Godzilla vs. Kong by Greg Keyes (e books free to read TXT) 📗

The tree shook in a way it had not before. Not from the wind, not from the rising water, but from something else. Something familiar, comforting, but at the same time so much bigger than her.

As the water touched her feet, she saw him, in the distance, coming her way. She waved, she shook the branches of the tree, watching as he waded through the flood. He did not see her, she knew; she was too tiny. His head was almost in the clouds, and his eyes were searching for something far distant, like the bending trees.

She closed her eyes. She knew the words to his hymns, although she could not say them. In her mind, they had their own shapes, taken from the lips of her kin, from their gestures, their expressions. She began to move her hands, to make those shapes.

Though you pass me by, O Kong, we are kin. Though you are great and I am small, we are one. Remember me, if only as a leaf fluttering in the wind.

Then she felt a warm wind on her face and opened her eyes.

He was there, his face filling her entire universe, his eyes, almost as big as her, full of concern. Below her, his hand rose up until it was level with her, within her reach.

He waited. It was her choice.

And it was no choice at all. Her most ancient kinsman, her god, had come for her. What could she do but accept?

She climbed into the huge cup of his hand. He closed it partway, shutting out the worst of the wind and the rain. And then, like a mountain walking he started off. And Jia was relieved, and she was sad, and she knew everything about her world was changed, and would never be the same again.

In His Sanctuary, Present Day

He remembered the glimpse of a tiny creature, one of his, reaching to touch him, the obliterating light that followed. Renewed, he had risen, and fought, and triumphed. He proclaimed himself and the others bowed to him. But no war is won so easily. He knew this from his own memories, but also from other recollections that came to him from a far deeper place, from the darkness before his eyes first opened. They were not the same recollections as those he had experienced himself; there were no colors or remembered shapes or even places, but instead a deep certainty. As his senses stretched to encompass the wind that blew from the heart of the planet and encircled the world above to meet the winds from the sun, as he could feel the slow rivers of molten rock flowing, colliding, swallowing land, giving birth to it, the cycle of hot rise and cold fall in the waters, the pumping heart of the oceans, everything that was now, so too did he feel what was, when the surface of the earth was liquid rock, when waters came, when ice covered everything, when the green life came and clawed its way onto bare rock. When many of his kind lived, fighting always, and the New Ones came to try to claim dominance.

He had settled the latest war. And then he had sought his own place to rest. But the same light that had given him the energy to fight had also destroyed that place. So he searched for another, and found it, wrestling it from a terrible adversary. He called the others to their places of rest. And there, in the warmth, in the hollow bones of the earth, he had rested his weary, battered body, knowing that eventually the planet would call him back. He drifted into the half-dream, where present and past were the same.

Time passed, no more than a single blink of his eye, it seemed. Then came an itch, a taste on the back of his tongue. Familiar but not familiar. Out of place and wrong. He tried to ignore it at first, because it seemed so insignificant; a tiny parasite trying to burrow into his scales.

But it grew, and as it grew, so did his anger. They should not dare. They should know better.

He broke from the half-sleep, his dreaming ended. He reached out to the other Titans, those woken by Ghidorah and all of the others, too. They were all still where they were supposed to be, quiet, at rest.

All but one; one that should be there but was not.

He pulled himself up. The time for rest was done. His gaze rested on the gigantic skull of the enemy, the ancient adversary his kind had once driven from this place but never completely defeated. He shrieked his warning, his threat, his growing rage.

And then he began his long journey back to the surface, to find the itch in his scales and end it forever.

Skull Island, Present Day

Kong woke to the sound of leafwings overhead, his arms aching as if he had been climbing. He could not remember what he was pursuing, but it had drawn so far ahead of him he could neither see it nor remember anything but depths and darkness—and a light, of some sort. A light that stung his eyes and flesh and had color like the brightest of skies. And there was an outline, a shape in the clouds. He should know what it was, but he could not quite remember. But he somehow felt it was out there, circling his territory, looking for a way in.

And he felt wrong. Slow. Everything slow, and not bright enough. Nothing exactly the right color, and the smells all wrong.

It had been like this. He remembered the rain, the fire in the sky, the water rushing across the land, the stink of everything dying, rotting. Everything darker, wetter, every day. The land bleeding like a wounded thing into the dark waters all around. The enemies from beneath came up, and he killed them, one by one or several at a