The Other King of the Monsters

[King Ghidorah]

I've just woken up from a dream of somebody I'm not sure I want to kill. 

That's never happened before, being unsure I wanted to kill something. The privileged excitement of ruining, beyond all hope of recovery, things that are beautiful, complex and unique, is what I live for. The bright tranquility I feel while floating golden and perfect above the desolation I've wrought, and the darkly intoxicating thrill of my own irresistible inevitability as I bring a final nightfall upon the dreams of an entire thinking species - those are the things that give me purpose. 

But now I'm confused. I think the smiling shape in the darkness just saved my life, which is also a new idea. Lives don't get saved around me, not even my own.

I've never had language before, either. Sure, I picked up a few words here and there, gleaned from the signals of doomed civilizations as I soared between the stars  - the name they gave me, for instance, after I destroyed the Venusians, whispered across the galaxy in reverence and fear - but as far as vocabulary goes, I've never seen the point. "Bow down", "you're worthless", and "Die" are the only things I've ever wanted, or needed, to tell anybody. I could say them just fine with my golden lightning, my warbling laughter, and my mighty stomping feet. 

Having words for things is doing something I don't understand to the way I think, adding a new crispness and specificity (such satisfying new ideas, so final in their aesthetics) to my stream of consciousness.  All I can say for certain is that it changes me, changes the way I frame my experience, and I'm not sure I like it. 

I open my eyes - only one pair of eyes! -  and I try to spread my wings.

That's when I scream.

"OMNI," I howl at the blank emptiness above me, no longer uncertain, my voice ragged and high and wholly unfamiliar. "WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME?!"

My wings, my glorious, golden wings, are gone. In their place are two... two arms! With fingers! (Such a horrible word! They sound like a parasite!)

It's unthinkable. It's the worst thing that's ever happened to me, and I'm certain I was decapitated not too long ago. 

Of course, that record doesn't stand for long.

In despair and confusion, I look at myself - only to discover that I have no neck! Just a stump on my shoulders with a head on top! I have a spot on my own back that I can't see! It's ridiculous, but my other two heads are even worse off. They're fused with my shoulders, comatose and unseeing, lacking even my pitiful excuse for a perch. 

An impossible, shattering truth dawns. This isn't my body! 

On top of my missing wings, and my missing necks - and I'm beginning to suspect two missing brains - my legs are far too long. My feet are strange, stretched out, with too many toes. I'm wearing pants, an entirely new and extremely stupid idea, but when I try to take them off they reveal something so awful that my one remaining brain rejects it outright. 

The only parts of my body that actually look like me are my chest, and my hide, covered in peerless bronze scales.  

I scream again, and I lash out with my lightning, not caring what I hit. The astral charge feels stunted, strangled - present but unable to flow properly through this mangled form. Still, I can't argue with the result. 

As it happens, I'm standing in a little basin of water at the center of a city (such a small way to describe something so much fun to ruin). The civilization that built it must have been advanced, because the buildings are thick and tall, with towers of glass and shiny metal. I can see my reflection in their polished walls, a cruel parody of my former glory, leering at me with an a flattened, hideous face in the moment before they shatter. One of them gets cut in half, and tumbles into the streets, burning as it falls.

I take a step, crashing through a skyscraper, and entire blocks crumble beneath my feet.

That's when I realize that my body isn't the only thing wrong here. This city has no inhabitants! There are no tiny creatures fleeing along its asphalt avenues, no little machines try in vain to pierce my glorious hide. 

Nothing is trying to stop me. 

In fact, beyond the edges of the city, nothing is all I see. Endless white, more terrible in its way than even the Anomaly who struck me down, and utterly empty. There isn't even a real horizon, just a vanishing point where the totally blank sky meets the totally blank firmament (which is another word I don't like). 

This is a... a prison.

No.

"NeaAOoo!" 

In a rage, I summon the lightning again, letting it build inside my chest. The power-flux still seems choked off somehow, like the tiny amount of energy this body can handle is barely worth my time, but when it erupts from my mouth - and my hands! - it still behaves exactly the way I expect it to. Buildings burst and crumble. Streets explode. I sweep arcs of crackling golden power back and forth across the city, only pausing to gather more astral charge as I reduce the entire metropolis  to rubble, smoke and flames in under a minute.

It tires me out enough to calm me down, and I'd be lying if I said it wasn't extremely satisfying, but without people, little people, looking up at me and seeing the ultimate truth of their pointless existences, its just not the same. 

I kick over some burning piles of rubble, but my heart isn't in it anymore. Even the fire smells wrong - burning wood, not burning metal, and not even a whiff of life-essence.  I turn to go... and I stop.

I feel my face move in a way that it never has before. There's something else missing. 

I take another step. And another. My footsteps are quiet. I stomp. I run around the border, where the burning city meets the endless white.

I jump, and the ground doesn't shake when I land. 

No. Absolutely not. No, no, no, no no. 

No. This does Not.  Happen. To Me.

If what I'm suspecting is true, I'm not even able to be angry about it. This is outside of anger, beyond it. 

This is an abomination. (Which is an excellent word, but one I don't have time to appreciate right now.)

"Holy hell," says a crackling, distorted voice behind me. "This is a new one." 

I whip around, baring my teeth, and hiss. A group of four bipedal figures, their bodies rigid and mostly white, with arms, and fingers, and only one head each, are looking up at me.  They're short, but not small enough to trample beneath my feet. In fact, they're almost my size.

"A tiny city," says a different voice, similarly distorted. 

All of the figures look the same. Each one has black patches on the joints of their armored shells, and each carries what I recognize as a directed-energy weapon. 

 "And a big Prime," says another. 

There's something I have to do. I've never done it before, and the very idea is vile - King Ghidorah doesn't ask questions! There's nothing I've ever wanted to know that I couldn't find out by trying to destroy what was in front of me.

"You," I growl tentatively, not speaking to any one of them in particular. "How tall are you?"

They all look at each other. One of them moves its shoulders, up and down. "About a meter and half?" it says. 

My legs feel week. I sit down heavily on a burning building, not caring about the flames. 

This can't be happening. 

I'm small.  



   

[King Ghidorah]

The creatures in armor (I'm sure now that it's something they're wearing) keep on talking, long after the fires I set have begun to die. They talk about 'Primes', and 'Secondaries', and Omnilium. Still seated on the rubble, I listen in a vague, half-attentive sort of way, barely hearing them.

Mostly, I can't get over the fact that I'm just so small! Tiny, in fact. I'm smaller than one of my old body's toenails! It's no wonder my power feels choked off - it has only this stunted skin-mite-sized form to flow into! The power is still mine, though, the ancient force of a matchless cosmic catastrophe: I am it, and it is me, and we are I, even if I am no longer three. It would be impossible to separate us. Even in this sorry state, I'm still King Ghidorah, and while I may be trapped here without my wings, the armored idiots are talking about civilizations now, and warp-gates to other places.

Inconcievable outrage and lust for apocalyptic vengeance upon the smiling thief who did this to me aside, I may be able to have a very fulfilling time here after all.

There's something else, too. 

I open one of my hands, and I see the first thing I've liked since arriving in this place. It's a many-colored orb of light, and if I didn't know better I would swear it was whispering promises.

(Promises are a grand idea - an expressed inevitability. I intend to make a lot of them.) 

I study the Omnilium. With enough of it, supposedly, I can have anything I want. That's good, because for the first time in my countless eons of existence, I want more than my next meal, and the opportunity to boil someone else's dreams. 

I can tell instinctively, though, that I'm going to need more of this new power in order to get what I desire  -  a lot more.

"I want my body back," I say out loud, reabsorbing the little the ball of raw potential into my dazzling golden scales, and interrupting a speech about some supposedly-wonderful empire which these bland fools want me to serve. They'd have about as much luck asking me to put this mocking insult of a false city back together. 

I burn empires.

One of the armored figures starts to respond, but I cut them off, rising from my seat. 

"In order to get it, I want more Omnilium."

The one who revealed his height to me earlier - and what an odd sensation, to be able to tell one of the tiny creatures I've trampled underfoot for so long apart from any of the others - says, "Well, if you come with us -" 

"But first, now that I've been brought down to your pitiful level, I want to examine in excruciating exactitude precisely how you miniscule, scurrying hive-builders EXPIRE." 

"Uhhh..."

All four of them stare, frozen.

In that moment, I unleash the golden lighting, a warbling, joyous cackle bubbling in my throat. The energy crackles and writhes as it erupts from my palms in spiralling arcs. There's a rhythym to it: a two-count while I summon the power. Another two-count, punctuated by the singing shriek of bolts of cosmic energy! A single beat, followed by another lash of my glorious golden fury! A three-count, and so it goes. The darting, leaping symphony of my power washes over them, and they try to evade, rolling and stumbling! Two try to run. Two of them kneel and fire back, little red blasts of light that splash harmlessly off my shining chest.

When my energy strikes them, the effect is more dramatic.

Armor cracks, blackening and bursting on contact, sending scorched shards flying. Bodies are blown backwards, skidding and rolling, leaking streaks of crimson from the fissures in their useless shells!  

Only one gets away, fleeing into the featureless void.

I stalk over to one of the corpses, and after some fiddling with my new fingers, which are far more complex to operate than it looks like they should be, I rip its helmet off.

The face underneath resembles the reflection of my own that I glimpsed (such a precise word, that) earlier. A flat face with two eyes, rolling sightlessly, one small mouth occupying the lower portion, and a pronounced nose. It lacks my horns, and the ears are absurdly small and round, but even so, if it had my handsome, shining scales, we could almost be brothers. 

Of course, if it had my scales it wouldn't be dead.

I walk over to another, and rip its helmet off as well, the clasps and buckles popping beneath my grip. This one has softer features, and different colored hair.

"What did you think you were going to do today?" I ask the corpse, baring my teeth in joyous savagery. "I'll bet this wasn't it, was it?" 


It doesn't answer. It doesn't need to. I'm getting all sorts of ideas. 

Before, when I brought worlds to ruin, one of my favorite parts of the experience was always the revelation, the moment when they understood. I was the end of the world, so many worlds, and in being that, I showed them just how little everything they valued truly meant. The ability to read moods seems to have deserted me, but there was a time when I could track decline of a civilization by the depths of their despair. 

I ruined planets. I never really had the opportunity - or even the concept, except in rare cases where a world turned out to have a guardian that could match my stature - to ruin individuals. They were simply too small for me to take notice of them except as a group.It was how they reacted en-mass to the destruction of their works, their cities, and the biospheres that raised them up where the meat of the experience lay (not that ravaging those things wasn't tremendously fulfilling in its own right).

Now that I'm on their level, however, there are so many little differences, even among these three, who were clearly trying hard to look as similar as possible.  Each one has a brain, like me: a perspective. It follows then that each one of these creatures contains a world for me to ruin. The differences are what makes each act of destruction special. Uniqueness, the loss of a thing that will never come again, is where the beauty of it lies. 
 
I still want my body back - but now I think I'll have to find a way to switch between my original form and this one.

Ruining a planet one person at a time...

I'm going to have to make my next victim tell me about itself before I kill it. 

[King Ghidorah]

There's nothing left to do on this sad little battlefield. After spending just a bit more time admiring my work, I strike out into the blank, featureless void. According to the gaggle of helpless buffoons I just slaughtered, gates to other places can be found here, places with people, and cities. Places with biospheres, and actual skies. 

If I'm to get more Omnilium, and if I'm to enjoy myself at all, I need to find one of those gates! 

My new form's legs are long, and with some practice, they prove to be far more graceful than what I'm used to. At first, traveling over land at such a brisk pace relative to my size is a novel enough sensation to keep me from getting bored. I don't think I've ever spent so much time on the ground before while moving from one place to another. The entertainment value of legs that are longer than my torso doesn't hold up, however, in the face of such completely dull scenery. This mode of travel doesn't have the same inherent thrill of unconquerable freedom that flight does. I used to spend millennia soaring through the star-flecked void of interstellar space on my shining, sun-bright wings, and if the threat of monotony loomed, I could always summon a cosmic cocoon and hibernate until I reached my destination.   

It was flat-out impossible to get bored on a planet.

I try throwing some lightning to liven things up, but there's nothing here to destroy. It just leaves sad little scorch-marks on the plain white expanse, which quickly fade from view. Fortunately, at about the same time I'm ready to start screaming from sheer understimulation, a shape appears in the distance. I increase my pace.

The object turns out to be farther away than it looks, but the journey is much less arduous now that I can see my goal - and when I'm finally close enough to make out details, I can barely contain my anticipation (which is a delicious word, magnifying the feeling it names). 

It's an archway, carefully carved from stone - and within the archway, a shimmering, membranous weft in space. As it grow nearer, I can smell things growing, the scent of water and soil. The smell of life! 

We'll have to do something about that.

The ululations of my laughter echo off the masonry as I step through the portal, and into a far more interesting place. 

King Ghidorah has entered Camelot. Gods help them all.