The thing that humans called SCP-106 had existed for a very long time.
It did not measure time the way flesh-beings did, in their neat little packages of seconds and minutes and years. Time, for the entity, was a fluid thing—a river it could step into and out of at will, a dimension it could traverse as easily as the pathetic creatures it hunted could walk across a room. It had watched civilizations rise and crumble to dust. It had fed on prey that spoke languages now forgotten by every living tongue. It had wandered the spaces between realities when the world was young and dark and better.
The humans called it "the Old Man." They thought they were being clever.
They had no idea how old it truly was.
In the countless ages of its existence, the entity had known many things. It had known hunger—the deep, aching need that drove it to hunt, to catch, to drag screaming prey into the beautiful darkness of its domain. It had known satisfaction—the exquisite pleasure of a successful hunt, of flesh dissolving beneath its touch, of terror so pure it was almost tangible. It had known curiosity—the strange compulsion that sometimes drove it to observe rather than consume, to study these brief, fragile creatures that scurried across the surface of reality like insects on water.
But it had never known fear.
Fear was for prey. Fear was the gift it gave to others, the seasoning that made the hunt worthwhile. Fear was the trembling in a victim's voice, the widening of their eyes, the desperate scrambling of their limbs as they tried to escape the inevitable. The entity had crafted fear into an art form, had refined its techniques over millennia until it could extract maximum terror from even the most hardened prey.
It did not experience fear. It was not capable of experiencing fear.
Or so it had believed.
The entity remembered the moment everything changed.
It had been standing in its cell—the pathetic box the humans had constructed to contain it, as if walls could ever truly hold something that existed between dimensions—when it felt the shift. A ripple in the fabric of reality, so subtle that none of the humans' instruments could detect it. But the entity felt it. The entity felt everything that happened in the shadows, in the spaces between.
Something was coming.
The entity had turned toward the disturbance with something approaching interest. Visitors were rare in its cell. The humans had learned, after many painful lessons, that direct contact with it was inadvisable. They watched from their little rooms, with their little cameras, thinking themselves safe behind their walls of steel and lead.
They were not safe. They were never safe. The entity simply chose to let them believe otherwise, because the hunt was more enjoyable when the prey thought it had a chance.
But this visitor was different.
It came through the wall as if the wall did not exist—not phasing, as the entity itself did, but simply ignoring the barrier entirely. The wall did not matter to this visitor. Reality itself did not seem to matter to this visitor.
And when the entity saw what had entered its cell, something unprecedented happened.
It felt cold.
The visitor wore the shape of a man. Tall, dressed in dark fabric, with a hat perched atop its head. But where a face should have been, there was only darkness—not the comforting darkness of the spaces between, but something else. Something deeper. Something that made the entity's own shadows seem pale and thin and insignificant.
The entity had lived in darkness for longer than humanity had existed. It had made the shadows its home, its hunting ground, its very essence.
But this thing... this thing was not in the darkness.
It was the darkness.
And suddenly, for the first time in its eternal existence, the entity understood what its prey felt when it emerged from the walls to claim them.
The entity tried to attack. Instinct demanded it—countless millennia of predatory behavior screaming that anything in its territory must be destroyed or consumed. Its rotting hand shot forward, reaching for the visitor's chest, ready to spread the beautiful corruption that had claimed so many victims.
Its fingers passed through nothing.
Not through flesh—the entity knew what flesh felt like, knew the satisfying resistance of meat and bone. Not through shadow—the entity knew shadows intimately, knew how to navigate them, manipulate them, become them.
This was nothing. Absolute nothing. A void so complete that the entity's own essence simply... slid off it, unable to find purchase.
The visitor spoke, and its voice came from everywhere. From the walls, from the floor, from the very air the humans thought they needed to breathe. Layers upon layers of sound, harmonizing into words that carried weight the entity could feel.
"That won't work on me."
The entity withdrew its hand and looked—really looked—at what stood before it. And what it saw made something deep in its ancient being shudder.
The visitor was not simply wearing darkness as a form. The visitor was darkness given consciousness. Every shadow in every corner of every reality, compressed into a shape that wore a suit and spoke with a voice and moved like it had purpose.
This was the thing that lurked beneath the lurkers. The predator that hunted the hunters. The fear that even nightmares were afraid of.
And it was looking directly at the entity, seeing through its rotting flesh and borrowed corpse-form to the thing underneath.
"You've been causing problems," the visitor said.
The entity did not respond. Could not respond. Its mouth, borrowed from some long-dead victim, opened and closed uselessly. Words were not something it had ever needed. Communication with prey was unnecessary—their screams told it everything it needed to know.
But this was not prey.
This was something the entity had no framework for understanding. Something that existed so far above it on the chain of predation that comparison became meaningless.
The visitor took a step forward.
The entity took a step back.
In all its long existence, the entity had never retreated from anything. It was not built for retreat. Its entire being was oriented toward pursuit, toward hunting, toward the endless patient stalking of prey that thought they could escape.
But now it retreated. Stumbled backward, its usually fluid movements jerky and uncoordinated, its eternal grin fading into something that felt sickeningly like a grimace.
The visitor kept advancing. Kept speaking, words that the entity barely processed because its entire being was focused on the wrongness of what was happening. It was being stalked. Pursued. Made to feel what its victims felt.
And it was terrifying.
The entity's back hit the wall. It tried to phase through—instinct again, the desperate flight response that it had never before needed to employ—but something stopped it. Darkness. The darkness. It was already in the walls, in the floor, in every crack and crevice of the containment chamber.
There was no escape.
"I am the shadow," the visitor said, and its voice resonated through dimensions the entity had thought were its exclusive domain. "And there is no darkness in this universe that does not answer to me."
The entity understood then. Understood what it was facing, what had come to its cell, what wore the shape of a man and spoke with the voice of the void.
The Administrator.
The word surfaced from somewhere deep in the entity's fragmented consciousness, a designation it had heard whispered in the shadows between realities. The Foundation—the organization that caged it—was vast and sprawling, full of little humans scurrying about with their little protocols. But above them all, unseen and unknown to most, sat something that was not human at all.
Something that ruled the shadows.
Something that had just decided to pay the entity a personal visit.
The entity collapsed.
Not from any physical force—the visitor had not struck it, had not used any of the crude methods the humans employed when they wanted to subdue it. But the weight of the darkness pressing in from all sides, the terrible presence of something that made the entity feel small, was too much.
It huddled in the corner of its cell, wrapping its rotting limbs around itself, and for the first time in its eternal existence, it cowered.
The humans were watching. The entity knew they were watching—they were always watching, with their cameras and their sensors and their desperate need to understand things beyond their comprehension. They would see this. They would see SCP-106, the Old Man, the terror that had haunted humanity for centuries, reduced to a trembling wreck in the presence of something greater.
The entity did not care.
Pride was a luxury for beings that had never encountered their superiors. The entity had spent so long at the apex of predation that it had forgotten what it felt like to be beneath something else on the food chain.
Now it remembered.
And the memory was horrible.
The visitor spoke again, and this time the entity forced itself to listen. To understand. Because understanding might be the only thing that kept it from being unmade entirely.
"I'm not going to destroy you."
The words took a moment to penetrate the haze of terror that had settled over the entity's consciousness. Not going to destroy it? That seemed... unlikely. Everything the entity knew about predator-prey relationships suggested that the stronger being should eliminate the weaker. It was the natural order. The way of things.
"I'm going to give you a choice."
A choice. The visitor was offering it a choice. The entity's fragmented mind struggled to process this concept. Prey did not get choices. Prey got caught, got consumed, got dragged into the beautiful darkness and kept there until they stopped being interesting.
But the entity was not prey here. It was something else. Something that the visitor was apparently willing to negotiate with.
"Option one. You continue as you have been. Testing containment, hunting personnel, dragging victims into your pocket dimension. But now you know what's waiting for you if you push too far."
The entity shuddered. Yes. It knew now. It knew exactly what waited in the deeper darkness, exactly what would come for it if it pushed too far. The visitor did not need to elaborate.
"Option two. You cooperate."
Cooperate. The word was foreign, meaningless. The entity had never cooperated with anything. It took what it wanted, when it wanted it, and nothing in its experience had ever suggested that another approach was necessary.
But the visitor was still talking, still outlining terms, still treating the entity as something that could be bargained with rather than simply destroyed. And slowly, reluctantly, the entity began to understand.
It was being offered a deal.
A deal that would let it continue existing, continue hunting, continue doing what its nature demanded—but within limits. Boundaries. Rules imposed by something that had the power to enforce them absolutely.
The entity considered its options.
It could refuse. Could go back to testing the containment, probing for weaknesses, hunting the humans that thought they could cage it. But now it would do so knowing that he was watching. That the darkness itself had taken an interest in its behavior. That every shadow in every corner of every site might contain the presence of something that could unmake it with a thought.
Or it could accept. Could play by the new rules, operate within the new boundaries, and in exchange receive... what? Better treatment? Opportunities to hunt that didn't risk bringing the Administrator's attention back to its cell?
Survival.
That was what the deal offered. Continued existence, in a universe where the entity had just discovered that its existence could be ended.
The entity rose to its feet. It approached the visitor slowly, carefully, every movement telegraphed and non-threatening. It raised one rotting hand, palm outward.
The visitor understood. A gloved hand rose to meet it, shadow pressing against shadow.
The deal was struck.
After the visitor left, the entity remained motionless in the center of its cell for a very long time.
The humans were still watching. Still recording. Still trying to understand what had happened in the containment chamber. The entity could sense their confusion, their fear, their desperate attempts to explain the inexplicable.
Let them wonder.
The entity had more important things to contemplate than the curiosity of insects.
It had met the Administrator.
The title took on new meaning now, weighted with understanding that the entity had lacked before. The Administrator was not just a bureaucratic designation, not just the mysterious leader of the Foundation's operations. The Administrator was the shadow that ruled shadows, the darkness that commanded darkness, the thing that even nightmares feared.
And the entity served it now.
Not through choice—the "choice" the visitor had offered was no choice at all, just an illusion of agency in a situation where the entity had no real power. It served because the alternative was annihilation, and despite everything, the entity wanted to continue existing.
There was still hunger to satisfy. Still prey to hunt. Still the beautiful darkness of its domain, waiting to receive new visitors.
The entity would have to be more careful now. More selective. The days of casual breaches and wanton hunting were over. But it could adapt. It had survived for longer than humanity had existed by adapting, by learning, by understanding the rules of whatever environment it found itself in.
The rules had changed. The entity would change with them.
But it would not forget.
Three days later, the humans brought it a gift.
A D-Class, they called him. A flesh-being wrapped in orange fabric, trembling with the fear that the entity had so missed tasting. He was released into a controlled environment adjacent to the containment chamber, and the entity was... allowed to hunt.
Allowed.
The word tasted strange, but the entity did not question it. The hunger was too strong, the need too urgent. It emerged from its cell, crossed into the controlled environment, and did what its nature demanded.
Four minutes.
That was all it took. Four minutes of pursuit, of terror, of the beautiful dance between predator and prey that the entity had perfected over millennia. The flesh-being screamed and ran and begged, and the entity drank in every moment of it, savoring the experience like fine wine.
When it was over, the entity returned to its cell.
Not because it was forced. Not because the humans activated their femur breaker or deployed their containment protocols. It returned because that was the deal. Hunt within boundaries. Accept limits. And in exchange, continue to exist.
The entity settled back into the center of its chamber and waited.
The humans were watching, as always. Recording, analyzing, trying to understand. They would never understand—could never understand—what had really happened. They would write their reports and file their documents and congratulate themselves on their improved containment protocols.
But the entity knew the truth.
It was not contained by walls or protocols or human ingenuity.
It was contained by fear.
Fear of the shadow that had visited its cell. Fear of the darkness that lurked beneath all other darknesses. Fear of the Administrator, the faceless thing that wore a suit and spoke with the voice of the void.
The entity had spent countless ages teaching prey to fear it. Now it had learned a lesson of its own.
There was always something darker.
There was always something deeper.
And sometimes, even monsters had to bow.
In the weeks that followed, the entity kept to the deal.
It stayed in its cell. It did not test the containment. When the humans brought it prey—always the D-Class, always the orange-wrapped flesh-beings that trembled so beautifully—it hunted within the designated zones and returned when finished.
The humans noticed the change. Of course they noticed. They were insects, but they were observant insects, always watching, always recording, always trying to make sense of the incomprehensible.
The entity heard their whispers. Heard them speculating about what had caused its behavioral shift, what had made it suddenly cooperative after decades of resistance. They developed theories—psychological changes, environmental factors, natural cycles in the entity's behavior.
They never guessed the truth.
They never suspected that their Administrator—the mysterious figure at the apex of their precious Foundation—was something that made SCP-106 look like a harmless shadow puppet.
And the entity was not going to tell them.
Some secrets were too dangerous to share. Some knowledge was too terrible to burden lesser beings with. The entity had glimpsed something beyond its comprehension, something that rewrote its understanding of the universe and its place in it.
That glimpse was its burden to bear.
Sometimes, in the long hours between hunts, the entity thought about the visitor.
It wondered where he had come from. Whether he had always existed, or whether he had been made—transformed from something lesser into the terrible thing that ruled the shadows. It wondered what he wanted, what drove him, what purpose animated that faceless form.
It wondered if there were others like him.
The thought was deeply unsettling. One Administrator was bad enough. If there were more...
But no. The entity pushed the thought away. Some questions were better left unanswered. Some doors were better left unopened.
It had a deal to keep. Boundaries to respect. A new existence to navigate.
The entity settled into stillness and waited for its next hunt.
In the corner of its cell, the shadows seemed a little darker than before. A little deeper. As if something was always watching, always present, always aware of what the entity was doing.
The entity did not mind.
It had learned to live with fear.
To be continued...