V Indictment of a Hollow Garden (An Arbiter's Tears - Unmaking Quest)

[King Ghidorah]

Groaning, growling, with aurelian energy sparking upon my brow, I wrench aside a twisted and smoking bulkhead. The metal squeals, folding beneath my irresistible grip, and I lever myself free of my transport’s shattered hull.

The crash was… an experience. The moment of impact, the sudden implosion of the cabin, the shattering ripple of kinetic chaos which hurled my unbreakable body against the wall, the floor, the ceiling without rhyme or reason as our stricken vessel bounced and rolled, slid and shuddered to a stop upon the frozen arctic ground, carving a miles-long trench in the ice – all novel experiences: well worthy of note, but not something I would like to do again.

However, there have been other positive developments in the process: My astral senses are beginning to re-awaken.

I had not even noticed, had not made the connection between the insistent pangs of instinct I have been experiencing and my bygone ability to sense the feelings, the very lives of lesser creatures – that is, until the moment that the mammal Hannigan’s body shattered against the crumbling bulkhead of his own tumbling spacecraft, the moment I tasted the sudden absence of his feeble life-force as it winked out of existence.

This heralds the return of a dimension of experience that has been sorely lacking. Comparatively, my long-delayed recovery from my gut-wound, blackened flesh finally flaking away to reveal scales of unblemished gold, is but a minor triumph.

All told, as I stalk away from the crumpled and burning frame of the boxy grey orbital craft, the icy firmament giving forth a dry and clammy crunch with every step I take, I am in an excellent mood. The air tastes crisp, the chill: bracing. A frozen, desolate world stretches out before me: plains of endless ice, lit in shades of twilight reflected from the gas giant which dominates the sky. My golden body gleams, the reflected glory of the gloaming staining my scintillating hide in shades of twinkling crimson. On the horizon, there is a mountain range, and twisted formations of ice lie closer to hand – but for the most part, all I see is rolling vistas of barren, wintery desert.

That is not, however, all I sense.

I raise my head, standing tall atop a frozen dune and narrowing my crimson eyes as I zero in on an anomaly. It is distant – hidden somewhere within the seemingly uninhabited rise and fall of the tundra – but something odd, something I have never, ever experienced before is pulling at my inchoate astral perceptions. It feels like a life-sign, a group of them even, but it tastes… wrong; There is no vibrancy to it – no complexity. It is too far away for me to say more with my powers at their current ebb: on a less barren world, I would not have detected it at all. The feeling is strange enough however that, in the here and now, it bears investigation.

Over the following hours, as I travel across the cryonic face of this savage little world at a loping jog, occasionally leaping over great, steaming chasms in the ground, the sensation I pursue grows stronger. It is a lush feeling, a dense outpouring of vitality: There is something very nearly arboreal about it. But again, there is that wrongness, that flatness, something almost suggestive of pantomime.

I feel as though I am being mocked; I do not understand, and that alone is enough to require swift and decisive action.

I crest a rise in the ice, stand atop a rocky, frozen hill – and I look down upon what many creatures would assuredly call paradise.

593/2500 words

 

[King Ghidorah]

In the trough of a small valley, little more than an unusually deep and wide space between two large icy mounds, a forested glade stretches out before me.

It sprawls in blatant defiance of climate, geology and all common sense: A lush canopy of broad-leaf trees stretches several stories into the air, their trunks straight and wide, anchored to the rocky and anomalously temperate earth by roots as thick as my thighs. The resulting foliage is dense, but there is enough distance between the trunks that at the edges of their branches’ reach, where the leafy coverage is thinnest, I can catch glimpses of what lies beneath: From the lower branches, vines dangle, covered in pink and purple flowers. At ground level, across every rock – and in the absence of the ice it is all rocks - extends a carpet of mosses, lichens, and soft grasses, interspersed with little white blossoms and larger flowering plants.

At the center of this fever-dream there is a clearing, a broad flat space blanketed by small leafy plants that almost looks to have been deliberately leveled. It is bounded by large bushes bearing five-pointed vermillion blossoms almost the size of my hand - and at the heart of the glade, a rift in the earth, from which emerges an explosion of color. Wildflowers for which I do not know the names, in every variety and shade, every shape and size, grow from the lip of the cave-mouth as though dancing upon the precipice of darkness.

The entire forest cannot cover more than several hundred meters squared – but the fact that it exists at all is baffling. Standing atop my frozen perch a warm breeze tickles my nostrils, and a dark frission runs down my spine.

There is something wrong with these plants – even were it not readily apparent that they do not belong on this planet, and could not have survived to this stage of development in this climate, there is something about their appearance which I cannot place but nonetheless sets my teeth on edge. The whole area seems… staged, somehow; Insincere in a way that I do not have the words to express.

The arctic wind howls, and the leaves do not move. The ruddy twilight shines, and the oasis below is lit as though by a summer’s day.

And, of course, there is the odd sensation which called me here, its source now plain.

The glow of a plant’s life is typically dim, only shining to any notable degree in the oldest of specimens. Even so, there is nuance and purpose to be found in such humble organisms: the beauty of a forest, the tapestry of such biological wonder in all its interconnected grandeur as it disappears in flames and thunder, the very lungs of a planet going up in smoke, is among my very favorite things.

The verdant expanse before me tastes like a grey smear.

Every plant, every flower, every moss and lichen, all have an infuriating sameness that makes them seem… absent. As individuals, they have no impact, even the expected biological synergy washed out in a sea of grey, as though they are already gone in some way that I lack the context to define!

Worse, it extends to the animals. At first I do not even realize they are there, so perfectly do the flames of their lives blend with the homogenized ontological slurry offending my astral senses. One of the fel hunters with which I so recently contended is hanging from a tree-branch at the edge of the clearing, relaxed and docile in a way that is completely at odds with its nature. Something larger twice-over, covered in matted white fur, sits calmly nearby, staring at nothing and cooing softly. Finally, hominids sit in a semi- circle, a formation slightly pinched at one end, around the outer rim of the central space. Most of them are simian in aspect, male and female, though some seem to be of more varied descent. One possesses a pallid blue complexion, has tentacles growing from its face and wears elaborate black robes. another possesses bright purple scales and a finely tailored suit; but most are dressed in worn and battered survival gear, equipped for a climate that, in this place, holds no sway.

They appear to be… praying.

Again, I feel a chill that has nothing to do with the temperature. This unnatural glade, with its empty beauty and oddly subdued predators, grates against the very core of my being. The sheer emptiness of it fills me with a fear that I have never known. I strongly suspect that I could burn it to the ground, slaughter all within and raze the very earth upon which it stands and that I would feel nothing: no rush of nihilistic epiphany, no moment of ecstatic revelation. Destruction without loss; Ruin without apocalypse.

I bunch my mighty legs and I leap, digging into the frozen rock with my talons and pushing off in a rush, using the momentum of my impact as I land to carry me in a slide down the side of the hill and across the boundary between one sort of desolation and another.

I will understand what is happening here – and I will end it.

1473/2500 words

 

[King Ghidorah]

I stalk between the trees in shining predatory grandeur, my bladed toes sinking softly and silently in the mossy loam with every step, the fronds of the undergrowth stroking at my heels. The air is warm, and smells of pollen and growing plants. I brush aside a flowering vine with one clawed, golden hand– and I pause, listening.

A bird, its elaborate plumage awash in brilliant color and its origin a mystery, sits on a nearby branch and stares at me with hollow, beady eyes, its gaze fraught with passionless intensity. There is low droning sound, on the edge of perception, but no buzz and hum of insects. The leaves of the canopy whisper in a warm breeze, but they do so in a single register, with a single voice.

I could almost think the sound is forming words.

Further unsettled, and furious at that fact, I continue on. It takes me longer than I would have expected to locate the clearing at the center of this unnatural ecology. For all its lush greenery, for all the intensity of color and smell, the underlying hollowness of it all confuses my senses, washing out my still-fragile astral perceptions with its tasteless and turbid blot. I wander between broad tree trunks, around clustered stones and past a little brook, its crystal clear waters unnaturally silent as they rush to an unknown fate. Wheresoever I wander, however, birds and small animals watch in eerie and subdued silence, their heads turning slowly to follow my progress.

I long to destroy them – to destroy it all - but I am afraid of what following that impulse may reveal.

What if my suspicions are correct? I do not want to know how that would feel; To ruin something, to devour an abundance so rich with life, yet to be left unfulfilled, illuminating nothing...

Eventually, the object of my search stands revealed. Catching a glimpse of open sky, unobstructed by the murmuring canopy, I vault over the top of a moss-crusted boulder – and land upon a field of clover.

Before me, some ten meters distant the gash in the earth looms, obscured by its blooming entourage. Overhead, the sky is cloudless and blue – but only directly overhead, a perfect oval amidst the overcast heavens still aglow with twilit contempt. Looking up, one could almost imagine that they had transfixed the attention of a great and baleful celestial eye.

The hominids whom I observed from my perch atop the crest of the valley still sit in their pinched half-circle, facing me from the opposite end of the clearing, the cave between us. Neither they, nor the docile beasts in attendance react to my arrival – or so it at first appears.

The tentacled creature in robes, formerly seated at the apex of the circle, appears around the edge of the flowering overgrowth, gliding smoothly across the carpet of rounded leaves and tiny white flowers.

Now that I am not observing it from afar, more details are apparent: It is almost as tall as I; It’s head is not merely tentacled, but octopoid, lacking in simian features. The eyes are large and black, a pair of narrow slits in its moist and glistening blue skin serving it in place of a nose. It arms are folded within its robes, which are not merely black, but trimmed with the deepest crimson. Embroidered in crimson upon its breast it wears a symbol – the same formation, I now realize, in which these people are seated: A pinched semi-circle with a little flange on either end of the curve.

It comes to a stop just out of reach, and, just as I am about to demand answers, an exacting and monotonous voice bores into the forefront of my awareness.

Welcome, Destroyer.

Come.

Join us.

Submit to the harmonious embrace of Anti-Life.

Find freedom amid purpose – His purpose.

Be reborn…in Darkseid.


It continues to speak, and as it does, our surroundings begin to darken, losing color and shape until we two are the only things that exist, standing upon the void. And then even we are gone – and there is only thought.

Whispers and promises, the very voice of a harmonious cosmos welcomes me, cajoling with honeyed invitations… And something roars back with venom and scorn, a trio of golden voices laughing in unison.

Is life not tiring? Do you not feel alone?


‘We are the only company we require.​

Even now, a singularity, we are not lonely.

How can one miss one’s self?​

Do you not seek freedom? Freedom from responsibility? From doubt? Would not toil in certainty of a greater purpose fill the void within you?​

We are the most free creature which has ever existed.

What is doubt? Lesser creatures doubt. ​

Our only responsibility is to ourselves –
and it is Glorious. ​

In Anti-Life there is purpose. In Anti-Life, there is certainty.
The certainty that Darkseid is ALL, and to labor in his name is to know peace.​

The only peace we seek is the serenity of ruinous illumination.​

The knowledge which you would deny us.

There is illumination in Anti-Life. To embrace the pointlessness of existence is true knowledge. You seek destruction? Then lay down your burden. This, too, Darkseid can provide.​

Destruction is not the goal.​

It is the method.

WE ARE NOT A WEAPON, TO BE POINTED WHERE ANOTHER WILLS IT


WE ARE THE GREAT JUDGEMENT: THE DISCERNING EYE BY WHICH CREATION APPREHENDS ITS WORTH. THERE IS NO BURDEN – AND NO GREATER PURPOSE.​

There is something behind the thing’s words – something beyond mere persuasion. It is oppressive beyond comprehension, grinding the very universe down to a simple calculus of despair. It asserts there is no room for the individual – no texture or depth to existence: It says that life, all life, is a lie.

I have been mind-controlled many times before: a peril of a triple-consciousness that I have had to learn by hard experience to defend myself from. This, however, is something different – something more elemental, seeking to flatten my very soul into the same grey sludge which lured me here with its sheer bland offensiveness.
It is mathematical in its exactitude, a relentless and perfect truth.
That will be its downfall.

The one force with which truth cannot contend is the truths of the self; and mine are truths that rage and devour, the very fires of a newborn cosmos – sometimes collared: but never tamed! This violation grinds against my triune soul with industrial persistence, seeking to master me with its contravention of everything I am, everything I value and desire, and on golden wings the very depths of me howl back from somewhere beyond mere thought, erupting like the birth of a galaxy:

WE ARE KING GHIDORAH! ​

DARKSEID IS -

ANTI-LIFE?​

WE ARE LIFE

THE FIRST LIFE BORN OF CREATION​

DARKSEID -​

ITS FINEST JEWEL! BLOODY CRIMSON AND SHINING GOLD!​

Darkseid Is the End -

WHAT IS THE END BUT THE WRATH OF THE BEGINNING?​

Darksei-​

JUST WHAT DO YOU THINK WE ARE?!​

The words crash upon the void like a bursting planet, striking with nigh-physical force. They are not a statement, they are an obsession long festering: the output of a feedback loop of three-way self-reflection and nihilistic longing incubated over eons, echo of the very cataclysm in which I was given birth.

The world snaps back, the blank space in which we float bursting like a soap bubble. For a moment, the betentacled priest and I mirror one another perfectly: in a blur of motion we point at each other. Still connected by a string of thought, the corridors of our minds echo with two voices screaming the same thing:

‘ANATHEMA!’

A pulsing wave of invisible force erupts from the priest, striking me from my feet and sending me sailing backward, glittering in the sun, to crash against a tree with such force that the trunk is split with a mighty crack! At the very same moment, golden lightning erupts from my palm, crackles across my bared teeth, ripples across the brows of my brother-heads where they lie sleeping within my shoulders. Even as I am struck, the tentacled priest’s entire torso disappears in a blaze of astral charge and an eruption of steaming purple gore.

2798/2500 words.

 

[King Ghidorah]

I was correct: destroying the robed cephalopoid is a remarkably bland experience. It is gone, and nothing of value is lost – just a vessel from which all complexity and texture, all depth and meaning had long since departed. I know now what is wrong with these people, this forest – none of them, none of it, is truly a part of the living universe: they are something else.

Anti-Life… The elevation of servitude and submission, the abrogation of the will, of striving and of strife. Here is Destruction without loss, Ruin without apocalypse. Lives not taken, for they are not truly there: Existence without flavour.

Laid out before me is the prospect of a universe with no soul, in which nothing is truly anything but another empty component of a monolithic will – tasteless, in every conceivable sense. Hackneyed, without depth or passion, communicating nothing and revealing even less.

It is, quite literally, the worst idea I have ever encountered, offensive beyond words - and something is putting it into practice.

As I extract myself from the shattered tree, the sunlight seems to a darken by several shades. The breeze picks up, rustling the canopy, and this time I can make out the words within the whisper of rustling leaves.

Daaaaaaaaarrkssssssseiiiiid Isssssssssssss.

​

As one, the praying hominids rise, their movements stiff and their eyes dark. The obsidian hunter drops from its perch, turns towards me and bears its many steely fangs. The hairy simian behemoth lumbers out of the woods, its wrinkled face and blackened teeth twisted into a horrific scowl as it tramples the clover underfoot.

I find to my shock that I do not want to destroy them – I just want them gone. It is a desire to kill driven by a pedestrian need, offering no deeper reward than simple accomplishment of the task, the removal of an obstacle.

My foes rush me, the hunter leading the way. Weighed down by the hollow mundanity of it slaying puppets, yet buoyed by furious anger, I get on with the business at hand.

I drop to one knee as as the bristling mass of black chitin and sinister blades leaps through the air, claws raised to strike, and I blast it squarely in the chest with both hands at the apex of its arc. Astral charge leaps and crackles in an amber storm of twisting energy, punching through the thing’s chest and burning out of its back, stripping the leaves from a tree on the opposite end of the clearing in a sizzling flare of cosmic fire.

I catch the broken body as it flops against me, accepting the sluice of caustic green gore across my thighs and, rising and turning, hurl the corpse at the lumbering simian behemoth as it charges forward. It is very nearly upon me when the leaking onyx shell catches it squarely in the face, filling its beady eyes and flattened nose with acid. With the thing unable to track me, I sidestep, throw a spiraling bolt of brilliant golden lightning into the back of its knee as it passes, and am rewarded by the sizzle and snap of burning flesh and shredded tendons. With my other hand blast an hominid who has gotten slightly ahead of the others. The massive creature stumbles, its weight and momentum carrying it into the very same tree I recently impacted; the tortured trunk gives way with a series of crackling pops and, with a terrible groan and a rush of breaking branches, tumbles into the forest.

The hominids ignore the fallen beasts and the ruins of their comrade, focusing in silent frenzy upon me and me alone as they stream around the mouth of the cave, pounding clover and wildflowers beneath their feet, raising little clouds of petals and broken leaves.

Most are cut down with little effort as I sweep their ranks with golden lightning, blast after actinic solar blast erupting from my hands, bursting from my throat. Some of these people have weapons, small projectile weapons which sting the smoking and acid-worn scales upon of my legs and bounce harmlessly off my gleaming chest – the rest brandish knives, tools, bits of random debris. It does not matter: the flesh boils from their bones, turns to ash and charcoal beneath the electric glare of my cosmic scorn. Their torn survival suits and ruined cold-weather gear fall to the earth as charred and smoking rags, followed shortly by the broken ruins of their steaming corpses.

Only the purple one in the suit, more agile and more perceptive than the others, it seems, manages to close the distance without being incinerated. She – I believe it to be a she - leaps into the air and slashes at me with a blade that blurs and hums, suggesting some exotic function.

It glances off my armored throat with a strange ringing sensation and a shower of orange sparks, and I punch my hand through her sternum. I feel her heart pump once before I crush it in my palm.

“I die….” She gasps, as I her shake her off my arm to fall leaking upon the clover, “ for Darksss….”

It is terribly unsatisfying, but there is a certain grim sense of accomplishment. I know this feeling, from the minds of scuttling masses past. This is work.

I take stock. My enemies, if such empty creatures can truly bear that label, are dead, save for the furry behemoth, which is trying in vain to stand, to put weight upon its ruined knee. Just in case, I blast it again, and I move on. Several trees have fallen, struck by stray bolts of cosmic power. Bushes lie smoldering and stripped of leaves and flowers, bare and fractal skeletons of burning wood. The blanket of clovers is trampled, and fanned by the whispering breeze and the dry air, kindled by arcing astral energies, the forest is beginning to burn.

I walk around the perimeter of the clearing, unleashing bolt after brilliant bolt of leaping lightning into the undergrowth until I am absolutely certain that this abominable arboretum is well and truly on fire. It is only then that I turn my attention to the thing at the heart of it all:

The cave.

It has not escaped my notice that such a thing should lie at the central point of this entire vulgar phenomenon. I do not know what is in there –whether this is the abode of ‘Darkseid’ or but a manifestation of its power, but I absolutely know what I must do.

Releasing my power in a sustained arc, I vaporize the remaining wildflowers, their ashes drifting away on the increasingly chaotic breeze, its malign whispers now evident only in snatches, mixed with drifting smoke and the crackle of flames. With my path cleared, I stalk over to the lip of the great wound in the earth, and I take a moment to boil the acid off of my thighs.

Steeling myself and raising my hands before my expansive and glittering golden chest, a short distance apart so that the palms face one another, I focus my power.

Lightning hisses, then crackles, then roars between my hands. It is almost too much for me to handle, the surging chaotic energies too great for this diminished form; Arcing trails race up my arms, crackle across my body. Upon my brow and shoulders, at the ends of my talons and the tips of my fingers, little wisps of golden dust arise.

Heaving, straining, every muscle and sinew vibrating with tension as golden blood leaks from my gums, I raise the shrieking orb of halcyon fury above my head – and, bracing one foot upon a rock and thrusting my arms towards the pit, with a great cackling roar I unleash a storm into the darkness.

Forking tongues of actinic, electric gravity, the rage of the dawn-times given form, light the shadows within the cave brighter than a noonday red giant. For just a moment I see vines and twisted roots within the hollow space, moving, writhing, growing as I watch – then my power washes over them, power undeniable, and in a flash of solar fury they crumble to dust. It goes on and on, a twisted, branching deluge that flickers and dances, ebbs and flows, cosmic chain-lightning unleashed until my body fails me, and I fall to one knee, spent, vapor rising from my peerless and shining form.

Echoing from deep within the cave, something wails – and, as my shining serpentine countenance twists in a glower of savage and offended animosity at the smoke which now rises from the pit, howling wordlessly around my shoulders the breeze turns bitingly cold.

Ghidorah used 1 focus to supercharge his lightning
4254 - out of 2500 words

 

[King Ghidorah]

Quest: Complete. This here is an epilogue.

As the false oasis burns and the natural climate of this vicious little world reasserts itself the crackle and heat of the fires rages against the rising scream of the jagged arctic winds. Flowering vines blacken and burn, disintegrating into fragile fronds of ash and ember; blazing tree trunks shudder and crack with a sound like cannon-fire, their rigid substance unable to withstand the physical strain imposed by the heat of the blaze amidst the sudden tartarean chill. Bushes blaze briefly and brightly, leaves and blossoms alike lost to the conflagration before their denuded forms collapse into charcoal fractals. The mossy loam becomes a carpet of blazing cinders and peaty brown smoke.

All around me, a rapidly growing rime covers the earth as the clovers begin to freeze, ebbing and flowing in bizarre patterns as the cold compete with the heat of the flames.

Great billowing plumes of black smog drift into the once-again-overcast sky, stretched and contorted by the rising gale. Overhead, the clouds are beginning to churn: A storm is coming.

I kneel by the mouth of the cavern, flanked on all sides by a cacophony of fire and ice in savage competition, watching as it smolders until I am certain that no greater foe is forthcoming – that nothing will emerge from the aftermath of my roiling astral fury in vengeful service to this ‘Darkseid’.

The tentacled priest’s words, and the terrible force behind them, rattle in my roaring brain. Although the sheer vulgar tastelessness, the nauseating horror that is Anti-Life is new to me, the… architecture of the thing is not altogether unfamiliar. Whatever Darkseid may be, its goal is clear: Hegemony. Aggressive hegemony. It subsumes others into itself, and seeks to destroy that which it cannot assimilate. In a savage and brutal universe, it is not an uncommon methodology; But this is no simple hungry swarm, no ego-mad machine or xenophobic regime terrified of a cosmos that it does not and cannot control.

My astral senses do not lie: This… vile corruption… penetrates its victims to an ontological depth I would not previously have thought possible. It robs them of texture, of their very place in this reality, flattening them into simple malign caricatures from which neither insight nor satisfaction can be derived.

I do not believe that a cancer so malignant can be destroyed by a simple forest-fire.

Pondering, I gaze deeply into the pit as the last of the fires within wink out, and the surrounding conflagration blazes higher, the crackle becoming a roar. This false paradise, this garden of the condemned, cannot have originated on the surface; The brief glimpse I received of the squirming network of roots and questing tendrils infesting this cave before my blazing astral discharge destroyed them makes me certain of it.

How deep do these caverns go? How far could this corruption extend?

If I am to be sure that this pestilence is eliminated, to secure my own pride and purpose, the great ruinous joy of my existence, and to rebuke this hackneyed horror, then I must go deeper than the shallow scars my golden wrath has carved into this blighted world.

I must pursue this revolting sickness to its source.

Snarling and sparking, my burnished body reflecting the orange of glow of the burning forest and with glittering saffron vapor still trailing from my shining scales, I leap into the darkness and descend once again into the subterranean depths.