Godzilla: Age of Monsters: An Age Before

by Omegazed

Long before the age of monsters, the stars were tread by beasts more ancient than the worlds. And of them all, the Ghidorah reigned supreme. Oneshot.

When the stars first burned in the darkness, life began to form. Worlds coalesced from the dust, giving birth to barren rock that would one day fill with water that would teem with life, all to one day bear life, spread plants, and form sentience to spread towards those stars that had begun the process. From stars to world to stars again; such was the process that life took to fill the universe with life. But for every rule, there will inevitably an exception: a break in this process that would skip a step or add its own. Inevitably, as is the way of life, it would find a way to get around these rules and create something special. But this exception was a quick one, perhaps heralding the grandeur and madness that this would herald. From star to world to star again.

This one skipped the middle.

The first markings of life grew without worlds, simply growing into existence out of the stars themselves. They ignored the rules of life, of time and space and necessity, existing as themselves wholly on their own wills. Some grew in the darkness where there were no stars; gibbering, squamous things that could not be called life, only abomination. Others formed of light and time, and formed great civilizations to conquer not the stars, but reality itself. But others were more simple, and simplicity has its own kind of power. From the stars themselves were these ones born, and like the stars they shone in the darkness. They would be the First Kings, the Stellar Lords, the Primal Emperors. They fed on the light of the stars and grew great and terrible. They fed on the others that grew and devoured them in the darkness, or in their great spires. They did not rule through mind and madness, or through will and manipulation. They would rule through might and terror, shining in the glory of the stars as they consumed all life.

This was how the story began, when the first of them came and learned to consume. When they learned to control the mind and break the spirit, when they learned to form around themselves the matter of stars to create from nothing. It was then they named themselves the Lords That Brings Fear Upon Wings of Gold. That they named themselves the Kings of Terror.

It was in this age before the stars dimmed, that Ghidorah rose to rule.

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2.27 billion BCE

It began simply enough. A burning yellow star, the sign of a healthy plasma reaction, sat in a cluster of similar or younger stars near the center of the galaxy. These places were the breeding grounds of eternity, the nests of the great dragons that swam through space. The star itself was a sign of the Ghidorah that would emerge into the universe, the creatures scales being some variation of the colour formed from the luminous body. It could vary, of course; a blue so bright as to seem white, a yellow burnt to brown, a red blazing pink or broken to black. The colour of Ghidorah was as varied as the stars, just one point that marked them as being the children of such things. And now was the time for another child to be born.

The roiling surface of the yellow orb began to churn with greater force, solar flares and coronal loops swirling outward from a central point. The surface swelled like an ocean in a hurricane, millions of tons of stellar matter being ejected from the bubbling pools of fire that heralded the beasts creation. With a roar that filled space with a psychic cry, the Ghidorah broke free from the fire, three heads raised high and golden wings spread wide. The golden newborn rose tall, 20 meters tall above the surface of the blazing orb. Compared to the great sphere, it was still less than a speck, invisible against the grand light of the star from which it had been born. Still, as it took to space with great soundless flaps of its shining wings, the light of the star reflected off its shimmering scales and made it seem a star itself.

As it cleared the last blazing bridge of coronal energies, the Ghidorah looked in every direction, sensing the universe at large to find its prey. Turning to look back towards the star, it could see its parents tail lashing from around the other side, the wingtips poking around on either side. It could sense the star being devoured bit by bit, a process that would take many thousands of years. Only those that would be Prime could feast on stars, and the true lord of the Ghidorah indulged in this fact as its child vanished into the void.

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3,277 years later

The Ghidorah had at last found its first world to consume. The other worlds were still young, and this one had nothing so great as even a sentient creature, the mightiest beast a cat-sized predator with a low profile and thick claws. Not so much as a mouthful for the dragon, but the life essence was as good as anything, and the species was soon extinct. The grass faded to brown and crumbled, the tall spikes of twisted green that stretched a dozen meters into the sky cracked and split apart, the oceans grew darker with the decaying matter. The very life of the world itself was drained, yellow light seeping from the world like blood from a wound to flow into the dragon's jaws. It tasted the power, felt it fill its insides, felt itself grow. Larger, not by much, but the dragon grew until the world was a grey rock devoid of so much as a soft breeze.

The Ghidorah felt itself being molded, growing smarter and stronger, knowing just what it had done and why through more than simple instinct. For the first time since birth, it grew, and as it matured it felt its purpose become clear in its three minds. Consume, conquer, control, create. Rule all things as one of many gods, become the lord that would master reality. It knew its path, and as it took to the darkening night, rocks formed from nothing around it to shield it from the harshness of the universe as it faded out of reality and sped through the darkness faster than the light could catch it.

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45,992 years later

Its first sapient race was one of hard flesh and wriggling tendrils, long fangs and deep black eyes that knew of what lurked beyond. That had grasped early the lore of stars and what rested beyond the light, and had grasped a portion of that might for themselves to raise up their civilization. Casting aside what forms they once held, they molded themselves into the likeness of the Unlight Lords, raising tall black monoliths inscribed with moving runes of insanity into the stones, and filled the black seas with millions of their young. One day, they would grow strong, dangerous, an eldritch race consumed with dark knowledge of the horrible things beyond the veil and the masters which they shaped themselves after.

That day would never come.

Ghidorah descended down on them with its cackling cries, piercing their warped minds with terror. Its golden scales seared their black vision with its glory, its unbridled might spat in the face of their squelching forms, and their blasted magics were met with golden fury that struck them with the power of stars. They screamed without mouths, bled without blood, and died as their unlife was sucked clean by the dragon. It drank in their power, and grew. Their lore filled its mind, their magics its veins, and their blasphemous mutations sought to corrupt its flesh and turn it into a amorphous beast like them. But Ghidorah were not to be turned, and the madness fled before its golden might. In its place sat a fourth head, and it cried with the others. Ghidorah grew, watching as the monoliths crumbled to dust and the seas grew still. Ghidorah went back into the dark, to find another meal.

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4,364,677 years later

It had been many long ages since its birth, and nigh-on a thousand great worlds teaming with life had been left blasted in its wake. Through this, it had grown, 5 heads, 10 heads, 50. 99 heads adorned its great body, and the first of these had grown larger and more cunning than them all. As it drank in the screams and deaths of the billions of hairy beasts below it, it could feel the final twitch of growth begin. It felt the flesh split, the eyes begin to open, as the last soul filled its maws and another race died. Not fully of course; some would escape into the stars, to repopulate elsewhere. It was the only wise way of ensuring a great harvest in the future, and a future civilization to conquer. But now, it grew, and as the head burst up in a scream, the neck snacking out of golden flesh with a burst of light, the Ghidorah knew it had at last come to what it sought since birth.

As it spat a hundred golden bolts into the skies, the heavens ripped open and ushered forth a god far beyond the Ghidorah below. Ten thousand heads gazed down on its, a single leviathan one in the center snaking easily around the moon the orbited the planet. The Ghidorah so far beyond the one below as to be a mountain before an ant looked down with 20,000 blood-red eyes, and its thoughts crashed down like a vast wave upon the younger monster. Feelings of pride, of will, of command, of foresight, of love and hatred and knowing entered the younger's mind, and words that were nothing so simple burned into its very being, and it became that will at last, as it was always meant to be.

Arise, Kradoram. Prime of the Ghidorah.

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1.985 billion BCE

Ghidorah was curled up on the now dead planet it had just finished devouring. Many would find it hard to imagine a creature who's race was literally named the Kings of Terror curled up anywhere, even the ruins of a dead civilization that was that way through its own might. Of course, Ghidorah did not need sleep, nor food or air, or any other sustenance of any kind other than the sunlight. But such things were besides any reasonable point, as was the fact that the Ghidorah was curled up around the still smoldering ruins of a previously great civilization. It had no reason to be doing so, and as such, that was the exact reason it was doing so. The very act of doing something entirely pointless was an indulgence that Ghidorah were only too happy to partake in; completely meaningless acts that existed sole to show how entirely superior they were in every way to every other lifeform in existence. This wasn't, as many would no doubt think, an act of bravado or contemptuous arrogance on the part of the golden dragon, even if it would have been entirely justified by its very real and rather significant superiority to every form of life it had encountered so far. It was simply an inalienable aspect of what it was to be Ghidorah; a maliceless pride that imbued every action.

It watched, curled up in the ruins, as its siblings floated through space nearby, working their way easily through the remnants of the surviving fleet, devouring the life or crushing the minds of those who still chose to resist uselessly. A few more planets were still populated in this star system, a few more hundred million lives to suck dry. Such was the existence of a race that could be considered gods.

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1.844 billion BCE

Floating around the star, the two hundred headed dragon looked down at the boiling orb and smiled. For a Ghidorah, there was nothing in the universe so brilliant as a star, especially one that matched their colour. The radiant little neutron stars gave birth to the fiercest and eventually most powerful Ghidorah, but they grew slowly and required huge amounts of light to fulfill their cravings until they were Prime. The smallest, most peaceful of Ghidorah were those of a white dwarf, a race of silver and dazzling white that were rather weak compared to most, but had a wonderful penchant for cunning. Those born from the red giants were huge, prone to using fire rather than gravity rays and tinting their rays with that colour, a prideful bunch that enjoyed painting themselves as gods even more than other Ghidorah. Those born from super or hypergiant were born large and powerful, but often were slower to do anything than the others, content with just devouring whatever happened to cross their path as they drifted through the darkness. Some Ghidorah decided to make their young in stranger places, like the strange quark stars that spawned the mad purple Ghidorah that knew what lay beyond, or in the collapsing behemoths of soon to be super and hypernova, the resulting beasts being like raging fires themselves; scales encased in lightning and flame like the surface of a star. Some, those considered mad even by Ghidorah, would make their spawn in the roiling death of stars, those black holes both wandering aimlessly or sitting titanic within the center of galaxies. And because each piece of a Ghidorah remains within contact with the original, making the countless spawn of a Prime forever linked to that Prime in a psychic connection that went beyond simple time and space, those that did this with theses voids in the universe knew that their offspring lived, changed beyond recognition compared to their sires, not trapped within these singularities, but unwilling to blight their kind with the sight of themselves, their solid black forms drinking in such light that one would never know if it was a black hole or a living creature that drank in the very fabric of existence.

But for this Prime, one born of a yellow star and clad in golden scales, only a star of similar kind to that which birthed it would do for its own children. And so as dozens of golden scales detached from its body and fell into the vast gravitational pull of the blazing sphere, it grinned with two hundred maws as they sank to the burning core, drank in the fires and molded themselves into new forms, to eventually be released back into the universe as newborn Ghidorah in some ten thousand years when they finished gestating in the core and rode the waves of light outwards in a great explosion of life, then to terrorize the universe as did their parent. It was, in its own way, a beautiful process that truly made the Ghidorah birthed from the heavens themselves.

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1.199 billion BCE

The Prime Ghidorah flew easily through the darkness, 542 heads gazing at the night beyond with calm eyes of deep red. Flanking it was a cloud of gold, some thirty thousand children of its own and its offspring, generations of Ghidorah traveling in a great hive-swarm. They had come to a great pocket of life, the place where this one had found its first pray a billion years before. It had been wise to leave them, to let them rebuild and repopulate, spreading their ancient empire through ten thousand star systems and ruling over the space between as vast horrors. They had grown well, some as large as buildings, others as large as mountains, some morphing and melting until they were living seas that could rise up at any moment and drag into their depths any that would disturb the waves. Spires extended into space like pins from a cushion, entire hemispheres of worlds and moons coated black and inscribed with glowing green that weaved great patterns over many millions of kilometers, or forged arcane circles over entire portions of the galaxy.

These black lords had long since grown terrible, mastering magics to move the stars and rend space, seeking ever to pull open the veil and let in things that were never meant to see the light of stars. These creatures had enslaved countless worlds, made dark pacts with things with neither reason nor purpose, seeking only to rule and devour and subvert another reality to their dark whims. How many dark libraries were risen to hold the vast stores of blasphemous knowledge? How many crypts were made to house those dead that sought to not remain so, that scathed at their coffins and moaned in the darkness? How great did the monoliths rise, black spires of stone and metal that hurt the eye to look upon and clawed at the unprepared mind in ravenous unreality?

These lords, the N'ghft Cai'lur, sought to raise up this great empire and cast down all who stood in their way. They had long forgotten the doom brought upon them by Kradoram so long ago, thinking themselves invincible against anything within the mortal realm. With knowledge of the blackest kind, with power that rent entire systems apart into gibbering madness, with moving moons for ships and spires that called form horrors that would sweep the stars clear from the skies and leave all in darkness, they thought themselves safe.

The universe was never kind to the complacent.

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1.199 billion BCE

In the distant future of that moment, those few who still remembered their long gone service to those dark lords would tell of a great war. A war that lasted 14,000 years, spanning a full seventh of the galaxy, involving hundreds of races and thousands of worlds. They would speak in whispered tones of how their masters had ruled the stars, and how the stars had grown angry and jealous at their masters power, sending forth monsters of fire and fury to smite the masters and their servants who dared to desire to rule their own fates. They would tell of how their masters cast countless magics to survive, blasted entire stars from the skies with green bolts of lightning that traveled the cosmic distances in an instant. They would speak of how the great ebony fleets went forth to fight the monsters, arcane might striking out in righteous fury. They would even speak fondly of the horrors their masters brought forth, the dark squelching things that rose from the deep caverns and the dark seas to slither onto land and gnaw at the world and those that lived there, simply to gather the power they needed to fight the star spawn that came down upon them. They would speak of how the golden devils reigned hell from the skies, scorching worlds to ash and boiling seas to vapor, cackling all the while. They would tell of how the skies warped and tore under the demons power, how gravity itself heaved and groaned under their power, entire cities tossed into space or sunk into the earth. They would tell of how the brilliant nightmares descended, sinking fangs into the flesh of their guardians or devouring them whole, how one could see the lines of life being drained vampirically from their bodies, leaving nothing but dessicated corpses in their wake. How until the very end, their masters fought, and how at the last they had cast a spell that had tore open reality itself and unleashed their greatest guardian, a true Unlight Lord from the dark beyond. The told of it as a great war, until the last of them faded into nothingness billions of years after the last of their masters died.

An eternal lie that the conquerors felt was beneath them to correct.

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The first battle was a surprise attack on a world known as Krat'nouo Hu, an outpost of a planet that was to be used for expansion outward into the next several systems. As such, it had a relatively large fleet, some 600 ships of all classes, though more than half were light ones serving as scouts. All held the same basic structure: blocky, with 9 rectangular 'arms' that swept forward from the aft, covered in green runes that often swept to a dark blue when channeling great power, no windows, no doorways; the only way in being to slide through living metal. These vessels were powerful and quick, sliding through space like swarms of wasps and stinging with eldritch might that could scour cities. Further, they could form complex matrices to channel more power, or combine into immense monoliths many dozens of kilometers in length. Filled with pride, their forms were crafted to show the unending power of the Dark Empire.

The Ghidorah came in a great swarm, formed around the great Prime that was Kradoram. The fell on the world like a golden hail, many thousands descending in a vicious cloud that spat lightning of pure gravity at the towering spires and floating monoliths that housed many tens of thousands of chitinous monsters. When faced with any normal planetary civilization, just one Ghidorah was enough, often serving to allow the younger ones to feed and grow. Against a full galactic empire though, they held back nothing, unleashing the full spectrum of terror that was the Ghidoran race. For each held not only a unique appearance, but a power as well. For all their incredible might and pride, Ghidorah were also far more cunning than one would think.

First came those toughest, the 4-legged behemoths famed for their durability and ferocity. Belching fire and gravity beams, they sailed past the fleet to make landfall, blasting apart the defenses and shattering the earth itself with their vast power in great waves of volcanic destruction. In space, those batlike monsters flew in great formations, splitting firepower and shattering formations with the ease of those master pilots whom they had consumed. The silver Ghidorah formed shields to block and redirect the eldritch beams, the brown and gold sent their minds invading the ships and turning them on each other, the purple and green unleashed warping waves of gravity that pulled the ships together and smashed them apart, the blue sent rays of hypercondensed heat burning through long lines of vessels. And at the center flew the Prime, its enormous power being focused on the greatest vessels, beams kilometers wide fully enveloping ships and annihilating them utterly. Even as they destroyed, the Ghidorah formed a net around the planet, subtly weaving the gravitational forces to their bidding. The many thousands were all linked to the mind of Kradoram, and it set them about the task with exacting precision.

All over the system, one a dozen other worlds, a dozen other Primes set about the same task, though their worlds were not inhabited. All were smaller than Kradoram, not yet ready to lead such an attack yet, though this would help them learn. For immortal beings such as Ghidorah, total destruction by a more powerful adversary was not a major problem, but it served as an annoying setback if it took a Prime thousands of years to reconstitute themselves. Against a civilization such as this, it was unlikely that anything more than a three-headed one would fall, but the possibility always remained. Still, the feast had grown grand indeed over a billion years, and not all would be able to help themselves. Those that fell in battle as part of the plan would get their feast once all was said and done, but those that fell to foolish haste would need wait until all but the dregs were devoured. Lessons learned were few for an immortal, but that simply made them all the more vital.

As the last of the ships fell flaming down to the world below, Kradoram grinned to itself. This was its meal above all others, and it was eager to taste their essence again after such long ages. It looked forward to sharing them with all its children.

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It was a good feast, if a slow one, but the Ghidorah had never lacked for time. They could afford it, their prey couldn't. One of the advantages of being immortal is that one could exploit the basic necessities of the lesser beings. Certainly, the N'ghft Cai'lur were not such easy prey they had once been; they had grown old, they could live for many hundreds of years without even the most basic sustenance, and some could continue agelessly if uninjured. But there were many ways to starve an enemy than blocking supply lines and destroying energy plants, and the Ghidorah had learned such things from long ages of devouring the sentient and sapient creatures of the universe. When it came to strategic warfare, few were as well-versed in its intricacies, or as creative in its executions.

It started with the gravity fields they laced around the world whose fleets had been pushed back or were away with other battles, worlds they couldn't simply attack the surface of for the heavy defenses or the shields that guarded them. They could have spent months or years blasting down the shields, taking casualties that would eventually heal, or else move on and leave the populous be until they had cut off all escape and could send their full force down on the worlds. But this was not a war, this was a feast, and it did not do to keep the troops hungry. So they began stripping the world clean using gravity funnels, ripping up unshielded locations, sucking up the water from the oceans to leave the nests exposed, and even funneling the oxygen into space to suffocate them. It was an elegant solution befitting the Ghidorah's sense of esthetics, if it could be called that: drain the resources the life bellow needed, wait for them to weaken or die outright, then simply funnel the resources back down to the planet so that life could flourish in the future, descend and eat the freshly dead, and then move on. Of course, as was always the case, there were some exceptions to the rule, worlds that were simply too heavily defended for such tactics to be viable. Instead, these would face the full gravitational power of the Ghidorah, entire cities being ripped up and tossed into space to be returned later as mountains of rubble, the planet's core confounded to unleash massive earthquakes and floods, or mountain ranges risen up where once great spires stretched.

Some world did not need such drastic measures, and could be handled with a more elegant touch. Certain Ghidorah more inclined to focus their powers on the esoteric could focus their own life force into spheres that would more efficiently drain the life from their prey. With dozens of these Ghidorah forming the spheres, supported by the hundreds of other Ghidorah arrayed around the planet, life could be drained from the entire world in a matter of only a few weeks, leaving the infrastructure utterly untouched and the biosphere easily repaired through simple seeding process that the more intelligent Ghidorah stored away for future use in their great stone planetoids. Such methods meant that, in a few million years, the planets would be ripe for the feasting once more. Sometimes, they would even seed a bit of themselves into the planet, to create stronger and more energy rich creatures to feast upon in the future.

Of course, the greatest threats came in the form of those fleets that had time to form up reasonable defenses around a few key worlds. Some had aid from huge fortress-moons that orbited these places, defenses unrivaled in place to defend what the N'ghft Cai'lur had reason to defend so drastically. Those planets housing their leaders were prime targets, as those individuals were personally filled with great energies; savory delicacies that any Ghidorah would risk a few millenia of healing to devour. Equally desirable and defended were those incubation worlds that were covered in vast oceans teaming with many millions or billions of gestating young. The young were ever the most delicious fount of life force, as they had yet to expend it on growing and losing it with age. These great egg clusters were among those most important feasts to the Ghidorah, and how many billions were consumed with unmatched relish could never hope to be known. As such, these were the places were the fighting was thickest, and the only times the Ghidorans ever faced even the slightest prospect of defeat.

The swarms of dragons that attacked the ships weren't the greatest fighters it should be noted, focusing on their immense durability to help them survive. Their scales naturally drank in energy, making the beams that sought to seer them black not as effective as they could have been, though they still found 'kills' through sheer firepower. The green bolts tore gaping holes through golden scales, even as golden bolts bore through black metal. Shots were warped and sent back by both sides, the forces of the universe being bent and played with by forces beyond mortal control. Gravity and space itself were turned inside out and in every direction, outside the combat zone it would have seemed like a huge bubble like flowing water, light sparking in long lines in between the distances between black and gold. In the dark of space, the Ghidorah could use power that they wouldn't risk on a planet for danger of destroying all life beyond consumption and later depopulation. Waves of gravity rolled over their foes, gripping them and crushing them, or sending entire volleys of green bolts back the way they'd come. The burning fires that some Ghidorah favored were replaced by concentrated beams of gravity focused down to a point of producing flares of plasma, boiling through the metal and stone of the Cai'lur and blasting away their dark runes. Others did the reverse, draining the ambient heat from the space around the ships and freezing it down to absolute zero, leaving nothing but cold husks to crack and shatter under the lightest force. Still others simply dove into the minds of the mortal creatures, inducing in them terror and madness at the forces they faced. These terror fields were the answer to anything that could not simply be destroyed for one reason or another, shattering the minds of those of weak will and leaving entire armadas to simply float helplessly as they were torn open like rotting carcasses under the talons of carrion birds.

There were some places, few though they were, where the Ghidorah failed and were pushed back, brought low by the dark sorceries of the Cai'lur and their summoned allies. These were the places where the Primes themselves intervened. With only 5 of them throughout the entire attack, they were limited in what they chose to do, and so came to these places where their children were unable to accomplish what was set before them. They left the consumption of all those lesser worlds to their children, for they were not so greedy as to deny their own progeny such a banquet. But for those places that put up so great a resistance, there were the feasts of the Prime. They came as fleets all their own, space rippling and folding to allow them passage where they pleased. Even if that place was into the heart of the enemy fleet, or at some angle around them that granted the best position for attack. The lesser heads would cackle as they spat a storm of gravity bolts into the formations, weaving madness and chaos amongst the ranks, while the main head would consume entire ships in its blasts, or else simply swallow them whole. For these the Black Lords held no defense, nor could they break the defenses of the ancient Primes. Crystal shields flared to life at every attack, absorbing or redirecting them back to those that had fired them. Eyes unleashed more bolts of fire, which would bend this way and that to envelop their targets or fly behind to attack a weakpoint like snaking serpents. The body would glow and pull ships inwards, to be constricted and destroyed by the extending necks, frozen by close-range blasts of ice, or simply crushed by the gravitational field surrounding the massive dragons. These battles were almost always short, entire fleets crushed with ease by the might of the Ghidoran lords.

Of course, the N'ghft Cai'lur were not utterly defenseless even with their fleets destroyed. They called up storms around their worlds of eldritch light and sound, striking at the minds of the Ghidorah and blasting them to ashes with immense bolts of power. Their fortress moons held great weapons: immense pylons and spires to focus the arcane energies into blasts of incredible power. They shifted space with their magic to turn Ghidoran might back on itself, teleporting the dragons away from the main host to be focused down by emerald storms, and precise methods were employed to literally rip the space of the Ghidorah apart, leaving them in thousands of blood pieces. Entire sections of space were consumed in vast portals leading to realities that even the dragons could not withstand, places of pure fire or dark water, realities where the space itself was corrosive or drank in their power and grew. Some even spat forth monsters of their own, huge beasts made entirely of grasping arms with gnashing maws on their palms, or kilometers-long eyeless serpents that would infect anything they touched with such evil that it would melt flesh and turn it into a writhing mass that devoured everything in its path. Others were masses of living crystal that harnessed the powers of the universe as the Ghidorah did, growing and absorbing all brought against them, or draconic beasts like the Ghidorah, only covered in spikes and dripping a purplish ichor from their wounds that was acidic to the touch. These and more the Ghidorah faced, and for each they found a solution. Some they drained the heat from, leaving them frozen husks. Others they tossed into the very stars that they so cherished, burning away the monsters flesh and leaving them trapped in the pull to burn away. Others they had to force back through the portals, or else tear open their own and cast the things through. Some even laughed at their so called 'masters,' turning upon the Cai'lur or simply vanishing off into the depths of space for their own reasons.

In the end, the N'ghft Cai'lur were beaten back, broken by the power of the star spawned dragons, their fleets in ruins and their worlds drained to naught but dust and broken ash. They were forced to retreat to the world they had chosen as their capitol, a world where the very landmass down to its core had been used to create the immense city-world above, leaving an orb of water sixteen thousand kilometers in diameter to serve as their greatest breeding ground. The city-world above was a vast fortress covered in rising spires and made in the very image of their greatest master of the Unlight Lords: Gnaiihn'ghft, Father of the Alldark. The entire 'world' was one massive monument to their otherversal masters, a focal-point of their black sorceries. It was here that the remaining lords cast one final great ritual that would ensure their enemies destruction, even at the cost of their civilization's own. Through the sacrifice of every male, female, child, and unhatched egg, they called forth a portion of their master into the very world itself. The inhuman face awoke with the cities that had been its eyes sucked into swirling portals of purple and gray light, and the entire thing awoke with a cry that shattered the minds of those survivors for 9 lightyears in every direction.

It was this abomination that faced the 5 Primes and their swarms when they came to end the feast.

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The abomination formed from the planet unleashed screeching psychic waves, and the Ghidorah that were not Prime were forced to retreat or risk irreparable madness. The stone and metal that formed the world warped and stretched like flesh, the ends opposite the face unfolding into great grasping fin-like tendrils, and the water that the world had housed flowed outwards into a mass of frozen spikes. The result looked rather like the primordial Alectos krakens, a monstrous fishbeast with nine limbs and nine eyes, jaws within jaws roaring into the very souls of those that looked upon it even in the void of space. This was but an avatar of the Alldark Father, Gnaiihn'ghft, but it was more than sufficient to lay waste to a billion worlds, and even then it rent reality asunder in an attempt to draw its own black dimension forth and remake the universe to better fit its own inconceivable perceptions. But this beast that exuded a cloying darkness was called forth for a reason, and it was not unopposed in its attempted rulership of all. Before it floated five great dragons, thousands of heads waving and gnashing at it.

About the worlds two moons were wrapped the vast red Kraforthas, the Vast Anger Child, and brilliant sapphire Byurandat, the Hungering Desirer. To their left was Yulndtia, the Starlight Sage, the great green searcher of lores. To the right was coiled Nidtyphul, the Gnawing Didact, of silver scales and curious mind. And atop this formation of gods was Kradoram, the True-Child of Hunger, the golden lord of this assault and greatest of the gathered Primes. Each stretched many kilometers long, though none had yet reached the true might of a Lord, something that they all intended to achieve this day. The winding necks and cackling heads wove spells into existence, forming a great ring around the entire system that would halt the spread of the corrupting reality until either it was cleansed, or they were all truly dead.

The avatar roared, gathering its might, and unleashed a pale brown bolt of crackling energy at the dragons. They formed crystal shields to defend themselves, redirecting the blast rather than take it head on. Not for lack of an ability to withstand the might of the Unlight Lord, but rather in a contemptuous display of their own might, a statement that said "Even you, who is so great, cannot even touch us." As if to prove this even further, Yulndtia unleashed a beam of orange light that struck the terrible face of the avatar and bent gravity around the impact to age it tens of thousands of years in an instant. Even as the stone and metal crumbled to dust, the dark power that sustained the abomination repaired the damage just as contemptuously easily. The might of lords met in a thundering display that shook spacetime itself as another bolt from the avatar was met with a storm of green shards from Nidtyphul, disrupting it and shunting the energy to the furthest corners of space. The shard barrage continued, punching into the warped planet's surface and teleporting the bits struck into the burning cores of stars to burn. Even this was repaired, matter recreated as easily one would brush away dirt. Following the attack made by its sibling, Kraforthas unleashed a burning stream of condensed star energy that burned the entire surface of the avatar, while Byurandat added in its own silver streams of energy that froze the surface just as it was being burned, the energies coming in waves to freeze and melt over and over. The entire face of the avatar cracked and bled black into space, reconstituting itself even as it sustained immense damage.

Forming its limbs in front of itself as a shield, the avatar formed them together into drill-like spear, and unleashed a tremendous beam of gray light that crashed against the Ghidorahs shields and splintered them. Warping themselves away from the beam, the Ghidorah appeared behind the avatar just as the two moons were destroyed, simply vanishing in the wave of light and being left with most of their mass gone, crescent bleeding dust all that was left. All five dragons launched an attack before the abomination could turn, beams of gold and red traveling the hundreds of thousands of kilometers in a fraction of a second to scorch and melt away the frozen ocean and blast apart the weaker rear of the planet-monster. It roared in something like pain, and the frozen water flowed as if it were not, shooting out before the dragons could react and entangling them. The frost colder than it should ever be cracked their scales and froze their blood, leaving the dragons to cry out in anguish as the unnatural force split their immaculate forms with sparkling wounds. Nidtyphul closed its eyes and glowed white, generating the heat of stars to burn away the magicked water, turning the heat on its siblings to free them as well. Eyes glowing purple, Kraforthas unleashed sparking bolts from those pits and blasted the avatar with light that formed sparking chains around its form. Holding it fast, it roared to its family to attack, Yulndtia and joined it in binding the Gnaiihn'ghft fragment by forming a complex loop of bent circles inscribed with ancient runes and symbols that slowed space's perception of the thing. As they held it, Nidtyphul and Kradoram flew around it in looping synchronicity, unleashing storms of golden light from their bellies to blast it, while leaving trails of gravitic energy that began to form yet another prison. Even as it howled in anger at the assault, the avatar violently pulled itself from time to a point where it would be freed, and displaced its situation with that, so that it appeared several million kilometers away from the field.

Spreading its limbs wide, it channeled its vast powers towards the gathered dragons, red and yellow energy flowing along the limbs like lightning rods down to its open mouth. As a purple, pointed corona formed in its maw, the last of the dragons made its presence know. Finishing its three hundred and thirty three simultaneous incantations, Byurandat formed a storm of micro-singularities in its many jaws and sent them all flying into its main mouth to focus into a single black hole a dozen kilometers across. Smirking to itself, it sent the singularity firing outwards at several million times the speed of light, to crash into the ocean and suck the mutated ichor into a realm of nothing but stars. As its essence burned, the avatar wheeled around and fired its titanic projectile at the sapphire god. Letting out a pained cackling gasp, Byurandat drifted backwards through the void, near half its body simply gone, white blood seeping into the blasted space of the wound. Howling in rage, the other four gathered their energies, and turned the prison they had been forming into a small star, warping it directly over the avatar. As it burned, they focused the binding ring around the system down to that single point, binding it in place and pulling its corrupted space down with it. Thousands of eyes turning into pure black pits, the Ghidorah crushed the star itself with immeasurable gravity, ripping spacetime itself to tatters as they focused all their power to kill the daemon. Singing a dark song of agony and wroth, the abomination pulled itself free of the prison, flowing outwards like a great cloud like an eel of bubbling ink and spreading its limbs outward like nest of writhing snakes. The nine heads let out calls that shook the dragons down to the deepest depths of their many minds, seeking to kill their souls where killing their bodies had proven difficult. It laughed as it entered their minds, their scaled flesh visibly deforming under the blasphemous ministrations of Gnaiihn'ghft, warping and bulging as their existence was filled with a will beyond this reality.

They burned, scales glowing as they fought to expunge the madness that gripped them, to melt away the corruption that sought to overtake them and make them minions to this black god. Their very scales seemed to turn to fire as their power built, growing ever greater under a commanding will beyond their own. At the same time, the invasive mind of Gnaiihn'ghft was struck by a presence exceeding what it had brought into this world. In the daemon's own mind, it saw a form far vaster and more terrible than even itself, ten thousand eyes gazing down upon it from every direction, a sky of blood-red stars that cut into it like a storm of blades. It writhed in pain as it tried to escape, and looked down to the only place the eyes were not so all-consuming. There, it found itself gazing into eyes larger than it in its entirety, and for the first time in ageless eons, the Alldark Father felt terror. The cackling laugh of the star dragon cut into it, and it knew pain unending. The Primes took their chance, feeling the will of their species itself, and fell upon the abomination like a murder of ravens. A thousand jaws found stone and metal warped to flesh, and drank of putrid black ichor. The unlight was drained from the font, the nightmarish flesh rent apart and swallowed. One by one the fangs sank and the avatar howled, and bit by bit was the Unlight Lord's avatar devoured.

It took nearly five years to fully consume the thing, for even to the last it repaired itself and fought back, but such simply made the feast all the sweeter. Byurandat ate the hardiest, and by the end only a few hundred meters wide remained of the hole in its body. The very final piece vanished behind the gnashing jaws of Kradoram, and the Ghidorah cackled into the darkness, once more the lords of all.

It had been a good feast.

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783 million BCE

It is rather difficult to imagine the mind of a being that has lived for hundreds of millions and even billions of years. To try and picture the visions they had seen, the sensations they had experienced, the knowledge they had gained. For one who had been born of the stars, who had seen what lay beyond them, that had flown through the vast voids between galaxies and seen the universal oddities that no other being alive had ever seen or would ever see. But Kradoram knew the minds of mortals. It had eaten enough of them. That was how the dragons learned, by eating those that thought the questions, that looked up at the stars and didn't know what they meant, those that scraped helplessly in the dirt. They ate the culture, the history, hundreds or thousands or something even millions of years of civilization devoured. Every Ghidorah could form simple rock to serve as both stasis and transport through the vast reaches, but those older and more skilled could craft them into things that simply didn't exist otherwise. The Primes rarely found the point, more than content with their own power, but even they found certain entertainment in these acts of creation. It knew of art and grew to enjoy crafting great statues of those it found worthy, those that had fought it or fed it; each was equally fulfilling. It learned of wordsmithing, forming poetry, songs, stories, carving its own language into the walls of its home that wrote the story of itself. It learned of science, and came to understand its powers, and how to exploit them to their fullest. It traveled from reality to other, stranger worlds, and wrote down what it had seen. It crafted architecture that made sense only to itself, great intersecting arches of scaled pillars that snaked away into nothing. It built up worlds, covering them with recreations of the greatest monuments of the worlds it had consumed, or else worthless structures that found its interest.

Then it would make them better. Towers would be taller, fortresses more defensible, artistic designs more intricate and esthetically beautiful for the standards of the original race, or changed entirely to better fit Kradoram's views. It would make this more structurally sound, this thinner and taller, that rounder of jagged. Entire cities rendered entirely in exactingly placed spikes, rivers formed of interlocking machine parts that would turn and turn and give the illusion of water. It would create vast overhangs and place cities upside down or on the sides, or create great rings along the entire surface that formed a vision only from a certain distance in space. It had no favorite work: everything it made was equally flawless and superior to all other works not made by Ghidorah. It enjoyed forming things no lesser beings could make: tall spires of interlocking crystals, cities that rose and fells like waves, inverse worlds that burned hot on the outside and held clockwork civilizations within with ten million figures made of glass set on three hundred year activity cycles. It would even form fleets to orbit worlds, silent sentinels that would attack anything not of its own make. Future space-fairers would wage wars against long forgotten puppets and they would never understand why.

In time it formed homes for its children, vast fortresses of stone and crystal hundreds of kilometers in diameter, and these it left to them to do with as they pleased. For itself it found no reason for a vessel, but formed something far grander to store its more personal creations, and so it made a home far beyond the boundaries of any galaxy, nestled in a web of stars it had plucked from their intergalactic journeys for light and sustenance. It was a winding web that wrapped around the stars and hung great walls of history crafted by Kradoram. The statues it made hung in invisible webs of crystal, posed in forms of war or terror at its coming. It kept a cage of materials that existed only here, those that it had made itself for one reason or another. It made great mirrors that could see long distances at galaxies it had been through in the past, to check on those reseeded worlds for future consumption. The only places closed were those great places that held plant and animal, entire worlds spun to house experiments for stronger life force. It tested how well it could effect the lesser minds, how its own essence infected and mutated them, how the species mixed through forced genetic combination. Lesser life was simply one more tool for the dragon, no more than clay to be shaped as the gods saw fit. Those few sapient and civilized beings that it found of particular interest it kept in tall buildings hung in bubbles of atmosphere, to study and build into its own armies. It showed them a fraction of the truth of the stars, just enough to change them without breaking them.

All this and more was but a fraction of its existence, a hobby of sorts between meals.

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421 million BCE

It flew with its siblings through the darkness, the vast gathering of Primes that came to greet their new kin. Some were red like spilled blood, crimson light crackling from their forms in pride and glory. Those small whites formed flowing rings that radiated a gentle light that knew the soul. Some orbs of fire seemed like stars, but were those nova Primes that held the most volatile and energetic stores of essence. Some red or gold were so great that those smaller ones could cling to their necks of hangs from their wings, the ancient behemoths half-lost in other realities. This was a monumental event that was long in the coming. After more than ninety million years, another Prime had at last been born, and a rare one this was. This was one older even than Kradoram, only now gaining Primehood because of what it was and the slowness of its growth. It was one of those few purple dragons that had contained its madness and grown free to at long last join its family in the realm of true gods. The beast was newly hundred-headed and still held some madness in it, and so was held behind the guarding claws of the Lord Ghidorah, progenitor of all gathered, the most ancient being know who had been birthed in the first stars of which now none remain. It clasped its child in one of its many hands, and spoke into the minds of those hundreds now gathered.

Long this has been in the coming, and now at last your sibling joins you. Proudcall unto eternity, the one who shall sow terror in those lesser and stands above all others who never shall be Prime. Sing loud the name Malifaien: Transcender of Madness.

The gathered cackled and their sibling was loosed, and the brilliant violet light burned bright in the heavens.

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252 million BCE

This had been a long journey, passing from the far side of this galaxy to the verdant world that had gained its interest. It glowed bright to the dragon's eyes, a new world fresh with unspilled life. Few were the worlds so vibrant with essence as this one, and Kradoram thought itself lucky to have found so delectable a meal. It was now one thousand heads, and its power was grown great indeed. It had left the swarms behind, and came alone to this world that orbited so nice a star. Not the impressive by any measure, but a vibrant yellow that always sparked a certain pride in the golden-scaled beast. Perhaps it would rest on the ruins of the world and bask in that light for a time, before it looked to the nearby worlds for life. It sensed essence in some of the moons, and one world far away felt like sleeping chaos, perhaps one of those that had escaped its efforts long ago. It didn't matter, it would devour all in time.

Starting with the little blue world that looked so desirable.

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The world was silent, peaceful. It had not yet gone on the paths that other worlds took, still devoid of the singular lifeforms that would come to dominate the planet and evolve into a single commanding presence on the galactic stage. For now, it was still alien to what it would one day become, no grass grew upon its surface and ancient trees covered the vast majority of the single continent that served as the face of the world. This was a world in its genesis, a world as of yet unshaped by the civilizations that one would day expand to cover its surface. It was nearly unrecognizable compared to what it would become, with strange mountain ranges and canyons splitting its surface, places that would one day break down or seal up to vanish forever. There were great forests formed from more species of tree than there would ever see in ages after, and thousands of kilometers of land was barren rock. This was a newborn world in the truest sense, a child that had not yet grown to understand the full gravity of nature. It was content with its quiet existence, complacent in its bounteous and diverse wildlife. Many thousands of species filled the oceans, crawled along the ground or soared through the skies. It was a warmer place, the winds were strange, rain and storms came and went in great intervals or sporadic comforted itself with the infant learnings of the universe that were the tools that would help it form and sustain life on its surface for as long as the star blazed as its sun.

It knew the other worlds that orbited the star, those that had been like it but were not so lucky. The red one that floated nearby had almost been like it, covered in water and ready to team with life. But it had been too small, too far away, to weak to sustain the life. The other worlds were simply failures: either balls of burning gas or frozen chunks of stone and ice. Certainly, other things teamed on those worlds that had come from elsewhere, those that didn't need the normal sustenance of life to survive, those that were content to build their homes in frozen stone or drift along massive in clouds of dust and fire. Some had even tried to come onto its very surface, but it had repelled them with careful storms and crashing waves, or used some of its vast stores of primal energies to destroy them outright. Eventually, it seemed, they had learned, and no more did they come to populate its surface.

Yes, the world was content to live in peace, nothing marring the perfection of its body.

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Kradoram came, sailing through the stars and past the blighted worlds that had failed to teem with life in a great fortress it had forged for the journey. Some held mild interest, but it would get to them after its meal was done. It wasn't often that the opportunity to devour a new world presented itself. It was a delicate time that lasted only a few million years on average between the stages of the planet developing the ability to bear life and then using that ability to populate the planet with lifeforms that would begin consuming its resources in the proccess of evolving and expanding their culture. The primordial seas that served as the spawning pools for this life actively wanted this process to happen, as they would always be the greatest founts of life and the fullest homes for this life. Then the life would spread from the seas and cover the land, feasting on the green that dotted the surface, then to devour other forms of life, digging under the earth or taking to the skies. Slowly, they would take to the stars themselves in fulfillment of all 13 primal forces. That was the wish of all life: to master the forces of water, then earth, then air and stone. They would master lighting and gain power, master powers of the elements, understand time and space, antimatter, even life and death. Eventually, for the few lifeforms that mastered eternity, they would craft the soul and wield infinity, and then become true gods that held the primal might of the universe. Ghidorah were closer than most, having been born with many of the powers already, but even they were eluded by the greatest of these forces.

That was the goal of devouring the worlds, draining the essence of countless trillions of creatures over billions of years: to one day harness the very power of life and death and become true gods. That was why, even now, Kradoram fell to the world with the overwhelming desire to drink it dry. It would eat it all, and one day it would even devour its siblings, or be devoured in turn. This was to be the fate of Ghidorah in the end; to consume and consume until only one was left with the souls and knowledge of all the others, breaking the final limit and becoming a God. It opened its vessel and floated down to the grass planes, the place seeming nothing more than a single mass of green in its titanic eyes. It drank in the scent of the world so full of energy, and began to suck it dry. Yellow essence began to rise from the plants, leaving them to turn gray and crumble to dust. It spread its tail like a root to the edge of the continent, its necks spreading downwards like a thousand rivers of gold that sapped the essence of all they touched. It sucked the lives of the creatures that ran and flew, leaving them to drop lifeless to the dirt. The tips of its tail sank into the water, and sapped the life of countless species dry. It tasted the newly formed essence and cackled in joy at the worlds lifeblood filling its veins.

The Earth bled, and howled in pain with great storms that rose up, but they were less than pinpricks to the dragon. The world felt itself begin to die, and knew it could only fade if it continued as it had, and so it set all its essence to a single creation. In the deepest pit of the ocean, all the life it would have formed was gathered into a single great form. It crawled up, being fed the Earth's vast stores of primal energy, and as it fed it grew and changed. The formless mass grew eyes, great disks that held thousands of points with which to see. Its body segmented, spikes jutting up from its back and huge spines rising along its center. Along its length grew hundreds of legs that grasped and pulled it along the ocean floor. The greenish mass hauled itself up onto land, a living mountain with serrated pincers for jaws. It pulled itself up before the dragon, and set to devouring the extended heads like the leafs of a tree. Even as it fed, its own powers spiked, and purple light shot from its eyes and scorched the scales of the dragon.

Kradoram howled in pain and rage, pulling back its necks to its body and uprooting its tail. It gazed at the hideous lump of chitinous flesh that dared to mar its hide, and unleashed bolts of gravity at it. But the monstrous larva was unperturbed, and it rose up taller like a snake and unleashed a huge blue beam from its abdomen that took Kradoram in the chest and injured it. Eyes flashing red, the dragon poured a storm of bolts onto its form, seeking to blast it to ashes. But the beast was armoured in great plates and resisted the attacks as if they were simply droplets of water, and it hurled more beams from the huge curved horns on its head to burn more scales and leave the dragon howling. Kradoram gathered its primal might and formed scorching heat over the larva, but it didn't even react. It unleashed a vortex of energies around the larva, but they simply faded away worthlessly. Roaring, the dragon unleashed warping space and aging time, but the larva ignored them and blasted it again. It was immune to the golden leviathan's efforts, and it was with a start that Kradoram realized it was outmatched.

But the Ghidorah was a beast of the stars, and it knew that this newborn could not follow where Ghidorah chose to. Spreading its vast wings, Kradoram flew up and away from the planet, up to the orbiting moon. Cackling in its untouchable throne in the heavens, Kradoram unleashed bolts down on the world, of gravity and lightning and fire. It blasted the larva with impunity, and for all the defender's might it could not withstand so great an assault, and its own blasts could not reach so far and with such force as those of the Ghidorah. It groaned in pain and tried to flee back to the water, but the dragon rent up the earth in its way into a field of spikes that cut at its belly and left a pool of yellow blood spilling from the wounds. For hours it suffered like this, only surviving from casting about itself a shield of hard stone that even the might of Ghidorah could not shatter. But the shield drained it, and as the moon at last passed beyond the horizon and the world was bathed in the light of the sun. Weakened, bleeding, dying, the larva could only curl up upon itself and wait for the moon to rise for its end to come. But the Earth would not allow its first creation to die such a death, and it formed the stone shield into a web that covered the larva, and in its cocoon it rested, healed, and changed.

At last, the moon rose up high, and the fully healed Ghidorah cackled as it came to see its prey's final moments. But instead of the dying beast, it found itself faced with a great sparkling shell, and with sudden shock it watched as the cocoon shattered and the larva rose as a great silver moth with wings of 13 colours into the skies with a song-like call. It rose before Kradoram could even attack, and sailed straight through the fortress the dragon had come in, shattering it and draining it into nothing bust dust that fell to the Earth. As if a beast from the pits of hell, the demonic moth rose into the skies and flew at the dragon born from the heavens. The dragon unleashed its greatest storm of light upon the moth, glowing gold and covered in fire as it did so. But the silver shell of the moth withstood the storm, and it crashed into the dragon with force enough to move the moon in its orbit. The rainbow wings grasped the dragon in its many legs and tore it violently from the shining orb, and with the might of primal gods it hurled the dragon from the heavens. Like a star the dragon fell, and it shattered the Earth in its ruin, sending great cascades of matter spilling across the land and into the ocean. The dragon roared as it felt its might overcome, and the silver guardian descended upon it in a crackling storm that struck the beast low. It seared the golden scales to black and boiled the blood within its veins, and formed around the dragon a great seal of ancient magics. With all its might, the vast moth broke the dragons mind and cast it into a deep slumber. Around the crater the dragon formed rose up a spine of mountains, and the earth sunk beneath it to swallow it up, and it closed around the blackened beast like great jaws.

Its purpose done, the guardian Gigamoth let loose a final call, and fall to the shattered continent nearby. It had one final task before it: to repopulate the devastated world with its own essence. Its wings broke apart, falling into the ocean from which it had come and sowing the sides for the teeming seas that would one day be. Then its body crumbled to dust, and spread as a cloud to the remains of what the world had become to form the creatures of the future. At last, its head remained, and the small jewel in the center cracked and gave birth to a larva that was like what it had been, but so much smaller and devoid of the primal powers that had been spent. Eyes fading to dark, the last of the guardian faded to dust and vanished, to sow the final seeds that would ensure the world would survive should such a being come again. One eye shrunk until it was nothing but a flat stone, a mirror that reflected the heavens. The tip of its horn shrunk and extended, becoming a blade to be wielded against any foe that would come, still covered in the dragons blood. And last of all the soul of it became a light that sank into the earth itself.

And so the world grew still and silent, its spirit resting in a slumber as deep as the dragon's.