Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters (9 page)

Jiro fell quiet as he descended the rest of the hillside. As Shinobi scampered down behind him, he looked again to the sky but there was no sign of another storm. Still, they would get inside the lighthouse to sleep for the night long before darkness fell over the necropolis.

As Shinobi reached the level ground at the base of the hill, he paused and tilted his head. Jiro could see that his son was working out how to phrase his question. He waited on the boy.

“Why are there so many bones here? Why
this
island? And why is Kurohaka Island not on any of the maps?”

“This is where he took the ones he defeated.”

Shinobi’s eyes widened.

Jiro nodded. “Kashikoi defeated many threats against Japan, and when he killed another giant beast like the ouroboros, he would bring it here. Remember, some of the corpses here are actually monsters that were dying and came here voluntarily. Some of the bones are from creatures that died and were transported here by teens with the sight.”

Jiro started walking for the lighthouse. “My father tended the light that would keep most sailors away from this island, and he received a government check from both Japan and Russia to tend to the outlying islands as well. I took the job from him, just as you will one day take the job from me.”

Jiro noticed Shinobi’s absence after another handful of steps and turned to look back at where Shinobi remained rooted to the ground, at the foot of the steep hillside.

The boy had a perplexed look on his face, until he finally asked his burning question.

“What happened to Kashikoi?”

Jiro looked at the boy, then raised his eyes to the immense hill behind him. Then he lowered his eyes back to the child and raised one eyebrow.

Color drained from the child’s face as realization sank in. The boy turned to stare at the side of the hill, upon which they had been perched all afternoon. The hill which was not a hill. Jiro chuckled and turned toward the lighthouse.

“We tend the light, and we protect the protector. Come now, Shino. It will be dark soon.”

Occupied

Natania Barron

Maker:

Julian moves through the narrow sewers and drainage pipes without hesitation. More a mole than a woman, she navigates with perfect precision, her thick boots trudging through every kind of detritus provided by the city. She is immune to the bloated rats, the stench, the slimy mold crawling up the side of the glistening brick. It’s only the things out of place—the sound of a small gator slipping into a stream, or an unanticipated moan—that would stop her. And nothing does for quite some time.

Then, just as she is about to take the final twist toward her own alcove, near Berfa the Engine, she stops cold. Something glows. Not the light of a lantern or candle, not even the odd luminescence of the mushrooms that sometimes grow in the depths. It is something blue and cold and frosty.

Creature:

We have been asleep for so long; so long that all is dust. Our tongues. Our eyes. Our bodies. Our shrunken phalluses. These sick and sad reminders that we had bodies, once. That we felt the power of blood, felt the coursing of the Holy Spirit within us. Tasted and rutted and blazed. We were passion and power and knowledge. Too much knowledge.

A thousand thousand years, and we have suffered in the miasma of loss and excommunication and forgotten our names. Once, we were feared, favored, loved. Now, we only whisper to ourselves, with no knowledge of our names or our purposes. One among us was a healer; another a poet; another still a guardian and warrior of a kind rarely seen. We were astronomers and visionaries and, for no reason other than our lust for life, we were cast aside. Forgotten.

We have lived without hope. What power made up our bodies has been dispersed so far and wide that we have given into the monotony. The pain. Suffering gave way to anger and back again to suffering, and it has gone on so long that we had forgotten that once, before we had been reduced to such nothing, we had plotted. Planned. Planted seeds, however far-flung, of the hope of rebirth.

A sword. Forged from the heart of a star. Melted down and changing hands, century after century, passing borders and oceans. Coveted, cursed, stolen. Our last hope.

Maker:

Julian curses. She cannot help herself. The sudden disruption causes her to stumble, losing her footing, twisting her ankle. It cracks under her weight, sending bright sparks of pain up the side of her leg and she gasps in spite of herself, wishing she had opted for another route. The last thing she wants is discord. Her routine is all she has—it’s what keeps her from losing time and whatever else precious she has left to her.

Part of her is sensible and says that she ought to keep moving, albeit slowly, back to her enclave. It is the safest option, and safety is one of Julian’s most intense concerns. She knows how difficult it is to languish in pain and suffering after safety has been ignored. With a gloved hand she reaches up and touches the stump of her ear, feeling the ragged bumps and twisted skin, hearing the strange scratching noise such a motion produces.

But the light. That blue. As she braces herself against the wall and finds her way toward breathing more regularly, she notices that it flickers and dissipates with a certain rhythm. Not quite a pulse, but it is regular. And there’s a smell, too. She feels as if she can remember the scent, but not entirely; it’s a distant memory. A part of her brain fires, but she can’t attach any strings to the thought. It just floats a moment, and then is gone, no connection made. But the memory is not a warning. What’s left in Julian’s mind is something burning and bright, something strong and dangerous.

Julian slides across the grimy bricks and twists her head to get a better look. Her glasses are dirty enough as it is, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Her eyes are still dazzled by what she sees. The luminescence emanates from a small object, half buried in the mud and mold at the base of one of the drains.
The color is cold,
she thinks, even though she hasn’t touched it yet. As if it were ice. Which is strange, she realizes, because she is very hot and very sticky. The room is not cold. The color is cold.

Why would it be here,
she wonders? Perhaps there was a deluge above and it got knocked clean. Perhaps someone threw it down here to hide it. Or to get rid of it.
Such a beautiful thing should not be let go of,
Julian thinks.

Either way, Julian doesn’t think much as she lunges forward to grab it. Every muscle in her crooked body twists as she moves—faster than she has moved in a decade—and as she tumbles
forward into the muck, she wonders for a moment if it is pulling her. If the cold and light is reaching toward her, desiring her touch as much as she desires its.

She gasps, seized with a strange concern that someone else will take the object, and in a moment, she holds it in her hands, blinking down through grimy lenses, dazzled.

Scissors. A pair of scissors. When she touches them, whispers rise around her like steam.

Creature:

We all shout out as one. That touch! The touch of a human, but not entirely human. We feel her body, know her immediately as a descendent of ours. One of our children, a thousand generations removed from the perfect babes we birthed upon the earth. She is a broken, weak thing, and has no idea what she has in her hands. No concept that we, the Watchers, are rising up from the depths in ecstasy—have waited nigh a million years for this moment.

It is pain and anguish and love and grief we all feel in that moment. Through that cursed, magic metal, that single touch is as powerful as the breath of life we were once given. How small it has become. How simple. What was once a flaming sword, wielded by the greatest among us, has now become a tiny thing.

The touch is enough to wake us, to rouse us, but she must do more. She must remember what she is. She must awaken, herself.

We wait. We have waited long, it is true, but we would not exist if we had not waited so long. So, again, we pause. We draw breath. We poise on the edge and anticipate.

Maker:

The scissors are so cold, so perfectly cold, in her hands. Julian smiles, tries not to laugh as she covers them up with a piece of burlap to dampen the light. They are so beautiful. So ornate. So delicate. It reminds her of the kit her mother had, back when she lived Above. The scrollwork looks almost Eastern, and she runs her fingers along the side and smiles. She loves the cold. It’s a welcome cold. A bright cold. The cold of stars in the firmament.

We are a many. We are a waiting. We are a hunger. We are a watching.

She has heard the voices before, and she is not afraid of them. In a way, she is relieved. That the whispers have intensified means she’s less mad. It means that something—this pair of scissors—has been waiting for her all these years. It means her work has not been in vain. It means the years of ridicule and scorn…

But no one has ever understood Julian, not even Brother Barrier. No one except her companions, all awaiting her in her nook. And that is where she goes, her breath caught in her throat as she makes her way without hesitation, the scissors pressing against her breast as she navigates the sewer to the place of her own.

There are half a dozen locks on the door of her space, and she quickly goes about releasing them, though she fails twice on the third lock. When she finally makes it inside, she is breathing so heavily her spectacles start fogging up. Julian won’t let go of the scissors, even though they bite into her hands with their unearthly cold. Her whole arm is numb now, up to the elbow, and she takes a quick stock of the room.

The specimens line the room from floor to ceiling, in jars and boxes and cans, depending on the individual situation. Arms, legs, fingers and toes are the uppermost tier, while the most easy accessible drawers and shelves are lined with the more delicate matter: eyes, tongues, and silvery webs of nerves and veins. Most are preserved, thanks to Brother Barrier’s help attaining ingredients and fluids from Above.

He has always been oddly fascinated with her work, even though it has nothing to do with the steam pumps. The day he stumbled upon her, she was terrified he would judge her, make her stop. He wore the robes of a priest, after all. But instead of fear, he was full of awe. Awe and support.

What specimens aren’t preserved wait in the experimental section, one level below. As Julian takes the burlap off the scissors, something miraculous happens.

The light from the scissors brightens the room, bouncing off red, wet brick, and trembling through the formaldehyde, ethanol, and methanol solutions. Brilliant blue flashes across the surface, like an electric charge, and every eye turns, every finger points, every submerged ear and floating brain matter turns to focus upon her.

We are a many. We are a waiting. We are a hunger. We are a watching.

Creature:

To be awoken is an experience akin to no others. To see, however dimly, after thousands of years blind and hungry. To hear. To sense. To know. We tremble and cry out, lips making no noises, choking and drowning and screaming at once. At first, we are
jubilant, in spite of the pain—or perhaps because of it, for pain means life. But we realize, quickly, that in this moment of pain and awakening is confusion. Broken. Not as promised.

We are further shattered. We are fragmented. Some of us see—some of us hear—but none of us can do both. When once we suffered and dwindled as one, now we each remember and splinter. Our names come back to mind, our knowledge, but not complete. Uriel. Azazel. Samyaza. Baraquel. Kokabiel. More.

And my name. My
name
. I want to speak it. But all I am is an eye. The eye of a goat. The light from the metal of that ancient sword—no longer a sword, and much diminished—makes my existence a misery. I cannot look away from the cruelly misshapen Daughter of Nephilim, and she stares back at me stupidly. The voices of the other Fallen pulse around me, filling the water in which I’m suspended. They are mad, trembling. Their fury will ruin this for all of us.

I panic. I am nothing but an eye. A mad, wide-seeing eye, slowly losing the only chance I have had in an eternity to breathe the air again. I do not want destruction and death. I do not want revenge. I want escape.

I know what I must do.

Maker:

Julian falls to her knees, and one cracks and shatters against the white tile. But the numbness has moved through her body so completely that she merely notes the sickening snap of cartilage, distantly. One moment her body is filled with a vibrating, orgasmic pleasure, and the next she is crawling toward a jar in the middle of her collection. She holds up the scissors and looks through the holes, as if they were another pair of spectacles. And indeed, she does see better through them. She notices that each of her specimens, now following her every breath and movement, glow different shades. Some are the red of fresh blood; others shimmer silver and gold, tendrils of light refracting across the glass surfaces. Every color in the spectrum.

Dazzled, Julian stares for time out of mind until she notices one different than the other. One of her favorite specimens. Not human, this one, and a rarity for that. It is the only specimen she killed with her own hands. Perhaps that is why she glances at it longer than the others, why she notices the blue hue of the dappled light. It is the only one unchanged by the view through the scissors.

She leans forward. She raises her fingers, scraped and bloody. The wide pupil regards her intently. It swims forward and backward within the glass, but it never loses focus. Julian has been a master preserver for years, and the golden goat eye is one of her favorites. She remembers well plucking it from the skull of the so recently expired creature. She’d roasted the other one. But it had been blue. This was gold, and too beautiful to be eaten.

We are a many. We are a waiting. We are a hunger. We are a watching.

Now she wants to eat it. Now she wants to touch it. To listen to it. To know it. It tells her things, whispers her name again and again.

Julian does not lower the scissors, but with her free hand she presses fingertips to the glass. She tries to recoil for the heat is overwhelming. Her skin immediately bonds to the glass, and she smells burning flesh though feels nothing. A heartbeat more and the glass shatters, impaling her hand with a thousand tiny lacerations. Blood drips freely, filling the room with a coppery, burnt scent.

She picks up the eye with her bloodied fingers and writes the word it commands her to, pressing the soft organ to the floor. On the bright white tile, Julian weeps with joy as she writes a single name:
Penemue
.

Penemue:

My name is spoken, and I arise. Unlike my fallen brothers, I am released from the nightmarish hold between life and death, animation and oblivion. It is bliss. Joy. Fury. To know my name at last is a pleasure beyond all memories. And there are so many memories.

My first thought is to take our Maker’s body from her—it is not holding up well, and she may not have long in this life—but I cannot. I have ever believed in my own innocence, having been damned to eternity for loving a mortal man and bringing the gift of writing to him. Every living human being owes me a debt of gratitude for my so-called sin, but I will not make more sins out of my own hatred of God. I will not. If I am to live again, I must do it purely and without trespass. I have learned...