Link to article: Good Hope.
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[[include :scp-wiki:theme:black-highlighter-theme]] [[>]] [[module Rate]] [[/>]] Thunder off the lip of the Cape. When the lightning cracked, it struck the rocks and outlined them in cold light, a light that blinded as much as it illuminated. By its crude glow, the mouth of the cave was just visible. Still, it was hard to imagine anyone finding it without foreknowledge. The woman presently clambering through the opening possessed such foreknowledge. She possessed a great deal of knowledge (both fore- and aft-), but little of it would matter in the end. This, she also already knew. She had, it must be said, a name; but she was so far-travelled and so well-lived that the number of people who knew that name was increasingly few. Most knew her simply as the Baker, and this suited her just fine. The wind and rain had plastered the Baker’s scarf to her forehead. Her hair was twisted into flat, unruly whorls underneath the fabric. As she made it into the shelter of the cave, she pressed the scarf harder against her scalp, squeezing out cold water that ran down the back of her head. “Adamastor!” she shouted. The lightning slapped the sky behind her, and the mouth of the cave was as bright as it was blind. There was no direct answer. Still, a thick air seemed to blow past her from deeper within the cave, like the dirty breath from a huge pair of lungs. The Baker wrinkled her nose. At her side was her [[[scp-8213 | bread spade]]], which she lifted in one hand and held out in front of her. She took a few steps forward, until her sandaled feet found the sloped edge of the cave floor. Before her was a steep and precipitous drop, almost imperceptible in the wild light of the storm outside. Her spade dangled over it, taunting. “You’ll come up to the surface to torment all those sailors, but not a word for an old Baker?” she called down into the hole. A dry smile was on her face. “Then, I will come down to you.” Without fanfare, she hopped off the dark edge. The sky crackled like a painted egg. It illuminated the Baker as she fell, swinging the spade behind herself and catching it in her opposite hand. When she sat on the handle, it slowed her descent as well as any witch’s broom. If the old wood digging into the back of her legs hurt at all, it didn’t show on her face. She descended slowly into the dark, almost meandering, like a leaf falling from a tree. Though the lightning still exploded outside the cave, the Baker’s face was inexorably swallowed into darkness. Before long, the only indication of the storm outside was a faint rumble that stirred the cave walls. “Adamastor, I rebuke you,” the Baker chided. “One day, you’ll have the royal blood of Portugal suffocating at the foot of your watery grave. You’ll fill the mouth of a holy woman with your foul curses. Why, you’ll even swallow the city from which I was born! We both know a little of what the future holds. A little, or enough.” She paused, although her descent did not. The sense of breathing below her seemed stronger, now. “And yet you will not take a simple house call.” Suddenly, a great rush of air blasted up from below. It blew the Baker and her spade upwards, nearly knocking her off of her perch. She held fast to the spade, teeth grit. The ends of her scarf whipped hard above her head. After a moment, the blast subsided—not unlike a long sigh being dragged out of an irritated mouth. The Baker stabilized in the air, resuming her descent. “Such a grump!” she barked, smirking. The Baker had reached the bottom of the hole. By now the sky was so far away that she might as well have been swimming in a sea of blackness. Her feet touched upon a ground so dark that it had no meaningful difference from the air. “I'm marooned here, Adamastor,” she continued, “and I'm trying to make it back home. I know you will not offer your help, so I shall take it in my own way.” With a lazy gesture, she brought the spade forward and drew a circle in the ground with the flat end. Strangely, despite how dark it was, the lines of the circle were immediately visible, furrows of light carved in dirt of pure black. “Shall I tell you a story, Adamastor?” Despite her question, the Baker stopped speaking for a moment. She hummed while she worked, eyes downcast at the circle that she was busily filling in with details. “One day, a-many hundred years from now, a proud Portuguese frigate shall dare to sail the very waters that marooned me here. Its three sets of sails will be huge with the wind. Its one-hundred crew will be strong-voiced and proud. But, when their vessel catches sight of the Cape, you will take all that away.” The Baker made a vicious strike at the ground with the spade, scoring a mark that sent particles of half-bright dirt flying through the cave. “A storm will dry their throats and bleed their strength. For dark hours they will fight at the rigs, only for the ropes to tear and the sails to be set aflame from the lightning. And finally, when the few of them remaining are gasping on the deck, //you// will bother to appear before them.” She flipped the spade around and started making smaller marks, using the tip of the handle. “I don’t imagine what you will plan to do with them. Something wretched, no doubt. But—by luck, or design—a lone sailor will say the right words. Pleading with the god before him, he will ask you to stay your hand long enough that he might tell their story. Intrigued, you will indulge him.” The Baker was almost done with the circle. Her movements became faster, and more certain. “And he will tell you the story of Portugal. He will tell you of a place as poor and oppressed as it was endurant. He will tell you of a people who stayed the path through hundreds of years, who refused to disappear or die out no matter what fell upon them. And he will tell you that he is one of these people, and that all he wants is to cross the Cape, which the Spaniards and the English and the Castilians and everyone else around them have never succeeded in crossing… mostly, I should add, because of you. He will appeal to you to see his value. He will tell you he does not mind that no one else notices it. So long as he might be allowed to cross the Cape, he will not mind anything at all.” The Baker paused, and rolled her eyes. “Torment… and Hope. The same thing, in the end.” She had finished with the circle. She stepped back into the darkness, her handiwork lit with an eerie light. “For some reason, you will see his reason. Maybe the truth in his story will make itself known to you. Or maybe he will have a silver tongue! These details, I do not know. In any case, for the first and perhaps only time in your wretched and immortal life, you will do something kind. You will let the ship cross the Cape. And because of that, the descendants of that ship will start to call the place the Cape of Good Hope.” Once more, the Baker held her spade out in front of her with one hand. Before her, the thaumic circle looked like one hundred pictures at once. In its precise and suggestive lines, one could see every swirling ocean, every ring in every tree, each great round geometric line of the Earth. The Baker stepped forward until the spade was hovering over the magic circle. “Later—much later—another ship shall cross the Cape. This one shall say //‘Foundation’// on her side. To this ship, [[[storm-s-reckoning | you will not appear at all]]]. These two vessels might seem like they have nothing to do with each other, but by the time you have met them both, you will know them to be nearly the same. That, I believe, is why you will not show yourself to the second.” The story thus finished, the Baker fell silent for a long moment. Her arm remained extended, the spade hanging in the faint light. “What do you think, Adamastor? Was that story good enough to grant me passage?” As if in response, the circle on the ground suddenly flared as bright as the lightning outside. The explosive light illuminated the Baker’s face as she grinned wildly. “Why, Adamastor,” she said coyly. “It might still be that you have a heart, after all.” Without another word, the Baker stepped forward into the circle. The light swallowed her, as blinding as it was illuminating. When it faded, the circle was gone, the ground once more swallowed in darkness. As for the Baker, she was finally on her way back home. 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