Quick the wicked hostess, Louhi,
Sends the black-frost of the heavens
To the waters of Pohyola,
O’er the far-extending sea-plains,
Gave the black-frost these directions:
“Much-loved Frost, my son and hero,
Whom thy mother has instructed,
Hasten whither I may send thee,
Go wherever I command thee,
Freeze the vessel of this hero,
Lemminkainen’s bark of magic,
On the broad back of the ocean,
On the far-extending waters;
Freeze the wizard in his vessel,
Freeze to ice the wicked Ahti,
That he never more may wander,
Never waken while thou livest,
Or at least till I shall free him,
Wake him from his icy slumber!”
Frost, the son of wicked parents,
Hero-son of evil manners,
Hastens off to freeze the ocean,
Goes to fasten down the flood-gates,
Goes to still the ocean-currents.
As he hastens on his journey,
Takes the leaves from all the forest,
Strips the meadows of their verdure,
Robs the flowers of their colors.
—Kalevala, the Finnish National Epic, Rune 30
Ilene shifted, looking for where the Iwi history picked up; the script could be written in almost any direction, and moving from section to section, sometimes the orientation changed without notice.
“Ah,” she murmured. “There.” She resumed the translation. “Trapped within their subterranean prison for millennia, the Skar King harnessed a terrible power. The ancient Titan, Shimo.” She scanned the next bit twice before relaying it to the others. She wanted to be sure she had it right.
“Shimo wasn’t just a Titan,” she told them. “She’s a World Ender. The Skar King controls her with pain. Her power covered the Earth in the last Ice Age.”
“So, wait,” Bernie said. “All of this is some kind of Hollow Earth… turf war?
“We reopened the vortex,” Ilene said. “We brought Kong down here. He’s been looking for others like himself—going deeper into the Hollow Earth and getting closer to their prison. The Iwi must have known it was just a matter of time and that’s why they’ve been calling for help, and that’s why Godzilla’s changing.”
“He’s gearing up for World War Three,” Trapper said.
“He barely survived last time,” Bernie pointed out. “What’s Godzilla gonna do on his own?”
Ilene shook her finger at Bernie. It was a good point, but the answer was there on the wall. “He won’t be on his own,” she said. “The Iwi believe that at the end of the world, one of their own will return and awaken Mothra—defender of the Iwi and ancient ally of Godzilla. The Iwi believe their savior will be…” She stopped, drew a breath. “An Iwi from Skull Island.”
She turned to regard Jia. Jia couldn’t have followed everything she said. She hadn’t been signing, and she’d been turned away from her daughter most of the time she was talking, so she couldn’t have read her lips.
Nevertheless, Jia’s gaze told her she already knew all of this. The queen must have been giving her own telepathic translation.
“That seems like a lot to put on one kid,” Trapper said.
“And how much time do we have, exactly?” Bernie asked.
“There’s no way of knowing,” Ilene told him.
Bernie mulled that over for a moment. “The end of the world, huh?” he said. “Can we just… If this Skar King guy wants to rule the surface, why would he destroy it?”
“Yeah,” Ilene said. She turned back to the inscriptions. “I mean, the Skar King is said to have one face that is two. One face speaks of paradise. The other promises pain. One tells his followers they will rule everything together. The other promises an end to those things the Skar King hates.”
“You mean he’s telling his apes one thing, but he has different plans?” Trapper said.
“Maybe,” Ilene said.
“Those things he hates,” Bernie said. “What does he hate?”
“That’s right here,” Ilene said. She tapped a symbol of the script.
“What does that mean?” Trapper asked.
“Everyone,” she said. “Everything. It can mean the universe—all of it.”
“That could… that sounds kind of bad,” Bernie said.
“Kind of,” Ilene said. “There’s some more over here. Let me have a look at that.”
* * *
Kong knew what death was. And he knew it was chasing him.
He couldn’t use his hurt arm for running. It made him slower than usual. That was good for Suko, who was able to keep up with him. It was less good for the outcome of the race. Already he could hear the hoots and calls of his pursuit. How many apes were there? Three? Two hands of fingers? More than that?
The way he was now, with one arm of no use—without his axe, which he’d had to leave behind—he might be able to beat two of them. Maybe.
But if he could make it to his territory, he would have a better chance. And if he lost, at least it would end there.
He wasn’t sure why Suko was with him. Why he had helped him back at the Home of the Apes. Suko could be brave, as he had seen. Suko had attacked him, an ape many times his size and strength—twice. But Suko could be a coward too, when he was with the others. Although now that made more sense. Red Ape liked cowards—he killed those who showed courage. Against him, anyway.
Above all, though, Suko was smart. He had to know that in choosing to go with Kong—in choosing to help Kong—he had chosen the same death that was now chasing Kong. Which meant Suko was now Kong’s responsibility.
They crossed the bridge of bones, and the smoking, bitter land of burnt rock was behind them. They still had a long way to go, but at least there would be trees and grass and water. Not that they would have time to stop and drink. Their pursuers were already gaining on them.
He thought of trying to hide, to take them by surprise, but he still didn’t know how many there were. No. He could make it back to his cave. There, they would see what he could do, even without the use of his arm.
They charged through the pond where he had killed the fish-snake. They startled a small pack of the same predators which he had fought earlier. They turned their heads, saw Suko. There were only four of them, not enough to have a chance against him, but they seemed to be considering Suko as possible prey.
Kong stopped just long enough to thump his chest and shout at them. They scattered. He chuffed and started running again.
He was slowing down by the time they were back in territory he knew. He could hear the other apes catching up; now and then, as he gained elevation, he caught glimpses of them.
He could count them now. A handful of fingers and two more. Red Ape wasn’t with them. It didn’t matter. There were still too many of them.
For now. But now he was in his home territory.
He swatted away a stick tied to a vine, releasing the huge rock he had prepared. It swung down from above.
He looked back and saw it crash into the lead ape, shattering bone and sending him flying. The others saw, however, and leaped over or dodged the trap.
A hand and one of them still gave chase. The next ape behind him put on a burst of speed. He couldn’t let them catch him here, in the open. He had to make it up the mountain.
The new lead ape leaped at his back, wielding a stone knife. Kong jumped too, catching a vine with his good arm, swinging over the patch of ground below.
The other ape landed on it, and discovered it wasn’t ground at all, but sticks and leaves and a scattering of dirt Kong had arranged over a very deep hole. He squealed and was gone.
The others, alerted to the trap, went around it.
Now it was down to a hand of them.
He cast about, looking for Suko, but the smaller ape was nowhere to be seen. Kong didn’t blame him. Suko would not last long in this fight. If he survived, they would take him back to Red Ape, who would probably hurt him, a lot, before killing him. He hoped Suko was taking this chance to escape to somewhere the other apes couldn’t find him.
Up Kong went, to the closed canyon at the top. Here he could fight with his back to the wall and with protection on two sides. He stumbled to one knee as all his strength seemed to drain out through the pain in his arm. He felt dizzy, like after he had awakened with the new tooth. He limped to the back of the canyon and watched hopefully as they rushed toward him, trying not to look at the vine he had stretched just above the canyon floor, just at the level of an ape’s shin. Or the rocks above that the vine would bring down when the first of them tripped on it.
They were wary now. They saw they had him closed in. But they still weren’t looking down.
Until the one in front did. He barked and held the others back with his hand. Then, very carefully, he stepped over the trap.
Kong prepared to fight. There was nothing else to do. Then the rocks fell anyway. The apes had a breath to see their fate plunge down on them, but no time to escape it. They vanished under the avalanche, all of them. He waited, ready for any motion, but none came. Kong heaved a sigh of relief, wondering what had happened to trigger the trap, glad it had.
Then he heard a call above. He looked to where the rocks had fallen from and saw Suko was there, looking pleased with himself.
Suko had made the trap work. He had moved the stick the vine was supposed to move. Suko thumped his chest in triumph.
Kong felt the little ape’s victory. But his legs wouldn’t support him any longer. He collapsed to the ground.
For a moment, he knew nothing. Then Suko was there, trying to lift him, to make him stand.
Yes. They had to leave. Red Ape would not give up. He would send more red-stripes. He might bring the cold-breathing Titan.
Kong felt his new tooth with his tongue, then looked down at the ruin of his arm. He needed a new one. Maybe the little ones could help. He would try to find them. He would follow the call he had heard.
With Suko supporting him on one side, he staggered past the dead apes in their grave of stones.
Hampton watched the topside of Tiamat’s ice massif grow nearer as the helicopter approached it. Or, rather, the late Tiamat’s ice lair; it belonged to Godzilla, now. The Titan had gone in hours before, and so far as they could tell, he hadn’t stirred since.
“Maybe he’s gone back to sleep,” Laurier ventured.
“He’s just had the Titan equivalent of about a million coffee drinks,” Hampton said. “Not exactly conducive to a nice afternoon nap. No, he’s doing something else.”
“We’ve got a call from the chopper.”
“Put it on speaker.”
Laurier nodded. A moment later, a voice crackled through the speakers.
“This is Monarch Air Team to base,” it said. “Tracking over Godzilla’s location. We’ve closed the shipping lanes within three hundred miles. Plasma readings indicate he’s absorbing everything in there. Whatever he’s getting ready for, it must be massive.”
“Uh-huh,” Hampton said. She was watching the data as it came in—energy readings, mostly. They looked… strange. Godzilla’s signature was there, of course, but something also remained of Tiamat’s energy profile. In fact, that part seemed to be getting stronger and a little weirder. She sat back and watched as the helicopter circled the floating mountain of ice. She glanced at Laurier. “You know anything about the mythological Tiamat?”
“Babylonian, right? A dragon goddess.”
“Yeah. The mother of the gods. Her children pissed her off, and she decided to murder them all. They got her first. Butchered her out into parts.”
“Nice kids.”
“She probably had it coming. Not so nice herself. But it’s what they did with her parts. That’s interesting. They made the world out of her. They used her ribs to hold up the sky, her tail to make the Milky Way. Her dead eyes, still weeping, became the wellsprings of rivers.”
“Okay,” Laurier said.
“So Godzilla just cut up this Tiamat. He’s taken her life, her lair, and according to these readings, maybe part of her genetic code. So what is Godzilla making? What is he creating out of Tiamat’s corpse?”
Ilene watched Jia play some sort of game with the other children in the village. It involved running with streamers of blue and saffron cloth, in patterns that were either very complex or entirely random. At times she thought it might be some version of capture the flag, but she had no idea what the rules were, or if there were rules. It wasn’t a game she had ever seen played among the Iwi of Skull Island.
What was clear was that Jia understood it, and was enjoying it tremendously. It felt so good to see her daughter just for once being a child. And yet at the same time she had to hold in her head the prophecy she had just learned of, that Jia was once again to be called upon to save the world. As Trapper had pointed out, that was a huge burden, one most people, much less most children, should not have thrust upon their shoulders.
And yet here they were.
“That looks like fun,” Trapper said, watching the kids. “Who’s winning?”
“I have no idea,” she admitted. He nodded. She could tell he’d really come to say something else. Trapper always knew way too much about how she was feeling.
“How’s your head?” he finally ventured. Then met her gaze fully and changed the question before she could answer. “How’s your heart?”
“What?” she said. “You mean beyond the Iwi believing that that my teenaged daughter will be the savior of all humanity?”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, apart from that.”
She nodded. “You know, I made a deal with myself when I became a mother. I don’t care what you have to sacrifice, what you have to give up—you will do right by that little girl.” She took a breath, not wanting to say the next thing, because that would make it real. But she had to do it. “I just never thought that the thing I’d be giving up would be her.” Her voice cracked in the last word, and she fought to regain her composure.
“Look,” Trapper said. “You don’t know that.”
“Really?” she said. “Trapper, before we came here, she said she didn’t belong. Anywhere.” She looked back at Jia, where she was smiling and playing. In her element. “If this is the life that she wants—I have to give her up.”
Sometimes Trapper knew when not to talk. He put his hand on her shoulder, instead. It felt good there, at least for the moment.
“You mind talking about something else?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said. “Anything else.”
He took the hand down.
“All of that stuff in the—shall we call it the library?”
“Temple of Knowledge,” she said.
“Okay, fine. Look, I think I followed most of it. Titan war. Rogue apes and all. But this ‘World Ender’? Shimo?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I’ve never heard it—or her, I guess—called that. I always thought she was a phantom, to tell you the truth. Just a trace in the rocks.”
She sighed. “Years ago, a paleontologist, Doctor Magezi Maartens, published a little monograph. It went largely unnoticed. But Monarch noticed. I was part of a team that went to talk to her. I was pretty new at Monarch. I wasn’t sure why I was there, because I wasn’t a geologist, or a paleontologist, or anything like that. In fact, at the time I was looking at rock art on a little island in the Pacific.”
“Titan rock art?”
“Godzilla rock art, specifically,” she said. “A cave painting. Godzilla and another Titan. Not one on our books. But big—bigger than Godzilla. From what I remember it looked like it might be four-legged, but reared up on hind legs. It had sort of a beaky face, like a turtle. And spines. Not like Godzilla’s, exactly, but… similar. It looked almost like it was dominating Godzilla.”
“That’s hard to imagine.”
“Sure. Kong tried it and wound up dead—well, technically and temporarily, but you get my point.”
“I had the point already. So what did your cave painting have to do with the paleontologist?”
“She had been working on dating the various glaciation events in Greenland, trying to establish a chronology for some fossils she had found there. And she’s discovered, well, a sort of layer.” She shifted around to look at him. “You know how one of the pieces of evidence of the asteroid impact that killed the non-avian dinosaurs was this thin layer of iridium found everywhere on the planet, all right on top of the last Cretaceous fossils and right under layers of Cenozoic ones? Iridium is really rare on Earth, but common in asteroids. The thing hit, threw up a cloud of iridium, and it settled all over the globe.”
“Yep,” he said. “That all rings a bell.”
“Well, she found a layer in the ice. The very first layer of ice laid down on Greenland almost a million years ago, right when it went from being ice-free to encrusted in the stuff.”
“Like, right before the last Ice Age,” he said.
“Yeah, like that. But it wasn’t a chemical layer. It was a pattern in the ice crystals themselves. She didn’t know what to make of it, but she had gotten corroborating samples from Siberia. It caught Monarch’s attention because one of our researchers had seen a similar pattern.”
“Let me guess. From the same period, the start of the Ice Age?”
“No. That was the thing. The Monarch ice samples weren’t from a worldwide layer. They were from a localized, singular event.”
“Wait. You don’t mean?”
She nodded. “Antarctica. Monster Zero.”
“You’re saying this thing put Monster Zero on ice? And started the last Ice Age?”
She shrugged. “The Iwi script called her the ‘original Titan’ but I was translating in a hurry. It could also mean ‘ultimate Titan’ or ‘quintessential Titan.’”
“Your cave painting?”
“Might not be related,” she said. “The paintings were very old. But I did research with nearby islanders. Some of the elders knew about the painting. They said another, very ancient people made it. And that they called the monster Whose-Breath-Makes-The-Ocean-Into-Stone.”
“Sounds related.”
“Uh-huh. That’s why they sent me. But then years passed. We found lots of Titans. But never her.”
“’Cause she was down here.”
“That’s what it looks like. Trapper, there has been more than one Ice Age. Some were a lot worse than the last one. There was one where everything was frozen to the equator. Life on the surface almost didn’t survive it. What is Shimo really capable of?”
“I think you just said it.”
“But if that’s true, what can Godzilla do?”
“But it’s not just Godzilla, right? And that raises another big question. I may be crazy here, but didn’t Mothra, um, die? In Boston a few years back? And not just technically dead but, you know, blown to bits? Kablooey?”
“There is that,” Andrews said. “And just days before that she was an egg in an ancient temple in Yunnan Province, China.” She shrugged. “Mythologically, Mothra is sort of eternal. She’s born, she dies, she’s born again. She comes when she’s needed. Monarch was never sure how long that egg had been in that temple. It could have been hundreds or thousands of years. Or where it came from, for that matter. But in the Iwi texts, there was a phrase I wasn’t sure how to translate, so I just blipped over it. But it used the same word as was used when they were talking about Shimo. It might mean the original Mothra, or the First Mothra, or just the most Mothra Mothra.”
“So, like the mother of all Mothras?”
“Could be something like that.”
“Huh,” he said. Then, for a while, neither of them said anything. They just watched Jia play.
“You know,” Trapper said, softly, after a little while.
“What’s that?”
“I… I had better check in on Bernie. He might…”
“Oh,” she said. “Yeah. He could be getting us all in trouble as we speak. Good thought.”
“Right,” he said. “We’ll talk later, hey?”
“Sure. Hey.”
* * *
Bernie realized he’d been neglecting his whole reason for being down here—his documentary. The initial meeting with the Iwi had been a little anxiety-inducing, but now everything seemed good. Nobody seemed to care where they went or what they did. Or what they filmed.
He had come upslope from the village to get a good shot of the stalagmite-stalactite pyramids, but then he’d seen some Iwi working at something that could help him prove a point.
Trapper had trailed along with him, almost as if he didn’t fully trust Bernie not to get into some kind of trouble—ironic, since he’d been the one waving a knife at these guys earlier.
Trapper seemed to also be watching the Iwi, gathered around a massive cut-stone block. A sound like the distant chime of a bell settled over the valley.
“Why is it, when I hear that funny tone, does everything feel lighter down here?” Trapper asked.
As he said it, three Iwi men lifted the block without apparent trouble and began to carry it away.
“That thing must weigh a ton,” Trapper said.
“Yeah,” Bernie said. He kept filming; Trapper’s question gave a chance to narrate a nice voiceover. If it didn’t come out right, it would at least remind him to go back and dub in a better version.
“Yeah. See, I don’t know how they can do it, but somehow they’re able to move their pyramids’ positions, which disrupts the gravitational pull down here. An entire civilization built off the manipulation of gravity.” That was good, he thought. He wouldn’t have to do another take.
“God, I wish I was streaming this live!” he said.
Trapper pulled something out of a ration bag and popped it in his mouth.
“What are you gonna do with that, Bern?” he asked as he chewed.
Bernie sighed. “Look,” he said. “I know what you’re thinking. But you don’t understand. To have been through what I’ve been through, seen what I’ve seen and to have absolutely nobody believe you?” He shook his head.
Trapper gazed around. He had a chip in one hand. Or a crisp? A snack. He gestured with it.
“This place,” he said. “This place is special, man. It’s magic. How long do you think it’ll stay like that if you start posting that? If you look at any isolated tribe, or community—how many of them survive contact with the outside world?” He waved the crisp at him again. “You know what I think the brilliant thing is? You already saved the world once. They can’t take that away from you.”
Bernie nodded, then raised the camera and pointed it at Trapper. “Can you say all of that again? The last part? So I have it on footage?”
“What?” Trapper said.
Trapper obliged him, finished his snack, and walked off. His repetition was less heartfelt. Or maybe, on hearing it twice, it just didn’t sound as good.
“I mean, it’s true,” Bernie said to himself, as he set up the camera to film himself doing a little exposition. He framed it so the pyramids were in the background. “No one can take it from me. But a little credit would be nice.”
But would it? Half the trolls would never believe him, no matter what. It’s what made it all so infuriating. It was like trying to climb a hill of sand, where when you took a step forward you slid back two. But he was down here now. It would be different after this. It had to be.
Sure he had everything framed right, he closed his eyes to clear his mind, then started the camera.
“So you see those pyramids behind me, right, Titan Truthers? Those are the real things. The template. The pyramids of Egypt, the Mayan and Toltec pyramids, the ziggurats of Mesopotamia. Oh. There’s lots more, all over the world. People have been trying to explain that for a long time. We’ve talked about Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu, how their civilizations spread ancient technology—alien technology—all over the world. Then, boom! They sank and vanished. Only maybe they didn’t ever sink. Maybe they were never continents on the surface at all. They were down here all along. Because I promise you, what you see behind me came first. And all those other places on the surface—just imperfect copies. The same form, but without the function. You ever hear of the cargo cults? In World War Two, indigenous people of the islands around New Guinea came in contact with the U.S. military, with technology and canned food and, just, things they had never seen before. After the war, the military left. The natives started building airstrips, life-sized models of planes out of straw. They carved headphones and wooden rifles, and marched like they had seen the soldiers do. They were trying to get them to come back, to bring more ‘magic’ stuff. So when you see the Great Pyramid of Cholula and you wonder ‘what were they going for?’” He turned and lifted his chin toward the huge crystalline structures. “It was that.”
He looked back at the camera, then switched it off.
“That was pretty good,” he told himself.
The Iwi men were back, moving another rock. Maybe he should get some more footage of that.
Sometimes, sometimes his imagination went off without him. That was usually good, Inspirational. But as he turned the camera, he suddenly felt not so much like an intrepid filmmaker, but more like those dads at one of those big corporate theme parks. Recording stuff while his kids rode the rides. And he suddenly imagined a hundred people like that, a thousand, all here, chopping this place and its people into easily digestible images and making little out-of-context comments for the folks back home.
He lowered the camera.
“Trapper,” he murmured. “You really, truly suck.”