SCP Foundation

Once, and since the beginning of all time, the whole World stood as a testament to the creation of magic and the majesty of Mother Earth's craftsmanship. The Old Ways thrived all across Gaia as its autochthonous offspring, the child-races, wove the threads of thaumic vitality latent within the Earth to work their sorceries in harmony with its nature under the three watchful eyes of the Trinity Sun.

Gaia continued in this harmony for untold megaanna. She remained whole and undivided even as the cosmos took form and separated itself into a myriad realms — even as the oneiric floe of Dreas and the vast Astral Seas floated astray into their own mental realm, even as the surreal left our world and the certainty left thereof condensed and crystallized, and even as great wonders and horrors sundered themselves away to birth the Blazing World and the Crypts of Shadow, Terra was not integrally phased.

That was, until the Jailors intervened.

On that day of infamy, in most universes the 13th of December in the year of our gods 1881, they drove a great rift through the world from which it has yet to recover. With the pens that signed the Convention of Preternatural Phenomena came, mere days later, the damning hammer of the Vast Sealing, a thaumic rite assembled of a series of thaumic rites over years of painstaking formulation; our predecessors tried to fight against it during its gradual enaction, but even in their earliest days, the Jailors were ungodly and unduly mighty. So all-encompassing was the Sealing that it vowed for all time thereafter to board up the subliminal links which connected the Earth and its magic to itself, and blanket that little of the world which remained cohesive under an unknowing dark Veil which further still made it a stranger to itself.

Alas, the Jailors succeeded. Our forefathers were forced to retreat and scatter their campaign of resistance across the Ways or withdraw it into the Great Library. In their absence and that of all the others forced to flee, the Jailors were free to go about instituting a dreadful new normalcy. Ironically but perhaps not unexpectedly, in answer to Gaia's pained cries of desperation, natural emergences of the occult did not decline so precipitously as the Jailors expected with the advent of the new regime, but increased even within the bounds of their Normal World and only became more hostile toward them and more resistant to their efforts as they continued to crack down, harming not only their efforts by repeated impediment but endangering the people they swore to protect as a twisted necessitation to perpetuate their own existence.

Now the world lives in sundered halves and in ignorance to itself. Left of the once-united First Gaia are two remnant realms; the castaway World of Normalcy, still subject to the Jailors' slavery, and the Real World, everything that was left of the World of Magic following the Great Sundering, crippled and beaten but still standing, awaiting the reunification of the prodigal son with the Earth Mother, of the estranged part with the whole.

Beyond the false domain of normalcy, the shattered shards of all Gaia remain rooted to the Taproots, hanging between the Stars. These distant locales, which would easily be recognized as an entirely different world by any victim of the normalcy, are in reality the truest and most purely magical Earth that remains following the Jailors' imprisonment of the realms. Far more vast than the world that lies under the artificial firmament they call Normalcy, it is here in the expanse, scattered between the windswept Outer Reaches, that the Real World can be found.

I come from a village on the Bladed Coast of Marassa. My mother was a sorceress who brought the winds and the rain and the blooming of flowers to keep the Elephant-Gods of the Eastern Plateau at bay; my father a missionary of the Theosophical Society from Gujarat, sent to Marassa to study the pseudo-dharmic traditions of our land's once-Indian conquerors turned forefathers and spread the word of the Ascended Masters. When they sealed us out, I was but sixteen years old.

What made us any different? We were human just as the men who had signed the Convention. We lived and sung and danced under the same Sun, dreamed under the same Moon. We too were human. We too traced our lineage to the First Man Asem and the House of Aud and its two rivers and two trees. Most of all, we lived in the same World. The one we were all meant to share, and did so in harmony until that initiatory year of their new order.

- Sayosh C. Sattrivah,
Wanderer of Kal'en,
Sailor of Six Seas,
Tamer of the Aidar Wastes
(1934)

Laenishar was a thriving oceanic kingdom and a local bastion against the Deep Ones of Ch'tishul. It was founded when the crustacean-folk and sea-elves came together to build castles from the white sands of the seafloor; over time, an outpost of convenience became a permanent settlement and soon the capital of a strong dominion under a wise lord. Eventually, it became the capital of those seas in all but name. Royal officers rode astride the hooktail serpents and hippocamp-dragons and giant mantas of the Ceratic Ocean and paraded through the submerged sandbar streets with urchin-spears in hand, claw and fin. A thousand pilgrims flocked from the cartilagekind cities to the East, for even the selachian sultans of Illynura and Me'olan grew jealous of our opulence. A hundred submersibles funneled through our tunnels and gates each day, for even the surface-dwellers had need of our artisan goods.

I was an architect there, a temple-builder. I would hammer the shells and pearls into the ground to tile the palace floors, hang driftwood drawbridges over thermal-vented moats, prune the corals into shimmering gardens, would shape them into columns and archways with the scleractimancy of the ancients.

Laenishar remains today, though not in its former glory. The Vast Sealing ensured it, like so many other realms, became unable to keep up with the technological developments of the normal world, and trade with that far reach of the Earth likewise cut off to deleterious effect. Its streets are packed and bustling no more; on some days, in fact, one can hear the flapping of a single inhabitant's fins from what seems like a mile away. Whatever we are to become, for so long as the world remains sundered, it will not be the opulent grotto-city whose prosperity once rang across the seas.

- Khhrish-crchakkc Gr'kizchs,
Royal Architect of Laenishar,
Builder at the Temples of Sand
(2001)

This land lies around a thousand miles out from the Ice Wall, to the South, or so at least this is the direction in which my men and I have chose to navigate, passing through the Autumnal Gate, although direction can hardly be ascertained here with regard to within the Known World. The climate and landscape is that of a dense rainforest, seeming impossibly tropical given its location. Admittedly, we are unsure how climate is determined beyond the Permafrost or anywhere else in the Outer Lands, so whether or not this can be considered a preternatural phenomenon I can not say.

We originally believed the land to be uninhabited by any soul-harboring race of men, finding only animals; miniature feathered dragons and six-armed lemurs being perhaps the most odd. But our assumption was disproven last night, when a tribe of natives reached our camp. They seem related to the dvergr though with greyish skin and yellowish eyes, and reside on the surface. These people were not hostile to us although appeared confused at our foreign language, speaking no tongue any of our men understood.

We have yet to discover whether this land is an island or a peninsula of a larger landmass, and efforts to map the coast are currently being planned to the most efficient degree possibly given the ships we have available to us. We have planted our flag and claimed this land for France, although it remains unclear if any practical operations will be feasible due to the distance and climate. My Emperor, I will await your response on this matter before we act further.

- Francois Marie-Thérèse,
Explorer and colonist of the Second French Empire
In an unnamed journal, 1858

My home is a tiny village on one island of a winding quasi-physical archipelago that connected the rolling hill-towns of Trollhafen near Karelia all the way to Geminia-Ra of the Second Ring. We were among only few permanent residents; most who washed up upon our shores were traders or rich old men from the West, occult traffickers and tycoons, rotting away in their perpetually-tropical holiday homes in the archipelago.

The Deathless Merchant came first, his Darke Trading Company bringing ships of enslaved blemmyes from the port at Moreton Bay to work what he intended to be a sugar plantation. But soon the House Darke were not the only foreigners wishing to escape to the Akappān Isles, and in the coming years all from the Master of Kaszusk to the ashen mages of Ctai to the merchants of Yuld came to claim a plot as their own — a property for hiding away taxes, or to stash ill-gotten treasures elsewhere.

All too often, those were the visitors we got if we were lucky. Sometimes Akappā would find more unsavory actors drawn up to its shores, most often the marauding gargoyle tribes perched aboard their feathered war-galleys or swashbuckling outlaws on zeppelins and spell-ships bound from Lost Baršum. These pirates proved their own nuisance, but were most often repelled before they could plunder in earnest; even when the Royal Navy wasn't present to take care of them, the battlemage battalions escorting their own merchant ships most often could.

But with the closing of the Real World came the canceling of all those commercial and defense guarantees. The pirates overran us without the certainty of international protection, coming to control sometimes a third or more of the island chain at any given time. This piracy likewise dissuaded traders from passing through our dimensional shortcut; I no longer saw the Forest Men glide down from Alfheim on their sky-beasts to sell their wares, nor the merfolk emerge from the seas to offer trinkets and pearls, neither the Nagas and Vanara escaping the Raj with artifacts of old to pawn off in search of a new life. They had been forced out and away — all of them, it seemed, for it was deemed there remained no room for them anymore in this world.

- Johannes Tzifur,
Wandsman of Niflhel,
Chronicler of the Outer Lands
(1956)

There is no doubting the truth. To cloak oneself in a Veil of perpetual twilight is to forsake the coming dawn of magic, and in so doing, it is to damn the whole world. To walk out from the perverse sanity of their world and wander the path of truth is the first mark of courage; to emerge from the delirium a more contented soul than before is the living proof which shall forever extinguish their false Light.

Welcome home, Wanderer, for you have joined us in the Real World where we always belonged.