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| “ | Does the black moon howl? | „ |
| ~ The famous phrase associated with the Black Moon. |
| “ | I told you: I am a player of games. My game is called existence, and I seek victory over my adversary. His pieces are many, his children and wives and meat angels, but I seek quality in my pieces. A singular, immutable hatred such as yours is a rare thing indeed. You would be my piece. My Black Queen. |
„ |
| ~ The Black Moon to a version of Allison Chao in "Blackened". |
The Black Moon is a major antagonist in the SCP Foundation mythos. It is an enigmatic, powerful, and ancient god-like entity existing outside of reality and wishes to cause as much destruction as possible.
It is associated with the memetic code phrase "Does the black moon howl?" which appears in numerous articles on the SCP site, including a number of SCP-001 Proposals, in which it is connected to the Foundation's Administrator, being indirectly responsible for the creation of the SCP Foundation. It is the overarching antagonist in the "REDTAPE" series, and plays a role in the "Our Open Veins" canon.
Appearance[]
When the Black Queen first met the Black Moon she described it as a faceless mass or cloud of dancing shadows that sat on a magnificent royal throne. After entering the Singular Conceptual Bunker the Black Moon was described as a shadow with delusions of form like smoke trapped in a fist, while its voice sounded like thousands of tiny whispers building to a divine crescendo. When talking to Cristina its voice sounded like the absence of one, with its words being described as word-shaped voids.
As SCP-5284 the Black Moon was described as an extradimensional extrusion composed of unknown organic matter that resembles a microscopic organism, measuring a volume of around 21.352 * 1010 km3, and being able to extend structures resembling amoeba's pseudopods.
BLACKSTAR described the Black Moon as an enormous pitch dark orb that resembled a bottomless pit, had a soft corona of red light around itself and tentacles could be seen protruding from it. When appearing to Dr. Mann, the Black Moon took possession of a pitch black fish with a bulbous head, oily scales and dark pearl-like eyes, and in his dreams it took the appearance of a black crystal sphere that increased in size.
Personality[]
| “ | Yes. Struggle is the natural form of creation. This is the chaos of the primordial womb. You are not thinking of morals or principles or mighty laws. They are all extraneous. There is only the inescapable cycle of violent struggle. This is how we all come into the world. This is what the world is. Survival is the only law. Look, child. Strike the deal in blood. Kill it. Take your place in the cycle of violence. Take your birthright. |
„ |
| ~ The Black Moon convincing BLACKSTAR to become its prophet in "INTERREGNUM: THE BLACKSTAR AT AMONI-RAM". |
Not much is known about the personality of the Black Moon. When confronting the Black Queen it appeared as an enigmatic individual who although it behaved as supporting her over the loss of her father, it was in fact part of its manipulation to use her in its fight against the Scarlet King. It also appeared to be fond of the void and the meaningless as when Allison stated that its title as the Black Moon didn't mean anything to her this greatly pleased it. The Black Moon was shown to see no value in life, killing each living intelligent organism over the course of countless millennia, expecting the end of reality with patience. After being tricked by the Administrator into devolving at the same level as him, the Black Moon was quickly filled with rage and attempted to murder him at all costs, while stating that everything its counterbalance did would be meaningless.
Salu-ki described the Black Moon as a coward and this can be seen when the canines and the humans around the world began howling at it, induced fear in it and forcing it to leave.
The Black Moon in SCP-7070 didn't show that much of a personality, apart from that before releasing the Black Blight it sent messages to Foundation personnel that there was no hope and that they should all kill themselves.
The Black Moon in Forerunner Triad, after being casted out by its fellow gods, Mekhane, the Scarlet and Yaldabaoth, it was hellbent to take its revenge on each of them, especially after seeing them commit the same sin that caused its downfall. As part of its plan it manipulated BLACKSTAR into becoming its prophet, telling him that survival and struggle are the only things that really matter in the world and all other things like morality or laws were trivial unimportant things, and promised him to give great powers so he could protect and control the world. Through BLACKSTAR and his Three-Pronged Army the Black Moon was able to get its revenge on the other gods by destroying the civilizations that they had helped built, although BLACKSTAR recognized the real foul nature of the god he worshipped and in fact detested it despite praying to it. In the modern era, the Black Moon's speech was more casual and friendly as it spoke to Mann, making small talks about his work which involved making weapons, stealing other people's identities and infiltrating secured facilities. The Black Moon made him doubt the Foundation's purpose while tormenting him in his dreams, leading to Mann trying to stop hearing it by stabbing his head with a screwdriver. Unfortunately, the Black Moon managed to fully corrupt Mann, taking advantage of his loss of identity and past memories to make him believe that in order to achieve true world order the world had fall into chaos, which led to him forming the Chaos Insurgency.
Powers and Abilities[]
The Black Moon was a powerful entropic entity existing outside of reality. It was capable of petrifying an intelligent lifeform and disintegrating in a matter of seconds, no matter if that being was cryogenically frozen or not. It originally did this once every decade, but as countless years went on it sped up this process, eventually killing multiple beings within minutes. It once tried to do it to SCP-682, but it regenerated from severed piece of itself and mocked the Black Moon. Allegedly, if someone were to look at the Black Moon it would be unable to use its powers any further, but it was never proven due to it existing outside of reality. The Foundation tried to create anomalies that behaved similarly to the Black Moon in the hopes of using them as vessels for the entity which would have led to them stopping it from continuing its destruction, but it failed as the Black Moon was not connected with the anomalies.
The Black Moon also appeared to possess some telepathy and omnilingualism as it could only talk to people through their minds since due to its form it was unable to properly speak and people understood what it was saying despite it talking in its own unknown language, and it also gave a version of the Black Queen the ability to utilize the Ways to properly travel through the multiverse. After making a deal with Etana the Black Moon took away the anomalous powers of humanity as part of the deal, rendering humans powerless, but could return their powers if the deal expired. The Black Moon was also shown to have been the source of ancient nahuales' powers, as they could transform into animals even during the absence of the moon during the night which shouldn't be possible for the normal nahuales. The Sin Nombre's nahuales were able to channel the Black Moon's power by using a liquid that reverted their DNA to their ancient progenitors but caused them to be overcome with uncontrollable bloodlust.
The Black Moon possessed a counterbalance in form of a power granted to a human individual. Despite giving this individual immortality this didn't actually make them immune to the Black Moon's effects but it just meant that they would be the last to die to the entity. After the Black Moon entered the Singular Conceptual Bunker it transformed into a humanoid form with its supernatural powers taken away as it existed as just information while inside the bunker. This allowed the Administrator to be on the same level as the Black Moon and thanks to this were able to beat the entity to death.
As SCP-5284, the Black Moon's mass possessed no heat and exerted no gravitational pull. It was capable of moving through space and was not affected by the nuclear missiles launched by the Foundation. However, when the canines and humans began howling at it, the Black Moon retreated back into the void of space as it was afraid of them.
In SCP-7070, the Black Moon was able to manipulate the Foundation's database to create false files which acted as a warning of the threat it posed. The Foundation personnel attempted to delete these files as they overflowed the entire database and decelerated their work, but the Black Moon made sure that these files stayed where they were, recreating them seconds after numerous Foundation thaumaturgists and AIs used rituals to remove them. Moments before releasing the Black Blight, it was able to influence several public figures and take over the systems of Foundation sites. The Black Blight that it released was a highly toxic material that covered most of Earth's surface and slowly killed countless creatures, forcing the remnants of humanity to live inside bio-domes to protect themselves from the substance. The Foundation was eventually successful in purging the Black Moon's influence from its database after creating SCP-7070-Ω, an artificial superintelligence comprised of the minds of all Foundation employees which took complete control of the Foundation.
Followers[]
Like other gods, the Black Moon has had sparse but notable followers who mainly served it to draw from its power, though it was despised by other groups such as the Wanderer's Library. One of the more notable individuals was the Resh version of the Black Queen, having willingly become the Black Moon's servant in order to be granted the power to freely traverse the multiverse and be able to rescue alternate versions of her father.
The drug cartel Sin Nombre, one of the more influential anomalous criminal organizations, had set aside their worship of the Pale Lady, the benevolent embodiment of death, in favor of a figure known as El Charro Negro, apparently an aspect of the Black Moon. Thanks to the Black Moon, various members of Sin Nombre gained special powers or had their already existing anomalous capabilities further augmented. Among these included the nahuales who could transform into beastly animals at will, and the cartel's leader the Empty Man who became completely antimemetic, being unable to be recognized or recorded and simply appearing as a human-shaped hole in reality.
In the ancient past, the Black Moon was worshiped by the Three-Prong Army, a powerful ancient empire that inspired the legends of the Sea People and believed that their deity embodied the concept of control over chaos. The army was led by the Black Moon's prophet the BLACKSTAR who waged war against the three other empires of the Mekhanites, Daevites and Sarkites, each pertaining to the gods that had defeated the Black Moon. As years went on after the three empires' demise, BLACKSTAR abandoned his worship of the Black Moon, reinventing the Three-Prong Army into the SCP Foundation and him becoming the Administrator, though their logo still featured the Black Moon being pierced by three spears.
The Black Moon, still determined to bring its vision of the world to reality, moved onto one of the Administrator's close associates, that being O5-3 Everett Mann, since he was stripped of his identity and past memories which allowed him to be influenced by the old god. After years of manipulation, Mann succumbed to the Black Moon's corruption and taking control of Delta Wave he founded the Chaos Insurgency which came to serve the old god and assist it in plunging the entire world into chaos.
Quotes[]
| “ | Meaningless. You'll die all the same. | „ |
| ~ The Black Moon threatening to kill the Administrator just like it did with the rest of life in the dead universe. |
| “ | Cuidate de las noches donde la Luna Negra aulla. (Beware the nights where the Black Moon howls.) | „ |
| ~ Gabriela Mendez's grandmother to her granddaughter in "The Men with No Name". |
| “ | Cristina, I can give everything you dreamed of, I can give you a power you could not even conceive. A power to free your people… hell… to free the oppressed all over the world. No one could dare to oppose you. Not the governments. Not Sin Nombre. Not the Ravens. Certainly not the Foundation. Even the Library itself would be a joke compared to you. You would be the hero. The savior of the beaten, the broken, and the dammed. Everywhere you will be remembered, not as a failure who got their people killed because of her weakness, but as victory incarnated, destroyer of the all oppressors once and for all. | „ |
| ~ The Black Moon tempting Cristina to accept its power. |
| “ | This is how I know that in reality, you are not a god nor even a demon. You are just another fascist pig preying on those weaker. So long ¡Luna Culera! I'm turning the lights back on. | „ |
| ~ Cristina rejecting the Black Moon's offer. |
| “ | For while the Scarlet embodied nature and gifted life, and the Steel embodied progress and gifted technology, and the Flesh embodied death and gifted continuation — in this way the Wretch also came to embody an integral piece of man's soul. Yes, the Black Moon embodied the chaos of creation and gifted control. And it gifted this mastery over reality itself to the BLACKSTAR, plucked from the flock to be a god amongst men. And it was only in the face of death unprecedented that the faith and resolve of the man known as the BLACKSTAR began to crumble. |
„ |
| ~ A verse of the Daeva song from "INTERREGNUM: THE BLACKSTAR AT EVEREST". |
| “ | Kindly? No, don't get me wrong. Things have already been set in motion. A chain reaction that can not be stopped. This is your inevitable Fate. Your inescapable Doom. And I only do this because I do really enjoy watching you suffer. The true torture at the Gallows is not the Hang, but the Wait. | „ |
| ~ The Black Moon showing Cristina her grim fate in "Árboles Bajo La Tierra". |
| “ | Look into your heart, find mercy, and tear it out of your chest. Nature is ever-spiralling towards entropy, and at the bottom of that spiral lies a single, shining black eye. The Black Moon has been watching, waiting for centuries. | „ |
| ~ From the "REDTAPE HUB". |
| “ | The Lady doesn't judge. It is not her place. She does not care if you are a criminal or a killer, she will give you mercy. But she will demand that you be merciful in return. She is a merciful Goddess, for Death is nature's mercy. But such compassion has always been at odds with the ways of Sin Nombre. It was bound to eventually be regarded as a weakness. "El Charro Negro" is different. Merciless. Fearless. Nameless… Be afraid of those nights without moon. It is a bad omen when nahuales howl to the Black Moon. | „ |
| ~ Samuel N in UIU File 2020 289: The Empty Man. |
| “ | ¿No oyes aullar los nahuales? ¿El llamado del Charro Negro? En la cima de este mundo, solo la Luna Negra existe. (Don't you hear the nahuals howling? The call of the Charro Negro? At the top of this world, only the Black Moon exists.) | „ |
| ~ The Empty Man. |
| “ | He blinked, and looked up. The moon here was black; the stars, overhead, were black, like arrows pointing inward, laughing at them, waiting to rise up and swallow them all. | „ |
| ~ A Daevite looking at the Black Moon in "Drowned Offerings". |
| “ | Black Moon: I'm natural, kid. This is natural. Everett Mann: What is? Black Moon: You can't force order onto the world. Order doesn't come from that. Mann: Where does it come from? Black Moon: Chaos. It makes its own order. |
„ |
| ~ The Black Moon speaking to Everett Mann in "Bone Prelude: FISHSKIN". |
| “ | It has held as many names as I have. The Abominate, the Wretch, the Apostate. The fourth god in the triarchy, banished, forgotten. Technology, nature, life. Entropy. The inevitable tendency of any system to decay into disorder. Into chaos. It lays its eggs into your mind. It gives you invented purpose. Kill him. Take that city. Destroy that kingdom. Set fire to the entire world just to watch the embers die. | „ |
| ~ The Administrator on the Black Moon in SCP-001 (ROUNDERHOUSE's Bone Proposal). |
Trivia[]
- The Black Moon and its phrase first originated in both SCP-256 and SCP-257-ARC which was then picked up by other authors who used the phrase as a memetic password for classified documents.
- The phrase is most often used by the O5 Council as a memetic shibboleth or codeword asked people who might have been compromised as stated in "GOC, or that guy with a gun fetish". The answers greatly vary, as those who receive the question would respond subconsciously and almost never make any real sense.
- According to "Taking the Lead" and "Face Time", when the phrase is answered it causes those nearby who aren't affiliated with the Administrator to feel immense pain, and even death to the mentally weak ones.
- There is another phrase involving the Black Moon used in "Hundred-Year Favor", that being "I'd like to short sell my shares in Black Moon LLC." which was used by Foundation personnel when contacting Foundation front companies.
- The phrase is most often used by the O5 Council as a memetic shibboleth or codeword asked people who might have been compromised as stated in "GOC, or that guy with a gun fetish". The answers greatly vary, as those who receive the question would respond subconsciously and almost never make any real sense.
- The name black moon was used for new moons or when they were absent from the night sky, and in paganism rituals conducted during the black moon were deemed more powerful while others believed that these rituals were highly dangerous when performed during the event.
- In SCP-2975, a powerful eldritch being known as the White Sun is introduced. It is unknown if the entity's name originated as the opposite of the Black Moon, or independently. In SCP-6689, a project regarding the anomaly was named Black Moon and Golden Sun.
- In SCP-2, when the question was asked to Researcher Rosen, he responded by mentioning that the Blue Moon (SCP-3570) screeched. SCP-6996 was referred to as the Red Moon.
- In a document recovered from SCP-2095 and the Sarkic scripture Sone Tal the Black Moon is mentioned, suggesting that the Sarkites and the Daevites were aware of its existence. In various Fifthist writings produced as a result of SCP-2456 mentioned the Black Moon as a sort of evil thing that opposed their deity who was associated with the sun. It is possible that the ancient Erikeshans were also aware of the Black Moon, as they mentioned it howling in SCP-5008.
- In SCP-5236, the Black Moon was referred to as female.
- In the "Black As Night" series, Foundation employees D. Lloyd and C. Zartion in 1920 wrote a book about the Black Moon and the origins of humanity.
- In "A Tale of Five Offerings", the Black Moon had its own temple where five fools created SCP-173.
- The Black Moon was also used to refer to SCP-5631, the mythological Bakunawa, consuming the moon to bring prosperity to the Philippines.
- The Black Moon being the fourth god after Mekhane, the Scarlet King and Yaldabaoth is probably a reference to how the number 4 is considered unlucky.
- In the Wanderer's Library wiki, there is another entity known as the Green Moon which is a sinister being of knowledge that inserts itself in some stories.
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