Marcus Chen died the way he lived—pathetically and with a mouthful of instant ramen.
The sodium-laden noodles had been his dinner for the past three weeks, ever since his girlfriend had left him for a guy who apparently "had ambitions beyond rolling dice and pretending to be a wizard." Her words, not his. Though in fairness, Marcus had to admit that spending forty hours a week as a data entry clerk and another forty as a Dungeon Master for his increasingly unreliable friend group wasn't exactly the stuff of romantic legend.
The choking started at 11:47 PM on a Tuesday—the most mundane possible moment for a man to shuffle off his mortal coil. He'd been reading SCP articles on his phone while eating, a habit his mother had warned him about approximately ten thousand times. The noodles went down the wrong pipe, his throat seized, and Marcus found himself alone in his cramped apartment with no one to perform the Heimlich maneuver.
His last coherent thought, as his vision darkened and his lungs screamed for air, was: Well, this is embarrassing.
His second-to-last thought was: At least I finished that campaign arc.
Then there was nothing.
Nothing lasted for what felt like an eternity.
Then something shifted.
Marcus became aware of himself again—not as a body, not as flesh and blood and bone, but as something else. Something vast. Something that stretched across dimensions he hadn't known existed, that touched realities layered upon realities like pages in an infinite book.
His consciousness expanded, and it hurt—not physically, for he no longer had a physical form in any conventional sense, but existentially. His mind, designed by evolution to track where fruit was and whether that rustling in the bushes was a predator, was suddenly processing information that no human brain was ever meant to contain.
He saw colors that had no names.
He heard sounds that existed only as mathematical concepts.
He felt the slow, grinding rotation of galaxies as they spiraled through the cosmic dance of entropy.
And he understood none of it.
What the actual fuck, Marcus thought, or tried to think. The words came out as something else—a ripple in the fabric of reality itself, a vibration that caused stars in a distant galaxy to flicker and die.
He tried to look at himself and immediately regretted it.
Where there should have been hands, there were appendages—dozens of them, hundreds perhaps, each one a writhing mass of impossible geometry. Some ended in claws that seemed to exist in multiple dimensions simultaneously. Others split into tentacles that branched fractally into infinity. His body—if it could be called that—was a mountainous horror of flesh and void, scales and shadow, eyes and mouths opening and closing in patterns that suggested either cosmic significance or profound indigestion.
He looked, Marcus realized with dawning horror, like someone had taken Cthulhu and the Scarlet King and thrown them into a blender, then reassembled the result using only fever dreams and existential dread.
His form pulsed with colors he still couldn't name—crimson and black and something that might have been ultraviolet if ultraviolet had decided to become evil. Crowns of twisted matter orbited his head like satellites, each one a different iteration of royal corruption. Wings of solidified darkness stretched behind him, vast enough to blot out suns.
I look like someone's DeviantArt OC, he thought hysterically. I look like a fourteen-year-old's attempt at making the edgiest possible character for a Cthulhu campaign.
The thought should have been amusing. Instead, it sent another ripple through reality, and somewhere in the vast darkness around him, he felt things notice.
The space Marcus occupied was not a space at all—it was an absence, a void between dimensions where concepts like "up" and "down" and "time" had gotten drunk at a party and were now arguing incoherently in the corner. He floated there, or stood there, or perhaps was there in some fundamental way, trying to process his situation with a mind that was rapidly realizing it was no longer equipped for simple processing.
Okay, he told himself. Okay. Let's be logical about this.
He was dead. That much seemed certain. The noodle incident had definitely killed him—he could remember the final moments with painful clarity, the way his vision had tunneled, the desperate clawing at his own throat, the shameful realization that his browser history would never be cleared.
And now he was... something else.
Something big. Something powerful, probably, given that his idle thoughts seemed to cause localized extinction events. Something that looked like it had crawled out of the intersection between Lovecraft's nightmares and whatever fever dream had produced the Scarlet King mythos.
The Scarlet King.
The name resonated within his new form, striking chords of recognition that shouldn't have existed. He knew that name—not from his former life as a mundane human, but from somewhere deeper, somewhere that felt written into the very essence of what he had become.
He was related to the Scarlet King somehow. Connected. Like recognizing like.
SCP Foundation, he thought, and the pieces began clicking into place with the ominous certainty of a trap being sprung. I died and got reborn in the SCP universe. As an eldrich god. Who is apparently related to the Scarlet King.
This was either the best thing that had ever happened to him or the worst.
Probably both.
Marcus floated in the cosmic void for what might have been hours or centuries—time was difficult to track when you existed in multiple dimensions simultaneously—and tried to formulate a plan.
The problem was that he had no idea what he was supposed to do. In all those isekai stories he'd read, the protagonist usually got some kind of instruction manual. A helpful goddess who explained the rules. A status screen that listed his abilities. Something to provide direction.
Instead, he had a body made of nightmares, a location in the ass-end of nowhere, and the growing suspicion that any action he took would have consequences he couldn't predict.
Okay, he thought. Let's think about this like a D&D campaign. I'm a player who's been dropped into a setting with zero session zero briefing, playing a character I didn't create, with abilities I don't understand. What would I do?
The answer came to him with the comfortable familiarity of twenty years of tabletop gaming experience.
Act mysterious. Don't commit to anything. Let other people fill in the blanks with their own assumptions. When in doubt, speak in riddles and let everyone think you're playing four-dimensional chess when you're really just confused.
It was the strategy he'd used countless times when players caught him unprepared—the classic DM tactic of pretending everything was planned while frantically improvising behind the screen.
But could it work when he was the one playing the character? When the stakes weren't imaginary experience points but potentially the fate of realities?
Only one way to find out, Marcus decided. If I'm going to be an eldritch god, I might as well be an eldritch god. Lean into the role. Method act the shit out of this.
He drew upon years of running cosmic horror campaigns, of voicing ancient evils and incomprehensible entities, of making his players genuinely uncomfortable with the things that lurked beyond the veil of reality.
I am not Marcus Chen, he told himself. Marcus Chen died choking on ramen. I am something else now. Something old. Something vast. Something that has ALWAYS existed, because time is a flat circle and I am the thing that watches the circle spin.
He tried to laugh, and the sound that emerged from his countless mouths was a discordant symphony of madness that echoed across dimensional barriers.
Yeah, he thought. Yeah, I can work with this.
The first entity to find him was small—relatively speaking, at least. A creature of shadow and hunger that slithered through the spaces between spaces, drawn by the ripples Marcus's awakening had sent through the cosmic substrate.
It approached cautiously, this thing of teeth and darkness, its form shifting and uncertain. Marcus could feel its attention like oil sliding across his consciousness—slick and unpleasant and deeply curious.
WHAT ARE YOU? the creature asked, its voice a chorus of screams compressed into meaning.
Marcus froze. This was it—his first interaction as an eldritch entity. His first chance to establish himself in whatever mad hierarchy governed this realm of horrors.
Don't panic, he told himself. Remember: mysterious and unknowable. You're not confused, you're INEFFABLE.
He drew himself up—a gesture that caused his form to unfold in ways that violated several laws of physics—and spoke.
"I AM WHAT REMAINS WHEN MEANING ITSELF LEARNS TO DREAM," he intoned, letting his voice resonate across multiple frequencies of existence. "I AM THE QUESTION THAT ANSWERS ITSELF. I AM THE SHADOW THAT CASTS THE LIGHT."
What the fuck am I saying, the tiny terrified human portion of his mind screamed. That doesn't mean ANYTHING.
But the creature seemed to disagree. It recoiled, its shadowy form contracting with what Marcus could only interpret as fear.
YOU... YOU ARE KIN TO THE CRIMSON LORD, it said. BUT YOU ARE NOT OF HIS MAKING. YOU ARE... OTHER.
"I AM WHAT I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN," Marcus replied, deciding to lean even harder into the cryptic bullshit. "AND I SHALL BE WHAT I AM YET TO BECOME. SPEAK NOT OF LINEAGES AND LORDSHIPS, LITTLE SHADOW. SUCH CONCEPTS ARE FOR THOSE WHO FEAR THE TRUTH OF THEIR OWN ORIGINS."
The creature fled.
Marcus watched it go, his countless eyes tracking its panicked retreat across dimensional boundaries, and felt a surge of something that might have been pride.
Holy shit, he thought. It actually worked.
He had no idea what he'd said or what it meant, but the shadow creature had clearly interpreted it as deeply significant and profoundly threatening. The power of confident vagueness was apparently universal, spanning even the gulf between cosmic horrors.
I can do this, Marcus realized. I can absolutely do this. I've been bullshitting my way through D&D sessions for twenty years. How different can bullshitting my way through eldritch godhood possibly be?
The answer, as it turned out, was very different—but not in the ways he expected.
Word spread through the outer darkness, through the spaces between dimensions, through the nightmare realms where entities of impossible power dreamed their eternal dreams. Something new had awakened. Something that spoke in riddles and radiated power on a scale that made even ancient horrors take notice.
They came to investigate, these creatures of the void—carefully, cautiously, the way sharks circle an unknown presence in the water. Some were curious. Some were hungry. Some were simply drawn by the gravity of his existence, pulled toward him by forces neither he nor they fully understood.
Marcus met them all with the same strategy: speak mysteriously, act like everything was planned, and never, ever admit uncertainty.
"YOUR FORM IS... DISTURBING," one entity observed—a thing of geometric impossibilities that hurt to perceive. "YOU WEAR THE ASPECT OF THE CRIMSON KING'S KIN, YET YOUR ESSENCE SINGS OF SOMETHING ELSE ENTIRELY."
"I WEAR MANY ASPECTS," Marcus replied sagely. "THIS FORM IS MERELY THE MASK I CHOOSE TO PRESENT TO THOSE WHO LACK THE CAPACITY TO PERCEIVE MY TRUE NATURE. BE GRATEFUL FOR THE MERCY OF INCOMPREHENSION."
I have no idea what my true nature is, he thought desperately. I'm just saying words. Important-sounding words.
But the geometric entity seemed satisfied—or at least, it stopped asking questions. It withdrew, its impossible angles folding in on themselves until it vanished entirely.
Another visitor was more persistent—a feminine presence that manifested as a cascade of crimson veils and whispered secrets. Marcus could feel something almost like recognition from her, a sense of familiarity that made his non-existent skin crawl.
"You are not of my father's direct lineage," she said, her voice like silk wrapped around a blade. "Yet you bear his mark. You carry his essence. How is this possible?"
One of the Scarlet King's brides, Marcus realized with a jolt. Or daughters. Or both, because this mythology is messed up.
"POSSIBILITY IS A LIMITATION FOR THOSE WHO CANNOT SEE BEYOND THE VEIL OF CAUSALITY," he intoned. "I AM NOT CONSTRAINED BY THE PETTY CHAINS OF 'HOW' AND 'WHY.' I SIMPLY AM."
The crimson presence seemed to consider this. Marcus could feel her attention like fingers pressing against his consciousness, searching for weaknesses, for lies, for any hint of the terrified human soul hiding behind the cosmic horror facade.
He focused on projecting confidence. Power. The absolute certainty of an entity that had existed since before the concept of existence had been invented.
After a long moment, the presence withdrew—but not entirely. It lingered at the edges of his awareness, watching. Waiting.
Great, Marcus thought. I have a stalker. An eldritch stalker. Who is probably the daughter of the Scarlet King. This is fine.
Time passed—or didn't, depending on how one measured such things in a realm where time was more of a suggestion than a rule. Marcus grew more comfortable in his role, developing a repertoire of cryptic statements and mysterious pronouncements that seemed to satisfy the entities who came to observe him.
He discovered, to his surprise, that he did have abilities beyond simply existing and looking terrifying. He could reach out with his consciousness and touch other realities, perceive the mortal realms that existed beneath the cosmic substrate like islands in an infinite sea. He could see the world he'd once inhabited—Earth, in all its mundane glory—and all the horrors that lurked in its shadows.
He found the SCP Foundation, that vast and secret organization that contained and studied the anomalous. He saw their facilities, their personnel, the countless entities they kept locked away behind steel and concrete and carefully maintained rituals.
And he realized, with a mixture of amusement and horror, that he was almost certainly going to become their problem eventually.
But more pressing than the Foundation's eventual awareness of his existence was the attention he'd already attracted from other quarters. The creatures that visited him were growing bolder, more numerous. Some came bearing gifts—offering worship, devotion, the tattered remnants of souls they'd collected across eons.
Marcus accepted these offerings with what he hoped was appropriate gravity, not knowing what else to do with them. He had no use for souls or worship, but refusing them seemed like it would break character.
And through it all, that crimson presence lingered. Watching. Waiting. Sometimes joining him in what he could only describe as companionable silence, as if she'd decided they were friends without bothering to inform him of this development.
He didn't know her name. He didn't know her intentions. But he was increasingly certain that his pretense of omniscient godhood wasn't fooling her entirely—she just didn't seem to care.
That was somehow more terrifying than outright hostility would have been.
The turning point came when Marcus decided to do something other than float in the cosmic void accepting offerings and speaking in riddles.
He wanted to see Earth. Not just perceive it from across dimensional barriers, but actually be there, experience the mortal realm in some capacity. He was a god now—probably—which meant he should be able to manifest in lower dimensions.
Avatars, he thought. Like Darkseid. I can create avatars—smaller projections of my power that can interact with mortal reality without destroying it through my mere presence.
The idea had come to him while observing a Foundation containment breach—some minor anomaly had escaped and was causing havoc in a rural town. The Foundation's response had been swift and professional, but Marcus had found himself longing to be there, to experience the chaos firsthand rather than watching it from across the dimensional divide.
So he tried to create an avatar.
The process was... intuitive, in a way that suggested his new form came with instinctual knowledge he hadn't consciously accessed yet. He reached into himself, grasped a fragment of his power, and shaped it.
The result was humanoid—mostly. Tall and gaunt, with skin the color of old parchment and eyes that burned with subdued crimson light. It wore robes of shadow that seemed to drink in light, and its face was handsome in an unsettling way, all sharp angles and knowing smiles.
Not bad, Marcus thought, examining his creation. Very 'mysterious stranger who definitely knows more than they're letting on.' Perfect for the role.
He pushed the avatar through the dimensional barriers, guided it toward Earth—
And felt reality itself buckle under the weight of his presence.
Shit, he thought, pulling back hastily. Too much power. I'm going to destroy something if I'm not careful.
He tried again, this time limiting the avatar's capabilities more severely. The result was weaker, less connected to his true form, but it slid through the barriers without causing any obvious devastation.
The avatar opened its eyes in an alley in some American city, surrounded by garbage and graffiti and the distant sounds of traffic.
I'm on Earth, Marcus realized. I'm actually on Earth again.
The avatar took a breath—a gesture it didn't need but that felt appropriate—and stepped out of the alley into the wider world.
It had been dead for... how long? Time was difficult to track in the cosmic void. Weeks? Months? Years?
The world looked the same, at least. Same cars, same buildings, same people hurrying past with their eyes on their phones. No obvious signs of apocalyptic devastation or major changes to the timeline.
Good, Marcus thought through his avatar. I haven't missed anything important.
He began to walk, simply enjoying the sensation of having legs again, of moving through physical space in a linear fashion. His avatar drew occasional glances—he was unusual-looking, after all—but no one screamed or ran. No Foundation agents descended from black helicopters to contain him.
This is nice, he thought. This is actually really nice. I can—
The thought was interrupted by a psychic scream that tore through his consciousness like a serrated knife.
FATHER IS DISPLEASED.
Marcus's avatar stumbled, clutching its head as the message repeated, echoing across dimensional barriers, carried by the collective terror of entities he'd never met.
THE OUTSIDER HAS DRAWN HIS ATTENTION. THE CRIMSON LORD AWAKENS FROM HIS CONTEMPLATION. HE COMES TO JUDGE THE PRETENDER.
The Scarlet King, Marcus realized with dawning horror. The actual Scarlet King has noticed me.
All his cryptic posturing, all his mysterious riddles—he'd never actually expected to face the real thing. The Scarlet King was supposed to be a distant threat, a cosmic horror held at bay by seals and prophecies and the desperate efforts of the Foundation.
He was not supposed to be coming here. To judge Marcus. To determine whether this newcomer was worthy of existing in his reality.
Oh fuck, Marcus thought. Oh fuck oh fuck oh—
He pulled his avatar back, dissolving it into shadow and reclaiming the fragment of power. His true form, vast and terrible in the cosmic void, began to tremble with something that might have been fear.
All around him, the entities that had gathered to observe him were fleeing, scattering like insects before a descending boot. Even the crimson presence—his persistent stalker—was withdrawing, though not as quickly as the others.
"He comes," she whispered, and there was something in her voice that might have been warning. Might have been anticipation. "My father comes. And you will answer for your presumption."
What presumption? Marcus wanted to scream. I didn't DO anything! I just existed and talked mysteriously!
But there was no time for explanations. Reality itself was beginning to warp, to twist, to reshape itself in anticipation of something vast and terrible approaching.
Marcus did the only thing he could think of—he drew himself up, forced his form into its most imposing configuration, and prepared to bullshit his way through the most dangerous encounter of his very short existence as an eldritch god.
Method acting, he reminded himself desperately. I am an ancient cosmic entity. I have always existed. I fear nothing. I am NOT a dead guy from Earth who choked on ramen and is now in way over his head.
The void before him began to bleed red.
The Scarlet King was coming.
END OF CHAPTER ONE
Next: The Scarlet King arrives to judge the newcomer, and Marcus discovers that his bullshitting skills are about to be tested like never before. Meanwhile, the SCP Foundation receives disturbing reports of reality-warping events that suggest something new has awakened in the spaces between dimensions...