Exploring the SCP Foundation: SCP-001 - The Scarlet King

[00:00:01]SCP-001: The Scarlet King. The SCP universe is  filled with a good share of giant monsters and terrifying deities. Drawing from the traditions  of HP Lovecraft, cosmic horror wouldn’t be very cosmic without unknowable entities existing  beyond the veil of human knowledge. While the commercialization of Lovecraft’s works and  horror fiction in general has led to many of these types of entities becoming big bad monsters that  threaten to show up on earth and stomp around like godzilla, true cosmic dread comes from something  far more esoteric and cryptic. The Scarlet King is a longstanding entity within this universe, and  the general image of him is of some ancient evil deity of bloodshed and destruction, harbinger  of various apocalypses. Evil cults worship him because they want to do evil things and cause evil  things to happen to the world, so on and so forth.

[00:01:05]This SCP-001 proposal however takes a different  approach to the King, presenting him as an entity far more enigmatic, and antithetical  to the Foundation. Let’s take a look.

[00:01:20]SCP-001 is listed with the initial object class  of Keter, but this is crossed out to now be Safe.

[00:01:28]The Containment procedures state that following  recent investigations by Dr. Robert Montauk, no action is currently needed to contain  SCP-001. It is functionally self-containing, and any Foundation interference may harm or  alter its containment irreversibly. SCP-001 is an entity ordinarily referred to as the Scarlet  King. It is currently located in several alternate dimensions simultaneously, and is unable  to enter into the prime dimension. However, it is believed to have been repeatedly attempting  entry for a period of under three hundred years, although it was originally written to be several  thousand years. The Scarlet King’s physical, mental, and conceptual properties are unknown  to the Foundation, but it continues to assert a strong influence on a number of individuals  and events within the prime dimension.

[00:02:25]It’s believed that the King’s existence represents  an ongoing but dormant Tashkent-Class Cross Pollination Scenario. This is a K-class  scenario wherein the imminent alteration of reality or eradication of all human life is  caused by the interaction between two anomalous objects of a radically different type. The  Foundation has scenarios for everything.

[00:02:51]Should the King enter the prime timeline,  an irreparable alteration to normalcy will occur, and it’s originally written that  containment of SCP-001 is a top priority, but this has been crossed out to now be  unnecessary. Any attempt to alter the King’s classification or object class will result  in immediate dismissal from the o5 council.

[00:03:16]References in art and oral tradition to the  Scarlet King appear across a wide variety of human and non-human cultures across the  universe, including in communities which have never previously had any contact with one  another. Common descriptions are of a red creature of immense size, ordinarily wearing a golden  crown or other headdress signifying royalty.

[00:03:40]Although the names ascribed to SCP-001 vary,  the majority contain a word signifying some form of royalty combined with a word  signifying the colour red. Cultures which do not have a concept of the  color red but follow this naming pattern universally use a color analogous  to the english concept of the color red.

[00:04:02]Most personnel, except those working on anomalies  related to scp-001, possess no knowledge of the entity. As part of SCP-2317’s containment  procedures, level 4 personnel, with the exception of Dr. Robert Montauk, are to be informed that  SCP-2317 is in fact SCP-001. I’ll take a brief moment here to recap SCP-2317, just for those  curious. 2317 is a door to another dimension containing a massive entity, the devourer of  worlds, chained underground. There was a bunch of ritualistic procedures to help contain it, many of  which lead people to think it’s the scarlet king, but the reality turned out to be that the o5s  made up all the procedures just to sustain morale, since the entity can’t actually be contained and  is going to break loose eventually no matter what.

[00:05:00]This is now stating that even level 4 personnel,  some of the most senior members of the organization, are lied to that 2317 is actually  the scarlet king. The truth, is unknown, although it’s a hypothesis which has received strong  support among several members of the council. The apparently multidimensional nature of the scarlet  king however renders the possibility of 2317 being anything more than a single aspect of the  scarlet king unlikely. It’s unknown when SCP-001 was discovered. The loss of several archives  concerning the Foundation’s origins in the 1889 Snarling Coup has prevented a full reconstruction  of events, although an investigation shortly following has led to something expunged. A  variety of groups dedicated to bringing the Scarlet King into the prime dimension have  existed over the years. The most recent of these has been the Children of the Scarlet King,  which was destroyed in a joint GOC-SCP operation in January of 2018. Its former leader, Dipesh  Spivak, is currently in Foundation custody.

[00:06:11]An update from 2018 states that the Scarlet King  has recently been the subject of an extensive investigation by Dr. Robert Montauk,  project lead on 001, 231, and 2317, and deviser of Procedure 110-Montauk. I should  also now take a brief moment to recap SCP-231 and the procedure, as it’s obviously relevant  here.SCP-231 refers to seven young females, probably humans but it’s redacted, that were  recovered from the raid on the Children of the Scarlet King. The first six all ended up  giving birth to something, which one way or another caused increasingly horrific disasters.  Since it’s believed that the seventh girl giving birth would lead to an apocalyptic scenario, she’s  now being contained through Procedure 110-montauk, an apparently extremely brutal and horrific  process. They have to constantly cycle out and mind wipe the personnel involved, and  mind wipe the girl to make sure the process remains freshly horrific for her. Dr. Montauk is  apparently the mastermind behind the whole thing.

[00:07:27]Based on the results of Montauk’s investigation,  SCP-001 has been downgraded to safe following a decision taken by the o5 council. Upon  the request of the former O5-13, a number of documents are provided, curated,  categorized, and included by the former O5-13, with the permission of O5-1, in order to  provide some context to this re-evaluation.

[00:07:54]We’re given an interview between Montauk and  Spivak, a few months after he was captured.

[00:08:00]Spivak complains that it’s been months, and  they’ve dragged him down here over and over and asked these endless questions. Montauk  apologizes to him, and asks if the guards have been treating him badly. Spivak  says not really, and he can’t complain, but it’s their eyes. They just look so  dead and cold. Montauk replies that he can rearrange some personnel, but they’re  a bit short-staffed at the moment and a lot of their best folks are away. Then there’s  the paperwork, and the endless oversight.

[00:08:36]Spivak mentions that Montauk isn’t what  he expected. He has heard of him, of the things he’s done. Procedure 110-Montauk. Montauk  replies that he merely did what was necessary, as a Foundation researcher and as someone  who doesn’t want to see his loved ones die. Spivak just says that that’s very like the  Foundation. Everything done is justified by what is necessary. They see the world, the people  moving through it, living lives touched only by totalising, universal laws of society and  physics. And everything has to be channeled through those laws, and that which lies outside  it is to be contained. It’s all so very simple.

[00:09:24]Some of his people called him evil, but he  doesn’t think that’s quite it. Montauk says that’s kind of him to say, and he’s not really  what he expected either, especially given his reputation. His head may be in the clouds,  but he seems to be maddeningly smug about it, although not as smug as some of the delusional  cultists who have passed through here. Spivak begins to say something about procedure  110-montauk, but Montauk cuts him off and says that he can’t discuss that. He asks what the  Children of the Scarlet King’s overall intention was. Spivak replies that he supposes you could  say that their intention was to save the world, by bringing the Scarlet King into this reality.

[00:10:10]Montauk asks how that would save the world, but  Spivak just asks if this is really necessary.

[00:10:17]They took away the King’s daughters years ago  and ended up killing most of them. They have already annihilated their society, and he’s sure  that Montauk knows all about what went on within it. They worshipped the King, pretending he  was Satan or some other ancient god of evil.

[00:10:33]Their inner circle believed in violation  as the ultimate holy act. They failed, and the Foundation and the Bookburners destroyed  them, and the matter has been put to rest.

[00:10:46]Montauk notes that he seems awfully calm while  describing the destruction of his life’s work.

[00:10:52]Spivak just says that he knows how this is going  to play out. Maybe he always did. Montauk asks why he referred to the Global Occult Coalition  as the Bookburners, a term used by the Serpent’s Hand. Spivak replies that it’s complicated. They  were affiliated with the serpent’s hand. Most of them passed through there at one time or another.  The Serpent’s Hand will disavow them of course, if they ask them. They’re not monsters like the  cult was. They have moral precepts. THeir whole point is to look for wonder, and since they  see no wonder in the King, they repudiate them utterly. But they know, deep down, that they need  the cult, for the same reason they let them live.

[00:11:41]They raided the library, fought them, skirmished  with them. They had a huge quantity of dirt on the cult, far more than the Foundation does, but  they never finished the job. They’re as bad as the Foundation is, in their own way. The same  compartmentalisation, the same singular goals.

[00:12:03]Their existence is based in nothing concrete.  The empty time of history, that’s all. They came into being at the same time as the Foundation, and  they’re more similar than the Foundation realizes.

[00:12:17]Montauk replies that that’s impossible,  as the Serpent’s Hand has been documented as existing long before the Foundation.  Spivak tells him that he’s missing the point. The Library’s always been  there, but not the Hand. Nobody ever cared about wonder in the old days.  They cared about food, family, and blood.

[00:12:40]Montauk doesn’t know what he means, but he says  that the Hand would, and even the Bookburners do, in their own way. The hand is scared though.  They try to blot them out, forget them, but they’re what they should be but never can be.  Montauk just says that he’s tried to make things comfortable for him, but there has to be some give  and take here instead of cliched, cryptic riddles.

[00:13:06]Spivak replies that he can’t tell him everything,  as he wouldn’t treat the information properly.

[00:13:12]He’d treat it as scientific fact, something to  be swallowed, understood, and contextualised. He asks him why he’s dredging this stuff up again,  and Montauk replies that he shouldn’t tell him, but he’s tired. He’s been working on SCP-001  for two decades. Project lead for almost 9 years, after he came up with the procedure.  Everywhere he turns he sees the Scarlet King, but nothing about him makes any sense. Some  big horned devil, arcane blood god. It’s all so small and so obvious. In the last decade,  the Foundation has faced conceptual demons, malevolent genre dwellers, sevenfold destroyers,  all of which are far worse than some old sacrifice deity. But there, behind everything, he  sees this smile in fire. That old dread, that lingers. And this is despite seeing  horrors far less easy and far more subtle trying to break the world on a daily basis.  He just wants to understand. Peel back the layers, the tales upon contradictory  tales, and find out who he really is.

[00:14:34]This job gets to him. The things you have to  do, the regrets. He’s too high-up for anybody to touch him now, and he’s run into too many dead  ends to get hung up over protocol by this point.

[00:14:48]He just wants Spivak to tell him something,  anything. Spivak says that he likes Montauk, as he must be a cold-blooded bastard somewhere  in there to have come up with the procedure.

[00:15:02]There are three things to understand about the  Scarlet King. Three laws which, when put together, make up a complete picture. One is the  law of blood, one is the law of concrete, and one is the law of howling. Montauk asks if  the king set these laws down for his followers, or were they imposed on him. Spivak replies  that they are both. The first was his law, the second was somebody else’s, and he’ll  find out about the third when he’s cracked the first two. That’s all he can give him  for now. He needs to learn in the proper way. After a brief pause, Montauk says that  it’s been good talking with him, as ever.

[00:15:52]We’re next given an extract from the memoirs  of Jack Hearst, a defector from the children of the scarlet king. Hearst was a high-level  reality bender, capable of entering the bodies of humans in the past and experiencing  their thoughts and emotions first-hand.

[00:16:10]The extract is a description of what Hearst called  the Battle of the Ghemelleth, purportedly a battle between SCP-001 and his followers against a group  called the Children of the Urns. Hearst apparently experienced the battle from the perspective of a  foot-soldier in the scarlet king’s army. It reads, “The fortress was monumental, made of volcanic  rock and jagged iron and built into a vast mountain. Every measurement, every angle was  calculated to promote the King's ideology. The steel slats and bars may have seemed to be  jutting out in random half-sawn directions, but if you could see the whole then you'd see  the symmetry. It was a perfect expression of cosmic order, expressed in endless sevens. It's a tough trip to remember, but bits and pieces come back. We were slaves, I think.  We had been taken from a far-off land. The nobility looked down upon us with cruel eyes,  but the King didn't care. He rewarded us, and so we were the instruments of his rule.  When a village required the justice of the King, we would descend upon them with blood and iron.  The villagers feared us, and that felt right to me. But when the horde came, with fire  and burning and their cries of freedom, the villagers were still just as scared as they  had been of us. That was not the fear of their master, I think, but the fear of anarchy. They  didn't know which way to turn. In the end, most betrayed us. Many had had their daughters taken by  our master. Old rites. Blood rites. Arcane rites.

[00:18:12]But we stood upon the battlements, loyal to  the last, our hearts bursting with happiness at the rightness of it all. I'm still not sure  exactly what was going on- it was all so chaotic, and full of red smoke- but I could feel my  host's bloodlust. We stood, and watched, and waited. The sound of rubble and explosions came  from across the hill, and the last battle begun.

[00:18:42]Then something strange happened. My host suddenly  felt afraid, and he and I were somewhere else. The sky was not red but black. I was not a slave but  part of a conscripted rabble. The peasants looked up at us. They were all starving. They held out  their hands, begging, pleading, praying. The wind was their master, and it screamed at them. The  horde was coming, but they, too, were starving.

[00:19:18]Then the scene flickered back, and I was in my  host again, under a scarlet sky. The King's voice raged. The rabble of his armies was fleeing to  the gates, but they would not open. Our arrows, coated in flame and pitch, flew back  again. But the horde was undaunted.

[00:19:40]In my mind I could see nothing but the fire,  the fire of the king. I drew my sword. We all drew our swords. We all charged into the fray. And then, as it were, the scene changed again.

[00:19:58]There were no battlements, only the dark sky and  the wind and a more ragged and lonely sky. The peasants pleaded, the nomads laughed, cheered,  wept. "The wind will rage no more!" they said.

[00:20:16]The two scenes shifted in and out. A red fort  bled into a black field. I have ruminated on it a long time, but I think they were the same  battle, seen through two different eyes. Or at least the memories of two different battles. The  whole thing felt strange; it was not like most of my trips. It was like a half-remembered  cacophony, two ideas ripping at each other.

[00:20:46]There was a timeline showing what really  happened, in that blackened wasteland.

[00:20:51]And there was one that had been made to be  true, imposed throughout time on the truth.

[00:20:58]The last thing I remember was being sliced by  a nomad sword, of a frail urn being held high, of seven brides being ripped from a castle-  or were they ripped from a field, taken as the spoils of war by some obscure tribe in some  lost steppe? I remember the King screaming, writhing, thrashing as he was sealed. And then I died, and woke up back at the ritual. For a second, I wondered if the others had  just made up the King, and sent some image of him back to the past. But I don't think that was true.  They lacked the power; and besides, it was never a total lie. There was something in that wicked wind  that reminded me of some of the older rituals.

[00:21:52]It was then that I decided to leave  the Children. I went that night, without a word. They didn't stop me;  probably figured it wasn't worth the effort.

[00:22:04]They were so certain in the success of their  mission. But I wanted no part in that any more.

[00:22:12]The things I saw were based upon the law of blood,  and I can only pray that they never come to pass.”

[00:22:21]We’re then given a log of all known attempts by  anomalous groups to force the Scarlet King’s entry into the prime dimension since the containment  of SCP-231. In 2009, the Provisional Children of the Scarlet King performed a summoning attempt  by ritual smearing of blood and the destruction of rubble recovered from the demolition of the  Cochran Gardens housing project complex in St. Louis. It is believed that the Children of the  Scarlet King manipulated state officials into the demolition over the course of several years,  and that this splinter group continued their work as the original Children went into decline.  The ritual was prevented by a Foundation raid.

[00:23:04]In 2012, the Red Guards appeared to be using the  blood, bones, and spinal fluid of several animals, combined with ritual chanting,  to create a portal to SCP-001.

[00:23:17]A large number of SCP Foundation logos, carved  out of bone, were placed around the ritual site in a defensive position, with these logos  being slightly incorrectly carved. The attempt came extremely close to success, but a critical  mistake in the words of ritual instead resulted in a large explosive blast, destroying all of  the assembled members of the Guards. It remains unknown why the Guards apparently wished to  invoke Foundation protection for their ceremony.

[00:23:51]In 2014, the GOC apparently attempted to summon  the Scarlet King, although the details are unknown other than obviously it didn’t succeed. Their own  records pertaining to the incident are missing, with the exception of the name being Operation  Historical Frontier. The mission statement was to exacerbate tensions of historical time in  order to bring forth and destroy a significant occult threat. It’s believed that several  GOC operatives were killed in the attempt.

[00:24:25]In 2017, the Army of the New Dawn attempted  a ritual involving burning several calendars adhering to the Gregorian calendar, while  members of the group raised up blood-soaked calendars adhering to the Julian, Hijri, and  Persian Solar systems to an effigy of SCP-001.

[00:24:45]The attempt was prevented by members of the  Serpent’s Hand, and all materials were taken to the Wanderer’s Library. Lastly, 8 months later,  the Serpent’s Hand attempted their own ritual, with the details mostly unknown. It’s believed  that it involved the highly selective destruction of particular books within the wanderer’s  library. The attempt was purportedly foiled due to a schism in the group, and the resulting  casualties severely damaged the library.

[00:25:17]We then return to another interview between  Montauk and Spivak, from a couple of weeks after their previous one. Montauk says that  he looked up those laws, and he’s afraid he’s none the wiser. Spivak asks what he found,  and Montauk replies that the law of blood is referenced a few times in quite a few places,  but he couldn’t find any concrete information.

[00:25:41]There was only one source of real use, a  description of something called the Battle of the Ghemelleth, written by a defector from  the Children. Spivak says that he read Hearst’s memoir once, the only genuine eyewitness of the  King’s sealing, although a rather unreliable one. He stumbled upon some early draft in  Hearst’s things, shortly before he left.

[00:26:07]Spivak was young back then, and he remembers  how passionately Hearst argued after his vision, said that they’d got the king all wrong,  that he wasn’t a demon or a monarch, but that he was a voice on the wind. When  Spivak was older, and figured it all out, he was surprised how close Hearst got to a  fuller understanding. He just wasn’t quite there.

[00:26:33]Montauk says that he should have guessed he was a  liar, but Spivak replies that Hearst isn’t a liar, exactly, just a little lost. And Montauk only  has Spivak’s word for it, which they have made abundantly clear they don’t trust. Montauk  however says that there’s no reason to doubt him, as he has nothing to lose, and he seems as eager  to learn the truth. Spivak asks him if he knows why Procedure 110 Montauk actually works. There’s  a pause of several seconds, before Montauk says that he can’t talk to him about that. Spivak just  says that he thinks he knows the answer anyway, and asks if Montauk lost someone. He’s  looked at the Foundation archives too, as it was necessary, back in the day, to check up  on what they were doing to the King’s daughters.

[00:27:25]He begins to mention Montauk’s brother, but  Montauk cuts him off, and says that this interview isn’t about his private affairs. Instead, he tells him to state the meaning of the law of blood for him. Spivak just says that  it’s obvious. It’s the way the Scarlet King ruled.

[00:27:45]There was order, but it was through the  imposition of an iron will on the peasantry, through armies of slaves, through a nobility  bred to be cruel. The realities of the world of his day, in his corner of the globe. Montauk just  asks what that has to do with SCP-001’s nature, and what are these other laws. He  doesn’t have time to play these games, and if he doesn’t tell him now,  he’ll be escorted to solitary.

[00:28:15]Spivak just apologizes, and tells him  that he must look for the law of concrete.

[00:28:22]We’re next given a page from the 1891 report  of Agent de Beauvoir on lost Foundation archives following the 1889 Snarling Coup. The  report was lost shortly after de Beauvoir’s termination in 1895, along with several  other documents from the Foundation archives.

[00:28:42]This page was recovered through unknown means  by Dr. Montauk, and no other materials from these data losses have been found. It reads, “In summary, the documents lost are extremely extensive, covering a wide range of data  concerning the Foundation's early history.

[00:29:01]Of particular note are several documents  related to SCP-001 which have gone missing.

[00:29:08]However, my investigations have provided me with  a great deal of information, and I believe that I can say with some certainty that the historical  record as stated in Scranton's Comprehensive History remains broadly intact, albeit with  some modifications I will detail below.

[00:29:27]Scranton's work states that the Foundation  was founded in 1824, by the merger of thirteen worldwide organisations with a particular interest  in preventing awareness of anomalous activities.

[00:29:40]The most prominent of these were the Foundation  of the Secure Containment of the Unnatural, the Devan-e Jaaduyih, the Unified Sites  of the Department of Unexplained Affairs, the Council of Five Overseers and  the Commitee of Paranormal Ethics.

[00:29:58]Scranton goes on to tell us that this was done  in response to the threat posed by SCP-001, and that the early Foundation had an extensive  role to play in that anomaly's containment.

[00:30:11]However, the documents I have before me present  a rather different picture. It appears that the Foundation was not founded in response to SCP-001  at all. Indeed, I cannot find any references to the present SCP-001 prior to 1826. It appears to  have been a highly publicised attack by SCP-173 in New York which was the initial impetus for the  Foundation's formation. SCP-173's still-unresolved containment breach in 1854 is, I believe,  the reason for the alteration of the record.”

[00:30:49]Next is a table compiled by Dr. Montauk showing  a series of votes passed by the o5 council correlated with incidents potentially or certainly  involving scp-001. In 1844, the council voted to officially standardise documentation across the  foundation, during which a series of hymns devoted to SCP-001 could be heard outside site 001.  In 1857, they voted to standardise containment procedures for scp-001, and all members of the  council reported dreaming of an unidentified man of South Asian origin weeping. In 1895, they  voted on the termination of Agent de Beauvoir. A large quantity of bloodstained sheets of paper  with the words SCP-001 written in blood over each sheet spontaneously manifested in the bedrooms of  all members of the council. The blood was later identified to belong to both agent de  Beauvoir and an unknown species of poultry.

[00:31:58]In 1902, they voted on the implementation of the  site system, during which a location in North America saw sudden and unexplained wildfires.  Residents reported seeing dragons made of fire and a horned crown appear in the night sky above  the area. The wildfires were found in 2007 to have begun at the location of the future site 19. In  1922, several cracks in the earth appeared near Containment Area 179. Red smoke was seen pouring  out of each crack for 7 minutes, before they abruptly closed. Jumping forward quite a bit to  2011, they voted to unify the project purviews of scp-001, scp-231, and scp-2317. A series of hymns  devoted to scp-001 were heard outside site 001, interspersed with the sound of laughter. Lastly, in March of 2018, they voted on the object class reclassification of scp-2317.  Several interdimensional rifts opened outside of containment area 179, alternating between  opening on universe-kappa-erikesh and opening onto an unknown dimension. This unknown  dimension is characterized by the presence of a large quantity of red smoke and an unknown  number of human voices screaming from within.

[00:33:31]We’re then given an extract from the 1972  political work Manifesto for Old Order, by Children of the Scarlet King member  Ariadne Cartwritght. Her work is only found in unpublished copies among anomalous circles  and groups related to scp-001. Fragments such as this were recovered by Dr. Montauk during  the course of his investigation. It reads, “The sin of modernity is vital to understand.  It is not that we glorify the premodern. The suffering was very real and very extant. We  must not fall into the trap of seeing the past as a series of beautiful Arcadias,  full of dancing around maypoles and shepherds living in pleasant anarchy. The past was brutal, but it was also real. It wasn't really the "premodern",  too; that is merely how historians have characterised it. They are wedded to their theory  of modernisation and can conceive of no alternate mode of development other than a singular drive  towards the contemporary West, with other modes of living seen as being stuck in some imagined  earlier place on a timeline. It's all nonsense.

[00:34:53]The people of the past were capable of seeing  the world as it really is. Those of us who have joined the King's forces can all see this truth;  that there is something very, very wrong with the world in which we live. Our buildings are made  of calcifying, peeling concrete as we shamble, each day, to jobs and lives created solely for  the purpose of maintaining their own system.

[00:35:24]But there is no other way to live. Socialism,  anarchism, syndicalism- these are little more than constructed pipe dreams, the frail thoughts  of lesser men trying to impose their antiquated prejudices on the world around them. No, there is  only one alternative way to live. To cast down the law of concrete is to raise up the law of blood. We must learn what it is to die. To be enslaved- truly, brutally enslaved, with no compassion or  compunction from our masters. We must learn what it is to be taken towards a single purpose, to  know and truly understand our lack of agency. We must be beholden to a world of gods and darkness,  the tempest-tossed refuse of a race of fools. We must kill modernity, postmodernity, with all  its analysis and sneering observation. There is only one rule; the rule of chaos. For  humanity! For life! For the Scarlet King!”

[00:36:40]That leads us back to another interview between  Montauk and Spivak. Montauk apologizes for his unprofessional behavior, as Spivak touched upon  a sore subject. Spivak replies that he will try to refrain from doing so in the future. He  asks Montauk what he knows of the origins of the Scarlet King. Montauk says that there  are many theories. A creature from the abyss, some shambling thing of old, a denizen of  Alagadda. Spivak says that they’re not all lies, but the texts have changed, the knowledge has  changed, the past itself has been changed by what came after. Montauk asks if he means to say  that the King changed the past, but Spivak says that his past has been changed for him. Spivak in  turn asks why he approved the Montauk procedure.

[00:37:40]There is a pause for several seconds as Montauk  stares at him, before saying that he thought he made it clear that this is none of his business.  Spivak just says that he doesn’t understand, as it shouldn’t have worked, the child  should have been born. There’s another pause, before Montauk says that he was angry when he  drew it up. It was unprofessional. Spivak asks if he thought that they took his brother, to which  Montauk asks what was he supposed to think. He started looking into their cult, making discovery  after discovery, and then his brother disappeared.

[00:38:22]Spivak asks if they can agree that it  was not a decision made scientifically, but one done in a moment of fury, rage, and hate.  Montauk tries to argue that he didn’t mean to, but Spivak says that he did. He just wants to  understand, and now he thinks he does. He doesn’t think Montauk has had much activity in recent  months, not after the hand’s attempt to open the gates. Their procedure keeps the girl from giving  birth, the nomads keep fighting their endless war, the spears are safely locked away by the  bookburners, and as for the devourer, there’s nothing they can really do about it. Montauk  replies that SCP-2317 isn’t SCP-001, to which Spivak corrects him to say that it wasn’t scp-001.  They’ve been telling everyone that he is though.

[00:39:18]Across every culture, in every city and tribe  and civilization, they’ve come across the idea of the scarlet king. Always the same, an emperor  in red, with a burning crown and an ethos rooted in some archaic fear of female sexuality. He is  always the same, a monster that is all-consuming and terrible, but so understandable. The big  bad thing in the dark, full of rape and fire and old blood-ritual. Does it never strike him as  odd that this is the thing behind the eyes? He’s faced monsters far grander and more subtle. But  always, there’s that lingering fear and knowledge of this hidden but oh-so-simple thing standing  behind it all. Montauk had already told him that it strikes him as odd, but he stopped trying to  make sense of their world a long time ago. The anomalous does not play by the rules of man, and  he’s too old to start redefining the universe.

[00:40:25]Spivak states that the thing Montauk doesn’t  remember, or doesn’t know, is that this wasn’t the only past. The scarlet king used to be  something very different. He wasn’t a monarch, and he wasn’t always red. He was the whisper  on the wind that kept the peasants working, staring up in fear of his righteous famine. He  was that inborn knowledge of a world of gods and demons which belied human agency and existed  beyond us. He was the cold hunger of a famine that had no rhyme and reason but the cold apathy of a  supernatural beyond us. And, given enough belief, he could be the devourer too. He is a creature of  truth. Montauk asks if he means that the Scarlet King transformed from one deity to another. Spivak  replies that he is not a deity, but an idea.

[00:41:27]Montauk exclaims that he’s real though, physical,  but Spivak just says that he can’t tell him any more, not yet. He asks if he found anything out  about the law of concrete. Montauk admits that he didn’t find much. He found out that there seems to  be a disturbing correlation between the activities of the King’s followers and certain decisions  made by the council. There wasn’t much else at all. The trail led him to some lost documents,  but eventually all they found was a dead end.

[00:42:00]A document about the Foundation’s origins, and  some insane old Child ranting on about modernity.

[00:42:08]Spivak assumes he’s talking about Cartwright, and  says that that makes sense. Montauk remarks that he’s a maddeningly infuriating person, and asks  why can’t he just tell him this stuff properly.

[00:42:21]Spivak replies that he’s his prisoner, and  he destroyed his life’s work. Montauk just expresses incredulity at the Scarlet King being an  idea, and asks what the hell that’s meant to mean.

[00:42:35]Spivak tells him that he’s close, close  to the truth. He will understand then he’ll understand him. Why he did what he did.  Why he was a member of the Children. He knows that Montauk is curious. Montauk remarks  that he does seem oddly well-adjusted to be a Satan worshipper. Spivak just tells him to be  careful, as the law of the howling may break him.

[00:43:05]We’re then given an excerpt from  the 1953 Bengali work Lala Raja, meaning Red King. THe work had been lost for  some time, and rediscovered by Dr. Montauk in the course of his investigation. It reads, “And so as British rule continued, something began to come with them, piece by piece. A shadow,  at first; a red thing. But it was not whole.

[00:43:36]It was not even in pieces. It was something  that crept up slowly, piece by piece. It met the shadows of our country, the mice bleeding  in the rice fields, and it began to take form.

[00:43:52]It didn't have a mind. Not at first. It wasn't  enough of a real thing yet to have one. It was a set of images. It was a blood-red slab of skin,  taken from the heart of some Christian demon, which was set upon an ancient magician of Hindu  rites. But then it was categorised, written down, described with precise scientific  terminology. It didn't like that.

[00:44:23]Things of magic, technology, empire that  were never meant to mix all came together, and began to bend the nature of the world. As Europe came to us more and more, as we learnt to be "civilised", our religion began to  change too. Anantashesha was not an ancient and capricious god in the form of an immense snake-  it was a moray eel of scientifically unusual size, noted for producing amnesiacs and causing a  cognitohazardous effect. We learnt that we were Hindu, that we always had been Hindu, and that all  our various and mixed beliefs were all variations on a singular ideal, because the British weren't  comfortable enough with another way of living which could not be classified, explained,  killed like a butterfly pinned to a board.

[00:45:21]But beneath this lay a fury. A cry  for authenticity, for a reality, even as we expressed ourselves more and  more in their language and their categories, even in our struggle against them. It lay  in our literature, in Tagore and the others; it lay in our adda, in our menial jobs as clerks.  The endless, struggling tension between old and new, between modernity and premodernity. And in  those fault-lines, in that cry of rage and fury, in our hatred of the old and the hatred of the  new, there rose a hybrid obeying nothing but the law of the howling. There rose the Lāla Rājā. Because what is he but the cry for a forgotten age? He is the British peasant staring up at the  red sky, the Bengali widow's weeping and shaven head, the Aztec priest ripping out another's  heart. He is all of those things transformed, as modernity does to everything, into modernity's own  destruction. He is the resistance, the fury, the hatred of all that was for all that presently is. What we were was full of good and evil and all else mixed together. The happiness, the beauty  of the world, the struggles and heartache and reality of it all. But now we have lost almost  all of it to the machine- except our rage.

[00:47:04]That's all that's left. And thus comes the King.  The howl of the destroyed and forgotten and oppressed. His only purpose is to destroy,  rape, maim, enslave and smile, smile that smile of a king whose enemies weep before him. He cannot exist where there is no modernity, because his entire purpose is given to  him by modernity. He is a god of blood, a god of spine and bone and sinew, to remind the  denizens of this world that it is not good. It is cruel and hateful and that is good, that is right.  Modernity is a sin and he is the correction, so that we can once again live as we must: cold,  and hungry, and starving, and very, very afraid.”

[00:48:11]A note was found in Montauk’s personal quarters,  believed to be written shortly after his discovery of Lala Raja. He writes that SCP-001 is a  conceptual entity created at the boundaries of the modern and the premodern. He writes that  the Scarlet King is a thing of blood and bone and sinew, his rule is just, the justice of the  dark, but he crosses this line out. SCP-001 is a physical being made manifest in a conceptual.  He comes with fear and a sword dripping with wrath and fire, but he crosses this out. SCP-001  originated in ancient Turkmenistan. It is believed that it was originally a Scythian deity. SCP-001  is a scientific phenomenon. It will be classified.

[00:49:08]It will be described. It will be understood as  an anomalous entity, as with every other. He then writes, but crosses out, but he exists in the  cracks, the faultlines. He feeds on description.

[00:49:25]He feeds on science, on the objective principles  and qualities. Seven chains! Seven brides! Seven seals for the Scarlet. I am Robert Montauk,  Level 4 Researcher, Project Lead on SCP-001.

[00:49:44]I am a researcher. I impose my solid, mechanical  will. I am in control. I possess agency. I possess agency. He then writes, but crosses out, I  am a quivering thing, looking up at a dark and clouded sky, fearing the almighty god. I am  free. I am chained. I am a doctor. I am a child.

[00:50:18]On May 22nd, 2018, a large crack appeared in  the wall of Spivak’s containment chambers. The crack appeared to open on another dimension.  A large quantity of red smoke could be seen pouring out of it, while an unknown number of  human voices could be heard screaming from it.

[00:50:37]Foundation staff found themselves unable to enter  Spivak’s containment chamber, and he informed them that he would only permit Dr. Montauk entry.  After some debate, Montauk was permitted entry into the containment chamber to interview him. As Montauk enters, Spivak is standing in front of a jagged crack in the far wall. Red light  and smoke can be seen emerging from this crack.

[00:51:04]Montauk asks what this is, to which Spivak says  a plea for attention mostly. He wanted to see him again, and his requests were denied. It’s been  weeks. Montauk just says that he has nothing to ask him, and Spivak surmises that he’s deduced  the truth. Montauk admits that he has, and the crack shrinks slightly. Spivak explains that it  grows and shrinks depending on the situation.

[00:51:36]Different actions have different meanings,  and thus different effects. It all depends on context. The other Children never got that, but  they never got anything really. They thought the Children were all devil worshippers, heading  for violation. Only he understood the point.

[00:51:56]Montauk says that it took him a while to  understand, and asks if the procedure even mattered. Is it even relevant? Spivak says that to  prevent the birth, it had to be something awful, something evil expressed in pain and rage  and fury. That is why it worked. It was never a sincere attempt to formulate a  scientific procedure on Montauk’s part, it was just pure, unadulterated hatred  wrapped in a veneer of objectivity. He thought the King had taken his brother, so he  decided to hurt the King. He didn’t, of course, and what he does each day to that poor girl is  little more than mere cruelty, but effective cruelty. The specifics are unimportant,  but the intent matters for everything.

[00:52:50]Montauk says that he should stop it, but Spivak  says that the Foundation won’t get it. They will never understand the law of the howling. They  can’t imagine it. It’s beyond their conception of reality. But Montauk might. He asks him if he  knows why the Scarlet King exists. Montauk begins to say something about modernity and premodernity,  but Spivak cuts him off. He says that it’s because the SCP Foundation exists. Modernity helped  shape him, defined the contours of his rage, but it was when modernity started interfering in  his kingdom that he was crystallised. Modernity in the form of the Foundation. They came into being  to lock away, classify, pin down everything that didn’t fit into their philosophy of Enlightenment  rationality. Everything had to be understood, contextualised, transformed from faerie and  godhood into simple, comprehensible chunks of logic and matter. It’s abhorrent, and it could  never go on forever. Something had to give.

[00:54:04]Something had to rise up in opposition. Montauk is surprised to hear that the Foundation was the first, and asks if  this whole thing was really their fault.

[00:54:16]Spivak asks if it’s your fault if you don’t know  you’re doing it. Montauk says that the ceremonies the Children performed all held that contrast.  Spivak explains that the King cannot exist without that tension. They needed those symbols  of modernity, those stark grey images, to make the rift in the first place. It was the perfect plan,  but they failed. Montauk says that the Foundation was formed in the 1820s to protect the world from  the dark, by a collection of brave men and women.

[00:54:52]To secure, contain, and protect. That is their  purpose. There is a virtue in normalcy which he doesn’t think Spivak can see. The world can  be understood. Truth, reason, rationality. The Enlightenment. These are their bedrock, these are  what have allowed them to see what is objective.

[00:55:18]Spivak asks if he really believes that, and  Montauk just says that he has to. Spivak says that he’s a scientist. He should know that  there’s no such thing as an objectively true finding in any science. There’s always room  for doubt, always space for error. Montauk replies that that’s just humanity. THey may have  flawed minds, incapable of full interpretation, but what they observe is solid and real. Beneath  it all, the laws, and the bedrock. Spivak explains that the bedrock is defined by the number seven.  Seven chains, seven brides, seven seals. His whole life has been defined by that number. It  tortures him. Endless heptagonal shapes dancing behind his eyes. They’re not allowed to live.  They’re not allowed to be people. That is the luxury of modernity, despite its coldness and its  creaking wounds, to be able to be a full person.

[00:56:27]Seven girls taken away by raiders in the  cold, as the wind demon howled and howled.

[00:56:33]So the Scarlet King had to have seven brides. Montauk retorts that modernity is not always cold. It’s less brutal than slavery. Spivak  asks what it’s for? Is that the only purpose, a mere absence of brutality. What’s the point  of having peace and kindess for its own sake, so you can smile for a few decades before falling  dead into an empty grave? Self-affirmation for a finite self. He doesn’t understand it, and never  did. He wanted to be like them, like Montauk, but the system just stared down at him with  contempt. Maybe it’s not coldness, as that seems too objective. It can’t be that, because there is  no objectivity. There’s just the screaming and the madness and the need for purpose. Montauk asks  if he really thought that nothing is true, but Spivak says that there is truth, but it’s never  final. THere’s no ultimate reality. No totality.

[00:57:43]No concrete way in which the world is run. There’s  just what they make of it. THe clay things they bind together and crudely make in clay. The crack in the wall grows larger, and the sound of screaming can be heard.  Montauk asks who’s in there with him, but Spivak doesn’t know. His seven brides, his  loyal nomads, ancient servants, more creations of the gap between realities. It all breaks down,  in the end. All Spivak sees anymore is the fire.

[00:58:21]He doesn’t see the world, or gods, or kings.  He doesn’t see anything but the flames. Matter and the physical are all fake. He only sees the  smile of his king, forged out of burning and frail matter. And it’s a sight that hurts. It is burning  and being consumed and it’s never, ever finished.

[00:58:45]Montauk asks why he doesn’t stop worshipping him  then. Spivak states that he was a frail thing, born in the cold and the dark. He tried his hand  at writing, when he was very young. He tried his hand at many things, bartering, starving,  surviving in the marketplaces of calcutta.

[00:59:07]Like so many of them, struggling to live  while the westerners grew fatter on their foreign wealth. He grew mad, as there was no  meaning, no purpose, in a country born to be ripped apart. He tried the gods, but they  were silent. He tried reason and atheism, but they were just as empty and unreal. Because  they were always going to be. Montauk knows now what the Scarlet King is. He is a creation of  swirling anomalies, of so many different times, all over the world. He is the memory of a  world that is lost, the premodern world, made manifest in a form of hatred for modernity,  the new, the humanism and smiling coldness that marks their day to day existence. Forged from  a perfect balance of irreconcilable anomalies and their breaking minds. He is an entity created  by this overwhelming, unavoidable tension. Of the howl of the old world when faced with a cold,  grey, purposeless new. He is the revenge of our fallen past. He is the idea of the ancient  in a world which discards and fetishises it.

[01:00:29]Montauk states that he is the tension between  the modern and the premodern made manifest.

[01:00:37]Spivak says that he is the faultline between  two irreconcilable worlds. And he can only, in the end, destroy them all. And that is what  is right. There’s a pause for several seconds, until Montauk asks what they do now. Spivak says  that he’ll shoot him, let them take his corpse, and go back to his life. It won’t last long now,  as the King’s coming is inevitable. He might try to do something to stop it, but it won’t work. The  Foundation has too much at stake, too much resting on the preservation of their ethos. They will coat  the world in concrete grey and the King will rise from the ashes, and the Children won’t even have  to lift a finger. Montauk doesn’t believe him, but Spivak just tells him that it’s time. Montauk  pulls out his firearm and points it at him. He asks him to tell him one more thing, if it was  him that took his brother. Spivak says that no, they have no idea who did, and Montauk  shoots him. The crack disappears.

[01:01:54]Afterwards, the O5 council took a vote on  approving suggestions made by Dr. Robert Montauk on Foundation Operating Procedures for improved  containment of SCP-001. THe vote was denied, 6 to 5. In a statement by O5-1, he writes that  Dr. Montauk’s investigations have been most illuminating. They have certainly raised  serious concerns about how the Foundation has been operating in recent years, but they feel  that his suggestions go too far. The ethos of the Foundation is comprehension. Postmodern notions  of the failability of objective universal truths are all very well in academic circles, but the  Foundation has always been first and foremost concerned with practicalities, basing its analyses  on the hard sciences and unquestionable truths.

[01:02:46]Changing their intentions and modus operandi is,  frankly, an absurd proposition. Their duty is, and always has been, to die in the dark to  protect those in the light. If they begin to abandon or redefine the notion of what dark and  light are, they risk a sharp descent into tyranny, incoherence and the loss of their  mission entirely. This must not happen.

[01:03:13]They cannot engage in cavalier redefinitions  of what the Foundation’s very essence is.

[01:03:20]They thank Dr. Montauk for his work, and they will  be accordingly updating SCP-001’s classification to safe as a result of it. Containing SCP-001  is no longer as difficult as it once was, despite its potential danger. If  Montauk’s information is correct, then it seems clear to them that the Foundation  should simply take a more laissez-faire attitude towards SCP-001’s containment. They look forward  to a more productive containment relationship with their oldest anomaly going forward. We’re left then with one final note, which reads, “I watched, hidden, as their bulldozers  came. Prime land wasted on trees, they said. They ripped them up, sliced their  roots, took them away to be made into tables, chairs or other monotonies. Then, over weeks  and months, they flattened it. They poured concrete into the rest. It was scraped  and shaped, cut into neat little squares, arranged precisely and in an orderly fashion. Walls rose up, great walls of concrete. Windows, their measurements precisely regulated. A  series of standardised bricks for other parts.

[01:04:46]Construction crews and workmen and all the rest,  working efficiently and precisely for a long time; filling in the details, the furnishings and  precise abstract wallpapers and everything else that went into making a facility. Finally, it was finished. One single, new tree had been planted in the centre of the  central courtyard; not through any sense of whimsy or delight, but to give those within  a little sense of nature, of reality in the centre of the grey. To keep them sane, nothing  more. A precisely mandated allowance for the improvement of human mental health, until they  can find out a way to phase that out entirely.

[01:05:33]I watched, and I thought about all that they-  that we- had done. I thought about the world they wanted. I thought about their spinelessness.  I knew what good was, and what evil was, and I saw none of it in either of them. I thought about  hollow men, made of straw, plastered together with thick paste and sold in a hundred, a thousand  identical ways in a thousand identical shops.

[01:06:03]I thought about what we had lost. And I howled. At night, the day before the site's grand opening, I dug up the seeds of the tree, and replaced  them. With a seed of my own devising. And over Site 231 will stand a thing of blood and  bone and sinew. A tree that drips and leers and feeds. It will drip strange fire, and  that fire will both burn and warm in equal measure. And they will look up at it and wish  they had listened while they had the chance.

[01:06:42]I know this path is wrong.  But at least it is a path.

[01:06:48]With thoughts and prayers, Robert Montauk, Child of the Scarlet King.”

[01:06:58]So, the Scarlet King is less of a big bad elder  god, and more of an idea. The idea being that there is an inherent tension between the wildness  of pre-modern civilization and the bland coldness of modern society. The SCP Foundation represents  the modern need for everything to be organized, calculated, filed away precisely, and they  do this to things that fundamentally reject organization and order. This tension spawned the  Scarlet King when the Foundation was first formed three hundred years prior. It’s not a fundamental  aspect of reality, nor is it some outer god from another dimension. It’s just the product of  modernity vs premodernity, order vs chaos.

[01:07:47]Montauk discovered all this by the end, and tried  to convince the o5 council to stop being quite so organized and orderly in their duties. The council  basically told him to stuff it, as that would turn the Foundation into something that just isn’t the  Foundation. Montauk in turn decided that picking any path is better than just the cold indifference  of the foundation and modern society, so he turned to the scarlet king, and now seeks to bring him  into this world by heightening that tension.

[01:08:20]We still don’t get any info about Procedure-110  montauk, other than that it is actually as bad as people think it is, and Dr. Montauk thought it up  in a rage, believing that the scarlet king and his cult took his brother from him. Spivak was utterly  confused initially as to why the procedure even works, but he realizes that it’s exactly that rage  that spawned the procedure that makes it work.

[01:08:47]It works specifically because the procedure  is not based on hard science, facts, carefully constructed research and processes,  but just wild abandon and hate. If the Foundation attempted to figure out why it works, the whole  thing would probably collapse. That is fairly wild to think about though, that the Foundation  heard his proposal for the procedure, with no scientific backing whatsoever, and said sure. The Scarlet King is a fairly longstanding aspect of the SCP universe, but the lore  on him has always been fairly hazy, with multiple contradicting accounts. I think  this is likely the most interesting one, even if it still leaves a lot of questions  unanswered and still fairly hazy. He’s not a big bad monster in the traditional sense, but  he is one that grows empowered every day the more and more efficient and calculated  the Foundation becomes. In some ways, he’s sort of the representative of anomalies  in general, an opposing force to the rigidity of the foundation. Since the Foundation is likely  never to reject modernity and embrace tradition, things are looking pretty good  for followers of the Scarlet King.