01-19-2017, 04:35 AM
(This post was last modified: 01-25-2018, 02:29 AM by King Ghidorah.
Edit Reason: There was no period at the end of the post.
)
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.
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.
Quote: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!