"There is One that inhabits the place of utter cold, and One that respireth where none other may draw breath. In the days to come He shall issue forth among the isles and cities of men, and shall bring with Him as a white doom the wind that slumbereth in his dwelling."
~ The prophet Lith, from the Parchments of Pnom
(Clark Ashton Smith, "The Coming of the White Worm")

Lincoln Sea, northwest of Greenland, 1980

Here is where it began, it thought. Gamera returned to the wintry barrens, where nearby it was awakened fifteen revolutions of this world around its star prior. Its accidental release from its icy entombment was not, in fact, the "beginning" of which its wandering thoughts had turned. Gamera's memory encompassed vast ages before recorded history, when the past was accounted for and subsequently forgotten, when the very ability to understand the passage of time was gleaned, lost, and recovered only tens of thousands of years later. It was so very old. Indeed, Gamera, under different names to divergent cultures, wherever a notion of its activities and image survived—stained with primitive dyes on cavern walls, given celestial distinction in the star charts of the first astrologers, accorded the burden of the world itself upon its back in the songs of the medicine lodges—was a symbol of longevity itself.

This is where Gamera was born—or made—and where it would be lost for so many eons. The dragon turtle recalled that before the shifting of the poles this frozen wasteland was verdant—a place where the waning gods of Eld had walked among that era's human analogues and prepared them for the dangers posed by the quiescent, primordial evils. In those days, the line between humanity and divinity was thin—mortals dwelt nigh as the gods themselves and venerated the greatest of them as their regents. Those golden days were filled with learning and pleasure—summer was eternal, sustenance was plentiful, and humanity's dreams were made extant by means of sorcery and super-science. The Eld and their disciples were higher beings, and they created marvels that the debased hominids of the modern age would only tremble at the sight of, alchemical and theurgical wonders humanity today could scarcely comprehend.

Gamera knew first hand, for it was among those very wonders. It had certainly invoked in contemporary humans far more than trembling throughout the duration of its return—tearful supplication on occasion and, too often, breech-wetting fear. Gamera could not fault the naked apes who had inherited the earth too much for their alarm. It was, after all, designed to be a warrior and a terror, a defender against the chaos spawn of distant stars, a soldier against the primeval lurkers of the blackened depths, a predator of the odious prowlers of the spaces between spaces. The Black Guardian of the North had finally restored itself to its full height of 80 meters. The edges of its bio-metallic carapace had sharpened into serrations. The talons of Gamera's scaly hands had lengthened exponentially to better rend the sickening flesh of its colossal foes. Though its ancient reputation had survived the ages in the form of diluted legends and myths, and its commitment to hunt down and destroy the emergent Old Ones remained as true as it had been in long lost Hyperborea—humanity continued to fear and oppose Gamera.

If it were not for two characteristics existent in modern mortals, Gamera would hardly regret the furious rampage that it carried out immediately following its awakening. An atomic accident had forced the super monster from its dreamless slumber and its first impression was that of a degenerate, corruptible mankind, a pathetic race far removed from its nigh-divine antecedents. This was a people, Gamera reasoned, upon the precipice of its own damnation. It could smell the influence of the Old Ones upon them—these creatures akin to the savage, simian folk of its antediluvian birthplace; who made gory offerings to Cthulhu and Tsathoggua in benighted enclaves on the fringes of grand Commoriom. While they were clearly, albeit distantly, descended from the Eld and their mortal attendants of lost Hyperborea, Mu, Kantapuranam, and Alanhati—the passage of time, and perhaps, indiscriminate breeding with more degenerate anthropoids had debased humanity beyond salvation.

Or so it thought. For during its war against them Gamera was exposed to the innocence of mankind's children, and the indomitability of the human spirit. The former, in the shape of a fearless, awe-struck child, had captivated the enraged creature, briefly assuaging it. A mere child had understood Gamera, had instinctively recognized the righteousness of its purpose. Though the rampaging monster had indirectly endangered the young boy in the first place, it decided to spare him. Gamera would spend several days contemplating the meaning of this encounter before ultimately, grimly resigning itself to its original course of extermination. The human spirit, on the other hand, ultimately defeated it, much to Gamera's astonishment. Rather than face their extinction as the decadent, inherently selfish primate vermin it had mistook them for, mankind rallied together, pooled their greatest technologies, and—while they could not, could never, destroy it—they managed to banish Gamera from the very planet it was designed to protect. Mere men had defeated a near-god!

When Gamera returned to earth, after a brief period of reflection, it was still angry, yes, but amenable to the idea that there was a purpose to its accidental release from its icy prison beyond that of humanity's total destruction. When a corrupted lesser Old One from the island remnants of Mu began its own terrible predation upon human civilization, Gamera's alternate suspicions were confirmed. The stars were right. The Old Ones were awakening. Gamera would don his ancient mantle of defender, if not for mankind as it had become, but for humanity's future, for the spark of divinity it retained in the form of its children.

And so it was. Gamera's toils were nearly ceaseless for several years. Its foes were mostly the less significant banes of the ancients, though even these battles were compounded in difficulty by the frustrating quality of humans to get in the way. Yet on some occasions the great guardian might have met its end if not for timely human intervention. The draconic doom of sunken Mu, Barugon, was unleashed upon Osaka and only defeated after Gamera learned from humans of the sickly creature's aversion to water. The blight of Alanhati, the vampiric god-avian Gyaos, was severely weakened by the same mortal ingenuity that vexed Gamera two years prior. An invasion from planet Vhoorl was thwarted when two children the aliens were using as hostages managed to break Gamera free from the Great Old One's mental domination. When human negligence was responsible for removing the Elder eidolon imprisoning the formidable Devil Beast Jiger, the Old One managed to infect the monster turtle with its parasitic progeny. Gamera was only wrenched from the jaws of defeat after a pair of brave boys relieved it of this cancerous infection.

Certainly, humanity still feared it and continued to misunderstand its intentions. The militaries of the world still put themselves in harm's way more often than not when Gamera clearly was their last, best hope against some rampaging entity. While they would find its mind difficult to comprehend, Gamera often lamented the loss of humankind's telepathy—which at least permitted for some rudimentary communication between them. Perhaps this was for the best, as it allowed the grim protector to ignore the few bystanders remaining underfoot when duty called it into population centers. If the past few years had any wisdom to engrave into its ancient, nigh-immortal mind, it was that there was too high a price for Gamera's compassion. Were it not for empathy, the monster could have sacrificed the Vhoorls' two young hostages and prevented the destruction it was subsequently coerced into. Gamera should have immolated the archeologists at the Wester Island dig site rather than allow them to release the Devil Beast Jiger, who would go on to harm thousands of innocents.

In the near future, Gamera considered, it would express far less sentimentality when it was working. From now until the turning of the age, when the Great Old Ones were quiescent once again, the Black Tortoise would be focused and pragmatic. It was an agent of primordial forces, it had a job to do, and that job was cosmic in scope. It'd sacrifice hundreds of lives to preserve a thousand. It would incinerate a thousand, children and otherwise, to salvage a million—its "Friend to All Children" epithet notwithstanding. Gamera would try, at least. Humanity's survival into the next golden age counted upon it, monstrous creation of the vanished Elder Gods, whether or not they knew or appreciated it.

---

This night, however, the only bystanders near the vicinity of Gamera's target destination were the seals, the white bears that hunted them, the spiral horned narwhals that swam lazily in the saline depths beneath the sheets of ice covering the sea's surface—and Charles Crawley, CEO and chairman of Alrayn-Crawley Financial.

Crawley gazed over the ice-covered railing of the Blæst Gående oil platform, derelict as of a few minutes ago, to take in the desolate vastness of the frozen sea, lit only by the stars, a sliver of moon, and the aurora borealis. Standing over two meters tall, bald and ebony-skinned, and dressed only in a black business suit to warm him against the wind-struck, sub-zero temperatures of his surroundings, Crawley cut an imposing, shadowy outline diametrically opposed to the whiteness of the landscape. Sharing the bleak pallor of the arctic barrens was the oil platform itself, now laying askew at a forty degree slant, its steely-gray railings and walkways, asphalt decks, and concrete towers completely enveloped in a crystalline sheen of blue-white ice. One might mistake the super-structure as having been abandoned for years, were it not for the presence of the corpses—dozens or perhaps hundreds of men lying, bent over, kneeling or standing upright in stiff, rigid postures. The recently deceased workmen resembled porcelain effigies, their flesh and clothing rendered blue-white by the sudden preternatural cold that blasted them and lingered still. Upon each face was frozen a rictus of sheer terror or a grimace of agony, blue-lipped mouths agape revealing broken teeth—shattered from final living moments spent chattering uncontrollably.

Charles Crawley paid the dead no mind, nor bemoaned the loss of the expensive platform, which he owned via a ACF subsidiary known as Peripheral Petroleum. The project had served its purpose. There was no further need to compensate the Danish crown for the rights to siphon the black crude from an undersea mountain whose peak reached a few dozen feet below sea level. Crawley knew in the long term the sludge mined here was no oil, and would probably prove unviable as an energy source. At the moment it was stored in reserve in massive Peripheral facilities across the globe. For a rainy day, Crawley mused. In any case, the sable stew needed to be drained away, like contaminated blood during a transfusion. For that is what it was indeed—blood. The financing, construction, and maintenance of Blæst Gående was a massive operation, in a very literal sense.

Several kilometers to the north, yet perceptible to the mogul's keen senses, was the enormous architect of the platform's upending, and the cause of the deadly, preternatural frost upon the workmen that no normal flame could thaw. Its flesh was pasty-white like that of a beached, rotting squid. Its shape was bloated and serpentine, externally segmented every few meters by ringed rims like the annuli of a worm. The entity rolled and slid itself like a sidewinder across the sheets of ice. As it stretched and contorted, it was difficult to determine the thing's total length, but Crawley judged its average at about 350 meters. Its thickness spanned about 45-50 meters at its most swollen point a quarter of the way down its length from its head. Crawley knew not where the creature intended to go, nor did he care, though he suspected it sought a new iceberg in which to make its mobile lair—as its notorious domicile had been affixed to the sea floor for a thousand generations. The Old One and its recently abandoned home, Yikilth, were known to Crawley through rare occult texts such as the Book of Eibon, an ancient memoir that had survived the eons to offer a glimpse of life and magic in lost Hyperborea. Rlim Shaikorth, the creature was called, and it once traversed the northern seas in its glacial citadel, assailing ships and ports with a lethal cold for reasons no mortal could fathom. Twenty or so millennia ago, the White Worm was feared and worshipped as a god.

The creature suddenly broke its rapid stride and coiled itself like some vulgar mockery of a rattlesnake. It turned its flattened disk-like face toward the southeast. Crawley beheld the monster's pale, gaping mouth and sunken, crimson eyes—which looked more like bleeding, abscessed sores than apparati for seeing. Crawley didn't need turn to know what approached—he knew well what was powerful enough to give a Great Old One pause.

"Rlim Shaikorth," Crawley called, "the enemy cometh." The entrepreneur's voice was deeply resonant, deliberate, and pleasant. It betrayed a trace of African inflection, though if any person was around to hear Crawley speak, they would be very hard pressed to determine the precise origins of his accent.

Crawley shouted: "Freeze this wretched spawn of the Eld to its bones! Return it to a hibernation to outlast the eons, lest it persist in thwarting the rightful return of your fellows. For once you did in ages past, so you must do again!"

The echoic, shrill hum of Gamera's rotary flight amplified to a ear-splitting clamor as it passed over the ruined oil platform. Four blue jets of ionized flame emanated from the chelonian monster's leg and arm cavities, each curving as it spun like a flaming shuriken toward the White Worm. Great trails of exhaust, tendrils of smoke intertwining into dissipating braids, followed in the wake of the whirling shell. Suddenly, Gamera extinguished two of its thrusters and presented its forelimbs and head. As if in answer to Crawley's threats on the Old One's behalf, Gamera shrieked a roar of its own—that iconic elephantine battle cry which made titans quake. It surged toward coiling Rlim Shaikorth on the awesome power of its rear rockets alone. Forearms extended outward to level its flying charge, Gamera gulped back its reptilian head. Waddled throat orange and aglow, the Guardian of the North opened its tusked jaws and eructed.

Rlim Shaikorth barely flinched as Gamera unleashed a volley of plasma fireballs toward it. The flying colossus veered to the White Worm's left and upward. The nighttime landscape, previously green and blue lit by the blazing aurora, flashed reddish-orange in the seconds between the fireballs' discharge and impact. Crawley, having studied the monster do-gooder for years, knew that Gamera's magnetoplasmic fireballs burned hotter than a solar flare. Few beings in the cosmos could feel the bite of those flames and not blister, though the effect was usually, terminally worse. Rlim Shaikorth was courting its own demise by just sitting there and staring with its stupid, red globular eyes at the incoming missiles. For a moment, the Old One reminded Crawley of a cobra charmed by a flautist in a Middle Eastern bazaar, or a deer on the highway transfixed by the headlights of an approaching truck. Perhaps, mused Crawley, Rlim Shaikorth was disoriented by his recent awakening. Or perhaps it never was a terror equal to the reputation ascribed it in the codices of the ancients.

Crawley half-expected an explosion of ionic fire, black blood, and charred wormish flesh. What he saw instead were three fireballs vanish into smoky wisps within a few meters of Rlim Shaikorth's corkscrewed bulk.

Aha! thought the chairman, the White Worm protects itself with a field of absolute zero cold. Not even Gamera's flames can burn at that temperature! The serpentine abomination uncoiled, slithered aside, and turned its head northward where Gamera was coming in for another aerial approach. This time, the monster turtle attempted a strafing run with its continuous "tongue" of superheated plasma. While it carved a deep steaming trench in the polar ice toward its annelid foe, Gamera's tongue of fire arched up and over Rlim Shaikorth's body before continuing on behind it, utterly failing to make contact with the Old One's flesh.

Charles Crawley laughed heartily. Again Gamera screeched, a roar of frustration that carried miles on the arctic winds. Unfortunately for the mysterious CEO, Gamera was intelligent enough to know that should it attempt to engage Rlim Shaikorth with fang and claw, its tissues, tough as they were, would quickly succumb to the cold that froze even molecules. Crawley amused himself momentarily with a mental picture of the reptilian behemoth flailing away at its foe while its frostbitten talons and snout broke apart amid gouts of green blood. In reality, the avatar of the Eld withdrew its head and forelimbs and reignited bluish flames from its arm cavities. Gamera resumed its saucer-like flight and wheeled toward its prey, likely gambling that its nigh-invulnerable, jagged-edged shell would protect it while severing the Old One in half.

Suddenly, as if to say, my turn, the White Worm's wide, toothless maw shifted expression from shocked animal stupidity to a menacing sneer. The monster annelid made a sound like a backwards wail that accompanied its enormous intake of breath. A thick ring-like bulge took shape around the creature's body, halfway between its face and its bloated mid-segments. Rlim Shaikorth reared up like a striking cobra, revealing a sphincter-like orifice on its swelling clitellum. The pulsating, fleshy ring glowed with pallid light. As Gamera spun toward it, the thickened gland-sack of the White Worm deflated—expelling from the orifice an intense, monochrome helix of energy.

The expanding cone of light caught the chelonian demigod dead on. Its propulsion fires died. A frost instantly congealed upon its bio-metallic shell. Dead spinning on inertia several kilometers toward the northwest, Gamera impacted and embedded itself three-quarters its width deep in an icy cliff. The landscape trembled with the shock of the enormous creature's crash. Rlim Shaikorth trumpeted its victory with more strange, backwards keening, nearly drowning out the noisome echo of the riven glacier.

The frozen deck of the Blæst Gående was silent save for a whistle of wind, the slight groaning produced by the swaying of the platform's construction, and the self-satisfied cracking of Charles Crawley's knuckles.