The creature struck the city forty-five minutes before rush hour, in full daylight, whilst everyone toiled at work and dreamed of the beers they\u2019d soon be imbibing.\u00c2\u00a0 The streets were plenty crowded; not everyone works till five.\u00c2\u00a0 And all those buildings that fell, they\u2019d been full of hard-working, unsuspecting Americans.\u00c2\u00a0 And, as it turns out, citizens of another forty-one countries–at last count.<\/p>\n
The creature descended from the sky with the sun directly behind it, as if it sailed the solar winds themselves.\u00c2\u00a0 Bright and reflective, at first it was hard to tell if there was something there.\u00c2\u00a0 Sunlight shifted and darkened and danced.\u00c2\u00a0 But when the thing spread its wings, it eclipsed the sun, albeit incompletely, and brought darkness to day.<\/p>\n
Its talons tore through steel towers, shattered glass, smashed concrete, collapsed stairs, and snapped elevator cables; do I really need to tell you what it did to human flesh?\u00c2\u00a0 Its teeth were razors ten feet long, its tail half a mile of crushing granite muscle.<\/p>\n
Eleven buildings, some forty thousand presumed dead or injured, before the creature settled atop the suspension bridge.\u00c2\u00a0 There, it shook out its gigantic flowing mane and roared.\u00c2\u00a0 A few miles distant, it sounded like a lion.\u00c2\u00a0 Up close, it sounded like death.\u00c2\u00a0 Ears bled.\u00c2\u00a0 Windows evaporated.\u00c2\u00a0 Concrete cracked, and bits of untouched buildings suddenly sloughed off in immense avalanches.<\/p>\n
By day\u2019s end, the expected death toll broke one million.\u00c2\u00a0 The creature sits there still, on the bridge, sometimes shaking its long hair or flexing its powerful wings or sweeping its tail through the river.\u00c2\u00a0 It broke the subways.\u00c2\u00a0 It paralyzed a world.\u00c2\u00a0 Billions watched the live camera feeds, those that still served, and what the satellites could see.\u00c2\u00a0 Unlike the Great Wall, you really could see this thing from space.\u00c2\u00a0 Awe, fatalistic and fantastic–there\u2019s no other way to describe the numbness, the horror, the despair.<\/p>\n
Yet, in a basement in upstate New York, two boys watch the TV with a great deal of interest.\u00c2\u00a0 There\u2019s a book between them, opened to a page on which is drawn a great flying beast with the head of a lion and a long lizard tail.\u00c2\u00a0 It\u2019s described as being the size of a mountain, which is only a small exaggeration.<\/p>\n
The book\u2019s contents are old, older than them, older than this country into which they were born, older than most of modern civilization.\u00c2\u00a0 Its pages are faded, so you can\u2019t really read the names.\u00c2\u00a0 You can only barely make out the inscription on its leather cover, though it\u2019s something older than Latin and therefore pointless to consider.<\/p>\n
This particular version of the book, however, was transcribed by monks in the fourteenth century under the direction of the Mad Abbot in a small town some hours southwest of Prague, in a mountain keep that remains hidden from modern eye.\u00c2\u00a0 That any book escaped its library is amazing.\u00c2\u00a0 Despite failing eyesight, despite lackluster candles, despite the gloom of Carpathian winter, the monks whose hands touched this book rendered a perfect duplication of the illustrations, of which there were many, and the unusual phraseology within.\u00c2\u00a0 They may have been unable to translate the text, but they knew where to put a line and where to put an arc.<\/p>\n
That these two boys found the book in a tunnel on the side of one of the smaller Catskills is nearly impossible to believe, especially considering the book was dry and protected, excellently preserved, surrounded by no other treasure or icon.<\/p>\n
They had managed to read the name of this creature, and to summon it, and now they watched the television with wide eyes and mischievous minds.<\/p>\n
One of the boys muted the sound and flipped through the book.\u00c2\u00a0 He did so carelessly, leaving deposits of oil and dirt from his fingers that would soon eat through the delicate pages.\u00c2\u00a0 It didn\u2019t really matter if he ripped a page, there were more.\u00c2\u00a0 He found the picture of a snake-like thing with a half dozen heads and huge red eyes and eight long, spider-like limbs.<\/p>\n
The other asked, \u201cDo you think it will work again?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cLet\u2019s find out.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the hour before dawn thousands of miles away, in another city with high towers and millions of people, the creature emerged.\u00c2\u00a0 It dug straight up from the center of the earth.\u00c2\u00a0 It was like a snake, or a worm, with a mighty mouth that swallowed entire fire stations and city halls.\u00c2\u00a0 It wrapped its serpentine body around buildings, using its long, thin legs to climb the sides and get a good grip, and squeezed.\u00c2\u00a0 It might have been trying to snap matchsticks.\u00c2\u00a0 Rubble rained from the towers, shattering smaller structures.\u00c2\u00a0 It moved faster than it had any right to move.\u00c2\u00a0 When the military came to meet it, they thought the legs might be a weakness, but they were wrong.\u00c2\u00a0 Once stripped of its limbs, the creature sidewinded, like a rattlesnake, crashing into anything it could.\u00c2\u00a0 Its full length, if straight, was estimated to be no longer than the first creature\u2019s tail.\u00c2\u00a0 Still, it leveled the city before rush hour would have started.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The creature struck the city forty-five minutes before rush hour, in full daylight, whilst everyone toiled at work and dreamed of the beers they\u2019d soon […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12,6,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=618"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}