The Curse of Mount Abraxas

Link to article: The Curse of Mount Abraxas.

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Many things are buried here.
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by [[[Koths Korner| Kothardarastrix]]]

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+++ 2014

At 3:00 AM Arabia Standard Time, August 3rd, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant has invaded the city of Sinjar and set about massacring its populace. On the other side of the world, where it is 5:00 PM Pacific Standard Time on August 2nd, [[[SCP-2068]]] feels every bit of it. And it does its very best to make everyone else at [[[secure-facility-dossier-area-14 |Armed Bio-Containment Area-14]]] feel it too.

The first indication of a problem is the siren. Not the breach siren, but the WWII-era British air raid siren that suddenly begins to blare from every single speaker in the whole facility, accompanied by the heavy blues of Tony Iommi's guitar. By the time those assigned to SCP-2068 recognize it as "[https://youtu.be/LQUXuQ6Zd9w?si=DEP34PwRP43JUQKT War Pigs]," it's already too late.

"//Generals gathered in their masses..//" Ozzy wails.

A gas explosion rips through SCP-2068's containment chamber, shredding the vault door like paper but leaving the indestructible pump untouched.

"//...just like witches at black masses.//"

Thick tar clogs the drains. Oil begins to pool.

"//Evil minds that plot destruction...//"

A wave of oil surges from the breached chamber. It catches fire.

"//...sorcerer of death's construction.//"

Clouds of thick, black smoke roil through the heavy containment section. The security system detects the breach and, just as it was programmed, seals shut. Two hundred people, mere minutes from signing off for the day, are trapped inside.

"//In the fields the bodies burning...//"

Sprinklers erupt, but water is nothing to an oil fire. Unburned droplets worm their way into the lungs of those caught in the choking smoke. In a few agonizing seconds, their blood is transmuted to yet more oil.

"//...as the war machine keeps turning.//"

Then it ignites.

"//Death and hatred to mankind...//"

A few dozen people escape the smoke by scrambling into hazmat suits, but those are little help against the ever-expanding lake of fire. Some slip on the slick and fall into the flames, where they died in a horrible lump of melting plastic. Others simply get turned around in the inky fog and wander the flooding corridors until the fire finds them, or the heat and exertion bring them down. One especially unfortunate bastard, a Junior Researcher known as [[[director-house-gets-whitewashed |Rob Berr]]], gets dragged into the fire by some kind of [[[scp-6643 |translucent orange tentacle]]].

"//...poisoning their brainwashed minds. Oh Lord yeah!//"

And so, out of almost two hundred soldiers and scientists, only five have found safety in the section's central freezer. Its armored walls and doors are impervious to explosions, its separate air supply is free of smoke, and its negative temperature is, at least, more survivable than the scorching heat outside.

But then again, the freezer is also filled to the brim with live samples of all the most horrible diseases known to man (and a few that aren't). [[[medical-seminar |Dr. Christopher Zartion]]] is looking up at one of those samples now, tightly locked in a metal drawer. It's labeled "[[[SCP-016]]]," and Zartion's not sure if he wants to remember what that one does.

"How long are we gonna be stuck in here?" someone asks, voice muffled by his suit. Zartion squints at him. It's hard to tell under the frosty hazmat suit, but he sounds like Researcher Lee Roy Carlson, the Director's worthless nepo baby. Of course he'd go asking a stupid question like that. No one knows they're in the freezer, and no one will as long as 2068 keeps overriding the airwaves with protest music. Even if someone does, it'll take hours to drain all the oil soaking the rest of the section, just to clear a path. It might take //days//.

Maybe it's a good thing that so few people had made it into the freezer. It'll make their air last longer.

Carlson sighs. "You know, when they told me this joint was cursed, I didn't believe it."

"Well, that was your first mistake," Zartion snaps. "Don't you know how we got this place, back in-"

-----

+++ 1979

The ogre grinned. With one fat hand, he used a rib to pick the shreds of an MTF uniform out of his teeth. They did not part when he spoke.

"So," he growled, "you think the seventh time will be the charm?"

Dr. Leonard Byrne of the Mythology and Folkloristics Department returned the ogre's grin. "Actually, I'd like to accept your challenge."

The ogre chuckled. "That'll be more fun for me, but I hope you don't expect it to work any better than your delicious friends' bullets." The remains of said friends (well, coworkers) were strewn all across the rocky slope of Mount Abraxas. Here was an arm, there a leg, over that way a body that'd been squashed flat in a way that, going by the stains on the ogre's rear, had been quite demeaning. There weren't any heads left, though, because they'd all gone in the ogre's belly. The look in his piggy little eyes said he still wasn't full.

"Well," Leonard said, "let's get on with it."

The ogre's bloodstained teeth parted long enough to admit the rib, which disappeared with an unsettling crunch. He clapped his enormous hands, sending echoes all down into Sky Valley. Rubbing them deviously together, he posed his question.

"How many men can I eat on an empty stomach?"

Leonard knew the answer immediately, but he humored the brute by counting the various half-eaten bodies strewn across the mountainside. It would've been quite hard to estimate how many entire bodies could fit in the ogre's belly, especially if it was bigger on the inside, but that wasn't really the question.

"One," Leonard said, confidently. "After that, your stomach's not empty anymore."

The ogre's eyes widened in surprise. "My! You're cleverer than you seem."

"I get that a lot."

He chuckled. "So, you have won my little game. Your prize is your life. Don't waste it." With one bulging arm, the ogre gestured back down the road.

"Actually," Leonard replied with a smirk, "now that my safety is secured, I've got a challenge for //you//."

The ogre blinked. "A challenge?"

"That's right! I've got some riddles of my own."

Slowly, the ogre's surprised expression became crafty. "That wasn't the only one //I// had either."

"Of course not."

"And what, dear delicious doctor, will be the stakes of this rematch?"

Casually, Leonard shrugged. "Simple. If I stump you, you'll become my prisoner, and I'll take your lair for my own."

The ogre scowled. He didn't believe for a second he could be trounced at his own game, but this squishy little Irishman seemed to think so, and that irked him. "And if //you// are the one who's stumped, you'll be my supper. Feet first."

Leonard looked down at his boots and wiggled the toes inside them. "Yeah, you're on."

At that, the battle began. Thirty white horses on a red hill. A building where blind men learned to see. Nails in my belly, trees on my back. Seven sacks of seven cats. Man, with his varying number of legs. A box unwanted by its builder. Four wheels and flies. And so on, and so on.

As the sun sank behind the Ruby Mountains, Leonard leaned back on his palms, legs outstretched before him. He'd removed his boots and was now idly wiggling his toes to taunt the hungry ogre.

Unlike his opponent, the ogre was not calm. His fists - each larger than Leonard's head - kept clenching and unclenching in anticipation of the dismembering to come. That dismembering was seeming increasingly unlikely, though; by all accounts, the ogre had run out of riddles. He didn't know how anyone such a small fraction of his own age could've amassed such a vast storehouse of puns, puzzles, and perplexities, much less the quick wits to solve his own.

"Stuck?" the insolent doctor taunted, still wearing that self-important smirk.

"No," the ogre grumbled, clenching his mighty jaws so tightly in his frustration that little rivulets of blood began to well up between his teeth. "Just deciding which one to use." This was a bald-faced lie; the ogre had exhausted his whole repertoire. He kept running back over his many centuries of memories, hoping to remember some truly unsolvable conundrum that'd escaped him until now, but could draw only blanks. Leonard had even known the cheater-riddles that were only solvable in context, like the one about the bees in the lion skull and the other one with the witches and the horse and the raven and the soup and the robbers-

Wait. Cheating. But how? He couldn't just pull any random question out of the blue. He'd let himself use the bees and the raven because those were at least well-known, but he couldn't just make up something that was literally //unsolvable//. That'd be unfair, and he'd be forced to forfeit the game if Leonard called him out on it, which he surely would. Of course, he could pick something that //was// - theoretically - solvable from the present context. After all, the precedent of the game had been set by Samson and the fellow with the poisoned soup. Surely such a master of riddles as Leonard couldn't argue with Samson. Or, in this case, with Rumplestiltskin.

Slowly, the ogre's scowl twisted back into a confident smile.

"Here," he boomed, "is my riddle: //What is my name?//"

Much to the ogre's delight, Leonard seemed surprised. "Hey, that's-"

"Nuh uh," the ogre said, wiggling a thick finger, "Rumplestiltskin."

Leonard scowled. He was right. The precedent was there. 

The ogre smugly crossed his tree-trunk arms. Suppertime.

Name, name, name...well, the ogre's accent was clearly French, but that didn't rule out nonsensical fantasy-creature names like "Rumplestilkskin." Maybe there'd been clues? Leonard thought over the answers to the previous riddles. Maybe they formed an acrostic? Maybe an anagram of one? No, that didn't make sense. The ogre had clearly come up with this on the fly, he couldn't have planned that. And why would he? Leonard eyed the brute's scarred skin. Maybe there was a brand or a tattoo hidden somewhere among the scars, burns, and broken-off sword blades? None presented itself, though. Even if there was something there, it was surely hidden by the patchwork of rags (mostly shredded ASCI uniforms, with some animal pelts mixed in) that the ogre had covered himself with. Leonard doubted the ogre would give him a chance to check for branded buttocks. He scanned the nearby slopes, looking for helpful little animals that might've overheard the ogre's name, but there didn't seem to be much wildlife to go around up on the bare, rocky slope.

With a creeping horror, Leonard realized that he might just be forced to make a flat guess. Those were horrible, horrible odds. He could try to run, he supposed, but that'd be a forfeit, and he didn't think he'd be outrunning the ogre's thickly muscled legs today.

Angrily, Leonard climbed to his bare feet and began to pace. He had to think of something. Anything. Maybe the name was a pun. A play on words. A rhyme. It wasn't uncommon for fairy tale creatures to have descriptive names. The Big Bad Ogre? Jolly-Jaws-Jack (well, Jacque)? Bigtooth Baptiste? Ravenous, Riddling, Repugnant Roland?

"Any guesses?" the ogre taunted, grinding his huge teeth from side to side in anticipation. Leonard, for the first time, was now seriously considering the possibility that those ivory slabs might be the last thing he ever saw.

While staring into the maw of his impending demise, Leonard realized that, during the entire time they'd been talking, the ogre had only parted his bone-crunching jaws once. That was odd. Come to think of it, that was the only thing about this riddling ogre that distinguished him from any other storybook threshold-guarding giant. Interesting.

"Can I have a hint?" he asked.

The ogre chortled in response, longer and louder than was really necessary. When the echoes of his great guffaws had finally run off down the mountainside, he treated Leonard to a flat, snappy "no".

"Well, that seems a little unfair, don't you think?"

"I told you, Rumple-"

"No, not that." Leonard gestured at the mangled remains of the Task Force, which by now had attracted quite a lot of flies. "These men here, did they even try to answer your first riddle?"

The ogre snorted derisively. "As a matter of fact, they did not. I found it rather rude, to tell the truth."

"Perhaps. But consider this: those men didn't use their guesses."

"What?"

"Well, I'm just thinking that since you ate these fellows before they tried to answer, that's a little unfair."

"They attacked me!"

"Oh, come now, you weren't in danger. That sword there has been in your skin since...what, the twelfth century?"

"Thirteenth," he muttered, adjusting his tunic of stitched-together ASCI uniforms to cover the rusted blade.

"Regardless, my point still stands. You denied these gentlemen their guesses earlier, and I think that, as a friend of theirs, I should be entitled to those guesses as compensation for your bad manners."

"Bad manners!?" he shouted.

"That's what I said. You've been a very ungracious host."

"Why, I never!"

Leonard shook his head in disappointment. "Yes, yes, very unbecoming behavior. Recompense is certainly in order."

"No!" the ogre cried, stomping his strangely dainty feet in childish frustration. "Absolutely not! No more guesses! That's not how the game works!"

Leonard rolled his eyes and threw up his hands in mock surrender. "Fine, fine. I'll settle for a compromise."

"Compromise?" he replied, raising one bushy eyebrow.

"Yes. Instead of extra guesses, I'll take extra questions."

"Huh?"

"Have you ever heard of a game called twenty questions?"

"Twenty?! I only killed six!"

"Of course, of course. I would never ask more than that. And, in fact, that is what I ask: six questions, from me to you, answered truthfully."

"Hmm..." thoughtfully, he stroked his chin. "Don't think I don't know what you're up to. You can't just ask me what my name is."

"Of course not! That'd be ridiculous."

"Humph. Fine." For emphasis, the ogre held up six of his sausage-like fingers.

"Excellent! Now, where to begin...ah! First question: where are you from?"

"Portugal."

That seemed unlikely.

"How did you get to America?"

"Jumped."

"What?" Leonard blurted.

Gleefully, the ogre lowered another finger. Leonard kicked himself.

"I jumped. With a running start, of course."

"Of course."

Leonard made sure to think carefully this time, lest he waste another question. The ogre was obviously lying to him. The mockery was rather insulting, but it might be the opening Leonard needed.

"Why are you lying to me?"

The ogre chuckled softly. "I only lie when it's through my teeth! Hahahaha!" Leonard could tell from the ogre's delivery that he'd been waiting to use that line for a long time. He tried not to show it, but Leonard was almost as happy about it as the ogre. This was the key to the whole thing. The fairy-tale creature's fairy-tale weakness.

"Alright, next-to-last question: aren't you getting hungry?"

The ogre tilted his pointed head. "What?"

"Well, we've been up here all evening. I wondered if you might be feeling a bit peckish. It's been quite a while since you ate my friends' heads, after all, and I doubt that their brains were very nutritious."

"I'm fine," the ogre claimed. A monstrous growl from his stomach disagreed.

"I won't mind if you have a snack."

"I'm going to eat you, if you ever stop talking!"

"Ha! That could be quite a while yet. I'm not done thinking."

"Hey, that's stalling!"

"I don't remember agreeing to any time limits, do you?"

The ogre grumbled under his breath, but he let it slide.

"Oh, that reminds me," Leonard said, suddenly patting his jacket pocket. "I think I might have an extra sandwich."

"I don't want it." Once again, the ogre's stomach betrayed him.

"It's peanut butter."

"I don't //like// peanut butter."

"Suit yourself." Leonard reached into his pocket and produced what was indeed a peanut butter sandwich, wrapped in wax paper. He made sure to eat it as slowly as possible.

"Mmm," he said, patting his belly. "I love me some peanut butter."

The ogre placed a hand over his stomach, but it wasn't enough to muffle the rumbling. He must have been lying about not liking peanut butter, too.

"Say, can I-"

"Hmm?" Leonard said, stuffing the last bit of sandwich into his mouth.

"Oh...never mind." Frustrated, the ogre reached down and grabbed the nearest body. With a sickening pop, he wrenched off one of its arms and stuffed it into his guillotine of a mouth. He started chewing, and Leonard saw his chance.

"Last question!" he said, quickly. "What's your name?"

"[[[scp-082 |Fernand]]]," said Fernand, still chewing. Fernand immediately clamped both meaty hands over his mouth, but the secret had already escaped.

"Aha!" cried Leonard, triumphantly. "And now, foul ogre, I name thee //Fernand//!"

"ARGH!" he roared, spewing chewed-up meat and bone shards as he talked, "THAT'S CHEATING! You said you wouldn't ask my name!"

"And //you// said you'd answer truthfully," Leonard argued, pointing one accusing finger. "Did you really expect me to believe that you jumped here from Portugal? You cheated, so I cheated, and that made us even. Then I answered your riddle correctly and won the game."

"No, that's...that isn't...NO! GRAH! ARGH!" Still howling in impotent rage, the ogre kicked the nearest corpse and sent it bouncing down the mountain. It rolled right past Leonard, but he wasn't worried. Now that he'd been beaten fair and square, Fernand could no more hurt him than a vampire could enter a house uninvited. He still waited for Fernand to finish his little tantrum, though. It would've been rude to interrupt.

"So," Leonard said, stepping boldly toward the blood-soaked, out-of-breath ogre. "Why don't you take me on a tour of my new lair?"

Fernand grumbled all the way, but he complied. The facility's entrance was a yawning, suspiciously rectangular hole in the mountainside. A rusted metal door still hung open and crooked in the cracked concrete frame. The Foundation didn't know much about this place, not yet, but they knew it had once belonged to the American Secure Containment Initiative. If their intel was accurate, it had been abandoned sometime around...

-----

+++ 1931

"Repugnant," snarled Brother Eyesore, sneering at the writhing, incapacitated guards and scientists. Two dozen of them lay sprawled along the length of the hallway, crying like wild animals in an indescribable, inexpressible mixture of pain, pleasure, hunger, exhaustion, and every other sensation the human soul tries to deny to its body. The transparent form of the Debaucherer floated among their convulsing forms, caressing sweat-soaked faces and gnashing teeth with its vaporous feet and the tips of its frayed, diaphanous wings. Its nebulous body blurred as it moved; sometimes she took the well-defined form of a voluptuous maiden, and sometimes she was a hazy, hunched hag. All the while, the noxious perfumes and demonic pheromones that comprised her shape - and that had plunged her lecherous victims into such agonizing ecstasy - slowly shifted through shades of bruise blue, urine yellow, and gastric green.

The bronze hexagram around Eyesore's neck sizzled with infernal energy, growing hot against the thick leather of his tunic. The Debaucherer was straining against its magic, empowered by the squeals of its victims. If this lechery was allowed to persist, it might break free of the binding.

With open glee and hidden disappointment, Eyesore raised his right arm. A serpentine symbiont slithered down it, extending its head just past his wrist and unleashing a spray of venom that combusted in mid-air and fell upon on the helpless forms spread out before him. They did not seem to notice, for even the pain of burning alive was far less than what the Debaucherer had given them, but it burned them all the same. Disappointed, the dejected Debaucherer faded away, its demonic essence returning to the hexagram until it was called upon again. Heedless of the burning bodies and their heat, Brother Eyesore continued on towards his true goal.

The halls of the American Secure Containment Initiative's underground base were dark with blood and scorch marks. Bodies lay everywhere. Most were on fire, though several seemed to have had their heads bitten off by something, doubtless one of the abominations that the ASCI had - until recently - kept locked up down here. There had been many such monsters, and releasing them to rampage through these subterranean halls had been one of the earliest steps of the plan. And now, Brother Eyesore had reached one of the last.

At the door to the final containment chamber, sequestered in the deepest recess of the mountain, Eyesore was met by Brother Earache. He was dressed the same as Eyesore, in thick, brown leather. Heavy boots and fat-fingered gloves protruded from under a thick coat. Its hood rose over his head, surrounding a mask of dull metal and blackened glass. The garb of the faithful was hot and heavy, but they relished it.

"Where is Brother Tonguetwist?" Earache asked.

"He is dead," Eyesore grunted. "A bullet shattered his hexagram, and the Slaughtering Perseverance broke free."

Earache laughed. "Then it shall slaughter these infidels forevermore. Now, let us assure that our brother will not have died in vain." He turned then to the immense vault door and raised his gloved hands in a dramatic gesture. Nine times, the hexagram about his neck flashed with coppery sparks. Nine spheres of crackling orange plasma appeared above him, moving in a slow circle like tiny electric planets. And at the center of each, dark against the bright ball lighting, floated the carbonized skeleton of a newborn infant, curled up as if still in its mother's womb, as if it had not been willingly released from her maternal embrace and passed through the flames to the loveless god of the brazen bull.

"Burn, my Pyre Children!" Earache cried. "Burn, melt, consume!"

Heeding their summoner's commands, the fetal flames shot forward into the vault door, vanishing into its metal mass. Dirty orange bolts danced across its surface, like the sparks that arc between two short-circuiting jumper cables. The door glowed red, then orange, then yellow, then finally a blinding white as the burnt babies wrought their wrath upon it. Eyesore and Earache gazed lovingly at the handiwork of their dark god's charred children. They stood heedless of the heat as the metal began to sag, then drip. As the weakening door finally lurched free of its frame, collapsing into a pile of seething slag, they raised their arms and voices in praise to the god of devouring flames. With fingers of liquid fire, the Pyre Children swept the remains of their handiwork aside, clearing a path for their father's followers. The brothers stepped between the piles of wreckage, waded through the air that now wavered like water in the heat, and relished the scalding purity of the searing air as it raised blisters on their sweating, reddened flesh. Then, as one, they knelt before their god, now freed from the prison of the blasphemers.

It sat there on its earthen throne, a titan of glazed and hardened clay, fired by the heat of Gehenna itself. A humanoid figure, boxy chest and tubular arms etched with intricate designs. Two great wings, rising behind it like a painter's halo. And the head of a bull, blank eyes wide, dark mouth gaping. Its arms were spread, palms turned outwards, ready to receive its sacrifice. The glow from the cooling slag cast an immense shadow on the wall behind it, one that seemed to grow larger every time the Brothers of the Brazen Heart cried its name.

"[[[scp-089 |Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!]]]"

Deep inside the furnace of the statue's chest, a fire was kindled. A voice like the far-off rumble of thunder rolled in its smokestack throat, rolled like cruel laughter. Now the Horned King Crowned in Shame would feast on the flesh of the faithful, feast as he had not since the blasphemers raided [[[scp-2427 |Hemlock Attic]]] and stole this earthen vessel away from his followers. Not since...

-----

+++ 1870

The only sound in the valley was the slow, muted thump of hooves on dirt. Captain Jedediah Shaw of the American Secure Containment Initiative found the silence unnerving. A mining camp should not be quiet. Then Sky Valley came into view, and it all became very clear.

The mining camp was gone. Not vanished; destroyed. The ramshackle buildings had all been toppled or smashed. Some bore scorch marks, though the flames had long gone out. And even from the pass he could see the red splotches on the dusty ground, and the buzzards that huddled around them.

Clarence "The Kid" Dawson rode up beside his captain and halted. "Guess we're too late," he observed, uselessly. He was in the habit of uselessness.

Shaw didn't reply. He just drew a pistol and spurred his horse on down the mountain. His three troops followed. After Dawson came miss Liz Green, the squad's medic. Before the ASCI employed her, she'd been either a traveling frontier doctor or a livestock veterinarian, depending on who asked. The rear was brought up by Amos Bridge, a bulky frontiersman who'd first crossed the Mississippi during the Gold Rush. He didn't talk too much about his past - or anything, really - but he was a crack shot with his old hunting rifle, and that was all Shaw needed to know.

The sorry state of the camp wasn't unexpected. Shaw's band was only here because the first group to arrive had called for backup, saying something about a "[[[scp-7587 |were-odactyl]]]". It had been over a week since then, without a single update. There were plenty of reasonable explanations for the lack of communication, but the American Secure Containment Initiative didn't deal in the reasonable.

Case in point: amongst all the burned and bloody wreckage of the camp, there was not a single body. Even the buzzards looked confused.

"There's no bodies," Dawson said, in case anyone had forgotten to pack their eyes.

"Not yet," Amos said, grimly. Dawson looked nervously at him, unsure if that was a warning or threat, and decided to shut up just in case.

"Alright, folks," Shaw said, pulling his steed to a halt. "Spread out. See what you can find."

Wordlessly, the team followed suit. The camp was small; counting the miners and whoever else they'd dragged up here, it might've housed fifty at most. Almost all of the buildings had been ramshackle houses; with a population that small, there wouldn't have been much point in setting up a proper saloon or general store.

The search didn't take long. When the team regrouped beside their horses, each member had a new observation to share.

"There's bullet holes in some o' the boards," Shaw said. "Our guys, and probably some o' the locals, put up a fight against whatever it was."

"Ain't no footprints," Amos grunted. To clarify, he pointed at the trail leading back up the mountain. The only tracks on it were their horses'.

"But there is a blood trail," Liz added. And so there was; a wide line of countless irregular splotches and splashes, tracing its way up the mountainside toward the mine. "Looks like it fell from pretty high."

Shaw looked up at the mine's gaping, darkened maw. So that's where the were-odactyls had gone. The bodies, too.

The others looked over at Dawson, but he seemed more interested in tracing dirt circles with his boot. Useless.

"Well," Shaw said, unhappily, "I reckon we better get up there."

"In the mine?" Liz asked, grimacing. "We'll go deaf, shootin' in there."

"Stuff yer ears, then. There ain't no space to fly in there, if they even can while the sun's up. Best hit 'em now, while they're boxed in."

Five minutes later, the four of them dismounted outside the mine. Taking Shaw's suggestion, Liz had fixed up some impromptu earplugs for the group. Shaw refused his; their guns couldn't do anything to his ears that the ones at Gettysburg hadn't already.

Under normal circumstances, Amos would've taken the lead. His beady eyes were the sharpest and, somehow, his massive feet were the quietest. Underground, though, both sight and stealth would be limited by lantern light. Shaw went first instead, hoping his lightning reflexes would be enough to put some silver through anything that jumped out. Amos and Liz came behind, rifle and shotgun ready to perforate anything that Shaw missed. Dawson brought up the rear, for his own protection as much as anybody else's, and held the lantern. The kid protested - he wanted to be up front, where the action was - and Shaw credited him for bravery if nothing else.

They had just begun their descent when Dawson spoke up.

"Something's not right here," he said, contemplatively.

"No shit?" Shaw snapped. He'd just about had enough of Captain Obvious back there.

"The rocks are too old."

That was a weird thing to say, even for Dawson. Shaw didn't turn around - that would've put his back to the dark and whatever might be in it - but he did bring the group to a stop.

"What?"

"These rocks," Dawson continued, "they're from the Cambrian Period."

"English, son."

"They're 500 million years old!" he said, with mixed wonder and impatience. "But pterodactyls, those only came around maybe 200 million years ago."

"So?"

"So there shouldn't //be// any in these rocks, live, dead, //or// fossilized! I don't see how the miners could've found one. That'd be like finding a [[[scp-4003 |human fossil next to a dinosaur]]]."

"Huh," Liz said, perplexed.

"Cave," Amos answered, simply.

"What?" Dawson asked.

"Cave. Dinosaur went in. Roof collapsed. Got buried."

"Maybe," Dawson admitted, uncertainly. "Or a burrow, or something."

Shaw sighed. "Is anything you just said gonna make them things easier to shoot?"

"Um. No?"

"Then you shouldn't a' said it. Now keep yer trap shut, we don't want the damn things hearin' us."

"Yes sir," he grumbled. Still, he continued to silently wonder what must've happened there back in...

-----

+++ The Late Cretaceous

Secure Compound-14 had fallen. The exact chain of events that led to the breach was not clear, and probably never would be, at least not to Scholar Ghost Sound of Glittering Falls, not if the sounds in the hallway were any indication. Sounds like the thunder of lead-launchers, the pained screams of the dying, and the monstrous roars of something very large and very angry. Ghost Sound knew the procedure was to wait for security escort, but the panic gnawing at her heart insisted that she should just run for it now, in case the monster got to her before security did.

Fortunately, it didn't come to that. The door to her laboratory swung forcefully open, revealing a security guard wrapped in blood-splattered pseudo-shell. It'd be of little use against an escaped Artefact, of course, but it still made her feel just a little bit safer as he squawked at her to move. Bundling her research notes in her claws, Ghost Sound scampered off down the hall, letting the watchful guard keep himself between her and the breaching Artefact.

The halls of Compound-14 were in pandemonium. Scholars sprinted away from the danger, and soldiers ran towards it. Dropped objects scattered underfoot, and she tried not to look as people stepped over or on the occasional fragmented corpse. If she made it out of this, it would take forever to scrub the gore from her talons.

Another roar sounded, so loud and close that Ghost Sound's eardrums crackled. Several voices screeched briefly in pain but were cut off by wet crunching sounds. Without thinking, Ghost Sound shed the extra weight of her notes and put on more speed than she'd thought was possible. By the sound of it, she was almost outpacing the guard.

Also by the sound of it, neither one of them was moving fast enough. Great, thudding footsteps pounded down the hall, joined by a deep, thunderous growl.

Ghost Sound rounded a corner, and the security wheel-wall came into sight. If she could get to the other side before it sealed, she might just make it out of this alive.

As if in cruel response, the wall began rolling into place, to seal the facility shut. An automated voice started counting down to the sunfire failsafe's detonation. Screaming with desperation and terror, Ghost Sound stretched her neck as far forward as she could, leveling her head with her tail and holding her arms flat to her sides for maximum aerodynamics. As the wind whistled through her feathers, it felt like she just might make it.

Then her talon snagged on something, and all hope of escape evaporated. The wall wheeled shut just as her tumbling body struck it.

The guard skidded to a stop. Then, with a resolute sigh, he turned to face the monster. It was something like an immense crocodylomorph, with a long, powerful jaw full of jagged, sharp teeth and a thick hide studded with armor plates and seeping bullet wounds. It stalked forward on six squat but powerful legs, spread somewhere between a lizard's wide gait and the upright joints of a quadrupedal dinosaur. A thick, spike-studded tail dragged the ground behind it, leaving a trail of sizzling acid and sloughed skin. Five compound eyes perched on blunt, twitching stalks, each black facet glinting with malice.

Screeching defiantly (or maybe just desperately), the guard opened fire. The lead projectiles ripped into the thing's seething flesh, but the beast didn't seem to notice. Faster than the eye could follow, it lunged. There was a sickening crunch. It thrashed the body back and forth once, then tossed it aside. Then it stalked towards Ghost Sound. She opened her beak to beg for mercy, or cry for help, or pray to the Iron God, or maybe just to scream, but she couldn't find the breath to do any of that. Then the beast lashed out with a cruelly clawed foot, and she couldn't do anything at all.

Loudly, it spat a glob of blood and flesh onto the concrete floor. Quietly, it muttered a word that no one else could hear.

"...//disgusting//..."

And with that, the compound was engulfed in a ball of atomic fire.

-----

+++ 2010

The beast survived the bomb, of course, just as it later survived the structural collapse of Secure Compound-14, the airstrikes that followed, and everything else the hapless [[[SCP-6980 |feathered bipeds]]] could throw at it. They knew they could not kill or contain it, but that had never stopped them from trying. It never stopped anyone. Not the ethereal children of the stars that bound it with a thousand hexes. Not the hairy ones had who had trapped it in a [[[scp-2932 |vast prison of living wood]]], grown from the plucked-out heart of an ancient goddess. And certainly not the smooth ones, those hideous naked mammals that called themselves humans. At their hands, it had been [[[scp-557 |chained in crumbling towers]]], [[[scp-5689 |caged in secret basements]]], banished to a dozen different dimensions, pitted against warriors, monsters, machines, and other beasts of bygone eras, and subjected to every other indignation imaginable.

And now the time had come again. [[[SCP-682]]] seethed in its acid tank, unstable bulk shifting slightly as the transport truck trundled up the mountainside. It didn't know what torment the Foundation would subject it to this time, nor did it really care. The end would be the same, as it always is. Life would go on, and so would the lizard. But, as it sat there in its acid vat, ever dissolving and reforming, it felt a twinge of the familiar. With senses unguessed at by humans, it peered beyond the acid, beyond the plated steel of its transport truck, beyond the rumble of the road and the moaning of the wind, beyond a hundred million years of tectonic upheaval and slow, steady erosion, and saw that it had been here before, buried beneath these blood-cursed rocks by the feathered ones. It made something like a sigh, or perhaps a low, gurgling growl, and to itself it thought...

//Some things never change.//

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The Curse of Mount Abraxas

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