Crossroads [Exemplary]

[King Ghidorah]

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Venus is in ruins. 

We soar above the boiling oceans on wings of gold, my gleaming scales the only light in a scorched and blackened sky riven by clouds of sulfurous ash. A half-sunken continent stretches out below me, the shattered peaks of terraced pyramid-cities squatting silently among the waves beside the crushed and flooded domes of their suburban arcologies: all that remains of the great garden-megalopolis that was the Venusian capital. 

It was the work of millennia, a wonder of the galaxy without equal - architecture blended seamlessly with botanical beauty, a living jungle that was also a bustling city; Mountains of metal and stone stretched from one horizon to the other, their platformed slopes home to vast forest-canopies and flocks of brilliantly colored telepathic birds. Below the trees, and deep within the pyramids, civil society thrived, a race of artists and scholars, psychics without peer in the galactic Western Spiral Arm.    

Not a growing thing nor thinking mind remains now - not one patch of ground exists that hasn't been bathed in cosmic lightning or pulverized beneath our mighty stomping feet. The scorched and bent durasteel skeleton of their sky-dome, Venus's premier spaceport and the heart of their doomed efforts at self-defense, rises above the churning red  seas like a broken rib-cage ten kilometers wide. Our left head rakes a bolt of astral fire across it as we pass and it half-collapses, slowly deforming and subsiding into the sea with a thunderous metallic groan. 

We cackle and spit more lightning, further ravaging the sinking ruins as we pass, leaving behind only hurricane-winds, burning rubble and churning seas. Tiny, dark shapes are tossed by the waves, lapping and pounding against half-drowned bones of a dead civlization: swirling rafts of ashes, corpses and debris. 

Ahead of us, something moves in the red-tinted gloom, rising from under the ocean between two low, broken pyramids. We know (because this is a dream of something which has already happened) what it is: one last war machine sent to stand against me - Venus' last knight; the very pinnacle of their technology, cast in their own image for the purpose of saving their world but completed too late. Now it's nothing more than a desperate attempt at revenge for a murdered culture, and we know it's going to fail. 

We descend, skimming just above the waves, steaming spray wetting our body as savage anticipation rises in our throats.The dark shape grows larger as we close in - and then an electric crackle races along its spine, a sapphire-white nimbus dancing down three bony ridges of jagged dorsal plates. A battle cry like the warped tolling of a great and terrible gong splits the sky and batters the waves, echoing off the ruins - and the sharp, sour taste of fear fills our mouths.

We swoop higher, pulling up short out of sheer panicked shock. He isn't supposed to be here. He can't be here! This isn't his time! It's not even his planet!

But He doesn't care - the Anomaly, the Warrior, the great saurian god-beast whose every heartbeat is world-killing anger and blue solar balefire, stands here in place of the Venusians' tin soldier, and the history we know is just one more trash-heap drifting on the tide.

Suddenly we're smaller, younger - soft and vulnerable, our wingspan stunted and our scales lusterless and dull. The Warrior is practically on top of us, towering above us, three times our size. He flexes his mighty clawed fingers. His powerful tail crashes against a ruin, sending masonry tumbling into the sea, and his thick, massive legs churn the water to froth with every step he takes. His predatory eyes narrow to slits - and as he curls back his upper lip in a vicious hundred-dagger snarl, we can see white light building, shining blindingly from between his teeth. 

We wheel about in the air, try to run, to flee into the spoiled and poisoned heavens - but the boiling sky is full of enormous rainbow-winged moths, blocking our escape. We can hear the hissing, throaty growl of primal energies racing along our murderer's dorsal crest, undercut by a subtler whine as the Warrior readies his most fearsome weapon. 

And when he unleashes that piercing lance of elemental destruction from within his fanged maw, the very flame of creation itself which our diminished form is completely unable to withstand, in the moment before it obliterates us utterly we see its glare reflected in the compound eyes of ten-thousand sanctimonious insects. 

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