"Gluttony… Keter?"
The live-chat ticker on the global stream practically exploded. Even veteran viewers, already numb from the last broadcast, felt their stomachs drop.
It wasn't just Chaos out there. More of Yaldabaoth's descendants had surfaced—and according to the dossier flashing across the screen—some had even been contained.
---
S.H.I.E.L.D. — Operations Floor
"W—what the hell? Taotie is Keter-class too?" Natasha Romanoff blurted, eyes glued to the slab of text cascading on the monitors. "And it's already contained? You're kidding me. How did the Foundation's Eastern Directorate pull that off?"
Nick Fury's gaze hardened. "You heard the minister earlier. He called them the Four Fierce Beasts—but then hinted there are six offspring in total. That means the Eastern Directorate has been studying Yaldabaoth's line longer than anyone realized. And they're not blind about it, either."
Natasha blinked. "You mean the old Abnormality Society records… that inheritance?"
"Exactly," Fury said. "They didn't just inherit it—they refined it."
Even with that context, the idea that the Eastern Directorate had secured a godspawn made Fury's skin prickle. This wasn't just a monster. This was a theological atom bomb with a heartbeat. And the file was calling it Keter like that label could hold the weight of what it meant.
He forced the thought down and read on.
---
Project Card — SCP-500 "Taotie" (Alias: Gluttony)
[Special Containment Procedures]
Area "890" at Site CN-51 has been established around the entrance to the anomalous space where the entity resides.
All details of the site (location, personnel, structures) are strictly classified and accessible only to stationed staff, Level-5 personnel, or with explicit Level-5 authorization.
All information related to the project is restricted to Level-3+ clearance. Personnel below Level-3 must obtain Level-4 authorization to access any data.
Inside Stark Tower, Tony leaned forward, interest peaking. "Did that say entrance to an anomalous space?"
Colonel James Rhodes glanced over, jaw tight. "Don't tell me this thing is tucked away in a separate pocket like Chaos—another 'abyss,' different rules, different physics."
"If it is, that complicates everything," Stark muttered. "A lot."
The procedures scrolled on.
MTF Chi-CN-07 "Caregivers" is permanently stationed at Area CN-51. Their mandate: protect anomalous individuals who are non-hostile yet vulnerable to exploitation.
Off-shift members patrol daily, watching for people trying to reach the entity.
On contact, detain such individuals, extract intel through standard Foundation interrogation and methods approved by the Ethics Committee.
After debrief, release, permanently contain, or terminate the individual post-amnestics, depending on risk.
Natasha frowned. "So people… seek this thing out on purpose? To meet it?"
"Apparently often enough that the Foundation posted a permanent task force to intercept them," Fury said. "And if the Ethics Committee signed off on the harsher tools, those 'pilgrimages' weren't a one-off. They were systemic."
Her mouth went dry. "What kind of Keter makes people line up to see it?"
"Not a weapon," Fury said. "A wish engine."
---
The Mouth That Eats What's Real
New lines snapped onto the page.
Research on the entity's mouth restraints is ongoing, with no successful replication yet. If a device with equivalent function is developed, it must be affixed immediately.
Because the entity's effects involve large-scale alterations to human common-sense cognition, and because the Ethics Committee has judged those consequences to have become the new "normal," any research attempting to reverse or "correct" those consequences is suspended. Such correction would catastrophically destabilize what humanity now accepts as normal reality.
The streaming chat detonated:
"It can change reality—and make the change become normal?!"
"If it's 'normal' now, undoing it would break our minds?"
"That's not containment. That's living under edits."
Back at S.H.I.E.L.D., a cold murmur ran through the analysts.
"So it's like Murphy's meta-narrative anomaly?" Natasha ventured. "Flattening reality into 'story'?"
Fury shook his head. "Murphy reframes; you can still smell the varnish. This reads like re-authoring the axiom set. The change stops being a 'distortion' and calcifies into the baseline. You don't notice what's missing. You just… call it Tuesday."
He rubbed the bridge of his nose. "We're not just looking at an eater of matter. We're staring at something that consumes concepts and leaves holes you can't remember were holes."
Natasha swallowed. "So that's why people go to it. They bring… requests."
Fury's silence was answer enough.
---
Description — SCP-500 "Taotie"
The entity is a giant canid, 6 meters at the shoulder, 17 meters long.
It has no eyes, only two arched, conical horns.
A long, narrow snout filled with serried needled teeth.
White, nylon-textured fur coats its body; beneath each forelimb lies a leaf-shaped red sigil that resembles an eye.
All four limbs are shaped like human hands, sheathed in black keratin, capable of fine manipulation—writing, picking up tools.
The entity communicates fluently in modern English.
Primary anomalous property: by opening and closing its mouth, it can consume matter or abstract concepts, causing the target to vanish in a fundamental sense.
The global audience went quiet. The creature formed in their minds: a white-furred, eyeless hound with humanlike hands and a mouth that didn't just devour things—it devoured meanings.
A godspawn who writes. Who talks. Who bargains.
Impressions complicated in a breath.
---
The Bone Ring
A diamond-shaped bone ring is inserted through the narrow snout, suspended between upper and lower jaws, rotating constantly.
At each of the ring's four corners, a conical spike—believed to be carved from a vertebra—juts inward.
Though damaged, the device still functions: it prevents the entity from eating unless a request is made.
"Unless requested?" Stark echoed, eyebrows climbing. "So the muzzle is a covenant, not a cage."
Rhodes shivered. "Meaning it doesn't bite on reflex. It answers petitions. Like a priest with teeth."
---
The Cave That Punishes
The entity is confined within a vast anomalous cavern, accessible via an "entrance" disguised as a sand dune.
Ambient temperature: 22°C.
Stalagmites and stalactites are unusually tall, thin, and abundant, forming ten concentric, cage-like rings around the entity.
Whenever the entity crosses beyond a ring, lacerations resembling blade wounds appear across its body, intensifying until it returns within bounds.
Fury leaned in. "That's not the Foundation's work."
"No," Natasha whispered. "It was already imprisoned when they found it."
He thought of the giant in SCP-2317, bound by theology and fear. "This looks like old law. Older than the Foundation. Maybe older than our myths."
The file kept unspooling.
The entity's four limbs are chained to the cavern's compass points.
The chains are bright red, fabricated from linked, living tissue—pliable, soft, and yet unyielding.
Touching any stalagmite triggers a chain reaction: the links begin to extend, spikes erupt along their lengths, and the chains coil around the entity, binding it fully while the temperature rises to burning.
The punishment lasts six minutes, then resets—until triggered again.
"Living chains," Rhodes muttered, aghast. "And punishing stalagmites. Who builds a prison that hurts when you leave… but only long enough to drive you back?"
"Someone who understood a god that kept promises but tested edges," Stark said softly.
Bold realization flashed across the room: **Taotie wasn't captured by the Foundation. It was captured by someone else—someone ancient—and the Foundation built a site around the door.
---
Writ on Stone
The cavern walls are carved with countless inscriptions in multiple hands across unknown centuries.
Most inscriptions are dissolved or calcified, but a few fragments remain legible.
Among them, lines that appear to explain the original sentence:
> "…in that era, the ruler banished sixteen clans and exiled the Four Ferocities; thus he bound the incompetent son of the Cloud-Crown line here, to punish his theft of the emperor's throne and his lust to devour the realm."
The S.H.I.E.L.D. analyst from Cultural Operations adjusted his glasses, voice steady in the briefing pit. "Stripped of poetic markers: an ancient authority exiled four monstrous powers, then imprisoned a failed princeling—the text calls him 'the incompetent son of the Cloud-Crown'—for ambition and usurpation."
Natasha looked back at the rendering of the pale hound. "So Taotie is the incompetent heir? A prince who wanted the throne and tried to eat his way to it?"
"Or eat the idea of someone else having the right," Fury said. "Devour legitimacy. Devour law. Devour nature itself if that's what it takes."
On screen, more text:
The entity reports that, from time to time, anomalous individuals and ordinary people who know of its existence seek it out and ask it to "eat something" for them.
If the entity refuses, some petitioners trigger the chain punishment to force compliance.
Most encounters end with the entity fulfilling the request, whether willingly or under duress.
The mouth restraint is believed to have been damaged during such events.
A hush fell.
Bold truth, laid bare: People found the door. People used the god. And when consent failed, they hurt it until it obeyed.
Natasha's fists balled at her sides. "They tortured a Keter into granting wishes."
Fury's voice was flat. "Not wishes. Deletions."
---
What Does It Eat?
In the Foundation's language, the verb was too simple. "Eat." But what Taotie consumed wasn't just food, or stone, or steel.
It consumed debts.
It consumed names.
It consumed memories.
It consumed habits, laws, taboos, axioms—anything that could be bound and offered as a coherent target.
And once eaten, the world closed around the absence like healed skin, calling the wound normal.
Bold, terrible implication: If Taotie ate the idea of a war, people would remember peace.
If it ate the concept of winter, crops would fail for reasons nobody could articulate.
If it ate gravity's whisper on a mountain pass, caravans would stroll across cliffs like flat ground, and the survivors would tell stories with no word for "fall."
No wonder people came. No wonder the Ethics Committee said that undoing those edits would collapse society. You can't "fix" a culture whose baseline has been rewritten—not without cracking minds, economies, and history like ice on a spring river.
---
The Prisoner and the Petitioners
Inside James's transport plane, the file rested like a brick on his lap. Across from him, two Foundation operatives sat silent, eyes closed, swaying with the engine's thrum. The air smelled of oil and old canvas. He scanned again the operational notes.
Bold directive: No one crosses the tenth ring.
No one 'tests' the muzzle.
No one offers a petition without Level-5 protocol, triple-witnessed, sealed, and archived.
They were rules written in terror—and in regret.
Because this wasn't just containment. It was triage on the human condition.
---
Stark Tower — War Room Sidebar
Rhodes whispered, "Do you think someone asked it to eat an enemy nation?"
Stark stared at the ring diagram around the beast. "If they did, there'd be no 'enemy nation' to name. Just maps with different borders no one questions. And a thousand near-misses in history books that almost mention a war—then don't."
"How do we fight something like that?" Rhodes asked.
Tony looked uncharacteristically grim. "You don't fight the eater. You protect what must never be served to it."
---
S.H.I.E.L.D. — Command
Natasha exhaled. "So the Foundation's job isn't only to keep Taotie in a cage. It's to keep people from feeding it the world."
"Exactly," Fury said. "Which is why they put the Caregivers there—not just soldiers. People who can spot a pilgrim with a grudge and talk them down before they turn a grudge into an erasure."
He tapped the bottom of the feed. "And that's why James is being sent in. If Taotie's part of the six, then every move we make now either slows a K-class… or tilts us into one."
Natasha's voice dropped. "And the muzzle? If it breaks—"
"Then a single sentence could take the sun off the ledger," Fury said softly.
---
What the Stone Forgot to Say
The inscriptions named a ruler who banished and bound. They named a Cloud-Crown line that spawned a prince who tried to devour the state. They etched rings that cut and burned, and chains of living red that tightened at trespass.
But stone could not say what the entity whispered when petitioners knelt:
> What would you like me to remove?
Payment is pain. Yours, or mine. Choose.
Bold, harrowing fact: Every correction someone begged for had a price—paid in scar tissue on a god, or on the soul of the supplicant, or on the fabric of the world. And still they came. Because what is humanity, if not a species willing to touch the red chain to make tomorrow hurt less than today?
---
James — Briefing, Wheels-Down Minus Two Hours
The operative across from James finally opened her eyes. "You've read the field additions?"
He nodded. "The pilgrim pattern, the black-market rumor nets, the cult vectors. I know."
"Good," she said. "Then you know why no one speaks a request in the cavern. Not in any language. Not even as a joke."
James closed the file. The vinyl cover clicked shut like a coffindoor. "What do we know about whoever built the prison?"
"Legends," she said. "A law bigger than kings. Tools we can't reproduce. And a will that knew exactly how this god cheats—so it wrote pain into the walls."
He looked out the port window. Clouds tore past like pale veils. "We'll need more than pain," he said.
She nodded once. "We'll need discipline."
---
The Chapter Turns
Back on the broadcast, the chaplain-calm voice of the Foundation reader concluded the page. The camera lingered on the last line:
> "Most meetings ended with the entity fulfilling the request—by consent or coercion. The damage to the mouth device is attributed to such encounters."
The stream cut briefly to a live map: a desert dotted with stray dunes, and one dune that wasn't.
Bold reveal: The doorway to Taotie's cavern looks like nothing at all—a sandhill with a shadow. Walk past it and you'd never know what you missed. Walk through it and you might never understand what you took.
In S.H.I.E.L.D., no one spoke for a long time.
Finally, Fury said what they were all thinking. "If Chaos is anger with a crown, then Taotie is mercy with a knife behind its back."
Natasha's eyes never left the screen. "And people go to it," she whispered, "because mercy is the only thing more dangerous than wrath—when it rewrites what we are."
--
Foundation's Caregivers stationed to intercept 'pilgrims'; post-amnestics outcomes vary: release, containment, or termination.
James assigned to next-phase contact under strict no-petition protocol.
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