 Before we get to the reading, I just wanted to do a quick announcement, doubling up on the announcement from last time, Escape from Site 19, today's sponsor. You use the promotional code Daybreak, that's capital all of the letters D-A-Y-B-R-E-A-K, and you buy a new Escape from Site 19 board game, you'll receive a special promotional when day breaks card, along with three special Christmas promo cards, and the tub itself will come with a nice decorative red ribbon, because it's Christmas. If you'd like these promotional materials, but you've already purchased the game, there will be a way in the next couple weeks, or next few weeks I should say, where it will be an announcement on how you can go ahead and get them at, I believe, just the cost of shipping, so that's in the future for you too if you've already bought one. I highly recommend it, if for no other reason than it's just an amazing piece of SCP branded merchandise, like look at this candle, where else are you going to get something like that? Get it as a gift for somebody that you know that likes SCP content, or just get it for yourself and play a board game that's fun. Now today we are going to do a reading, so I'm going to be back off camera for the rest of the video, I just wanted to pop in and say, you know, buy this, use the code, it will be a link and a coupon code in the description, coupon code is Daybreak, get 10% off. Alright, let's get to reading. The Star's Do Not Wait View was written by Dematix, it is under a Creative Commons Share Like Attribution License, and can be found on the SCP Wiki in a link in the description below. It's quiet out here. The desert sprawls from horizon to horizon, where purest white meets twilight red. There are no edges here, no angles, just curves, and the gentle rise and fall of dunes as far as the eye can see, and everywhere beyond. Had a visitor from some other world laid eyes on this place, they might have found it serene, even beautiful, pure, but I can enjoy no such delusions regretfully, for I know what lies beneath and among the sands of the endless desert, a charnel house spanning an entire planet, seven billion human souls ground thin and fine until no trace of their existence could ever be found. And I know this, because I put them there, oh brother, it all happens so fast once we're gone. It began the day that you, you who I have never known, found my power, the power I hid from myself in some previous life for reasons, well, I can now easily guess. I was looking out of the window of my apartment so I could see the stars, and instead, I saw you, blazing as you tore yourself asunder to keep the power away from yourself. You didn't trust what you would do with it, and so you chose to throw it away. You knew yourself all too well, as I suspect I did too, at one point. By all accounts, I should not have been able to see you, for my apartment was truly a tiny containment cell about a half a mile underground, but such considerations never meant much to one living entirely in his own world. When I saw the moment of your demise, I became aware of myself for the first time in, I don't know how long. Whichever part of me that led me to throw away my power did the same to my will, trapping into an eternal status quo from which there would be no release, an eternity of filling spreadsheets for employers who existed solely in my head by nine o'clock meetings with no one, a fake crushes over imaginary women, an eternity of tired, grinding mediocrity. But that was over that night. When your soul was burning in the atmosphere like the loneliness of stars, I awakened. I died. And whatever left that little cell-turned-department wasn't me anymore. I was never more than an earthworm, distinct from all the rest only and then I had a little more control over the soul in which I crawled. They never thought me more than a minor reality bender, a bundle of introverted powers with neuroses that was very unlikely to ever pose any serious threat. And they were right. The person I was, SCP-1915 as they called me, I was never anything other than that. But 1915 died that day, watching a fallen star. The thing that then swatted at the guards posted at its cell, like there were less than nats, the thing that raised Site-17 into this fine white sand that is now so warm beneath the feet, that was something else. Not an entity, for that would imply a personality. And this thing surely has none, not a purpose, for there was no purpose behind its action then, nor will there ever be for any of its actions to come, nor has it a will for it wants nothing, not vengeance, not dominion, not freedom, not even simple power. Now, if I had to describe that thing as anything at all, it would be an absence, a void where an entity should be, a lack of purpose, an imbecilic force devoid of all will, an absence. The sand is still warm to the feet, and that means the sun still burns high above. I wonder why it lets it remain, when all else was so quickly erased, when it could so easily just reach and plug it out of the sky. Had it been another, I'd suspect it was to mock humanity's memory, to mock that sliver of me that still persists in the flesh, stubborn, like a buried tick. But this is an absence, it doesn't mock. After Site-17's destruction, retaliation soon followed, standard containment teams at first, though certainly still enough to meet any anomaly the Foundation imagined could be contained in Site-17 with overwhelming force. When those men failed to return, failed to even report their arrival, more serious measures had to be taken. Site-17 has always been isolated so they could act freely. Gunships, fireteams, aerial bombardment, and artillery barrages. Site-17 came down on what it still believed to be 1915, like a fire god's fist, all heat and sound and bluster. And had it still been truly corporeal, I doubt even ashes would have remained. But whatever the absence truly was by that point, the tattered semblance of my flesh hanging around it, had very little to do with it. It simply stood there, took it all in. The Foundation's initial fury was soon spent, then it began to walk, not too quickly. For days it simply leisurely strode on while the Foundation threw everything it had at it. I watched from within my deadbolt as it walked unfeeling, uncaring in this desert followed in its wake. As unscrupable and unstoppable as its harbinger, we are not quite alone here. Some stubborn immortals persist, wretched creatures, a cotton in a way an ancient man still walks tormented by three mocking voices. He believed once he was the only one left he would be allowed to rest, and he was wrong. Beneath the ground is a soul, suffocating as the earth slowly grinds its sanity to mulch. From its prison of gold and rubies there would be no release, elsewhere lies a once smiling god as the sands cover his prone figure. He doesn't resist, he had once promised the world his love, promised humanity the stars. Sand pours through his fingers as he tries to gather his flame together for his people, but it's dying and they are dead, extinguished forever. When someone walks they are bound to reach somewhere eventually, despite everyone's best efforts. The absence arrived at its first city, the sands at its heels like an obedient lap dog. Oh, there had been villages and towns before that, but the absence didn't seem to care enough to bother with them. It simply walked by, leaving them to the whims of the sands, which were only ever singular in their intent. But through the streets of the city it strode as mobile task forces fought and fell to buy the civilian population just a few more minutes to evacuate. By this point, hiding what was truly going on became impossible as street after street sank beneath the gentle crawling tide. The foundation had of course attempted to evacuate the city once it realized there would be no stopping the absence, but if I've learned anything in my eons as a corporeal peon, it's that organizing an operation of that magnitude is something that takes a lot more than the foundation had. It's a wonder they managed to save as many as they did. And as for the rest, it waited until the night fell. I imagine it was an eerie sight. That lone figure standing beneath the frozen light of other worlds in that empty intersection between financial and residential districts where train tracks used to be before the old steam locomotives went out of service and were never replaced with new ones. Yes, it waited until it could see the stars. And then burned without heat, without light, and without life. It burned a hole through the city and there was nothing left to fill it in. Reality can't suffer a vacuum, they've always said, but the absence had shown how little it cared for reality, so it was gone. How does someone explain something like that? How do you describe what isn't there? Where one moment was a city of 500,000, the next? It wasn't. To the place it was, even the sands wouldn't come, it was just a scar, it was nothing. It was then, I think, that the foundation realized it couldn't stand alone. The next few months of the absence march saw them turn to their sometimes allies. Even mage killers and thermonuclear strikes, initiative paladins and holy relics. Sniper rifle, sacred sword, burning inferno and divine retribution, the absence did not care. And soon the foundation had no allies left to turn to. It then called on its once vicious enemies, ink-eaters wove their art in maddening patterns to break the minds of the infinite. Archivists and librarians poured from the ways, bringing with them the knowledge of a hundred thousand worlds. Clockwork titans shook the barren whiteness of the sands with a thunder of metal. The absence didn't care. Soon the foundation ran out of enemies, and a last act of desperation, they then committed their final, most painful betrayal. The wardens unleashed upon their world the prisoners. Of these I have made note, though I doubt the absence did the same. On the blasted wasteland that was once Boston, it was assailed by two brothers, one savage, the other somber, more violent, the other reluctant. They nevertheless fought with a graceful unity to take the breath away. In their eyes, I saw that they did not know each other for a very long while, and that they fought so that they could have the time to rectify this. I saw regret, and hope, and rage, and desperation, but most of all I saw a simple need to be. I would like to believe that you and I would have been like them had we met, brother. They fought with the fury of a thousand years of solitude, and it did not matter. Before the walls of Acre, as the ancient city was drowned by the desert, two figures approached us. One was four-legged and horned, its crown was ice, its eyes, galaxies, its whole power was absolute. The second was a man, simple, humble, but possessing of love, of being that extended to the edges of the universe, compassion to pierce the deepest hells that had nothing to do with weakness. Of the two I could not tell you which was more glorious or which was more terrifying, but they met the absence with will alone, and when I felt it fall on us I thought I would weep. Surely, nothing could withstand such a presence, surely nothing would want to, but the absence was less than nothing, infinitely less. I've told you what became of kind pangloss of the other, even less remained. For months they came, for years, for decades alone, or in groups with ferocity or with blank stairs the foundations prisoners threw themselves at the absence. I could not hope to imagine the reasons behind the actions of every individual anomaly, but if I could guess, I would say that the idea of sharing existence with a thing, like the absence, galled them to the point of madness. I don't blame them, but by the end the prisons ran empty as the world dried up, as life was drained from it inch by inch and grain by grain until only one city remained. I do not know by which power I was allowed to send my senses ahead of us, as the absence marched towards that tottering bastion which held in its quivering embrace the very last of humanity. As the sands around us buried the last of the trees that will ever grow, I felt each tiny mote of light in that sad place like the flame of a cheap candle moments before a typhoon. In these moments, as twilight danced in lurid reds and oranges on ivory, I sensed them all. For you, brother, I witnessed. In a low and narrow room a woman sat hunched at the foot of her, even narrower bunk and couldn't bring herself to pray. She had lost her mother when she was but a babe, and though she was no longer young, her features still displayed all the violence of that incident. Her mother stood before the eater of children and did not budge, and when they both fell down she sang, still, the praise of her lord. She lost her father in the first days of the war against the absences, the paladins marched with holy fervor in their eyes. Her father had been a believer, had always been a solid presence in her life, an anchor immovable by anything but regret. He had promised her he would come back. He didn't mean to lie. But as God had forsaken him when it counted most, forsaken all of them, and now Naomi knelt at the foot of the ever-narrowing bunk and could not pray, so she cursed instead. Below, in a series of dank cellars which might have at one point stored cheeses, a woman of about forty tinkered with broken toys. When she was young she made wonders, such wonders. In every line etched across her prematurely old face, I saw what could have been, had it not been for the absence, that had not been for me. In the dim light and the soft noise of rotting wood crumbling beneath calloused fingers I saw the death of potential, the death of all possibility. Though Isabel was stubborn as she always was, she knew that this toy would be her last. Just as well she thought, after today there would be none left to play with it. On the rooftop of the highest building still standing, an elderly man watched the world come to an end. He was once an agent of the foundation, once one among a hundred thousand ready, prepared, and collected. His duty was to instruct new agents what was proper for an agent to do, how it was proper for an agent to think, and he'd been very good at his job, since generally his recruits survived for long enough to thank him. But what was he now, he wondered? As he watched the sands pour over the paltry last line of defense that a few defiant fools had erected the day before. His lads and lasses were all long since dead, and all that he knew, all of his years of training and experience in the end, had amounted to less than nothing. No longer an agent, for there was no longer an agency, no longer a teacher, for the students were gone, no longer a man since, well it wouldn't do to repeat that, would it? No longer anything, and that was the cruelest joke. And no longer mattered if the absence arrived, he thought. They were already within it. The noise behind him and the old man turned to see a small, mousy man in a wrinkled gray suit, and a deflated hat, that at one point looked like it might have been a fedora. He looked at the old man but said nothing. Lamarti looked back and didn't know if he should laugh or cry, and soon it ceased to matter. Such was the end. Quiet. Small. Bereft of heroics and great deeds, free of pretensions of great meaning. One night there was a human race on the planet Earth, and next there wasn't. And that was that. And that was that. The stars do not wait for you, brother. When you took my power, when you burned yourself in the skies above, they looked upon you and they felt nothing. The stars did not wait for humanity, for all of the promise it showed, for all of the promise others saw in them. But what of the absence? What of me? We are, or I am, by all accounts and possible qualifications, the greatest monster this world has ever saw, perhaps that any world has ever saw. And yet, brother, I see now that the stars do wait for us, for me. And where's the justice in that? Don't look for it. There isn't any. But the fact remains, brother, the stars do not wait for you. They wait for me to take them into my embrace. And I suspect it shall not be long. Thank you very much for listening. If you enjoyed the video, hit the subscribe button and the notification bell next to that so you're notified when I upload new videos. And then head on over to patreon.com forward slash de-summarine and pledge at any level, like everybody here on the screen already has, including MC Casual, who has pledged at $50, and Sinjeriki, who has pledged at $100. It is nice to know that I'm not alone out here and I will see you all again on Tuesday.