Titanomachy, Chapter Two

It had been, first and foremost, a game.

A means of whiling away the long hours and days, he’d hidden himself in the depths of the great boreal forest, tinkering, toying with the minds of men. He’d found most of them weak and feeble, easily provoked and more than susceptible to his influence. For a time Diaborus was content to create scenarios and watch them play out, observing the reactions of his thralls from afar, seeing how his influence affected their minds, but in time he wanted something…more. He began luring humans to his lair, drawing them away from their homes in the cold dead of night, instilling in their heads an irrefutable notion of his divinity, appealing to the ego shared by all kaiju; a strange form of cult soon swelled in the forest, setting the trees ablaze with ceremonial bonfires and guttural chants and dances, all to appease their monstrous and ever-watchful lord. He found entertainment in this, drawing out much amusement with which to distract himself from a tired, prolonged, and ultimately meaningless existence.

But in his game, in his experimentation with godhood, Diaborus discovered opportunity.

Look at what works he was capable of – could he not use this? Could he not do more? Had the centuries made him forget the importance of his long-abandoned quest? Diaborus looked inward on this for many a day, responding not to the pleas of the worshippers who crowded around his icy cavern home, worried and fearful. But in time their master returned to them not in the flesh but in the mind, commanding them to find the strangely warm, bubbling lakes that dotted this ancient land…and to drown themselves within.

Arriving at the sites one by one, Diaborus polluted the atom bogs with his own blood, catalyzing a timeless reaction that he too was once a product of. In them his children were changed, transformed by the unnatural energies of The Cycle, their bond to their lord and master stronger than ever before. In time they resurfaced not as men, but as monsters in miniature, resembling more Diaborus than the people they once were. As the years passed this inhuman horde grew in number, swelling into the thousands, then tens of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands; rural villages, warlord camps, and remote Soviet gulags were abandoned seemingly overnight, their occupants lured away by the siren call of the atom bogs, their bodies and minds slaved to an ever-growing swarm intelligence.

But if Diaborus were to succeed, if his plans were to come into fruition at last, he would need more…many, many more.

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Northern Siberia, 1979.


The nameless village of Viktor Syvatoslav was under attack.

Wood splintering, fires crackling, and frostbitten lips parting to scream – all this Viktor heard as the impossible things that had found his home besieged it, tearing doors off their hinges and seizing the people cowering within, taking them by the legs or throats and dragging them off into the black forest amid piercing wails and hideous, inhuman cackling. While smaller and sleeker horrors assaulted the windows and doors, gnashing their tusks, looming high above them were hulking, barbed goliaths as tall as giraffes and heavier than two elephants, their giant paws plunging through rooftops and scooping out Viktor’s people by the handful, carrying them away on earthshaking tread.

For poor Viktor this was a catastrophe, but for its architects, it was little more than a supply run.

Diaborus’ brood must grow, of this he’d been adamant. But when the numbers of willing grew thin over recent months, he decided to experiment once more, this time by sending out his minions to abduct human victims from their homes, drowning them in his atom bogs and converting them into his children by force. Already the results were looking promising….

Viktor knew none of this, naturally, nor would he have likely cared; for now his only concern was getting to his cabin and finding his rifle, then go back out there and blast the head off anything that didn’t wear shoes. He’d nearly made it too, had it not been for the shadowy form that leapt down from his rooftop as he made it panting and sweating to his door, fumbling with the keys in his wrinkly, shaky hands. It landed hard on his shoulders, smashing his face against his front door and down into his crudely-poured concrete porch, claws digging into the back of his jacket. Then, without missing a beat, the monster seized Viktor by the ankle and started dragging him away, joining others of its hideous, unnamable kind as they carried off his fellow villagers. Sliding roughly through the mud and litter, Viktor struggled to flex around, desperate to get a better view of his captor…and yet dreading what he might see.

The creature itself was uncannily humanoid, but larger, close to seven feet high by Viktor’s estimate. Save for a few tattered remnants of clothing, the thing was completely naked. Its skin was a mess; it was as if its body couldn’t decide whether to grow hair, scales, or quills. All three integuments littered its body in no real pattern, but the quills tended to be denser around the lower body, concealing the groin. The monster’s other hand drew Viktor’s eye to it as it swayed back and forth, where he saw five fingers that ended in glistening black claws like a bird of prey’s. Behind it stretched a tail that was coated in quills and looked eerily reptilian; batting against Viktor as the beast dragged him out of the village and into the forest, the appendage flicked back and forth, its scales and quills rasping against one another. The creature had a rank petting zoo-esque stench to it, underpinned by the coppery odor of recently dried blood.

But it was the monster’s face that made even wizened old Viktor feel queasy on an indescribable, primal level. From the front it bore a passing resemblance to a scaly human, but as soon as it turned either way the muzzle became evident, longer and more ape-like than anything else. The hair that must’ve once been on its head was gone, save for a few stubborn blonde strands. The stiff brow and enlarged cranium were like that of a gorilla, the latter betraying a tall sagittal crest and enormous jaw muscles beneath; the cranium’s surface was smooth, bald, and plate-like. Its cheekbones seemed larger than in a human, much more pronounced and tipped with what looked like a black thumbnail. Flattened nostrils like an ape’s gently flared with every breath. The eyes were big, bigger than a human’s and with a sclera as black as ink; even so, Viktor could just barely detect the movement of an even blacker iris in that dark pool. For a brief instant it looked at him over its shoulder; he held its gaze as it brushed aside a cluster of brambles. The long mouth parted as it smiled at him, revealing four long canines that seemed too big to fit in its mouth; the incisors were missing in both jaws, replaced by something that resembled teeth but were fused at the root, almost beak-like.

Elsewhere in the tangled brush Viktor could hear the traipsing of other monsters as they hauled off their own victims, some dragging them as he’d been, others throwing their still-struggling prey over their shoulder, and not a one of them showing any signs of fatigue. What were these horrible creatures? They seemed in some ways so strangely human, and yet….

Viktor was not given the time to think. A falling branch, disturbed by another creature bounding through the mossy boughs overhead, struck him in the forehead and knocked him out, leaving the old man slack as he was dragged deeper and deeper into the dark, forbidding wood. Perhaps, had he known what awaited him there…this was for the best.

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2015.


Decades after his cult was established, Diaborus reached out through his children’s innumerable minds, calling them all to order.

More than seven million of these monsters now inhabited the furthest reaches of Russia’s forests, hidden and undiscovered by humanity at large. In vicious packs they lived, fighting for dominance amongst themselves, killing and dying all the same in their master’s hallowed name. Anxious and eager for a fight, they milled around in their lairs, waiting for a signal. When Diaborus gave them one, they leapt into action.

For kaiju, those ancient and long-lived creatures, time was of relatively little importance; to a human, a century was a long life lived, but for a kaiju it was little more than a blink of an eye, an ephemeral thing that in their grander scheme of things meant very little. Such was the case with Diaborus who, in his patience, had waited and waited as his children grew in number, plotting for the day to come. To him, these past decades were but a fleeting instant.

Now, on this dark Siberian night, he decided that he’d waited long enough. It was, at last, the time to act. It was the time to strike.

And on this dark Siberian night, towering over the forest, Diaborus loosed his creations upon an unsuspecting world.