornir, the skyline of Eurtec, and the waters of the Lethe. The main lights are off. It is leaning against its staff.
Interviewers Note: Unlike our predecessors, I prepared for this moment to ensure smooth establishment of working relationships with Omega-77 and SCP-001.
Director Light moves towards SCP-001 slowly, looking around the room. She looks as if she is about to speak but SCP-001 speaks first.
SCP-001: Softly. Director Light, I have seen this day across many nights and colored murals in the fabrics. You have come for many reasons with many questions, for your job and curiosity clawing in the depths of mind.
Director Light pauses five meters from the window. Her brow wrinkles. She opens her mouth, but SCP-001 speaks again.
SCP-001: Forgive me, I am terrible at introductions, one of many costs of seeing everything. Please, have a seat, there is tea on the table.
Director Light sets the boxes and bags down on the table and sits. She pours herself a cup of tea.
SCP-001: You could have had me escorted into a small and oppressive interrogation room for this. Yet you did not, and I am curious why.
Director Light: I think we both know that you’ve already seen why.
SCP-001: There are many paths ever branching and winding through the river of twisting threads, Director. I’d prefer to know which I live in. It’s so difficult to tell at times.
Director Light: I’ve done my homework. If you look at everything, it’s not hard to see the many mistakes of those who came before when it comes to you, and if we’re going to work together productively it’s best not to repeat them. Putting you in an interrogation room and referring to you by a number identifier only causes stress and doesn’t inure you to our presence. We’re taking a different approach.
SCP-001: Then you’re already far ahead of the curve.
Director Light: That’s the goal.
Several seconds of silence as Director Light sips her tea.
Director Light: Did you have the Cult build this penthouse for you?
SCP-001: No, they insisted on building it for me, but I never requested it or expressed a desire for it. Such luxuries are not something I crave.
Director Light: But you accepted it anyway?
SCP-001: I did. If I refused it, they would have thought something wrong with it that I would not speak of. They might think I saw some ripple in the strands of fate speaking of something foul. They act as a meteorologist would, reading the little trickling waves in a stormfront no matter how irrelevant or meaningless.
Director Light: That has to get exhausting.
SCP-001: It can be.
Several seconds of silence. Director Light looks out the windows.
Director Light: Did you ask for the windows?
SCP-001: I did.
Director Light: Why?
SCP-001: I enjoy the warmth of the muggy underworld leeching through the glass and comforting my old bones, and I do very much enjoy the sight.
Director Light: What? You enjoy staring at Eurtec’s ugly grey skies and the river’s fire?
SCP-001: Is that what you see? I see fields of flowers and great spiraling forests clawing at a star filled sky.
Director Light: How ar—Oh gods dammit.
SCP-001 laughs.
Director Light: They warned me about your sense of humor, and I walked straight into it.
SCP-001: Clearly, they didn’t warn you enough. But enough about my strange abode. You have questions and gifts?
Director Light: Good faith offerings for a productive future. Candy and sweets, chocolate milk powder, and a sundress since Omega-77 says you enjoy more casual attire.
SCP-001 turns and crosses the room, taking a seat across from Director Light. It sets aside the cane and reaches out, touching the box and bags, and investigates them with its fingers.
SCP-001: Quite generous. Yet, I sense such things are not given freely.
Director Light: Everything has a cost.
SCP-001: Indeed. Well, I am ready for your trials whenever you elect to begi—
SCP-001 stops mid sequence, and its eyes visibly dilate. It pats the couch and then the table, lifting a square device which it presses its hands into. After several seconds it breathes out deeply and shakily sets the pad down.
SCP-001: Apologies, you can begin whenever you are ready.
Director Light: How many times a day does that happen?
SCP-001: I stopped trying to count a long, long time ago.
Director Light nods once and pulls out a thick vanilla folder while SCP-001 pours some tea.
Director Light: Before I start, how would you prefer to be addressed?
SCP-001: Seeress is fine. Simple and to the point. Oracle if you need to shatter the monotony.
Director Light: Not Norn or Destiny’s fingers?
SCP-001’s brows furrow but it smiles.
SCP-001: No. Not terms that I particularly identify with.
Director Light: Sensible. I have a document here that I want to discuss with you. Why don’t you feel it out, it’s in Braille so you should be able to read it.
SCP-001 reaches out and touches the paper. She spends approximately five minutes reading over its contents.
SCP-001: These are familiar.
Director Light: I expected they would be. They’re a list of predictions I assume you were forced to make in the predecessor to this monstrous creation we’re sitting on top of.
SCP-001: Barely perceptible to the microphone. Yes.
Director Light: In your own words, tell me what you noticed about them?
SCP-001: All of them are correct. Happened in this shard of thread. Pyrric victories with high costs for the Nazi Warmachine. Arranged to take targets they would never hold longterm in the east. Predicting a last desperate major success.
Director Light: You saw those outcomes?
SCP-001: Only that they would succeed in that path.
Director Light: Are you sure?
SCP-001 starts to respond, but stops, picking up the square pad again. This time it whispers and the microphones in the camera do not pick them up. After several seconds it sets down the pad again.
SCP-001: …
Director Light: Here, do you remember these predictions?
Director Light slides another piece of paper over to SCP-001. After another few minutes of reading, it frowns.
SCP-001 Yes.
Director Light: Why don’t you describe these predictions for me.
SCP-001: They are strategic predictions, battle directions and war management. The predictions were wrong.
Director Light: Strange, in the last six months since the GOC collapsed, you have had a 100% accurate prediction rate, and yet here it was what, 50%? That kind of accuracy shift doesn’t happen overnight like that. In fact, between 1940-1945, or at least the remnants of what we could find from that period, your accuracy was somewhere in the 45% range, and jumped up to 100% from 1945-1949. Lets look at some examples.
SCP-001 shifts on the couch.
Director Light: You predicted a landing in, quote, ‘places close to the straits and cliffs of great white’ on May 20th, 1944, just weeks before Operation Overlord. Close to but not closest to the Dover Straits. Did you know that German High Command was obsessed with the idea that the landing would be at Calais before they got your prediction?
SCP-001: Yes. I knew.
Director Light pulls out another document.
Director Light: Ok let’s contrast that with a slightly different prediction. During your Beneficial Entity Assessment hearing with the GOC on January 2nd, 1946, you made a prediction which caused a ripple effect that lead to the death of four GOC medical personnel who had medically abused and neglected you for months. Do you remember this?
SCP-001: Yes.
Director Light: Right, let’s focus now on the era we have really good records for. 1949-1969. Your accuracy rate in this period overall was a stunning 98%! But stop me if this sounds familiar, your accuracy for major world events and strategic inquiries by General Stephen Bowe was somewhere around 33%, if we look at what the GOC thought your interpretations were indicating. Though those statistics can shift quite a bit if we look at a more broad view of interpretation.
Director Light pauses.
Director Light: Sorry, a misinterpretation of prophecy isn’t really on you is it? Not unless you deliberately constructed what you said to promote a specific outcome.
SCP-001 shifts on the couch again. Its hands are shaking as Director Light pulls out another document.
Director Light: On 3rd October, 1950, Harry S. Truman and Douglas Mccarthur contacted GOC officials through Pentagram about the crossing of the 38th parallel in the Koreas. Your prediction was interpreted by the GOC as indicating a decisive victory for Allied forces and that China was bluffing, which was enough to convince the US military and president. US forces crossed the 38th parallel and pushed the North Koreans continuously back. They approached the Yalu river, the Chinese crossed it with soviet air support, and pushed Allied forces all the way back to the 38th. The GOC and Pentagram were ostracized for misleading Allied Command.
SCP-001: …
Director Light: A little curious that they didn’t think to blame you, or maybe Bowe did in private?
SCP-001: …
Director Light: In 1957, you were forced to exert prescience to look into the stability of occultic relations in the Balkans and Near East. Your prediction led to the shipping of occultic artifacts from the region, convincing the GOC they would be safe aboard trains and that the Hand would never assault them. The Zurich incident with former American collaborators turned Hand Operatives, [REDACTED] and her partner [REDACTED], lead to loss of para-tech research facilities in Zurich, several high ranking and irreplaceable researchers, and the capture of hundreds of occultic artifacts by the Serpents Hand. The bonus, of course, was the humiliation of the GOC and pentagram, wasn’t it?
SCP-001 stares blankly off into space.
Director Light: Let’s see, the Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missle Crisis, Redirection of JFK’s entourage, leading to the death of the United State’s biggest GOC contribution component and further marring its reputation in its biggest funders eyes. The list goes on of misinterpreted visions among perfectly fine and accurate predictions, and all of them point to one thing.
Director Light lays the documents on the table.
Director Light: Why don’t you put it in your own words what this is?
SCP-001 stares into space for several minutes.
SCP-001: Conspiracy. Manipulation. Guidance of humanity to a better path for what comes next.
Director Light: Wow.
Director Light looks at SCP-001 for several seconds.
Director Light: Wow, you don’t deny any of it? You did it. You manipulated fate by withholding information, lying?
SCP-001: No. The things I predict are never lies. They’re truths, things that might occur; could occur, in the infinitely spiraling frameworks forming all around us. Just not necessarily truths to be fulfilled in our given reality. Conversations with other iterations across infinite folds.
Director Light: Multiversal tree… of course. I should have put that together.
SCP-001: Difficult to see if you are not truly immersed in it.
Director Light: When I looked through everything, all the documents spanning nearly thirty years, the pattern became unignorable. Were you counting on no one ever looking at everything combined? Scattered and fragmented across decades?
SCP-001: Perhaps. The GOC blindly believed everything after the beneficial asset assessment. It made it easier.
Director Light: So, all of this, was it personal? A reaction to Bowe, to the Obskurakorp? Was it to better your conditions? What’s the endgoal here?
SCP-001: It would be a lie to say it wasn’t personal. Early in my life, I was treated very poorly, women were less than men, and a blind fortune teller near the bottom. I am a patient woman, shaped by the eons I have wandered this earth. I do not move rashly anymore… everything I have predicted, everything I have done is for myself, and for the world. So yes, it was personal. It was the most personal thing, the most personal anything I have ever done.
SCP-001’s voice rises as she looks up, staring straight at Director Light.
SCP-001: Yes, I helped bring the Third Reich to its knees. They were evil, perfectly ordinary human evil that I have seen roll across the world and ages a hundred times. The medical personnel much the same. The GOC, and General Stephen Bowe, who forced me to endure excruciating pain nearly every day for two decades for their predictions. It was all deliberate and careful maneuvers on a board none of them could see so that I could finally have a better life. So that the world would be ready when the seals come crashing down and the sky burns with crimson fire and weeps lilac blood.
SCP-001 looks down again.
SCP-001: I deserve better. The millions of innocents who’ve burned at fascist hands deserve better.
Several minutes of silence.
Director Light: I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t ask the next question, so forgive me.
SCP-001: I rarely hold ill will for questions without malice.
Director Light: How much of it was an act? With the GOC, with the Obskurakorp, with the Cult.
SCP-001: An act?
Director Light: Pretending to be something you weren’t. The projection of a frail woman incapable of standing up for herself. I read what you did to General Bowe with your staff. Couldn’t you have broken out of German captivity?
SCP-001: No. They caught me alone, in a place I could not act. Trapped me, sapped me of strength by denying me rest, food, water. Beat me, screamed at me, kept me in the dark, tortured me day after day until I was certain that no matter how many wrong predictions I gave I would never escape, no matter what the other branches said, no matter what I saw. The hospital was…not much better. I was frail, terrified, disoriented and unsure if I would wake up in a bed or kneeling with my arms pinned in the air.
SCP-001 breaths heavily.
SCP-001: Did I see what the path was, what would need to be done to reach the desired goals? Yes. Did that make any of it an act, did that make it a certainty that it would come about in my mind? No. I was terrorized nearly every day for fifteen years by a power hungry bully in uniform and everything I did was to reach a better end.
Several minutes of silence.
SCP-001: The question now before you and I, is will the Foundation be better? Will you be better than what came before?
Director Light: What has your sight told you?
SCP-001: That you are not a foolish woman. That you and those who come after you plan and move in the longer term. You will either throw me in a cell and keep me there until the world burns all around you when it’s too late, and then I shall be left to flee. Or you will see the truth and know what must be done.
Several seconds of silence.
SCP-001: So which will it be, Director?
Director Light leans back against the couch and looks out the window for five minutes.
Director Light: Well. I won’t lie Seeress, I’ve not informed the O5 Council about what you’ve done. Not yet at least. I could keep it all to myself, cover it up. Oh, I’m sure someone else will come along and put it all together, but that will take time, and I can certainly make it harder by burying the materials deep. But I don’t think you want any of that. I suspect you want the council to know.
Director Light leans forward, resting her chin on her clasped together fingers.
Director Light: This too has been a manipulation. You knew I was going to lay this all out before you. How many years ago did you see this moment?
SCP-001 is quiet for several minutes. It then smiles.
SCP-001: Dozens of times over hundreds of years. Time is but an artificial construct flowing slowly in the dreams of eternity made prophecy. To quote a popular turn of phrase to be in another forty years, the game was rigged from the start. Though the travel was no less arduous for it.
Director Light whistles.
Director Light: This whole time, planning every move. Consulting in the dreams and daydrifts with an infinitely scaling arrangement of other yous. You’ve wanted the upper echelons of the Foundation to see what happened before. You’re more useful to us here in these towers, continuing your endless work. You know it, I know it, the O5 Council knows it. Every tiny twist of phrase has been gently shepherding us here.
SCP-001 smiles.
SCP-001: Flattery goes far, Director. I much prefer to think of it as a dance, but yes, I wanted them to see what is at stake.
Director Light: I can barely fathom how much you’ve endured, how much you must have questioned it all on the edge of breaking and still… still you kept going. Your will must be forged of steel.
SCP-001: Aesir Brass actually.
Director Light: Ha. I take it then; you’ve seen their toys? The devices and mechanisms to ensure your cooperation, and I’m sure the safeguards are already in motion and they would fail, just as the GOC and Nazis failed?
SCP-001: I hope it never comes to that, but the path taken may still fluctuate in the river of time.
Director Light: Well, as long as I’m director, I’ll strive to make sure that doesn’t happen. This, everything about you. Your resilience, your machinations, It’s… impressive. Everyone else is playing checkers and you’re playing multi-versal chess.
SCP-001: Chess at the cost of dozens of branches and billions of lives for every incorrect permuation. Though a game it may seem, it is not.
Director Light nods twice.
Director Light: Did you ever need this, the Nornir Foresight Matrix Array? Or was that too a ruse?
SCP-001: There was a great deal of trial and error in finding the right path to bringing it into existence. Many of me perished or met much worse fates in trying. Hence the uncertainty if this was the right thread. Those the Cult calls my sisters perished so I could walk. So yes, I need it. Exertion takes a terrible physical and emotional toll on me.
Director Light: I’ll make sure that’s emphasized in the file.
Silence for several minutes as Director Light writes upon a notepad.
Director Light: I suppose I just have two questions left before we officialize the Cult of the Nornir’s absorption under Foundation authority.
SCP-001 drinks from a cup of tea.
SCP-001: Ask what you wish to know.
Director Light: You’ve won, haven’t you?
SCP-001: It was never about winning. It was about guiding the world to a better fate.
Director Light: Right, but you helped topple the GOC and the Nazis, have effectively secured yourself a comfortable existence, control the strands of fate and the direction the Foundation moves. What are you going to do next?
SCP-001 looks in the general direction of the windows.
SCP-001: Ensure the Foundation is ready. Ensure the world is ready.
Director Light: Ready for what?
SCP-001 speaks at a raised volume.
SCP-001: The coming of the end, when the stars fill the sky with hateful burning. When the oceans bleed prismatic lightning on the cusp of being vaporized. In those chaotic hours the seals shall shatter, and all shall perish lest the tide is stemmed by the mother’s beating heart and restoration of her children’s once all-consuming song.
SCP-001 sinks into the couch seconds later. Her hands are shaking.
SCP-001: The apocalypse. The end of everything.
Several seconds of silence.
Director Light: The return of the Daevae?
SCP-001: Worse. An end to all reality that has been clawing towards us since the end of the Singers nearly three millennia ago. It is coming and humanity must be ready. The world must be prepared. The seals shall shatter and everything fray apart at the seams. You must be ready and mend the bridges long burned.
Director Light writes on her notepad for the next five minutes. SCP-001 leans back against the couch. For five seconds, it appears far older than it does in the minutes before and after this section of the recording.
Director Light: I appreciate your candor, Seeress. I have one last thing I’d like to discuss. It’s important.
SCP-001: I grow weary of conversation, but I can entertain one more line of inquiry.
Director Light: Did Speaker Ella ever tell you that she figured it out?
SCP-001 tilts its head.
SCP-001: I’m not sure what you’re referring to?
Director Light: That you’re not a Norn. That you’ve never been a Norn.
SCP-001 stops moving.
SCP-001: I’ve never claimed to be one of the Sisters.
Director Light: But you let them believe so?
SCP-001: I never corrected them or protested or demanded their help. They did what all superstitious humans do, what even I have done, they saw something that fulfilled their beliefs and latched on.
Director Light: So you used them for your own purposes?
SCP-001: In a way. Blind leading the blind.
Director Light laughs.
SCP-001: I don’t consider it using. It was a mutual exchange, I fulfilled their beliefs, gave them purpose. They lost their spiritual source to the Nazis, and I filled the gap left behind. In turn they fought for my rights as a person, planned and constructed the very thing I needed to help turn the tide and guide our path to a better tomorrow.
Director Light: Mutualism is a noble way to frame it. Lucky coincidence or plucked strings?
SCP-001: You already know the answer to that question.
Director Light: Let me ask what I really want to know then.
SCP-001: Answers may find you.
Director Light: Who are you really? What did you tell Ella and Edvard. Where did you actually come from? You’re not a Norn, that much is clear. You’re not relegated to the Greek Underworld so you’re not a Moirai. At least, I don’t think you are. Maybe you’re Tiresias? Or did you go by something else. Just who is the name behind the woman in front of me?
SCP-001: Curious guesses… Trust is a fickle thing, Madeline. Names, true names have power, history, and curses. Some more real than others. The Foundation and you have not yet earned that trust. In time that might change. But trust aside, if I told you my true name, you’d never believe me.
Director Light stands.
Director Light: Well then, I believe we have a long road ahead to forge that trust together, Seeress.
SCP-001: Only the sands of time will tell.
<End Log>
Director’s Note: This was a truly fascinating conversation. SCP-001 didn’t try to hide or deny what I have long suspected. It has been manipulating global events for decades. It faced unimaginable suffering and persisted. I find myself admiring that sort of spirit.
It has seen something coming, some catastrophic disaster on the horizon, probably far sooner than any of us expected. Instead of trying to save its own skin, it has orchestrated all of this to help avoid that outcome.
We need to make sure that we give this anomaly everything it needs to continue its work and avoid the mistakes the GOC made. Some would argue I’m trusting it too easily, but I got more than a few glimpses behind the curtain today and I believe every word she said. I have a lot of work to do to shield SCP-001 from the more unilateral measures the O5’s can take.
Addendum 11: O5 Council Proposal
On July 1st, 1970, Eurtec Director and head of the Department of Predictive and Prescience Sciences Madeline Light submitted proposals regarding SCP-001 to the O5 Council for the following items: Thaumiel designation and containment protocols including detailed documentation with both existing documents provided above, and detailed records from the GOC archives. Upon review of all documentation, the O5 Council unanimously voted to approve all containment measures presented, with the noted addition of restricting SCP-001 to personnel with Level 5 access without six months pre-written approval.
The Site Director’s Council and the Ethics Committee were provided a heavily redacted iteration of these proposals and unanimously approved their implementation.
As a part of these considerations, SCP-001 is to have regular bi-weekly meetings with the current Director of Eurtec.
Addendum 12: New CEO of the Silicon Nornir
On 07/18/1975, Speaker Ella Haugen and Speaker Edvard Hägglund passed away due to natural causes. Speaker Ella was CEO of the Cult of the Nornir for 40 years and had been integrated into Omega-77 as SCP-001’s primary contact liaison alongside Speaker Edvard. SCP-001 refused to activate the NFMA for a period of two months. The anomaly was despondent for another six months following its return to activity.
Speaker Ella’s daughter, Stigurd Haugen, had been in training to take her mother’s place and was promoted to primary contact liaison for SCP-001 and the new head of MTF Omega-77. SCP-001 continues to work with Ms. Haugen, but Omega-77 has observed a notable decrease in the more personalized communication and efficient presentation of prophetic texts and artworks for interpretation that was seen under Speaker Ella.
Update 09/05/1978: Continued efforts to increase the presence of individuals with empathic and strong moral tendencies have increased SCP-001’s communication substantially. New protocols are being implemented to select and train for these qualities.
Addendum 13:
NOTICE: CHANGE OF ROLE DETECTED. PLEASE ENTER NEW USER IDENTIFIER AND ACCESS CODE.
THE FOLLOWING FILE REQUIRES DIRECT APPROVAL FROM O5-07 TO ACCESS. MEMETIC KILL AGENTS ARE PRIMED FOR UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS.
USER CODE: WIZARD ON HIGH.
KEY PHRASE: A MAGICIAN ALWAYS KNOWS HER TIME AND NEVER REVEALS HER TRICKS.
KEYPHRASE ACCEPTED. WELCOME O5-07.
SCP-001 Interview Audio and Video Log 151 IVA-001-151:
Interview Log IVA-001-51
Interviewer: Director Madeline Light
Date: September 30th, 1980.
Location: Silicon Nornir Central Complex
Foreword: On September 15th, 1980, the city of Eurtec experienced a large-scale ontological disruption which temporarily disabled all active security measures and most monitoring equipment within the city. SCP-001 was within the NFMA’s central complex within the array’s focal chamber at the time of this incident. Bulkhead security doors closed, and it could not be reached by Omega-77 personnel.
When the doors were eventually opened, SCP-001 was found seated in the center of the focal chamber. It was unusually agitated and had to be escorted back to its personal chambers in tower three’s penthouse.
Initially, Omega-77 and Eurtec security personnel believed the cameras within the NFMA focal chamber were affected. However, on September 29th, 1980, Nornir engineers discovered the cameras were still active and pulled the footage for Director Madeline Light to review. Director Light then arranged a normal biweekly interview with SCP-001.
<Begin Log>
Director Light enters the central focal chamber of the NFMA. The chamber is large and appears organically shaped to resemble a magma chamber. Lava tube-like structures are arranged along the ceiling and face down into the center of the chamber. Several of these tubes contain large bundles of wires and fibers which vanish into the floor. The walls, floor, and ceiling are carved with irregularly shaped light panels which glow in varying shades of neon, predominantly reds, blues, and yellows. SCP-001 is standing in a circular area of sunken flooring with stairs in front and behind it. There are large digital consoles on either side with biometric interfaces.
Director Light: Seeress, how are we today?
SCP-001 turns to the general direction of Director Light.
SCP-001: Madeline, you are early. Most unexpected.
Director Light: Are you seriously telling me you didn’t see me coming? With chocolate milk and candy no less?
SCP-001 waves a hand in the general area of its face.
SCP-001: Nope, nothing.
Director Light laughs.
Director Light: Surely you heard the doors, you can’t be deaf too? Did you hearing get scrambled, oh maybe you drank from a tainted pool and got shot through the neck? Am I going to read about sudden changes in your medical chart induced by divine intervention?
SCP-001: The audio quality of the recent dreams has been a bit spotty. I think I need a new aux cord.
Director Light: I’ll see what our doctors can do with such a dated input port.
SCP-001: Are you calling me old?
Director Light approaches and descends the stairs into the pit. She places the pitcher and candy on a table off to one side with chairs. SCP-001 joins her.
Director Light: Good gods, you really are deaf!
SCP-001: How dare you. I am positively ancient.
Both laugh.
Director Light: Well you seem in good spirits.
SCP-001: The path continues to wind in favorable ways; there is much to be positive about.
Director Light: Good. That’s what I like to hear. The Councils and Ethics Committee are happy with your work, even if all of them may not agree that we’re using the resources appropriately.
SCP-001: I expect this will be a short meeting then? Other than the folder in your right hand, which I presume is the most recent list of things the Council wishes to forsee?
Director Light: Well…
Several seconds of silence. SCP-001 tilts its head after drinking from the pitcher of chocolate milk.
SCP-001: I feel tension from you Madeline. What is it?
Director Light: You’ve lied to us, Seeress.
SCP-001 frowns. Her brow wrinkles.
SCP-001: Madeline, I have not lied to anyone. I never lie about the fate unwinding before us all, only provide what information is most fit and relevant.
Director Light: But you did lie to us very recently.
SCP-001: I’m confused and unsure of what you’re referring to.
Director Light: Let me play a refresher, it might jog your memory.
The following is a transcription of an audio visual log that was recorded on September 29th, 1980, between the hours of 1200 and 1300 in the NFMA central complex during a major ontological disruption which disabled most monitoring and security systems within the city of Eurtec.
<Begin Log>
SCP-001 is seated within the central focal chamber of the NFMA. The power abruptly fluctuates, and the bulkhead security doors slam shut and seal. SCP-001 stands, visibly startled by the loud noise and sudden disruption to its biometric interfaces.
The lights blink off for several seconds. When they return, there is another figure in the room with SCP-001. They are a middle-aged woman dressed in a well-tailored red pants-suit with brown hair. The face is visible but has antimemetic properties which prevent structural details from being retained. She speaks to SCP-001.
????: Good, I was able to execute and get inside with [Ontological Disrupted Name Removed]’s help. I was concerned this trick might not work. [Additional Ontologically Disrupted Name Removed] it’s good to see you again in the flesh.
SCP-001 slams the butt of its staff on the floor. Its teeth are bared and it gestures rapidly.
SCP-001: Who are— What are you doing? Why are you—you should not be here! Not now!
????: I needed to make contact. After we sent me back, I needed to be sure that this is it, that we fixed it. Did we do it? You’re not her, but you must have seen it already.
SCP-001: Of course I’ve seen glimpses of that strand. I have lived it through a thousand thousand lives. I know what we did, I know whence we sent you to, how we sent you. We didn’t take you to be a rash fool.
????: I’m almost offended by the implications of being called rash. I have spent years constructing dozens of countermeasures to prevent the Jailers from identifying me. And a dozen more tricks stuffed up my sleeve. This is driven by thousands of hours of consideration and study. Relax [Ontological Disrupted Name Removed], you are not the only one who plans in spans of decades.
SCP-001 scowls.
SCP-001: I plan in spans of centuries. The nerve, were you this arrogant before? This short sighted? You twist fate’s strands without seeing them and have the audacity to tell me to relax. You risk upending everything. We gave you very specific instructions not to make contact.
????: Specific instructions with no termination point. I have spent the last four decades of this life moving pieces into place in preparation to keep [Ontologically Disrupted Names Removed] in play. I’ve been tracking everything you have done through informants. The GOC is gone, the Jailers wrapped around your thumb, when will be the proper time if not now? I waited ten years for you to reach out after the GOC fell apart. I waited, and waited, prepared to bring myself and our key players our side so we could build everything needed for what’s coming. And heard nothing. If not now, then when? When it’s on our doorstep?
SCP-001 shifts through several facial expressions rapidly as it steps up out of the pit.
SCP-001: You had informants?
????: Of course I did, Seeress. A magician always has tricks up their sleeve. Now, I have done everything we discussed before I was sent back. What’s the next step, the next keystone in the line to stop what’s coming? When can you join us to build for the next steps in stopping this catastrophe?
SCP-001: Two turns of ten and five revolutions of the sun. Then and only then will the preparations for your rejoining begin. I will go nowhere, did she not tell you this?
????: What? But I—
SCP-001: The Jailers are the key, the foundations are being laid, and the players are being prepared. You are too early and have thrown wrinkles in the early iterations of my webbing and it may very well tear apart beneath your careless weight. I might not be able to undo the damage.
????: …oh. I—
SCP-001: There is nothing else to say. Go now and pray you haven’t unwound everything I have woven. When the time is near, messages will come. Do not do this again.
The camera and audio recording short out.
<End Log>
Several minutes of silence.
Director Light: So…
SCP-001: …
Director Light: You lied to us. You told me two weeks ago, nothing happened while you were in here.
SCP-001: …
Director Light: And yet here I am, having been handed evidence to the contrary. Not only was it not nothing, but you met with the source of the ontological disruption and seemed to know them.
SCP-001: …
SCP-001’s hands tremble.
Director Light: You and I are the only ones who have seen or heard this recording. You remember what you have been saying all along every time I have tried to ask about your personal details? Well, trust is a two way street.
SCP-001: …
Director Light: I have trusted you pretty implicitly until this point Seeress, for the good of normalcy and all humankind. But this is a pretty major trust breaker. So, I’m going to ask you questions about what we just listened to, and I expect honest answers if you want to keep building trust with me. Otherwise, we’re going to have to make some changes.
SCP-001: Okay.
Director Light: Right, so, first of all who was that?
SCP-001 hesitates for several seconds.
SCP-001: That’s not a question I can answer in full.
Director Light: Why not?
SCP-001: There is ontological and conceptual interference that spans infinitely many branches. The true name has been scraped and drowned and buried.
Director Light: Right.
SCP-001: For simplicity’s sake, they go by the alias Tilda Moose.
Director Light: I know that name.
SCP-001: I’m sure you do. They’re a member of the Serpents Hand.
Director Light: Yet they seemed to be quite intimate with you. How do you know them? Were they Edvard’s contact?
SCP-001: I don’t. I don’t know.
Director Light: I sense it’s more complicated than that.
SCP-001: Other iterations do know them. Or her. Sometimes him or xe or xer or zer. They and them. Through them I know her.
Director Light: Multi-versal tree gives me a headache.
SCP-001: It goes away with enough time.
Director Light: Chocolate milk seems to help you.
SCP-001: Imagine what it was like before it was invented.
Director Light: I’d rather not. Alright, why do other iterations of you know her? Are you with the Hand in those branches?
SCP-001: No. Those branches are few and far between.
Director Light: Okay then how do you know her? Work with me here.
SCP-001: We came to know her at the very end, after the unravelling of reality had begun and all that was left was the Library trafficking refugees to other branches. She was searching for ways to avert the end, if not in those branches then in others.
Director Light: Two of a kind then?
SCP-001: Of a sort. My counterparts appear to have overestimated her capacity for patient long-term planning to a certain point.
Director Light: Right. Well, she found you in the Library at the end of time looking to stop this apocalypse. Why is it that she seems to know you in this reality when you claimed you’ve never met? Don’t tell me, she’s prescient too?
SCP-001: No, she’s a magician, a trickster, an academic thaumaturge. No capacity to see the unwinding strands other than perhaps the ability to divine some small parts of fate.
Director Light: Then how does she know you so intimately?
SCP-001 hesitates for several more seconds.
SCP-001: I have only caught glimpses of it, but temporal displacement of the mind was involved.
Director Light stops writing.
Director Light: Did you say—
SCP-001: Yes.
Director Light: Not a joke—
SCP-001: Not a joke.
Director Light: How does that work?
SCP-001: You’re asking a blind hermit, worshipped as a goddess by a Cult who has no experience with temporal engineering, how my counterparts and a magician sent her consciousness and memories back in time?
Director Light rubs her temples.
Director Light: Fair point.
SCP-001: They used a device, somehow managed to pull it out of the crumbling remains of reality from a place called Site-43.
Director Light stares at SCP-001 for several seconds in silence. She gestures.
Director Light: Alright, I’m going to have to look into all of that further.
SCP-001: Please do. I would like to know too.
Director Light: What a batshit crazy concept, who the hell would make a machine that sends someone’s consciousness back in time?
SCP-001: A man named Placeholder Mcdoctorate.
Director Light: That was rhetorical.
SCP-001: My answer was not.
Director Light rubs her temples.
Director Light: Ok, back on topic before I burst a blood vessel. So, you sent this Tilda Moose back in time in a different branch reality where she, what, displaced her younger self?
SCP-001: Unlikely.
Director Light: Well, how then?
SCP-001: My understanding is it worked by depositing them in their younger self’s body like a dissociative personality, and they work together. It may explain… the rashness of this Moose if the older one is not driving the body.
Director Light: Right. This is a hard pill to swallow Seeress, but I believe you.
SCP-001: I would hope so, this reality is stranger than fiction.
Director Light: It certainly is. Why does she want you to join her? Or rather, why do you need her here?
SCP-001: It’s complicated, but for the web to reach its fullest completion in preparation for the catastrophe that will eat reality, Moose must defect from the Serpents Hand. Only, she seems to have misinterpreted the construction of how this must come to be.
Director Light: She’s supposed to defect? Well, why not now? Why did you send them away and not bring them to me?
SCP-001: There is an order to the webbing, a precision needed to achieve the outcome that will better us all. Too soon, too late, the web will fall apart. Those pieces that they seek to bring with them would not agree to the defection now, and the necessary pieces and technology to ensure they follow the strands aren’t in place yet. To simplify: It’s too early and they are long lived and slow to trust.
Director Light: I suppose that makes sense in the grand scheme of things. You seemed surprised to know there were informants in the GOC feeding information about your predictions to the Hand?
SCP-001: An act in part. I long suspected that there were Hand infiltrators. Planned for it. Though I never confirmed it, I suspect it was Edvard, may his soul rest evenly in Elysium. His reactions and sympathies were always strong.
Director Light: You’re right about Edvard but…Elysium? Why Elysium?
SCP-001: I have to keep you guessing about my personage.
Director Light laughs briefly.
Director Light: You are going to drive me insane.
SCP-001: I certainly hope not. I would never inflict such cruelty on another. I would also hate to see you locked in a padded room with rats.
Director Light: Back on topic. You didn’t know any of this was going to happen?
SCP-001: Some things elude the strands of fate in prescience. Moose and their pieces are frequent flyers of this domain. It is difficult to see them at times, due to their integrity to reality and destiny’s outcome which they frequently defy.
Director Light: So literal forces of agency. I guess that all makes sense and answers all my questions. If something like this happens again, don’t lie to me about it. My trust won’t afford another break like this.
SCP-001: I understand.
Director Light: Good. I’ll seal these records and bury them under classification; there’s no need for anyone to know about this.
SCP-001’s shoulders drop.
SCP-001: The stars and sands of fate greatly appreciate this, Director.
Director Light: Enough to tell me your name and where you came from?
SCP-001: A day far ahead and yet not so distant.
Director Light: A girl can hope for sooner.
SCP-001: Patience is a virtue, Madeline.
Director Light: Did I tell you that they are giving me a promotion?
SCP-001: No, you didn’t, but I already foresaw it.
Director Light: O5-07.
SCP-001: An impressive feat. Will you still have time for these meetings? I have grown quite fond of your presence.
Director Light: That’s touching Seeress. I’ve grown fond of yours as well. Worry not. Eurtec is still under my remittance in my new position. I’ll just come with a lot more guards and esoteric countermeasures.
SCP-001: I’d expect nothing less.
Director Light: This also means, when the time is approaching, we can discuss this “Moose’s” defection.
Several seconds of silence pass. Director Light’s expression changes gradually.
Director Light: You set this whole thing up this way didn’t you, so that you could make sure that happens? Did you bait her? Did you bait me?
SCP-001 smiles.
SCP-001: I am becoming too transparent for you.
Director Light: Or I’m just getting old and easier to fool.
SCP-001: Perhaps. What about your daughter? Will it be challenging to raise her now that you will be an O5?
Director Light: Sophia is in college now, Seeress. But it won’t be long I feel before she joins the Foundation. Don’t change the subject, Seeress, you haven’t answered my question.
SCP-001: Time moves too quickly for my ancient bones. She will be a part of the generation who strives to restore our world.
Director Light: So you’ve said many times, Seeress. You’re not going to answer my question, are you?
SCP-001: You already know the answer to it.
Director Light shakes her head while smiling.
Director Light: Before I go, I have one more question.
SCP-001: Of course, Madeline.
Director Light: Who are these critical pieces that Moose went back in time for?
SCP-001: [REDACTED]
Director Light’s expression changes several times in rapid succession.
Director Light: Well, that’s a complication.
<End Log>
Directors Note: Nothing is ever simple with SCP-001. Machinations within machinations. I was starting to get a little lax with her, but with this most recent event I need to keep a closer personal eye on her.
My bigger concern at the moment is learning about [REDACTED]. Those are names I’ve seen before, and I have a distinct feeling that this is going to be a lot messier to set up than I first thought.
Addendum 14: Preparations for Operation Rat Race
On October 3rd, 1980, a long-term project began dedicated to monitoring the activity of Tilda Moose and their associated Hand Cell consisting of [REDACTED]. This initiative was unfortunately beset by difficulties given the limited interaction profile with other Hand Cells, and the high levels of capability of both Tilda Moose, [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] in detecting Foundation Infiltrators and operating against active assets.
Several active Foundation sites have been severely damaged and raided by [REDACTED] following these attempts.
Operation Rat Race: Defection of Tilda Moose
In May 2005, O5-01 and O5-07’s offices began cross-department and division coordination for the heretofore predicted defection of Tilda Moose and two critical Serpents Hand operatives heavily involved in the collapse of the GOC.
SCP-001’s predictive capacity advised Foundation assets of vague details of multiple operations by Moose’s active cell. Unfortunately, due to the limitations of SCP-001’s ability to see [REDACTED] and [REDACTED], counter-intelligence and counter-insurgency missions during the period as a part of Rat Race suffered heavy casualties and lost high value equipment.
The operation came to its fruition on May 15th, 2014, when special task force elements retrieved Tilda Moose from a drop site just outside of an entrypoint into Eurtec. Confrontation with [REDACTED] encountered some difficulties but ultimately resulted in an agreement to surrender to the Foundation for debriefing, recruitment, and special operations/Red Right Hand assignment under O5-01.
Further information and documents for Operation Rat Race and the defection of Tilda Moose can be accessed with appropriate clearance.
Addendum 15: Mount Helicon Incident 05/05/09
On May 5th, 2009, SCP-001 was escorted to the base of Mount Helicon, Greece as part of their pre-approved extra-Eurtec excursions. This was a consistent yearly trip that has been repeated since SCP-001 was integrated into the Foundation. Upon arrival, SCP-001 requested to mount the summit by itself without accompaniment. In recognition of good behavior and prolonged cooperation, SCP-001 was allowed this privilege.
Mount Helicon drawn by CEO Ella Haugen.
Fifteen minutes after its ascent, a large-scale Ontokinetic disruption of reality occurred, originating from the mountain’s summit. Omega-77 quickly ascended by a narrow path and experienced large-scale reality bending phenomena which necessitated the activation of mobile Scranton reality anchors.
When they reached the summit of Mount Helicon, SCP-001 was found weeping in the middle of a forest of dead trees next to a pond that was filled with 50% water and 50% blood by volume. SCP-001 was inconsolable and flew into hysterics, resulting in further large-scale ontokinetic manipulation that injured three members of the MTF.
SCP-001 was sedated and returned to Eurtec by airlift, where it locked itself in the penthouse for a period of three months. During this period, Omega-77 reported that it refused to do any predictions and refused regular meetings.
When SCP-001 finally resumed normal social interactions and cooperation, it remained relatively despondent for another six months. SCP-001 was not known to be capable of large-scale ontokinetic sculpting prior to this incident. When asked what provoked this episode, SCP-001 initially refused to answer and changed the subject. Eventually, it told O5-07 Madeline Light the following:
They stole the most precious and important thing I have ever had. The strands of fate are so much darker now. I spent months searching for the truth among the threads of how to get her back.
Only to be shown that it’s not my battle to fight. The world has truly taken everything from me now.
Addendum 16:
On May 16th, 2014, the following interaction occurred between Director Madeline Light and SCP-001 at the end of a regular bi-weekly meeting.
<Begin Log>
SCP-001 and O5-07 Madeline Light are in the Slicon Nornir Tower Three penthouse. There is an opened bottle of red wine on one of the low tables. Their glasses clink against each other.
O5-07: The apex of my career, coordinating with O5-01 to bring about the defection of Tilda Moose, mastermind behind the protracted Hand Campaign to bring down the GOC.
SCP-001: A celebration well deserved.
O5-07: A celebration that wouldn’t be possible without you, Seeress.
SCP-001 smiles.
SCP-001: I simply illuminated the path. Nothing more or less.
O5-07: Nonsense, you were involved at every step. This literally could not have happened without you. Take some credit, have some pride in your work.
SCP-001: Pride can come when the cataclysm is averted. For tonight, a brief respite and moment of quiet in the calm before the bey of wolves that announces the imminent arrival of the skin stripping winds driven before that howling storm on the horizon.
O5-07: It never stops for you, does it?
SCP-001: It will someday. Sooner than before. But there will be much to do and see once the seals are soldered shut.
O5-07: Well, hopefully you’ll be able to rest then.
SCP-001: For a time.
Several minutes of silence. O5-07 looks out the windows of the penthouse. Her hair is grey and there are many wrinkles on her face.
O5-07: You know, they confirmed it right away.
SCP-001 looks up in the general direction of O5-07.
SCP-001: Confirmed what?
O5-07: Their ontological associations. Titles, names, [REDACTED]. I don’t know if you saw those exchanges between Moose and O5-01’s office.
SCP-001 does not respond.
O5-07: There’s just some things about Moose knowing and priming us to ask about those details that I don’t really understand. How did they know about [REDACTED]? The other stuff, true names and titles, that wouldn’t be hard to put together, but something so… personal seems strange.
SCP-001: Guesswork. Something Moose is very well regarded for. They excel at piecing together a puzzle with many of the fragments missing.
O5-07: Certainly, but if there’s one thing I’m good at, its reading people. Moose has a tell, fiddling with their hands. Even you, Seeress have a tell.
SCP-001 shifts in the seat before reaching out and curling her hand around the staff.
O5-07: And there it is. All these years between us, and you seemed… so very deeply invested in the fate of these, by your own words, “people who did not know you existed.” There’s a difference in you, between the cold logic of saving the world in your personal crusade and this sort of behavior.
SCP-001: What are you suggesting, Madeline?
O5-07: Do you know how many times the speakers logged text and artwork of your looking into the relative timeframe of the coming apocalypse?
SCP-001: I don’t keep track of such things.
O5-07: Four times a year, at the change of a season, for the past forty-four years. 176 times.
SCP-001: …
O5-07: Quite a lot, at first glance. Do you know how many times the Speakers have logged interpretations that concern [REDACTED]?
SCP-001’s grip on the staff tightens.
O5-07: Two thousand two hundred and twenty-eight times in the past forty-four years. Once a week at least. For people you don’t know that seems like an awful lot. And then there’s Moose, knowing deep things about [REDACTED] despite having at best a lukewarm relationship with [REDACTED]. That’s not exactly the kind of thing you tell your handler in the Serpents Hand, no matter how close your wife is to them, is it? That’s the sort of deeply personal nature that would only come out if you’d been there, or if you were very close.
SCP-001’s hand shakes.
O5-07: So which is it Seeress, is this some sort of 3D chess for Moose, where she tells us to ask after these details as confirmation that [REDACTED] are onboard? Or did you tell Moose deeply personal details because they’re your very close friends, and this was the way you were going to track if they were truly onboard? Was this your final tell for if calamity was being averted or not?
SCP-001: …
O5-07: I can wait. I’ve waited forty-four years for you to feel ready to tell me who you are, and this is the closest I’ve ever been to untying the knot.
Several minutes of silence. SCP-001 turns to stare in the general direction of the windows.
SCP-001: Yes. I knew them.
O5-07: Then why all the secrecy, why not reach out yourself?
SCP-001 stands up abruptly and bangs the butt of her staff on the ground. O5-07 jumps. Several guards enter the penthouse but are stopped by O5-07’s raised hand.
SCP-001: Because that was more than five millennia ago. I did not lie or hide it from you, I do not know them, not as they are now, not as they will be in five minutes because there is a colossal rift of years between us.
O5-07: Oh.
SCP-001: I care because they were once my friends. Once we camped beneath the ever-burning stars under a drifting tide before a grand storm. We drunk and celebrated beneath a clear summer’s night after preventing the greatest end. We wept together when she who brought us all beneath that sky gave everything to secure our future! But that was eons ago, and I do not see them clearly so I have spent years and years worrying about whether they will reach that proper threshold that is needed if we are to prevent catastrophe!
SCP-001 walks around the couch and towards the window, holding the glass of wine in one hand and the staff in another.
SCP-001: If I made myself known to them, I could not foresee how they would act. All the avatars of Creation’s will are difficult to see, and it is a grand burden for her ultimate designs.
SCP-001 downs the glass and tosses it. It shatters several yards away.
SCP-001: I stand here on the precipice of the most secure and forward I have ever been in these many curses of prescience and loneliness I bear and it is still not enough!
SCP-001 hits the glass with a fist.
SCP-001: The 2nd most powerful oracle to ever walk the earth, and I am still infinitely many leagues behind [REDACTED]. If it were her here, if humans hadn’t—maybe we could see it clearer. Maybe I wouldn’t be so blind, maybe the next twenty years wouldn’t be such a fragmented view of what could be. But she is bound in that paradise beyond time. Worse her many great granddaughter bears but a fraction of that specific capacity and hovers out of reach for another three years. And I, I am here alone after nearly forty years of being handled like a tool, like a machine not a person, and forty-four more of moving under my own power to save us all.
O5-07 looks down into her wine glass.
SCP-001: So yes, Madeline, I told Moose about [REDACTED]. I watched and stared into a blurred and muffled kaleidoscope for forty-four years hoping for more insight. I walked the earth, broke bread, and drank with them in a distant past. I knew them. And this, this was my only way to be certain they were ready for what comes next. And they will not know, they will continue to not know for years yet to come, because what would I be to them but a stranger once known five thousand years ago? How could they possibly react in knowing I have been here the whole time?
Several seconds more of silence. SCP-001 turns and taps her staff on the floor, walking slowly back to the couch and table. She circles the table and reaches out with her free hand and traces O5-07’s cheek, before lifting her chin. O5-07 raises her hand to stop her Red Right Hand contingent who are raising weapons.
SCP-001: If I don’t tell you something, I am not excluding it in the hopes that it will lead you down the GOC’s path. It is because what I know is thousands of years out of date, or so vague and hard to see as to be useless. I have a reason, everything I do is with purpose. Even lifting your chin here and now to stare into my sightless eyes.
O5-07’s cheeks flush. She looks up into SCP-001’s face.
Director Light: T—that much is clear.
SCP-001 releases her after several seconds and returns to the couch.
SCP-001: Now enough of such things. This is a celebration.
Approximately ten minutes of silence. SCP-001 has produced another glass and poured wine for both of them as they drink.
O5-07: I didn’t mean to—
SCP-001: Its fine, Madeline. The moment is past, and no ill will is held against you.
O5-07: Are you going to clean up the glass?
SCP-001: The Roomba will handle it.
A Roomba with cat ears taped on appears and begins sweeping the penthouse. Five more minutes of silence occur broken only by the Roomba’s vacuum and clinking wineglasses.
O5-07: Seeress?
SCP-001: Hmm?
O5-07: Have you ever been in love with another person?
SCP-001: What provokes such questions?
O5-07: You tilting up my chin.
SCP-001: Oh.
SCP-001 stares ahead in the general direction of the elevator.
SCP-001: Yes, I have.
O5-07: And they are—
SCP-001: They’re…
SCP-001 pauses and appears to struggle for several seconds.
SCP-001: They’re beyond my reach now.
O5-07 is silent.
O5-07: Man, woman, nonbinary or other? If it’s not an intrusion to ask.
SCP-001 is quiet for several minutes.
SCP-001: I can’t abide men.
O5-07: Oh?
SCP-001: Men have inflicted great pain, heartache and despair upon me.
SCP-001 shudders.
SCP-001: I have never felt anything for them, and they have given me reason after reason to believe that this was purposeful on the grounds of their atrocious abuse and mistreatment of me across time. The thought of loving a man brings nothing but a cold, numb disdain. The next man who tries to force themselves upon me shall live in a torment of possibilities that will never be. I will never be that vulnerable again.
SCP-001 spits on the table. Several minutes of silence.
O5-07: And women?
SCP-001’s eyelids droop.
SCP-001: A complicated relationship. Some have been cruel, vindictive, and torturous. Others have been gentle, kind, intelligent beyond reproach, and fiery in their passions. Nonbinary is much the same.
O5-07: And this ‘they?’ You mentioned.
SCP-001 looks in the general direction of the windows. She then speaks at a low volume.
SCP-001: The greatest love. The only love I ever truly needed. A compliment to my every flaw, a warm fire and invigorating drink to my every strength. Dancing to the beat of the ever-flowing constellations and shimmering stars across the annals of history. Her passions were unmatched, her enthusiasm for the yoke of progress infinite, and her despair at the loss of [REDACTED] inconsolable. A warm fire always ready, a bed of thick blankets beneath the cool mountain air. Her voice, though not the crystalline tone of her sisters, honeyed and rivaling the rich tones of mortal singers. We’d sit beneath the stars for hours upon hours and laugh and sing until the sun’s pink fingers crested the horizon.
O5-07: She sounds perfect for you.
SCP-001: She is and was.
O5-07: Is this who you have gone to Mount Helicon to see with the Cult and now Omega-77?
Several tears roll down SCP-001’s face.
SCP-001: Yes.
O5-07: I am sorry, for whatever its worth.
SCP-001: Thank you Madeline.
O5-07: Do you—I could assign a research team, an MTF to pursue this. Track it down.
SCP-001 shakes its head.
SCP-001: The offer means a great deal Madeline, but it is not my fight. It is not your fight. It is an unforeseen sacrifice for our actions, and one I must live with. Chasing it myself won’t free her. Only one person can and I know not when she’ll stir. It is a tragedy in many parts.
O5-07: I’m sorry. You’re sure?
SCP-001: I’m sure. She knows already, she referenced it, but I didn’t see what she saw coming, and there was nothing I could do by the time I realized the truth.
Several seconds of silence.
SCP-001: One day she’ll return, then I will go back to her.
SCP-001’s voice breaks. It puts its face in its hands, and shudders for several minutes.
SCP-001: For now my eyes are needed to see the greater scope of the end in sight, no matter how many tears fall.
O5-07 nods once. Several minutes of silence pass.
SCP-001: Thank you for understanding. The offering means a great deal.
Several more minutes of silence. O5-07 looks down into the wine glass and swirls it. She speaks when SCP-001 has appeared to fully recover.
O5-07: Seeress, if things had worked out differently, would you have loved me?
SCP-001 brow wrinkles.
SCP-001: Madeline, have you—
O5-07: Would you?
SCP-001 looks directly at O5-07. She does not answer for several minutes.
SCP-001: No. Loving you would be loving a passing daydream. You would be here one moment and gone in the next blip of the twisting threads laid out before me. Maybe when I was younger, maybe before I was ruined by the world and those horrific monsters.
O5-07: Oh.
SCP-001: My sweet Madeline, I could never love you now like you deserve. I could not live with you in every moment you craved, cradle you in the warm morning sun in a grassy field, argue over the little things in the arrangement of paintings on the wall, the cleanliness of plates in the cupboard. I could not be the mother to your children; I could not be the mortal woman you seek in your heart.
O5-07: Why not?
SCP-001: Because I am strung to Destiny’s weave, to the Fates’ plucking fingers, and to Creation’s unending, writhing flesh. I live in the space of things that might be, could be, will be, and never were. A settled, happy existence I could never provide you. There would never be enough time.
O5-07: There never is, even now.
SCP-001: I know. I have always known. What you love is an endless river with depths deeper than can be possibly grasped. You would ever be a shadow, no matter how high you climbed, and a fleeting shadow gone in the snap of a finger. Nothing could have changed that.
O5-07: What about Ella, didn’t you and her—
SCP-001: No. Ella tried, and I told her much the same. But she never stopped trying, and in the end, her chase won her little and left her lonely in ways I could never provide or satisfy. Her daughter has been much wiser, but all the same you seek what I can’t give.
O5-07: I understand, though it hurts. So, you never felt that way?
SCP-001: Yes. I did, and perhaps still do. I will weep for you, as I wept for Ella, as I wept for my greatest love. Not for what might have been but for what was lost in connection that will never be the same.
O5-07 frowns then nods. SCP-001 reaches beneath the neckline of its top and pulls out a key from within. It leans forward pressing the key to the table. There are several metal taps before SCP-001 finds what it is looking for, and a small mechanical click is recorded. SCP-001 slides out a thick and weathered leather bound book.
SCP-001: I once told you that in time I would tell you all the matters of person. Though not today, that time is fast approaching. When it comes the absolute truth will become apparent. Though knowing you, much as I know Moose, your eyes will see the writing between the lines when I hand you this precious piece of my soul bound in frail pages.
SCP-001 offers the book across the table. O5-07 takes it.
SCP-001: In seven circles of our rock about the gleaming fire of Helios, I’ll reveal the final truth to you. But there you will be bound not to tell another soul.
O5-07 stares at the book, then looks up at SCP-001.
O5-07: Thank you Seeress, for finally trusting me.
SCP-001: It was hard won.
O5-07: Did Ella and Edvard know at the end?
SCP-001: Yes. Though I do not believe Edvard ever believed it.
O5-07: I guess I have only two things left to ask today.
SCP-001: Ask and I shall answer.
O5-07: This whole time, all these years, you have talked about the end approaching. This grand cascade failure of the seals. These are O5-01’s project, aren’t they? That’s why they’ve been here so much in recent days.
SCP-001: Yes.
O5-07: The threat is just a cascade HK-class Deific Subjugation Scenario, is it not? Yet you talk about it like all of reality will be unmade. Why?
SCP-001: Because when the seals shatter, nine shall rise from their astral pits. They shall crush the earth and mankind beneath their heel and breach beneath the grand ramparts shielding Creation’s heart. They will destroy her in totality and when they do the grand pillar of Creation, the largest buttress of reality’s weave shall crumble and all will begin to fray. Then they shall turn against one another, and accelerate our universe’s unraveling as they tear each other to pieces.
O5-07: Oh. Now I see why they have two projects.
Several minutes of silence.
SCP-001: You had one more question?
O5-07: Right, yes. Apologies, I got lost in the heaviness of everything you said.
SCP-001: Understandable.
O5-07: I guess I wanted to ask, when will you tell the world who you are?
SCP-001 smiles.
SCP-001: When [REDACTED] returns to life.
<End Log>
Directors Note: Based on its responses to my questions, SCP-001 appears to have been in a long-term relationship with aspects of SCP-7238, though which of them I can’t say. I did not submit the materials SCP-001 gifted me for evaluation by Foundation researchers. I’ll read them myself and turn them over when I retire, which will honor the Seeress’s wishes.
My successor will look back on this log and may be alarmed at how attached I became to SCP-001 to the point of craving its romantic touch. To that concern I say, when you spend most of your life in her company, you too will struggle to not see the breadth of beautiful humanity in her soul.
Addendum 17:
Interview Log IVA-001-562
Interviewer: O5-07 Madeline Light, Current Eurtec Interim Head Tilda Moose
Date: May 15th, 2021
Location: Silicon Nornir Tower Three penthouse
Foreword: On April 15th, 2021, O5-07 Madeline Light announced her intention to retire on the 15th of May 2021, after more than 60 years of employment by the Foundation. The following is a log excerpt of the final biweekly meeting between SCP-001 and O5-07 after the latter had already submitted the final retirement documentation and turned over title and transition of office documents to Tilda Moose who would be assuming her duties as the new O5-07.
<Begin Log>
The penthouse rooms of Silicon Nornir Tower Three are decorated with banners and gold lettering reading ‘Congratulations on Retirement’. Director Moose, SCP-001 and Madeline Light are seated in a circular arrangement on the couches with champagne glasses in their hands. Light appears particularly frail and hunched in her seat. Her hands shake while holding and sipping from the glass.
Light: I can’t believe the day is finally here.
Director Moose: It had to come eventually. It comes for us all.
SCP-001: Except for me.
Director Moose: You’re an outlier and shouldn’t have been counted.
Light: Well, it took its sweet time getting here.
SCP-001: What will you do, once you’re out? Write a memoir?
Director Moose winces.
Light: I might have if they’d let me remember anything, but no. Sixty years of my life to this jailhouse and they won’t even let me keep the memories.
SCP-001: I’m sorry. I didn’t know.
Light: Bullshit you didn’t know; now forgot I can believe.
The room is silent for several seconds.
Light: Crochet. Maybe a bit of painting, they are giving me one last drink from the fountain of eternity here in Eurtec before the amnestics kick in. It’ll be nice to not have the shakes for another decade.
Driector Moose: I’d ask if you would miss it, all of this, but we’ve already trodden that road. So instead, is there anything left you’d like to do before you go?
Light: There is.
Light looks at SCP-001.
Light: It’s time, isn’t it?
SCP-001: It is. If it is still something you wish to know? It won’t affect the outcomes, either way.
Director Moose: Time for what?
SCP-001: Shush, it’s not your moment.
Light: I’ve waited 51 years, Seeress. I’d sooner be dead than let the mystery of my whole life slip away forever. The stars above would not forgive me never having known. Very last thing on my bucket list before they render me an insensate old granny with a bit of spry left in her bones.
Director Moose: I’d hate to be your nurse in that home.
Light: If Sophia puts me in a home, I’ll come back from the dead to haunt her.
All three laugh.
SCP-001: You read it then?
Director Moose: Read what?
SCP-001 attempts to menace Director Moose with a rolled up piece of paper, but points at a nearby empty seat instead.
SCP-001: I said hush you.
Light: I did, Seeress. It was—I’m still not sure how you wrote it, but it was…
Light trails off and stares out the window for several seconds.
Light: I don’t have the words to describe how it made me feel to know all of that. Everything that happened.
SCP-001: It is a heavy weight to bear.
Light: I never even realized you were—
SCP-001: They wrote it down and blacked it out in the files. All of them.
Light: It tracks with how you were treated.
Director Moose: I am entirely lost.
SCP-001: I will fill you in once she’s gone, now hush this is her moment. Speaking at a low and gravelly volume. A magician with no sense of gravitas, who would have thought.
Several seconds of silence.
Light: Before you tell me, can I make a guess? I have a suspicion cause the very last thing in that journal’s chapter is unreadable.
SCP-001: All these years and you never made one, why now?
Light: Part of the final moments of the chase. There’s something rewarding about having put all the pieces together myself at the end.
SCP-001: Then of course, Madeline.
Light: Well come over here, I ain’t going to say it out loud and these old bones don’t move as well as your ancient ones.
SCP-001 grasps its staff and stands. It moves over to kneel by Madeline Light. Madeline Light leans over, kisses SCP-001 on the mouth for several seconds, before whispering in its ears. SCP-001 briefly flushes but otherwise does not react. Director Moose looks away from the pair.
SCP-001: Close, its actually—
SCP-001 leans in but its lips are still visible. The recording is disrupted briefly by several bursts of ontokinetic interference; however, several frames are visible where the signed letters of C O T are distinguishable.
SCP-001 gently places one hand on Light’s cheek and kisses her for several seconds. When she is finished she slowly stands and makes her way back to the couch. Silence continues.
SCP-001: That was to remember me by. In dream and vision if not in physical reality.
Light is staring into her glass.
Light: I should have known. It was obvious and in front of my face the whole time. You were far less subtle than I imagined, and yet you managed to fool me the whole way.
Light looks up at SCP-001.
Light: Well played, Seeress. A life well lived.
SCP-001: A life well made.
Light: True.
Madeline Light rises from the couch.
Light: That was the final bond keeping these old bones to this bureaucratic monolith. Now? Well, I suppose there is nothing left to do but walk into the light of normalcy and become irrelevant.
Director Moose: For what it’s worth Madeline, though my time under your tutelage has been short, there wasn’t a day that went by where you didn’t teach me something new.
Light: Don’t get sappy on me. I don’t want to end up bawling here at the end.
Moose smiles.
Light: But, it was good to work with you Moose. Even though we were adeversaries for more than half my life.
Director Moose: Fate is a strange thing.
Light: Especially when she’s sitting across from you.
SCP-001 wiggles a finger in one ear.
SCP-001: Did someone say something?
Director Moose and Light laugh. Several seconds of silence follow as Light looks out the windows.
Light: I had better get going before my nerve fails. Y’all have a good rest of eternity and do me a favor. Win this fight ahead. Don’t make me kick your asses as a ghost for losing.
Director Moose: We’ll certainly do our best.
Light: You better.
Light crosses the penthouse towards the elevators at a slow pace. She presses the button and the doors open. SCP-001 speaks to her one last time as she steps in.
SCP-001: Madeline, one last thing.
Light turns around in the elevator and presses the button that holds the door open.
Light: I’m listening C—Seeress.
SCP-001: You asked me seven years ago if things had been different, if I would have loved you.
Light: I remember. You said you wouldn’t and then gave me a long winded monologue that only an immortal goddess bound up in fate could produce. What about it?
SCP-001: I made a mistake once. I won’t make it again. I lied.
Several seconds of silence.
Director Moose: …
Light: …
The [REDACTED]: …
SCP-001: …
Light laughs.
Light: Now you tell me.
Light laughs for several more seconds. She wipes her eyes with her free hand where tears are forming.
Light: I look forward to the next life Seeress, where you’ll make good on that promise. Not just to me, but Ella too. Please look after Sophia for me.
The elevator dings as Madeline Light releases the hold door button, and the doors close. Director Moose, now O5-07, is alone with SCP-001.
Director Moose: So, are you going to—
SCP-001: I told her my true name, and she learned that I was not born in the shape I now claim.
Director Moose sips from her glass.
Director Moose: Ah. That explains that.
SCP-001: That explains that.
Director Moose: Mhmm. That’s what I just said.
Several seconds of silence.
SCP-001: I marvel at your ability to remain nonchalant in such moments.
Director Moose: There’s always time for gravitas, and time for humor as well.
SCP-001: The greatest trick a magician has, timing.
Director Moose smiles. Several seconds of silence pass.
Director Moose: Well, here we are, finally alone again.
SCP-001: Here we are.
SCP-001 and Director Moose look out the windows at Eurtec.
Director Moose: Do you ever get fatigued, thinking about the momentum, the monumental cliff that we face?
SCP-001: Some days it’s harder to shake these ancient bones from the bed. But we get up. We go on because that is what it requires, that is the sacrifice necessary to save the grand tree.
Director Moose: Do you ever think you’ve sacrificed enough for one life? You of all people especially.
SCP-001: Read the files, have we?
Director Moose: But not that book. Knowing the name is enough, enough to know what you’ve been through—and yet…
SCP-001: And yet you only know pieces. And yet she still sings in the deep, waiting. The hour hand moves ever closer, the ticking ever louder.
Director Moose: Being around those two, I think I’ve started to hear it.
SCP-001: They don’t hear it yet. Neither do the others, The Twins, The Queen in her gardens of the dead, The Witch on her island in the depths, and so many others. I’ve never stopped hearing it, but it’s getting louder.
Director Moose: It’s getting closer then?
SCP-001: Four rings of the rock around Helios until the Sapphire and the return of the engineer. Three until the return of the blade. Fourteen until the grand palace rises anew into the sky, and the seals fail.
Director Moose: So this is it then, this is the one.
SCP-001: While exhaling heavily. This is the one.
Director Moose: Then there is a lot of work to do, child of Ilion. A lot of work to return the Singers to the fold.
SCP-001: There always is. Yet curiously, I do not know when the next avatar of primordial fire will appear.
Director Moose: The what?
SCP-001: Idle musings of a deranged old lady, pay them no mind.
<End Log>
Addendum 18: SCP-001 Journal J-001
On May 15th, 2021, O5-07 Madeline Light reported to the amnestics clinic in Eurtec for debriefing and memory erasure as part of standard retirement protocols. During debriefing, she surrendered the only sensitive item remaining on her person, a thick leatherbound book containing SCP-001’s personal journal. The following document contains the most relevant excerpts linked to identifying SCP-001 based on early life events that were previously undisclosed.
Foreword: I sit here at the top of this sacred place among a field of blooming flowers in the spring of the year 4957 from when the seas were set in earth and sky. Here I have elected in the event that things do not work out I have foreseen, to paint for you whoever may be reading this tome, whether it be in the Library or some other misbegotten place, the story of how I came to be.
Even now as I sit here staring at the sunrise, I can see the grand canvas of history sprawl out before in a stream of rippling color. Yes, see. This is the story of my birth, the story of how someone who was not me died, and the weave of my life was forged.
Chapter 1: On A Life Recorded in the Annals of Myth
She, that girl who seems so very far away now, was born in a palace beneath the glimmering light of Helios’s sun. A place of sweet and bitter scents in perpetual contradiction. It sat atop a lush hill overlooking a fertile coastal plain on the edge of an empire whose name is long forgotten. Tall walls, a merry life of people used to the ways of war found in the south and east.
She was born on a warm summer evening, with the smell of dew was unusually strong on the wind and some ancient chthonic intent had crept up from beneath the earth. The elder of fraternal twins, she was loved. Born to a king and queen beneath a greater mantle who stared down at her glimmering eyes with an adoration and gentle warmth that was not built to last.
They named her in the old ways of the world, but it was not her true name. She was not born a girl as she should have been, and the world was worse for it. And though they sat there adoring their new tiny bundles, those ill-fated parents did not yet realize what power they had brought into the world.
Summers began to flow together in the endless paints streaming across the sky. She grew. She took her first steps beneath the all-knowing sun and found her footing in the world amidst the rolling grasses and lush forests. She saw things that others didn’t, couldn’t, but didn’t yet know what they meant. Heard muffled choirs in a rolling pitch, washed with aromas to which not even her parents would have been exposed. They were shadows dancing in dreams unspoken.
And with every step, every inch gained, fundamental incongruence with the world grew. A roiling black dissonance seeping into flesh and nerve.
Every glance into the clear fountains of the palace, the mirrored surfaces of shining bronze were a reminder that she was wrong. This flesh that was hers was not hers, but a strangers, a wrongness that she could not escape.
The smiles and laughs in play became fewer with every passing summer. Discord in flesh and soul plunging what should have been a happy soul into the dour abyss above a hungry underworld.
The discomfort of that ill-fitting skin did not go unnoticed by the world. It was seen by opportunists looking for diamonds in the rough.
When she was eight summers tall, she and her brother came to rest in a grand marble colored space in the palace. It glimmered with golden statues of a radiant young man bearing in his arms a lyre and upon his back and glimmering bow. It reeked of incense and herbs so strong that it made her eyes water. Brother of the Hunter, born of prophecy, medicine, music and inheritor of a chariot of fire across the sky. They slept there beneath the swirling color and twinkling lullabies when they grew too tired to continue play.
In a waking dream this opportunist came, skin glimmering with twinkles of sunlight and backswept hair framing blue eyes.
“Children of Ilion, I have seen you this night aslumber at my hallowed feet.” His voice was deceptively honeyed to her ears.
He was awash in scents of baked breads and cream filled things that she could not grasp. She stared up in wonder for him, for the threads of those above seldom graced the dreams of mortals.
“Your grace, what honor you bestow on us,” she said, bowing at his feet.
He smiled. She believed it warm, welcoming, friendly and filled with favor. How could she have known how wrong she was?
“I have foreseen your greatness in the twirling stars above. I come before you because you will make great marks upon history and the weave of destiny, and I seek to aid you in that quest in return for favor owed.”
His eyes turned to her, shimmering in the midnight starlight.
“My lord, you bless us with your presence and gifts? Name thy favor and we will meet it!” she cried, not understanding the price that would one day be paid.
So great was this moment it blinded her growing gifts to the truth of his desire. The lust in his soul that would only grow.
“Worry not about the favor requested now, you are too young to fulfill such merits. To you,” he gestured to her brother. “The great gift of prophecy I will bestow. And to your sister—”
She gasped, tears springing to her eyes at such novel validation. He saw her for what she was. What she should be. He looked at her sending chills up her spine from the intensity of his otherworldly gaze.
“To you the gift of prescience, the grandest human prophet to ever live you will be. But more than that I will correct the wrong in your flesh.”
She gasped for air in disbelief. What dreams she had not realized needed to be fulfilled, and now they were upon her. She wept in relief for this greatest of mercies. How could she have known that prophecy was already hers? How could she have known the true cost of the shifting of her flesh?
“Will you take these great wonders I offer you and adorn yourself in my favor?” he cooed.
“Yes,” they said together. How could they refuse?
He stepped forward and placed that shimmering skin against their heads. Their eyes burned with deep and heavenly fire. That little girls flesh writhed against her bones, shape changing and flourishing in bursts of glittery flame.
With a great rush of air and plunging stomachs, as if falling through an eternal starlit sky, they awoke in the opportunist’s temple. Two serpents lapped their tongues in their ears, entwined in copulation. They slithered away when they the young girl and her brother sat up.
The prince looked upon the princess and cried out her name.
“You are a girl!”
She looked upon herself, the beautiful bundles of her hair, and the reflections in the nearest pool and polished metal and felt congruence. She burst into happy tears.
“I am a girl!” And she was truly in all ways.
The King and Queen were brought hastily to the temple and saw what had become of their children. They praised on high the truth of otherworldly visitation, proclaiming their child a daughter, a princess, a prophet to be.
So, it was they brought great fortune tellers from across their kingdom to instruct their children in the art of prophecy, though they truly did not need it. Their gifts were so potent as to eclipse their teaches within a few months of lessons.
Her brother grew and grew into a grand Augur with every passing year, but none could match her strength of sight. She flourished in her new skin, renewed with life and happiness, no longer trapped by Misery’s chthonic grasps.
She saw everything that could be, everything that might be, everything that had been, and everything that would never be. She was still so young, and the art of determining which belonged to which yet remained to be mastered.
At fifteen summers her parents sought a proper husband, a prince from some far-off land to secure alliances.
But she was never interested in the idle looks and politics of men. She preferred the sweet scents of wives, the gentle touches of feminine skin and the callouses of strong huntresses. She flirted with the women of the huntress’s temple and became a priest of two, the opportunist and the wise owl in her shielded armor. In part fulfilling foreseen prophecy, in part to avoid the forced irritations of an unhappy marriage.
The king and queen had many children and did not despair their daughter’s choices. They were, in their own ways, good parents to her. But their youngest they spoiled, a beautiful little boy who had grown into a heartthrob all the same.
On a cool autumn evening when she was sixteen summers tall, a dreadful wind blew through the princess’s chambers.
The opportunist had come for his promised favor.
He appeared in a burst of glittering moonlight whilst she dozed away in her bed. He sat on the edge of her postered repose, and drug warm fingers across her cheeks, stirring her from slumber. He smiled lazily at her, as if his intent was perfectly clear.
He pulled away the sheets, pressing his hand to her chest to keep her from fully rising.
“Lord, what—how may I serve you this night?” She asked him, shrinking in that predatory glimmer filling his eyes.
“I have come for my favor, sweet priestess.”
Her stomach twisted in a nauseous knot.
“What might I do for you?”
Without hesitation he spoke of his desire.
“I would make you mine. I would lie with you, make sweetest love with you now until eternity. Marry you underneath the glimmering sun.”
The whole world turned on its side as she realized the choice before her, as his hands caressed her thighs. Bile filled her throat, the scene of rotting flesh sharp against her nostrils. She could not bear it.
“No.”
He stopped, hand firmly grasping her thigh. Too firmly for it began to hurt, and tears pooled in the corners of her eyes. He stared down at her, as she trembled against the bed.
“What did you say?”
“No, I don’t want to marry. I don’t want to lie with you.”
He released her thigh, constricted blood painfully throbbing through the limb. He pressed his hand against her chest harshly while leaning forward, constricting her breath. He roared, his voice a layered boom that filled all the room and his breath stank of rotting meat.
“YOU WOULD DENY ME?”
“I will not lie with someone I do not love. I will not marry someone who I do not love!” She panicked, squirming against his grasp.
Her heart hammered in her chest, feeling the hot sting of heat burning from the sun he embodied against her chest.
“I made you! I gave you everything, fixed you when you were broken, gave you sight when you could not see. You dare to refuse my love?”
What could she say to soothe this angered spirit other than the truth in all its poetic aspiration?
“I could never love you like you deserve. I could not live with you in every moment you craved, cradle you in the warm morning sun in a grassy field, argue over the little things in the arrangement of paintings on the wall, the cleanliness of plates in the cupboard. I could not be the mother to your children; I could not be the mortal woman you seek in your heart. I do not love men; you seek something I could not give!” she cried out in fear.
“You ungrateful whore!” he screamed in her face, spittle splattering and sizzling against her skin. “Upon you I cast the greatest of curses. From this day forward with these eyes that tempt me you shall never see the world as it is again.”
She cried out in agony as his worldly influence poisoned her vision with stinging agony. Black swallowed everything in the empty void of Chaos’s reign. Blood dripped from the corners of her eyes, staining her white gown.
“I doom you to never again be believed, your prophecies will ring true for yourself, but your words will be deafened and absurd to those who you most want to believe them.”
She wept in the abyss of sightlessness feeling the curse take effect, crawling beneath her skin in sunkissed marks. Then, flesh shifted in a place that was most sensitive and she screamed. She prayed and prayed and prayed to the owl on high.
“Finally, I take back what I once ga—” but before his magic could writhe again through her flesh, the medallion of the owl burned with otherworldly vigor and scalded his hand, blocking the fullness of the curse.
“Interference!” he screeched as shadow fell on the room, and then he was gone in a puff of light.
But the damage was done. He had undone a piece of her flesh, stolen her sight, and left her destitute and doomed to be disbelieved. And her brother? Her brother was left unmarred, having gladly accepted the patron’s favor.
The brother looked upon her with pity, and though he at first tried to support her, defend her visions, she was poison. Even the eldest brother, long gentle and soft with the sister he so loved, could not defend her.
So began the slow spiral of madness that would doom her family to its end. The rumors curled throughout the city that the once great oracle of the east had fallen into madness, insanity. Her visions, predictions of wealth or ruin were ignored. Every prediction said aloud resulted in a choice that would ensure the worst would come to be.
It only got worse.
Having seen twenty summers, she foresaw a cataclysm, the end of her parents’ kingdom, the end of her people by the choice of her youngest brother.
Influence from on high would come to him with a choice, a gift of vanity and flattery or a gift of wisdom. Saw him leave for a foreign fortress where he would doom them all.
She begged him not to listen at a table filled with the aroma of delicious meats and sweet fruits. She begged him to refuse to play the game in the twilight hours of the morning as the first kisses of the sun were trying to crest the horizon.
“If you go, you will ruin us all!”
“You wish for suffering and misery in this house of our blood. You lost yourself in madness and now you want to drag us all with you. Do us all the good of shutting up and throwing yourself into the sea. You’re insane.”
He didn’t listen. He insulted her, demeaned and degraded. Had her dragged off to her room where she was locked in for three days. He went. Left on a boat as she stood in her window, watching with sightless eyes as he rode into a bleeding sunset.
She foresaw his return, with a beautiful woman, a foreign queen in a golden veil. Her people rejoiced, they sang, burned bonfires that smote the air with ash and pleasant pheromonic woods. They sacrificed animals to the gods above, filling the plaze with the metallic iron of blood. They welcomed him with open arms, oblivious to the heralding of their doom.
She stood and watched through sight and sightless eyes as they ascended the steps of the palace, inconsolable with rage and despair.
She leapt out of the crowd, pouncing upon the woman and tearing at her hair and that golden veil.
“You’ve doomed us all! Everything will burn, blood will fill the river and bay and nothing will be left!”
She was pulled away by the guards, dragged screaming about death and the end to her room in the palace where she was locked inside for three days and nights. She lay curled up on the bed and wept for the state of things. Cried to the opportunist.
“God! Oh God of Prophecy!
Thou hast ruined me. Thou has doomed me.”
The only person who dared to visit the maddened oracle was the eldest brother. A man among men, always gentle with her, and even moreso now. He listened, even though he did not believe. But for a moment, it felt as if someone believed her.
The ruin began with the arrival of those foreign kings with grand armies of the greatest warriors told of in stories and minstrel’s tales from travelers abroad. The air stunk with their terrible manly odors. Great men by the thousands, so many of whom were doomed to die.
They demanded the return of their stolen Queen, but her youngest brother refused. Her parents so foolishly supported him.
It was war. A raging, hateful war that ballooned into the arrival of great flesh crafters of the northwest, the ancient blood and plant lovers of the east, the mechanized children of the northeast and west in their grand ticking gears and four legged monstrosities, and finally the singers of the sea from the far north come to aid the wronged kings.
It was there on those walls she saw the great evisceration of her people’s patrons at the hands of something much older. There, deep in the throes of war upon the palisades she first felt the warmth of Creation’s caress against her cheeks.
But it would not save them. Any of them.
Her eldest brother was the first to fall, speared through by a great warrior enraged by the death of a lover. She saw it long before it happened and wept for him. Begged him in the dim lights of fate not to leave.
But he did not believe her. He refused to decline a challenge and rode forth on chariot to meet his end. It was a grisly end. She stood on the ramparts of the wall, the last light of sun’s warm kiss wafting against her skin and the smell of rotting death on the wind. She listened to the shouts of a victorious warrior and the sickening crunch of bone and flesh smashing against the ground.
Her brother, defiled in defeat, dragged across the battlefield by chariot.
She accosted the youngest brother then, screaming in his face.
“It’s your fault! This is all your fault! If only you had listened, he would have lived!”
He reeked of cowardice and failure. Too afraid to face what he had begun until she ripped apart his pride with increasingly harsh words. Her youngest brother, aggrieved with blame, took a bow and shot dead that champion of the west.
But it was all so very little in the face of what was to come.
The greatest betrayal was the desertion of her twin brother. That too she saw coming. In the howling wind of a dreadful morning she begged him not to carry through beneath the fetid stench of carts of bodies being hauled off to burn. But like the rest, the curse had infected him too, and he went anyway. A traitor to her people, whispering in their ears of all the secrets of their defense.
The doom was fully here and there was nothing she could do, though she would try.
The grand tactician, a man so hopelessly brilliant that none in her home could match him, derived the final death knell. A gift offering of peace left on the shores as their fleet mock sailed away. A grand wooden burden beast. A feast with endless drinks was declared as they rolled it in.
But she saw the truth. Of course she saw the truth. Dozens of men waiting inside for the guards and soldiers to get fat and drunk and fall asleep. They would pile out of the horse, open the gates, and that would be the very end.
Hysterical with rage when she was ignored by the King and Queen, she snatched an axe from a guard, and a torch from the wall, and sprinted at the gift. Screaming. The air was filled with the scent of wines, searing meat and cooking breads. The sound of snoring men, drunken soldiers, and giggling wives all around.
“They’re inside! They’re inside! They’re waiting inside to end us all!”
They stopped her, of course they stopped her.
“Poor princess, lost to madness and insanity. Blinded by the sight and unable to tell what’s real from what’s false. Even if they did put men in there, it would never be enough.”
She was dragged away, weeping. Unable to stop fate’s cruel march forward. They were going to lock her in her room again, but she couldn’t let that happen. There would be no coming back out.
So, she broke free, she fled to the house of wisdom, with its wooden statue of the armored strategist ever watching. Here she claimed asylum.
“Oh, spirit of Wisdom, grant this humble priestess your protection and asylum!”
She sat beneath the statue for hours, waiting. Waiting for it to come.
Come it did, with fire and blood and shouts of terror. The doors opening as women sought asylum, burying themselves deeper into the marble. She smelt ash, smoke, burning wood and flesh.
She begged the wise goddess for her protection again and again.
Then he burst into the room, a savage man wearing animal skins and full of muscle. He strode across the floor and grabbed at her. She lept forward, clinging to the statue, begging for help, for protection. So hard did he pull the statue it was toppled from its housing and cracked against the floor.
He reeked of musk, smoke and ash. His laugh filled her ears.
She died there. She died there where the last of her dignity, the last of her innocence was snuffed out against the backdrop of flames.
That’s where I was born. Weeping on the floor of the house of wisdom as he towered over me.
I saw the thunder come before it struck, the quaking steps of another entering the temple. A great clap of light burning in the dark and a tremendous crack splitting the air. He was knocked from his feet, sent tumbling across the floor. When he got back up, the skin of his shoulder sizzled the air with smoke and the flesh was an angry welt of red in the Sight.
“You dare come between me and my prize?!” In the Sight he stood there, staring with fury on his face, body half covered by his skins.
“Bugh, fowl. This is a sacred house for your kind, and you desecrate it and assault an innocent woman? I will kill you here and now by the decree of your gods for this sacrilege. You shall never accost another woman.”
There was bile in my throat, I could smell the ozone, the singed skin lingering in my nostrils. Shouts echoed in the distance. He roared, spear in one hand, shield in another as he banged his spear against it.
He was a fool. Even my people knew the reputation of the Singers of the Sea.
Her magic smote the air with great hateful flame, twin blades merging into a trident of Poseidon’s swirl.
It wasn’t a dance; it was barely a fight.
He stepped inside, swinging that spear.
With one great hand she grabbed the shaft, snapped it in half, and then kicked him in the stomach while he was still stunned by the loss of his weapon. He flew across the room with impossible speed and force, colliding with a marble column. His shield was knocked free by the breath stealing collision and rolled across the floor like an errant jar lid making some great escape.
I saw her reel back.
I heard her grunt.
The trident’s angry metal split the air, smashing the marbled stone of the column just above his head with such great force that like an axe against wood it split it down the middle. In an act of providence by Athena’s hand, the sky smote with a thunderbolt that ripped right through the man. When that did not kill him, a great gout of water burst from the sky and washed him in a furious river from that place, down the hill and plains and drowned him in the great sea beyond.
No one stopped to help him, for they knew a man doomed by the Gods’ wrath when they saw it.
“Is that the best he had to offer? To think I fought ten years by his side.”
I stared sightlessly up at this demon of war, having foreseen the glimmer of her golden scales in the firelight. Who was this creature who had saved me as a newborn? What power of the gods did she wield? Why did I not forsee her until now, why was her presence a void in prophecy even at this moment?
She reeked of wet, and it was not unpleasant.
She picked me up and I broke in those mantearing arms. I wept for what I had lost, I wept for the city burning around us, I wept for the girl who had died this night and how I had taken her place. My would be savior and conqueror lifted me from the floor and wordlessly carried me across the grounds to safety. But there was no safety left here. Only the scent of ash, burnt flesh, and metallic blood on the breeze.
“Is that—?” someone asked, a voice I now know as the tacticians with its metallic tinge.
“The Seeress who is, by her own people’s musings, mad and lost to prophecy.”
“Yet she knew we were in the horse. Doesn’t seem so mad to me.”
“She has a curse upon her.”
“What happened to her? Why are her robes ripped bare. Why is she bruised and bleeding?”
“Ajax.”
“Goat fucking bastard.”
“He defiled a house of wisdom.”
“The gods will take care of it, and we will reduce his rewards.”
“I’ve already taken care of it.”
“What? What did you do.”
“Your gods sought revenge, and I gave it to them.”
“You killed him on their behalf?”
“No, I made an opportunity and they took it.”
“Was it at least a worthy fight?”
“Not even close. I feel cheated by your gods.”
“Good riddance then.”
“I’ll take the girl as my pallake then.”
“I would prefer she come with us. Has she not been through enough in your people’s wasteful hate?”
“She’s my prize by right, her brother stole my brother’s Queen.”
“Will you treat her better than those who came before?”
“Yes. I am not the monster here.”
I foresaw his name as I wept in the singer’s arms. I was set on a soft bed of blankets aboard a great vessel. He was the king of a faraway place, and he was to be my end.
He was gentle. Smelled strongly of flowers and was unusually kind to me. It was not until later, when I confronted my brother on his throne at Bouthroton, the traitor told me he had bargained for my life, to be this man’s concubine. I told him then that it did not save me from the horrific fate that was bound, and that he himself would meet such a fate.
He believed me then.
This king touched me in places I care not repeat, discovered what others had long ridiculed me for, what I was considered a lesser prize for. And yet he seemed not to care.
It didn’t change that we were doomed. It didn’t change that I did not feel for him, that I did not love his gentleness.
We returned to his home, escorted by the singers. In the wee hours of the morning before we arrived, my rescuer stepped into the hold before they left for a home of their own. She was not alone, a presence that was familiar and alien at her side. There a song just out reach burrowed in my ears, the scent of soft earth, the decay of autumn leaves, the salt of the oceans tides, floral scents of indescribable lushness, incense, and the smotes of stardust drifting on an astral wind filled my nose.
“You’re sure?” The singer’s voice rang in my ears.
“Yes.”
I felt a warm hand brush against my cheek, my neck, and my chest. Too many hands to be a human. Too soft to be a person, reaching deep past the skin into my very soul and plucked at infinitely many strings. Her voice filled the whole world.
“This end you see is but a beginning. When you awaken you will be more than you ever were. Seek us then, on the stormy isles of the north once you’ve regained your strength. Once you understand what you are. There, you shall find new purpose.”
It was layered, eternally fragmenting. My sightless eyes filled with the burning strobes of four golden lights.
As suddenly as it began, it vanished.
“Survive, child of Ilion. Your fight is not over.”
Then they were gone.
We were docking on land. This foreign king who had brought me far from my ruined home, spoke to me with reassurances and low whispers. But I had already seen what would come next. He would be called into the palace, where his wife and her lover would be waiting with knives. Then they would call for me.
He went despite my urgent warnings. Then the guards came to bring me in and I resigned myself to what was coming.
I knew when I was brought into the humid baths, that he was already dead. The stickiness of his life’s ichor burned against my toes. The iron of his blood and the flatulence of his gut overpowered the incense and soaps of the bath. There was no choking, just the circling steps of his murderers.
“Such a pretty prize my husband brought back, don’t you think Aegisthus?” Fingers caressed my cheeks, my chins.
“Almost a shame to waste it. But I hear she’s mad and blind, so may be for the best.”
It began with a stinging, vibrant pain in my left thigh. It was so very cold, colder than Hades’s icy embrace, parting the soft flesh. Alien, freezing metallic. It twisted and violated me and created something that never should have been.
Then there was another, pushing into my back. Another in my belly. Again and again across my flesh, hot blood streaming down my skin as I staggered to my knees. Taste of metallic blood filled my lips, the reek of death clawing at me as Thanatos lingered on the edge of my vision, waiting for the end. I didn’t scream, or cry as they carved me, sliced open my chest and exposed my guts to the world.
There was no point in struggling or crying out. This was simply fate.
I collapsed against the floor, their echoing laughs fading as they left me to bleed out.
That’s when I heard his wet footsteps.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk. Look at how far you have fallen, princess of Ilion. Final moments spent bleeding like a stuck pig next to the baths. You could have been great. You could have been the greatest prophet to ever live. We would have had beautiful children. Such a waste.”
His voice was a mocking trill of pleasant unpleasantness against my ears, a reminder of the sweetness of the music he could make that would only bind me here at the end of everything.
I managed to croak out a shuddering tumble of words with what little breath I had.
“You doomed so many.”
A hand grasped my face, lifting me. Pain blossomed as an inferno ripping through my shredded body.
“I doomed no one. You doomed them by being ungrateful.”
“Why?” I gasped out, struggling to stay conscious. To hold onto the sliver of life left to me.
“Because mortals need to be reminded of their place. Because I made you what you were, and what you are. I gave you everything, and you spat in my face. This beautiful woman carved from a boy. It’s like all those nymphs and boys; I give them everything and they are always ungrateful. Maybe this time will be different, maybe this girl I made from a boy will be grateful. What does he do? He behaves like a spoiled little brat.”
I grit my teeth, hands shaking at his grip around my neck.
“Now, because I am a generous god who is more than willing to offer mercy, I’m going to offer you one last chance. Marry me. Have my children. We will make such sweet music when we make love. I will restore your sight, lift the curse, and fix you again.”
I drew in ragged breaths struggling to stay awake. It hit me. I saw the moment, the opportunity to end this cycle, heard a thousand voices across an infinitely spiraling sea of fractured stars, felt the chthonic pull of blackened strings that I had never known were there. The fates, the Moirai were singing.
“Take it! Take it all from him. Become what you are meant to be!” they shouted.
But it wasn’t the fates. It was me. All me.
“Okay…” I rattled out.
He chuckled. “Good girl.”
And I felt his magic, his soul reach through his fingers. Another voice echoed with the choir.
When you awaken you will be more than you ever were.
“I have a better idea,” I said with sudden vigor I never had before.
I saw it, that ripple in his soul, his eyes. The prophecy, the vision of what would happen.
And abruptly I knew, that he had lied. That my hold on Destiny’s weave was greater.
With fingers wrapped in the leaking black of chthonic might I snared his magic, snared his soul, a wide hole opening in my chest.
In that moment, there were no Fates. There were no Moirai, there was only me. My agency.
He screamed, a wordless, incoherent burst of rage. But it was too late. The weight of what I was, what had long lay dormant inside of me, wrapped around my prescience, sucked in his magic, his conceptual depth and soul. It condensed, twisted, and homogenized him like he was being pulled through a straw, his flesh and matter pulled apart and into me.
I felt the might of the Sun filling me, the burst of prophecy and fate, healing and medicine screaming beneath my skin, music bursting in my very core.
Then he was gone, and I lay soaked in blood on the floor. I had somehow lifted the curse on my own.
But blindness remained and I have never cared to fix it.
My wounds were closing as I stared up sightlessly at the sky. Hours must have ticked by, possibly days. Then there were footsteps, light and airy. I felt a comforting chill wash across my cheeks.
A hand, calloused and yet impossibly soft pressed against my cheek. I could not see her, the Sight showed nothing.
“You finally ended his reign of madness. His torturing of what he couldn’t have driven by endless lust. You, soft child of Ilion.”
I did not know the voice, but it was soft and yet rugged. She smelled of a different sort of musk, of decaying soft leaves, of moonlight.
“Lay still here, and I shall guide you to a place you may heal and find peace, for a time. My power is bound for another, but for you I shall give this blessing.”
I’m not sure when she left. When the prevailing stench of blood filled my nostrils again. Nor how long it was till the wet steps of the guards came to clean up the mess.
But I passed out. I’m unsure how long, days, maybe weeks.
When I awoke, I washed up on the shores of a beach, caked in sand and water and dried blood. Disoriented, I was certain I had died. I could barely walk, my legs shaking and unsteady, even though I had stolen the Opportunist’s staff. So, I crawled. I’m not sure how long I crawled, or how far, but it was up. Up and up for hours upon hours. Maybe days, I don’t think I slept. I don’t think I needed to anymore.
But I reached the top, I suppose it always did have a top. There was something different there. A magic I had not encountered before, the magic of pure music, creation, inspiration. Nine beautiful voices sinking golden honey in my ears, warming my muscles and filling my mind with so many ideas. This place was warm, a pleasant wash across my skin, reeked of the earth, of perfumes, flowers, and so many other things.
“Oh my…” someone said.
“Poor thing, look at it.”
Then, the softest, warmest fingers against my face. In a miracle, the light returned to my eyes, the world filling with fuzzy and blurred color tones. Once my brain remembered how to interpret the sight of eyes, the picture became clearer and clearer. Eight of the most beautiful women I had ever seen, each halo’ed by a sheen of divine light.
But my eyes stared deep into the eyes that were immense nebulae condensed into orbs. A gorgeous woman kneeling and lifting my chin. Her skin was of olive, speckled with freckles. Her hair waved in the air, undulating like gas clouds in the void of stars, constantly oscillating through neon colors.
“Muses.” I croaked out at last, realizing the truth of the matter.
“Shhh child of Ilion, rest and we shall care for you.”
I remember smiling, I remember all the possibilities of what could come spiraling all out before me.
And then I passed out. There on Mount Helicon, I found myself, who I am, who I really wanted to be.
There I fell in love with the Muse Urania.
There I awakened.
There are so many more stories to tell of those years.
There was a moment when I, descending the mountain’s many narrows paths, passed an elderly man whose name I did not know, up the path. Near the foot there were voices, and they cried out to me.
“Tiresias! Tiresias is a woman! She has been blinded by Athena!”
It was true, the wise goddess of protection dared to climb the slopes and bathe with the many nymphs atop the mountain. We did not speak, for she no longer knew me. Never did I see that man who climbed the mountain, I truly wonder if he was a figment of a different dream.
There were other days when there were great tasks to be accomplished. Urania, requiring some chthonic reagent for a grand and ambitious project, sent me deep into the plumes of the underworld.
Rumors had reached us upon the mountain of the fates of many of those long forgotten heroes of the war outside my burnt and ruined home. There in the depths along a burning river a voice greeted me, a tinny, metal voice I had not heard in nigh a decade. There was a rush of air, the pulse of pounding blood and the dying bleats of a blackened lamb as I saw him through the sight. An all too familiar man of metal, legs of orichalcum bird talons and a face exhausted from great gaps of age removed from home.
The tactician had yanked me from the depths to a place I did not know. I spoke to him of what he desired, that should his crew slay the beasts of burden so meticulously cared for by the lord of light riding across every day filled sky, that he and his men would be stranded and his men smashed against the rocks. Again, I was referred to as Tiresias, this time by a man who had known me in brief before. Such a strange thing to be hailed by a name not your own, but one less strange as the years have moved by. Thence there was a rush of air, and I had returned to those distant fields where I found what my beloved desired.
I suppose that is whence these myths became entombed in the minds of all.
There were many more stories and myths made in those distant years, happy joyful moments that I shall not share. I prefer to keep them in dreams and memory for they are so very precious to me. Perhaps one day I shall tell my nieces, those delightful loving things, these stories so they eternally enshrine them in their great pieces.
But for now, even here my most personal book shall not receive such private happy things.
When thirty years had passed by, I left my newfound love on that sacred mountain and promised to return whenever I could. I wandered the earth, blind once again outside the mountain’s magic.
I trekked through forest, across rivers and bogs and swamps and marshes. Through grassy fields and mountain crags until I reached the northern oceans.
In a singer village I was greeted warmly. I offered gold for transport to the Stormy Northern Isles. They refused my gold and took me aboard one of their strange new vessels, and together we rode through treacherous hate filled seas.
It was there on one of those islands, the largest of them, that I left those kind sailors and their strange scented wetness behind. Across sand and grass I walked until I heard and saw through prophetic sight a great camp on a hill above colossal stone and metal artifices. Meats filled my mouth with salivation as I approached, spurned by strange bread smells, alien fruits and wines.
Three voices reached me on the wind as I walked slowly up the hill leaning on my staff. One I knew, two I didn’t and yet did with growing familiarity that I could not explain.
“So what, we’re hitting the fucking crimson fucker first?”
“Scarlett Monarch dear.”
“Right, whatever. You want us to go with that big untested hunk of magic metal that you think will work? Me, her, you, and the eldritch thing masquerading as a redhead? Just the four of us and that experiment.”
“White water, you make it sound like we’re running to our deaths.”
“We are! Artemis’s bow, we’ll need a hell of a lot more than that. I know you singers like your fucking fights, I do too, but like, it should at least be reasonable.”
I slowed my walk as I approached. Yet the bickering continued, somehow oblivious to my approach. I knew those voices and yet didn’t all the same. Eyes were already on me, but not of the bickerers. Those same golden eyes from all those years ago.
The bickering stopped as my staff, the staff I had taken from my patron when I obliterated him, gently thunked against a log.
“? Where are you—”
“Well, who is this?”
“Wait a fucking, you’re—”
In that moment, I was assailed again by all those early and alien smells from aboard that king’s ship so many years ago. I heard her strange golden song, louder now than before. I felt her. I felt the Mother of all Creation in her fullness before me. Writhing spheres of cerulean flesh and unending mass of allseeing eyes consuming me with their sight amongst a mantle of endless stars woven as crimson hair. A many armed pillar of reality stretching to fill all horizons.
All the sky filled by creation.
“Welcome, Cassandra of Troy.”