[Great] New, Flammable Places

[King Ghidorah]

The warble of my own laughter is still ringing in my ears when I step out of the echoing emptiness of that hellish alabaster expanse and into the piercing glow of a glorious noonday sun, shining in a cloudless sky. I'm standing on a high hill, upon moist, rich soil. A forest is nearby, with some rock outcroppings poking above the treetops. I only recognize the bizarrely enlarged plants because of my elevation, which gives me something closer to my accustomed perspective - walking through such places, surrounded by trees that are many times my size, is an experience I don't look forward to at all. 

Setting them alight is another matter. I've always liked the smell of burning vegetation. Or burning living things in general, really.

On the horizon, I see a snow-capped mountain-range, hazy from distance. Between here and there are lakes, streams, rivers, forests, and vast fields of grass (The fact that there's a word for grass is astonishing. It's so small, thinking about it in my former incarnation would have been less than pointless). This world is so rich that it practically gleams like a jewel in the sun. When I've regained my proper form, ruining it will be a joy. 

What really grabs my attention, though, is much closer to hand. 

Arranged all around me are enormous, rectangular gray rocks, almost twice my height. They're piled on top of one another in sets of three, two stones standing on-end and a third laid across the top, forming mock-gateways of sorts, facing the real one. Spaced evenly, all together they form a circle of monoliths about a dozen meters across. 

Someone clearly put a great deal of time and effort into this strange monument. It was probably expected to last for centuries. 

Such a ridiculous, pointless ambition. It demands a delicious demonstration.  

I bathe the stones in golden lightning, bolts of heat and force arcing from my fingertips and crackling from my jaws, laughing at the mad folly that put this absurd construction here in the first place. My power rips furrows in the soil, reducing tiny, green growing things to ashes. It strikes sparks from the monoliths, blasting red-hot shrapnel high into the air. Stray bolts hit the forest far below, cracking tree-trunks and setting undergrowth alight. 

About a minute later, amidst air thick with dust and smoke, I stop blasting, and I stare, red-eyed and dumbfounded. 

The stones are still standing. The're scarred and pitted, yes, blackened and ravaged by the force of my peerless astral charge. They glow red-hot, clicking as they cool, but they've barely moved. Only one of them is even cracked!  

At my proper size I could have obliterated this place with a single stray bolt!

Shaking with fury at my own impotence, I stalk over to the nearest monolith, and I strike it as hard as I can with my palm. Other than a loud, meaty sound, this accomplishes nothing, so I curl my fingers around my thumb, making my first ever fist (such a lovely, functional word), and I do it again. Stone chips fly, and I bare my teeth in glee. 

It takes me almost ten minutes of constant two-handed pounding to crack the accursed thing, and by the time it falls my hands are numb, but the apocalyptic snap! as it breaks may be one of the sweetest sounds I've ever heard. The grinding rumble as the pieces topple, taking the enormous stone the target of my anger was supporting with them, is even sweeter. I'm so entranced that I nearly fail to step out of the way. 

When the capstone hits the ground, the entire hillside jumps, knocking me off my feet. In the ensuing stillness I feel something I've only felt once before: the horrible thrill of Fear. If I'd stepped back just a little bit slower, I know instinctively that I would have been seriously hurt.  

A loathesome idea, but one I absolutely cannot ignore takes hold. 

I'm vulnerable in this new form.  I'm going to have to be more careful.

[King Ghidorah]

After I pick myself up, I consider destroying the rest of these obstinate megaliths, but the sheer effort and time it would involve makes the prospect depressing. 

I shouldn't have to work this hard to break a bunch of stupid rocks! And a mere falling stone shouldn't pose enough of a threat to set my heart pounding like this!

I'll have to come back here when I'm stronger (A word I dearly love. Stronger! It growls!). 

Yes, I've wasted enough effort and time on these lifeless blocks of granite - there are living things here. People, and more importantly, Omnilium - the power I need in order to return to my former glory.

I leave the drifting dust, and the smells of powdered stone, burnt air and scorched earth behind. Wisps of smoke and pulverized debris waft off my brilliant, stainless golden body as I stride from the stone circle and down the side of the hill.

There's a path, leading in short order to a road, which is a concept I'm familiar with, despite only ever having previously seen them as tiny lines on the ground (It's only a small mental leap from roads to space-lanes, after all). It's made of bare dirt, with the occasional stone marker. I'm tempted not to follow it, but roads lead to towns, and towns have people, and people have Omnilium.     
...though, come to think of it, I don't really know how to get it from them. Do they keep it inside, like I do? 

Since I've already conceded once to the necessity of interrogating the locals, and since I've hit upon the revolutionary idea of learning more about the individual people I destroy in order to better savor the bouquet of their loss, I suppose that I don't sacrifice anything by asking someone about this. The next person I see is going to have a lot to tell me. 

I've only been walking for a couple of minutes, through grassland and low bushes, before I come to a fork in the road. There's a wooden signpost (which is a useful concept, elegant even). It's made from a small tree-trunk, stripped of branches, with planks nailed to the side. The planks have writing on them, and I'm surprised to discover that I can read it.  

Evidently my newfound grasp of language and the associated concepts is more complete than I'd dared to imagine. 

According to the sign, if I continue towards the mountains in the distance, I'll reach 'Minas Tirith', as well as several other places that are written in smaller letters, and so presumably aren't as important. If I follow the other path, into the forest, I'll apparently be heading for someplace called Holmwood. 

The first thing I do is break the sign. I tear it out of the ground, digging my clawed fingers into the wood, and smash it in half across my knee. I leave the pieces lying in the road. The reduction of useful elegance to functionless chaos fills me with a dark cloud of warm, pleasant ecstasy, temporarily chasing away the frustrations of the day. 

Feeling much better, I consider my options. 



 

[King Ghidorah]

I've been walking down the road to Minas Tirith for ten minutes before, struck by a sudden, visual epiphany, I realize that the smallish white mountain at the base of the distant range isn't merely covered with an unusual amount of snow.

It's covered with city. A gleaming, white, mulit-tiered city, carved of stone and shining in the sun. It rises up the base of the mountain to its peak, with five distinct, concentric levels, separated by high walls. The peak itself is fused with a long, flat plateau which protrudes from the rest of the mountain, cutting through the tiers of the city rising around it like the bow of a ship (though larger by far than any I've ever sunk). The wedge of its tapered end stops shy of the outermost wall. Atop all of this, where the plateau meets the rest of the mountain, is a gleaming citadel, crowned by a single ivory spire.

This, then, must be Minas Tirith. It couldn't be anything else - the name seems to wrap around it, seeping into and through it, making it somehow more itself. 

The mountain stronghold is glorious - from this admittedly great distance, the technology level appears very low, but the engineering and craftsmanship that must have been involved make it a functional work of art. Provided its still inhabited, and I think it must be because that sign I broke seemed new, it could have a population of millions. 

My first response is, instinctively, to try to take to the sky, to fly to the city and cover it with golden death - but I can't, so I start to break into a run.

Then I remember what happened at the standing-stones, and I stop mid-bound. A wordless, bellowing moan escapes my throat, and I cover my face with my hands.

I can't do it. I literally can't do it! I'm just not strong enough to ruin something that grand! I'm too small, now, and too weak! It would take decades! Besides which, now that I'm reduced down to the level of the fleeing masses, now that I'm vulnerable, assaulting a city that large could very well get me killed!  

I clench my fists and I scream in rage and thwarted bloodlust, howl for a deep aesthetic yearning denied!   

In the end, I can't even look at the accursed place. It mocks me. Every second Minas Tirith remains standing, un-ruined, un-ravaged, un-burned, it mocks me. 

If it were a matter of choice, it might be different. I might refrain from immediate attack, take advantage of this new perspective to walk the streets, learn the city and its culture, understand its unique contribution to the world and the subtleties of its character before bringing it all to a flaming, final end. The very prospect makes me shiver - but I lack that choice. I lack the ability, and that just makes me want to destroy the mountain-metropolis even more!

I do the only thing I can. 

I turn away. I put the jeering horizon at my back, and I retreat along the furrowed dirt road towards the fork with the broken sign, and from there into the forest. Minas Tirith is finally obscured from view, no matter where I look.

[King Ghidorah]

Traveling through the depths of the forest is so engaging I don't even mind the claustrophobia (which is a muddled word, poorly suited to its meaning).

The road is flanked by trees on either side, older and mightier than the ones at the forest's edge. Here, they're massive things, with rough, sturdy trunks bigger around than I am. They're spaced far apart from one another, but there's very little undergrowth - the ground between them is lumpy and gnarled where their roots break the surface, choking out any lesser competition (Seeing it fills me with something I didn't expect to feel here: Approval). Wide branches form a canopy which creates an arched ceiling above the road, almost entirely blocking the sun save for a dim, diffuse light filtering down through layers of dark, vibrant green. The air smells clean, and yet somehow musty.  

Tiny animals, smaller than I had ever conceived, scurry between them and flitter above. Birds call. Squirrels caper in the branches. Foxes. Insects (Creatures even smaller than grass!). So many things I had never even imagined because they were simply beneath my notice, now given shapes and names. I've never had this perspective of a forest before. I'd only ever seen a canopy from above, typically while reducing it to ash, blasting it to pieces, or crushing it beneath my feet.  

Those memories are made even sweeter with this new, firsthand knowledge of the delicious complexity, the sheer unsuspected abundance and diversity of living forms that must have vanished forever in my wake, burned to ashes, drained of essence and ground to dust. I'd always thought it was the city-building species where all the real sport lay - their work, their ambitions, their ideas, the death of their dreams and aspirations as their planet fell apart around them. Oceans were also interesting enough in their own right, if only for the storms they made, and the things that came out of them when they boiled, but forests? Forests were just a lot of wood: a minor part of the greater tapestry of Armageddon. Unless they contained animals large enough to hunt, they were just mindless fun, really, offering only the simple satisfaction of their ending, and of a world thoroughly ruined - or so I thought. 

Once I get my real body back, I'll definitely have to find a way to retain this perspective - after millions of years, I'm learning to appreciate the act of ravaging a planet in entirely new ways! What else have I been missing?

I can't wait to find out - but in the meantime, I do my level best to savor the scent of scorched vegetation, the zing and pop of exploding wood, and the screams of fleeing animals as I pass, raking arcs of lethal golden lightning back and forth across the trees.

[King Ghidorah]

I've been walking for hours when a completely new experience presents itself.

I'm stalking through the depths of the woods, allowing this easily-tired body some time to recuperate from hurling minute-long barrages of arcing, leaping death. The forest is thicker here, the trees closer together, and only the occasional dapple of sunlight penetrates the canopy, flickering brilliant gold against my unconquerable hide. 

Just as I begin to wonder if this forest is ever going to end, a man drops out of the branches above, and onto the road in front of me, landing in a crouch and rising gracefully to his feet. 

He's short - shorter than me, anyway - and thin, dressed in dark-green cloth and chainmail with leather strips woven between the links. There's a sword at his hip, grease and leaves in his bright red hair, and a cocky smile, the first smile that I've ever seen, plastered across his face. 

Baring the teeth to show a lack of hostility. What a bizarre idea!

"Hello there friend," he says, dripping with cheerful familiarity and resting a hand on his sword. "I couldn't help noticing you're an awfully shiny fellow, what with that fine golden armor and all, and as it happens I'm a little short of funds at the moment. I'm sure you know how this works - financial remuneration, resulting in compensation, by a lack of violent altercation!"

I've never been mugged before. Attacked? Yes. Assaulted? definitely. Bombarded? Many times. But nobody has ever tried to coerce me into giving them anything. Not until now, anyway.  

What a fantastic opportunity!

"Who are you.Tell me about yourself." I demand, watching him intently. 

He sketches a mocking bow. "Well now, I do appreciate the courtesy, your lordship. Usually it's all, 'you can't do this', and 'do you know who I am', and 'what the mud-spackled hell is going on', and I have to cuff my customers smartly about the ear to make them pay attention. But you sir, are clearly a gentleman of breeding, wanting to know the story of a lowly brigand such as myself!"

The thief takes a moment to preen (a word I deeply enjoy, though watching him perform the act is irritating), running his hands through his hair and straightening his chainmail. I wait, and think of how much sweeter his destruction will be once I know what it is I'm taking from the world.

"The name is Brock Coxley, not to be confused with Loxley. Thief, Secondary, and soldier-of-fortune, at your service. My exciting tale begins several years back, when a forgotten Prime of quite excellent taste summoned me to be his lieutenant in the troupe of bandits and rogues he was seeking to assemble. I didn't have a life before that, made whole-cloth out of Omnilium, but my summoner made me smart, and he made me strong, and if I do say it myself, devastatingly attractive."

He flashes me another proud smile. As near as I can tell, he remains unbearably ugly, just like everyone else I've met since coming here. I'm far more interested in the fact that he's apparently made of Omnilium. What was it the grinning bastard said? It ties the Omniverse together? 

I focus on the well of raw potential within me, and then I focus on the long-winded brigand - and I can feel the Omnilium in him calling out to me, the same way life-essence used to, or raw magnetic charge. It's a strange sensation, like the miracle substance is... suspended somehow, but if I were to put my hands on him, I think I could reach out and touch it. 

Coxley goes on, "That worthy fellow wasn't quite as clever as me, though, and he ended up getting banished to the fiery underverse in short order, leaving me in charge of his group of Burly and Violent - definitely not merry - men. Who, by the way, are pointing an assortment of very dangerous projectile weapons at you right this very moment. We've been quite successful. Robbing from the rich, paying the poor a discounted price for assorted goods and services that we then use to continue to rob from the rich - We're big contributors to the local service-economy."

The thief draws his sword, a long, thin blade which utterly fails to impress me. "Speaking of which, as much as I do enjoy talking about myself, its time that we got down to the business at hand, eh?"

I agree wholeheartedly.

"Do you know how I can get more Omnilium, Brock Coxley?" I ask him. 

The bandit laughs, and levels his blade at my face. "Maybe I was wrong, sir. You don't understand how this works. I'm here to take things from you, not help you get more of anything, let alone Omnilium. So, seeing as you're apparently a Prime, if you could just take a minute to give me some Omnilium, preferably in the form of gold, or other equivalent currency, I'll be on way, and you can keep your lovely armor." 

This time I smile. The eyes of my two dormant heads flutter for a moment, a tingle in my shoulders, reacting to my sense of predatory triumph.  


Speaking low, I growl, "I'm not wearing armor."  

The thief looks confused, and starts to say something, but I don't give him the time. 

I unleash the lightning.

[King Ghidorah]

It doesn't go the way I'd hoped. Rather than running, or panicking, or obligingly dying, Coxley dives forward, rolling under the arcs of astral charge, and drives his sword into my stomach. 

It hurts, which is something I did not expect at all. The blade fails to break through my scales, but I can feel the blow, and my mood isn't improved by the sudden barrage of arrows that erupts from the trees, fired by bowmen in hoods and dark clothing who seem to melt out of the forest like ghosts (which are an idea I find profoundly offensive - when something has been destroyed, it should stay gone). Any one of their primitive projectiles I could safely ignore, but there are so many of them that they practically set my hide ringing. 

I try to grab the bandit leader's sword, but he's already pulled it back, and he makes a pair of stinging, shallow slashes across my chest, scoring my scales, actually managing to mar my glorious, shining perfection! Another storm of arrows erupts from the trees, and it seems like every one of them strikes me in the back. 

It hasn't come up before now, but confronted with someone who can actually fight, surrounded by what must be at least a dozen archers, I'm suddenly faced with the fact that I have no idea how to use this body. Previously, my raw power had been enough, but I'm outflanked, and Coxley is both skilled and surprisingly powerful. 

I roar, and spit a bolt of energy, but he sidesteps, and kicks me in the side of the knee, quickly tumbling out of reach when nothing is achieved. I turn to follow, hands thrown wide and sparking, the staccato rhythm of my glorious electric discharge raking a lethal arc across the trees! Several of the archers are struck, screaming their lives away as my peerless lightning blasts the flesh from their bones, but Coxley merely frowns, ducking and weaving as my efforts flicker harmlessly around him. 

My frustration is growing. I kick and flail, lunging and swinging my limbs in great, powerful arcs, but Coxley evades easily, his lips twitching as he tries not to smile. How dare he mock me like this! This bandit is just another tiny, scurrying creature - unique, yes, and worth appreciating for that, but nowhere near grand enough to challenge me. Coxley is no Destroyer. The power of a star doesn't burn within his chest! My one and only defeat, beneath the claws and flashing balefire of an opponent whose immaculate ferocity and unrelenting force were unmatched across eons, will not be followed by humiliation at the hands of a MINIATURE THIEF!

He thrusts again, in the same spot as before, and this time the man actually draws a single drop of golden blood. 

My vision goes red. 

Responding to the anger, something inside me stirs. The eyes of my two dormant heads snap open, shining like dying stars. There is no intelligence there - I'm still alone within myself - but my desperate rage has roused them nonetheless, and I can see through their eyes. 

The difference between having two points of reference when aiming and having six is almost as marked as the difference between having hands and having wings. 

Coxley presses the attack, slashing again. I swing my claws at him and he sidesteps easily. I step back, focusing all six of my eyes on him as another barrage of arrows - this one much less intense than before - shatters against my burnished body.   

Gathering my power and triangulating carefully, I attack. Three streams of golden lightning converge on the bandit leader, spiraling around each-other as the energies intertwine. The look of surprise on Brock Coxley's face when they catch him in the chest, erupting from his back in a shower of ash and bloody embers, that moment of confusion when the little light behind his eyes goes out and everything he was is lost forever, is nothing less than superb!

As I suspected, knowledge of what I'm taking away adds a whole new dimension to the act.  

My two pairs of auxiliary eyes return to dormancy as I turn from my fallen foe. I sweep sheets of power across the forest for a  solid half-minute, and the archers disappear, either turned to ashes or returned to the shadows. Soon, the crackle of burning undergrowth and the rustle of the wind in the leaves is the only sound that remains. 

My lips part in a savage snarl of victory.

I. Win! 

[King Ghidorah]

Returning to Coxley, I crouch down to retrieve his corpse from where it lies crumpled in the road. In the shadow of blasted and blackened trees, with flames crackling nearby, I hold it aloft by the collar of his chainmail, the links bending and twisting beneath my golden grip as I pull his mortal shell up to where I can look it in the eye.

The dead man's gaze is wide, staring at nothing in sightless shock, and his face, formerly so animated, is slack and pale. There's a smoking hole in his torso the size of my thigh, bounded by melted mail, charred meat and flaking ashes. 

"You thought you were clever," I tell him. "But in the end, you weren't as smart as you thought. Still, other thinking creature's looked up to you - you had ambitions, and you inspired followers. You were a part of the tapestry of life here, and now that you're gone, you leave a Brock Coxley-shaped hole that nothing else can fill."

I pull the body close, the head lolling against its shoulder as I hiss in his ear: 

"Thank you for that." 

Then, I take him apart.

I focus on my Omnilium, feeling it calling to its muted echo within Coxley. His body begins to glow softly, whispy rainbow streamers rising from his skin, and from the wound that killed him. Slowly, deliciously, the glow spreads, and his features begin to blur, his form softening at the edges at it dissolves into a mass of prismatic light! He spirals down my arm in probing, serpentine coils, and minute by minute vanishes, melting into the shining scales upon my chest, becoming one with the glorious golden expanse that he foolishly mistook for armor. 

With the possible exception of the mega-pyramid garden-cities of ancient Venus as they sank beneath fouled, boiling seas and choke on their blackened sky, it's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

In very little time at all, not a trace of the bandit leader remains, except for a deep sense of satisfaction on my part, and a sizable addition to my Omnilium reserves. 

I bare my teeth, grinning viciously, unable to stop. Today, I've become more than just a destroyer! 

I am now an un-maker, and that knowledge, coupled with the lingering, vibrant desolation of extinguishing an individual, keeps me laughing all the way to the forest's edge.

[King Ghidorah]

The sun is setting when I finally leave the forest. Liquid and shimmering above distant treetops, its piercing orange and dynamic crimson immediately set my lustrous golden body ablaze with the vivid colors of dying daylight as I step from beneath the shaded canopy and into the open air once more.  

Behind me, the forest is burning - though not terribly well, unfortunately. For all the singed, blasted, blackened timber and smoldering undergrowth I've left in my wake today, very little of it actually caught fire! Besides which, the flames aren't going to spread very far in such a lush, verdant woodland. 

It's frustrating. There was a time when I could have drained the entire wood of its vital essence in a matter of hours, leaving a dried and lifeless bad-land ripe for incineration (a lusciously sibilant word for one of my all-time favorite sights), but this is the best I could do under my current circumstances. 

As with the standing-stones, I'll have to come back here when I've regained my proper form. Until then, I should focus on what's in front of me.  

The road falls away, plunging into a vast basin filled with rolling fields and wooded dells. There's a lake at the bottom, ringed by sparse forests, and fed by a waterfall which tumbles from a rocky red cliff on the far side of the valley. The river glows like magma as it crosses the rusty lip of the falls, lit brilliantly by the sunset at the very moment it plunges into the shadow of the rock-face - though not quite as brilliantly as me.

Even so, it's the farms and villages that catch my eye. 

Dotted throughout the hills and nestled in the glens are several small clusters of architecture: wooden cottages with thatched roofs, clustered around larger, two-and three-story stone buildings, raised from red stone blocks. Along the packed-earth roads that run between these small settlements are stand-alone farm-houses, with their barns, paddocks and whitewashed sheds. The new and unfamiliar core-concepts behind farming (such careful nurturing! Such effort!) make the prospect of reducing them to ruin so sweet that I barely restrain myself from sprinting down into the valley to do exactly that!

It's the castle that stops me. Huddled beside the lake is a sturdy stone keep, with four fortified towers of varying heights surrounding a high central spire. It's built from blocks of the rusty rock that seems to dominate this valley, and spreading out around its curtain-walls is a settlement - a town with streets, and even a few buildings larger than a barn, which wraps around one side of the lake. 

I know about castles - I've smashed enough of them over the eons to get the general idea. They're at the center of things - not just as defenses, but for political administration (and oh, how elegant, the way the will to resist crumbles when they're gone!). This isn't just a few random villages: this is a polity. There's something complex and unique here, beyond just the individuality of the people who live in it. Laid out before me is an entire way of life in detail - the identity of not just a single person, but a community, itself made of smaller communities - and those made of people! 

I'm going to ravage this place!

I can feel it in my bones, more than a desire, but a kind of urgent knowledge. I'm going to raze this lush valley to the ground, and leave it a smoking pit, spewing toxic fumes into a weeping sky! The fires on the houses, the moldering trees and the boiling lake, the glorious chorus of screams, mixed with my laughter as I caper in the blasted ruins of the keep... I can see it - practically taste it! 

But it will have to wait - I need to get stronger before I annihilate these people, and while I do that, I'm going to to explore their little hidden worlds. 
 
I can't help but grin. I've never had the ground-level view of a place like this before - only the vague core-concept of what I was taking from the universe,  as part of the larger tapestry of a dying planet. Such dark delight-in-destruction, despite lacking in the exquisite detail available to me now, has been enough to sustain my passion for millennia uncounted.  

Erasing Brock Coxley was everything I'd hoped, but that was just a test-run, and an abbreviated one at that.

I suspect that this experience is going to be special in ways I can't even conceive.

Ghidorah has reached the Duchy of Harnburg. Soon, he will meet a variety of people, many of whom don't deserve him, and have awesome adventures doing awful things.

If he survives the upcoming attempt on his life, that is! Stay tuned!