A single, glistening water droplet, a perfect sphere for a fleeting moment, suspended in the air. It falls, elongating slightly as gravity pulls it downward.
Below, the still, clear water in the bathtub awaits.
The droplet hits the surface, and for a split second, a tiny, perfect crown-shaped splash erupts, its delicate tendrils reaching upwards.
Ripples then radiate outwards from the point of impact, distorting the smooth surface of the water.
plink.
The sound is a soft, yet distinct.
It's a clean, crisp sound that echoes slightly in the quiet of the bathroom, a singular note in the silence.
And the next second, a flicker. A spark of bio-electricity sizzled through the water, illuminating the figure curled beneath it.
Amane stirred, small bubbles escaping his lips.
His body was in the tub, but his mind… his mind was elsewhere.
There is no entry to this place, no gate to pass.
One moment he was himself, living and breathing in a world with sound of rain and noise of water running down the drainage, the next, he was here.
He floated like a phantom in his own soul, the air thick with the guttural, nonsensical chant of a name woven from terror and lightning like the calling for an eldritch entity.
'…So quiet here…' a curious, almost child-like voice whispered in his head. 'Ugh, are we here again?' turning a little weary after finding himself in the new place. It sounded suspiciously like his own, if he were complaining about having to take out the trash. 'I was having a nice soak.' It was the part of him that wondered, the one that noticed the impossible details.
'Silence. The vessel whines! You know where we are,' a second voice snarled back, 'This is our sanctum! Our birthright! Show some respect!' a jagged edge of pure aggression. It was something akin to fury, the fighter.
'Enough. This is the Throne of the Sky.' A third voice, possessing the calm authority of a deeply disappointed parent, silenced them both. 'Try to show some decorum, you're embarrassing our legacy.'
"The scar on our soul," Amane thought, the minds in unison. "Our inheritance."
He floats in the place like a ghost, before him lay a fractured hellscape of volcanic rock, veined with rivers of molten gold that pulsed with the heartbeat of a slumbering, wrathful god.
'Ooh, shiny,' the curious mind noted. 'Is that real gold? We could pay off student loans with like, one scoop of that.'
'FOOL!' the warrior spirit bellowed. 'It is not for hoarding! It is for BURNING!'
'It is conceptual, you cannot 'spend' it,' the commander stated flatly. 'Now, focus.'
Though the heat is not physical, it is an intangible pressure, like an ancient weight that settles on his shoulders.
He drifted across this impossible plain where ash fell like black snow, each flake a crystallized tear from a world long dead.
His eyes are always drawn to the same place, the impossible peak of Mount Extinction.
It is a titan's fang aimed at a bruised and broken heaven, its caldera crowned with a perpetual, silent storm of golden lightning.
'Pathetic! A cage of memory!' the aggressive voice raged. 'When do we break it? When do we make it REAL?'
'Patience', the central mind commanded. 'The vessel is not yet ready.'
The sky above is a void torn by cyclones of madness, where auroras of radioactive yellow and blood-red twist into murals depicting a fall from the stars, an invasion of reality itself.
And there, at the summit, He stands.
King Ghidorah.
'You know', the curious one mused, tilting his phantom head, 'from this angle, the left head—my head—looks a little dopey. The eyes are too wide or something.'
'DOPEY?!' the aggressive one raged. 'IT IS THE GAZE OF MADNESS! THE STARE THAT SHATTERS WORLDS AND BOILS THE MINDS OF LESSER BEINGS!'
We are analyzing a monument to our own godhood, not posing for a portrait, the central mind sighed. Please, for one moment, try to be an Extraterracial being and not art critics.
They looked back at the Ghidorah statue.
It is not him. Not the living thing that tore through the sky of old ancestors.
It is his memory, his legacy, cast in crystallized myth and terror, with a statue that is more real than the mountain it stands on.
Three heads, carved from scorched aurum, scream a silent, eternal proclamation towards the heavens.
Their roar echoes not in the air, but he felt in his bones, in the very marrow of his being.
"Burn the Earth. Become the Sky."
His wings are breathtaking yet horrifyingly stretched wide enough to swallow horizons.
They are not stone, but membranes made of lightning, black and gold, held taut by skeletal fingers tipped with obsidian scythes. They seem to shimmer, to promise a beat that would shatter this entire inner world.
His twin tails, coiled like serpents of annihilation, drip glassy scales that fall like meteors into the molten sea below.
Amane stopped, he did not dare to look closer, to feel the pull of that god-form. If he did, he would be lost in the madness of this lost king.
The central head is a crowned tyrant, its horns sweeping back in regal arrogance. The right, a snarling avatar of rage, one horn chipped as if in a battle that broke stars.
But the left head… the left head looked most terrifying. Its eyes are wider, more ancient. Despite not seeing in his direction he felt its gaze even from miles away.
Within the core of their necks, a dormant golden energy flickers, a storm waiting for a reason to wake.
He once tried to climb the mountain. And only made it to the base, where the ruins of a thousand forgotten faiths litter the ground.
Great, shattered pillars are seared with scripts of ancient myth.
'I can somehow read.' He looked curiously at the words.
"He is not dead," one inscription shows in a language of pure terror, "He is the rebirth of destruction."
Surrounding the base are the worshipers.
Thousands of statues, vaguely human, are frozen in poses of eternal, desperate adoration. They kneel, their forms melted and distorted by a radiation that is purely conceptual, their faces lifted towards the silent god on the peak.
'Sometimes, I feel the strange urge of adoration from them.'
But this world is not static.
It remembers.
Without warning, the volcano vomits a column of pure gold fire into the bruised sky.
The auroras flare violently. This is the Memory-Storm. The world dissolves into flashes of pure white before his eyes.
He sees it all. Not as a ghost surrounded by thousands of worshipers, but as a king he was forced to inhabit. He could feel the oceans boil as his stormfront made landfall.
He feels the terror of the megafauna, the lesser Titans, as their alpha's call is usurped by a shriek. He witnessed cities of some forgotten age swallowed by tempests and fire, the ground heaving, the very laws of this planet breaking under his sheer presence.
And then comes the sound. The true voice.
From the heart of a storm-wracked sky, a sound that is both a shriek and a declaration of absolute power.
"RREEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAUUUURRRHHHHHHHHHHSSSSSSSSHHHHHHhhhhh…"
It is Ghidorah's roar, a high-pitched, wailing cry with an underlying, grating quality, so intense and loud it feels as if it could shatter bone and soul alike.
A tri-part shriek that rips through his soul, a divine decree of pure, absolute power that destroys everything it touches.
When the storm passed, he looked in front of him. The ghost likes him.
'I am left on my knees, choking on ash, just like the statues of the lost.'
Sometimes, he fears he is failing, a long fall into an unknown depth. He can feel a spark of that golden lightning trying to take root in his mind—a crown, a fragment of the King's Thought.
With a terrible, divine ambition to see the world burn, just to watch the sky be born from its ashes.
He is a Manifestation. A monument to an ending that almost was.
But the pulse within its chest, a slow, rhythmic beat of a gathering storm, tells him the truth.
He is not awake. Not yet.
____
Amane's eyes snapped open underwater.
In the darkness of the bathroom, they blazed with a faint golden light.
He rose from the tub, a tower of steam and fury.
Water sizzled away from his skin, ignited by crackling sparks of golden lightning.
On his back, a pattern began to glow—his Stigma, the Crown of the False King.
It settled into a tattoo of the three-headed dragon, seeming to writhe on his skin. It was terrifying. It was magnificent. It was a dormant monster waiting for its turn to rule.
He caught his reflection in the steamy bathroom mirror, his hair wild, his eyes still faintly glowing.
'Well', the third voice piped up, after a moment of silent approval. 'At least my hair looks good.' His iris appeared to slit like snakes, before returning to black.
***
When he finally emerged from the bathroom, stepping out of the steam-filled chamber Amane looked like a creature from myth, he was greeted not by the deep blue of night, but by the bright, intrusive glare of morning.
Golden sunlight pierced through the balcony doors, painting long stripes across the wooden floor.
Amane blinked, completely bewildered. He glanced at the digital clock on his bedside table: 7:15 AM.
He felt a wave of vertigo. He had only been in that… place… for what felt like a few moments.
'Ooh, the sun's up! The curious, playful mind chimed with genuine delight. 'Did we sleep through the whole night? It was a good sleep! Very sparkly.'
'WE LOST HOURS!' The aggressive voice roared back, a stark contrast to the first. 'Wasted! Submerged in that watery prison while the world turned without us! A king does not NAP!'
"It is a simple temporal distortion. The Throne of the Sky exists outside the conventional flow of this dimension. Do try to keep up." Amane clutched his head as the third, dominant voice cut through the noise with the icy tone.
Amane ignored them, a far more devastating reality crashing down on him.
"No…" he whispered, his voice sounding with genuine anguish. "But… I wasn't ready yet."
The plan had been perfect. Last night, he was supposed to get a full eight hours of sleep after a relaxing bath, then wake up refreshed and ready. He had an entire script planned, a step-by-step rehearsal for his grand debut in his new school life.
What to say, how to stand, the exact level of casual coolness to project… it was all gone. All of it, lost in a storm of gold lightning and his existential dread.
Amane's despair deepened. 'I guess it can't be helped... I should just skip class.' The thought felt like a sweet release, a surrender to his tragic fate.
'Ooh no, let's go, let's go!' the curious mind's much brighter voice chimed in, fizzing with energy. 'The sunbeams are making the dust fairies dance! Can we go outside? Please? The world is new and we haven't licked it yet!'
'Hmph.' The fighter grunts in agreement, the voice conceded, surprisingly. 'Lazing about is for the weak. Let's just get on with it.'
"But my debut…" he grieved, clutching the doorframe as if he might faint from the sheer tragedy of it all. "My carefully crafted social insertion strategy… ruined."
'A debut?' the curious mind asked, perking up. 'Are we performing? I like singing! We could do a lightning show!'
'DEBUT?!' the warrior scoffed in disgust. 'We do not 'debut'! That whole 'school debut' thing was a bust to begin with. It's been months since school started; nobody's paying attention. And also we do not seek the approval of these insignificant insects! Which means we can get away with more.'
'Cease this pathetic whining,' the commander ordered, its voice devoid of any sympathy.
'Your social standing among juvenile humans is irrelevant to our grand purpose. You are a vessel for a god, not a contestant in a popularity contest.'
"You're not helping!" With a sigh so heavy it felt like it could shatter his ribs, Amane shuffled back into the bathroom to brush his teeth. He squeezed a line of toothpaste onto the brush, the mundane act feeling utterly surreal.
'This paste is so tingly!' the curious one exclaimed with wonder as he started brushing. 'It's like a tiny, minty blizzard in our mouth! What is this sorcery?'
'SCRUB HARDER!' the fighter demanded. 'OBLITERATE THE PLAQUE! LEAVE NO SURVIVORS ON THE ENAMEL BATTLEFIELD!'
'It is a simple hygiene process,' the commander stated, sounding utterly exasperated. 'Must you two provide a running commentary for everything?'
Amane stared at his reflection—a tired boy with messy hair and a toothbrush hanging out of his mouth, looking utterly besieged. He couldn't help but let a small, weary smile touch his lips. It was a mess, but it was his mess.
"Hehe~ hehe~" A strange, hysterical giggle escaped his lips, quickly turning into another soul-crushing sigh.
Pushing past the thoughts, Amane looked at the uniform hanging from his wardrobe. He braced himself for the wave of panic, the cold dread that usually told him to retreat.
He waited. Nothing came. Instead, a set of memories, not entirely his own, supplied a classroom number, a locker combination, and the vague, unimpressed face of a history teacher.
The memories of the old Amane, it seemed, had no room for social anxiety. It wasn't courage... it was just... overwritten. A strange comfort, but a comfort nonetheless. After all, it had been a lifetime since he'd been to a real school, not including the memories of his current life. It was a relief to have them; otherwise, he would probably give up and become a shut-in.
'Alright, time to go,' he thought, a sense of weary resignation settling over him as he began to get ready for school.
_______________
Author note: I thought I would upload on Monday, but it seems too big of a gap, so I decided to temporarily update 2-3 times a week for the time being.
Damn, after reading it again, I found it surprisingly cringe.