M Not with a Whimper, but a Dream

[King Ghidorah]

King Ghidorah is alive. Even now, reduced and diminished, he rages through the underbelly of Inverxe, intent upon disrupting the Unmaking. However, his existence is more complex than even he gives himself credit for: if Ghidorah, is alive, then who is that corpse embedded in the bedrock deep beneath the surface of the planet? Why, after centuries, does the titan's rotting flesh still bleed? Is it a mere castoff - a shell? Or is there more to it than that?

King Ghidorah is dead. Long live King Ghidorah.

Likewise, alive and well, King Ghidorah is awake.

But dead and rotting, King Ghidorah is dreaming.

As we come screaming down out of the midnight sky, everything burns.

We strike the atmosphere with wings backswept, our velocity hypersonic, our momentum unstoppable; The stratosphere roars like a black-hole in pain. Gravity bends around us, the very laws of this universe pliant in our immaculate presence. Superheated gasses, ignited by the stress of our passage, wreath us in a mantle of crimson flame, setting our indestructible golden scales aglow with shades of scintillating sunset. The clouds part before us, blown apart by our mach-front, there and gone in a flash as we bleed velocity; The shock-waves spread out across face of this world, a clarion call of the End.

All over the world, we can hear them, in bunkers and parliaments and great glass towers: Little men with withered spirits and static minds attempting to piece together the truth of us, the very face of their extinction laughing before their blind and piggish eyes.

We writhe in anticipation, three sinuous serpentine necks and three bestial golden grins. Our tails twist, tracing trails of ionized air. An ocean roils beneath us, great shifting mountains of black water glowing red in the light of our arrival, and with a cackle, a roar and a curious purr, we lash its surface with bolt after blazing arc of astral charge, raising towering columns of electrically-charged steam.

Our wings snap open, and golden arcs dances across the chiropteran membranes, discharge from the spurs and angles of their structure. As we slow to nigh-subsonic velocity, skimming low across the tips of the waves, the air around us thickens, dancing with vapor and cosmic energy – thickens, and begins to spin.

Thunder cracks, but our wings beat louder. The heat of re-entry bleeds away, but still we glow – perfect and golden, the eye of the rising storm.

Ten thousand times, and ten thousand times before this occurs - simultaneous, but never two times the same: the ocean is green, the ocean is blue, the ocean is red – it is water, it is blood, it is liquid methane, the touch of our fury setting the entire planet alight. We descend atop a fleet of ocean-going vessels, the force of our passage capsizing the few which do not turn to vapor and shrapnel beneath the blaze of our electric scorn. They are military, civilian, the pleasurecraft of the elite: an oceangoing civilization on a planet with no land and the last refugees of a nuclear war.

There are no ships, but rather a platform, a deep-ocean facility concealing secrets known to few: ancient powers and sleeping gods. We rip the knowledge from the minds of its scuttling insectoid custodians and bring my full weight down upon their bristling ocean fortress, blazing bright with the dawnlight of a mad and uncaring cosmos: a three-headed pyre come on electric wings for the children of a forgotten heaven.

This, too, is a manifold event: the facility is in the desert and in a blooming valley, deep within the jungle and in the very center of a continent-spanning megalopolis. It is a pantheon, a prison, a ruin and a warehouse: the home of gods, of artifacts, of ancient knowledge and sacred portent – and we shatter it and blast the blast the very bedrock upon which it stood. Destiny itself breaks beneath the weight of our gleaming regard, burns in the glare of our power; we breathe the bouquet of the ruin of fate and sigh with triune bliss.

Upon streets of gleaming cities lit with the neon razor-light of progress unchained, upon floating temples and mountaintop tomb-cities we descend. Our wrath is immaculate, twisting lances of cosmic power leaping from our throats to shear through infrastructure and architecture, stone and steel rumbling, crumbling amidst towers of leaping flame. Populations flee before us, habit and structure descending into chaos as they shelter in burning buildings or attempt in vain to flee, the scope of our existence a thing for which they have no context, and even less defense. We wade through the work of centuries, stalk the manifest dreams of generations, and wheresoever we pass, it all crumbles away: art, architecture, society and government – dust beneath our mighty stomping talons.

Specifics diverge further. Holy men fall to their knees and weep, tear their robes and break their relics, scream profane curses at the heavens and weep tears of blood as the sky catches fire. Parents drown their children in waters choked with ash, poison their partners and set themselves afire. The weak and the destitute burn cities in our name, drag any who could offer salvation into the streets and impale them on burning stakes, sacrificing any hope of salvation or sanity in the vain expectation that fealty will win them mercy.

Overlapping, the planet stands strong. Its people are bold and brilliant, its technology and culture advanced. Our initial attacks are repelled by barriers of energy and weapon-arrays linked to the planet’s very core. Titans rise to face us – great metal golems wielding blades and balefire. Over centuries, we clash – a war that spans star-systems. I retreat, ruin less defended worlds, raise slave-armies of half-mad survivors. Over a quiet millennium, we bide our time – and when the forces of that utopian world venture boldly into space to defend against our slavering hordes, we descend in person upon their homeworld once again, a myth for which they are no longer prepared.

They stand tall: they trust in their long-departed gods, they rally together as their cities burn and their oceans boil beneath the lash of a cosmic hurricane. And when the last hot-blooded survivor leaps from the burning skeleton of their highest tower with the full intent of punching our centermost self in the eye, the faint tickle of empathic satisfaction we feel when his body shatters against the iris makes the entire exercise worthwhile. We blink, and he is gone.

Continents sink, scorched and lifeless, homogenized landscapes of rubble, bones, and blasted vegetation vanishing beneath the waves. Seas drain into great smoking rifts in the ground. From a barren moon in orbit, we watch. We have not set foot upon this world, not graced its atmosphere with our presence. The inhabitants have done this to themselves, with but the merest telepathic prodding. In less than a decade since we discovered this planet, we drove their leaders mad. There is a rare moment of dissention between us, a difference in perspective between our Wrath, our Whimsy and our Control. We conclude that as fascinating as the exercise may have been, it lacks a certain flair.

Across tens of thousands of worlds, into deep astrological time, unto the very birth of the Universe:

These are the ways the world ends.

 

[King Ghidorah]

Ghidorah is rising.

In the depths of Inverxe, with every step forward he takes, his power grows. His true form remains beyond him, but within the depths of his astral well he is recapitulating the steps of his own development. It is a stunted and vulnerable shape by his standards - but the power of a Titan is his once again, whensoever he may choose to grasp it.

Embedded in the walls of an ancient cavern, the corpse of Monster Zero lies regal, broken and still as ever - but the dream changes, an awareness of Ghidorah's limits penetrating even unto the depths of death.

In the southern arm of the galaxy, it is a season of glory, tears, and the madness of prophets, for we are a scourge upon the spaceways, ravaging planet after planet at a greater pace than ever before, and for the first time since the dawn of the Universe, we are not alone.

The mad cyborg, Gigan, is at our side. He is terrible in his own way, but in every conceivable sense rather than our own, much narrower and more dignified example. His bladed limbs flash, his curved and predatory beak screams in perpetually-baffled rage, and the burning crimson laser-light which lances forth from the ruby visor of his cyclopean eye is a mighty enough weapon for most purposes – but compared to us, he is small and fragile, his verdigris-brass body a chaotic blend of scaly flesh and technology, his mind not efficiently split but fully scattered. Without our help, he would be eminently stoppable.

It is not an alliance of our choosing. None of this is of our choosing, and our ferocity as we tear the spine out of an entire starborn empire is as much out of frustration and offended dignity as the yearning for the illumination of their ending.

We are bound - made a weapon in the service of the High Controller of the Empire of X. We feel it amidst the identity-dynamic our triple consciousness – a fourth presence among our trinity, editing the flow between our desires an our actions, forcing Control into a near-coma and usurping his place as executive decision-maker.

The Wrath is apoplectic, lashing out madly at everything and anything… but it is The Whimsy who will deliver us. He watches and he waits – his burning curiosity eagerly probing for any weakness, any opportunity to cast off the cybernetic chains of the Xillians’ master computers.

Under cover of the known factor of his own distractibility, The Whimsy alters our pathway through the spaceways by fractions of a degree, into the shadow of a thousand light-year magnetic superstorm erupting from an otherwise unremarkable black hole.

The ion-flux burns out the Xillians control-implant.

The pain is greater than we have ever experienced, a knife in the very soul of us, leaving us twitching and ravaged amidst the blaring drone of cosmic chain-lightning for a time interminable – but it does pass.

Gigan, following gormlessly after, is less fortunate. He does not have enough of a mind to operate without clear instruction – so we point him at the Spacehunter Nebula, expecting him to destroy the fledgling civilization which resides there. Regret is not in our nature, but it is an action which we will eventually regard as… less than ideal.

We hold the memory of this insult close; We return it ten thousand times over to our tormentors, these infants who in their arrogance and presumption believed that We could be made a tool for their purposes, our vengeance carving an enduring legend across the Southern spiral arm that cuts to the galaxy’s very core!

The entire sequence of events runs together, blurring with infuriatingly similar occurrences. Sometimes its is the Xillians, resurgent no less than four separate times before we finally hunt them down to the their final redoubt and destroy their species utterly and for all time, a people and a culture who simply did not know when to stop lost amidst amidst the flash of our lightning, the thunder of our footsteps, and the echoes of our laughter. Sometimes it is the Spacehunter Nebula, whom we do not get the opportunity to punish – their armies, their homeworld, that tragic idiot Gigan, their whole civilization entirely consumed by the advance of the Crystal Chaos before we could finish them off. The last of the Kii’laks, the Exif Empire, a half-dozen others whose civilizations are long since dust - by telepathic assault, hypnotic suggestion, and cybernetic control bolt, they rob us of our will, make of us a catspaw for their own galactic aspirations.

It is a fool’s errand, an invitation to destruction, but they cannot resist the siren’s song of our power, cannot but imagine what they could do with it. Always, we break free – by ingenuity, by guile, by chance... And more often than we care to consider by the unthinkable shock of defeat – for those who would rule the Milky Way always, inevitably, set their sights upon the Earth, pitting us once more against one of perhaps two creatures that exists to whom we will grant a dignity akin to our own: the Balefire Knight.