Godzilla: The Harbinger (PROLOGUE)

I am ancient and unending.

Alive beyond the confines of my reptilian mind.

My existence stretches past the fabric of history into the shadowed past, a place the modern man does not remember. It was here that my species was born. There was light, and a fire in our bones at our conception as simple beasts. But the Sickening Fire fated to change me did not occur until thousands of years later.

I am the last of my kind. Born late, born small, and born with a predisposed distaste for humankind. It was intended to be this way, as I understand it.

I was told to eradicate them.

See how they torment you with their war machines, my conscience whispered. Transforming you into a being that transcends anything that ever lived. See how they also destroy each other. There is a black illness breeding in their hearts that must one day be put to rest.

My mind, seemingly sharper than that of the fauna around me, had only blossomed further with time. As my planet evolved and strange, glistening animals of silver and darkness began appearing on the waters, my conscience unfurled. I became aware of evil.

When the Sickening Fire came, I was conscious of my anger. It frothed in my veins like the waters encompassing my island home, sweeping into a consuming hatred of the audacity of men. How could they annihilate each other as they did? And how could I connect with the feeble pulsing of their rotting minds, feeling the bleak, empty darkness of their spirits?

Monsters! Even in my transcendent form, looming over all living things, I loathed the little beasts as creatures more destructive than I could ever be. My mind was not swayed when I discovered the extent of my own monstrosity. Despite the blazing heat that expelled from my mouth, born deep in my flesh of a toxin the world should never know in such quantities, I hated men.

They had done this to me. Made me transcendent.

There was a strength in my new form I did not admire. It was frightening to feel, and even more so to glimpse in the reflective winking of the waters. Where had those raised shards of bone come from, stabbing the sky from my spine? They glittered like the silver animals on the ocean, infecting every length of my backside.

My feet no longer made soft footfalls on the sand. They had expanded into earth-crushing weapons pulverizing the land I walked on, creating such massive tremors that nothing living wanted to be around me anymore.

And that is perhaps the most egregious thing about it all. Not merely the alien power throbbing in my cells, nor the small insignificance of the trees I once took respite under. It was the loneliness. Being deprived of old friends who no longer recognized the quiet, grazing dinosaur on their island.

I was blessed and fearfully cursed with a probing mind, but the awakening brought on by the Sickening Fire only enhanced my wretchedness. To be an entity that is not only too large and cumbersome for its own body is one heartache, but to be aware of such things!

Oh, how I despised the man.

There will come a day when you will destroy them, the voice of the "Other" assured me. It was a promise, and one I found myself intending to honor. When their wickedness and their internal decay that they lavish upon this world has grown too pungent, you will be the cleanse.

Yes, I thought. I will burn away the shadows man has gathered and heap these atrocities on their own heads. There will come a day and an hour when the light must finish this cruel darkness.

For a while, however, I would lay low. The "Other" would give the word when the time had truly arrived. The time to cleanse away the stains. I would conceal myself from humankind and harvest more hatred of him in my heart in the coming years.

It would not take long. A few decades at least, a few centuries at most. This was all very well. I would wait.