Tales of the Amalgam'verse: Ancient History · 3:48pm Oct 10th, 2018
Proofed by Faith-Wolff and Lance Omikron! Something to help hold folks over
4.5 BYA, Precambrian - The three Primordial Aspects are known to have been extant on the ancient, forming world. Enjin churned the land, settling the volcanic activity and shaping the central continent. Mizu cleansed the early ocean of its pollutants and purified the waters. Doragon beat the sky with its wings and blew away the thick smog cover to make the ozone layer. Their actions cultivate the landscape into one suitable for life, though life was not created by them. After an unspecified time on Terra, they depart for the rest of the system to repeat the process on other worlds.
250 MYA, Permian Period - Multicellular life has been long flourishing in the forms of normal sized plants and animals, and as natural-born kaiju who fed off the radiation in their environments.
However, drawn to the abundance of life like a ravenous horde, long-standing invasions by various interstellar and dimensional entities begin to threaten that. These “demons” wreak havoc on all that their massive numbers encounter. Native animals and kaiju become possessed into rampancy and bloodthirst to sate their tormentors' sadism, no longer just naturally competing but actively trying to destroy one another. Entire species are forced to slaughter one another, the ecosystems thrown into mayhem, and more and more invaders keep coming like a swarm of locusts after sensing the misery and despair to in turn cause more negativity that draws in more of their kind in a feedback loop. The Archdemons aside from the red one made their claims and new kingdoms, corrupting and ripping the world asunder from the sky down.
The Aspects return in full force and take an active role. Enjin, Mizu, and Doragon launch a war against the corrupting influences and invaders for the sake of the remaining life on Terra. They fight valiantly against hordes that outnumber them ten thousand to one for weeks, on land, through the air, and in the depths of the sea. The war lasts a century. They are defeated. Time after time they fight to preserve the failing biosphere, only to be overwhelmed by massive numbers. For every titanic demon or possessed kaiju they strike down, a thousand more replace them. All while Terra becomes Hell on earth.
Captured, overwhelmed, and to be executed by the leaders of the hordes as trophies of conquest, Mizu grabs its battered compatriots and transports them away via its reflection-based powers through a pool of the Aspect’s ichorous blood. The invaders revel in their victory, continuing to hunt them for trophies as they go about their sadistic massacres.
This used to be a paradise. Now it was nothing but ash, snow, and corpses of a the past. A single massive form carried two others across the dreary landscape, not another living thing in sight as it left a trail of churn ash in its wake that plumed into the smog covered skies. One could scarcely ascertain it was daytime given how thick the cover was. Even the ground felt toxic. It was searching for something, even as its battered body demanded rest. It finally found it after a day of trekking. A place with trees, dead ones, but trees nonetheless. A set of knuckle bound spines raked the ground, tilling the soil to bring up some ground water and expose some edible roots. Not for Enjin itself, but for another as the ape-like Aspect of Land set its compatriots down.
Doragon lay almost pathetically against the outcropping it was perched upon, half its wing torn off and marred by fel fire scorch marks all over its body. Mizu, settling into a large pond Enjin had dug that it cleansed of impurities, was hardly better, most of its forehead gem having been ripped out along with several flippers and tendrils. The oceanic chimera was slumped on the shore, for most of the seas had become so badly polluted and tainted that they burned anything they touched. Doragon’s runes pulsed, and it addressed the other two in speech comprehensible by none but them.
Mizu stiffened and looked down at the suggestion: That they abandon Terra. It wasn’t all heedless. They were clearly overwhelmed here and there were other worlds they had tended to, as far as the M nebula. What was one worth? Green glow contrasted against the blue as Mizu retorted, smashing a flipper on a boulder to crush it and sending a small tidal wave in doing so to soak the shore.
If the dragon suggested abandonment, the Aspect of the deep called for worse. It flooded the nearby area and sent out a jet of pressurized, energized water to cleave through a hillside like a sword.
The invaders had come here from their realms. If they reveled in what they had now, they’d never cease their campaign.
Doragon was unconvinced, strong gales of wind rushing past it to shove Mizu’s surf away. It pointed to the burn mark across its chest, cast from the blue fires of the large, radioactive reptilians who had largely been possessed alongside the insectoids as shocktroopers.
The fact that they didn’t know if other invasions had happened elsewhere was all the more reason to check, to try to guard regions the demonic horde’s new units couldn’t follow to, or even exist in. Perhaps there, the battle might go differently.
Mizu’s multiple eyes narrowed, almost spiteful. They should have never let such monsters exist. That caused Doragon’s eyes to widen and it almost sprang upon its counterpart, demanding to hear what Mizu proposed be done to fix it. The answer did indeed cause Doragon to pounce at the leviathan, only to be caught by a massive arm and be held away by a towering simian.
Enjin neither said nor emoted anything the whole time, pulling the aspects of sea and sky apart. All throughout the battle, it had kept one of its hands closed and refused to open it despite getting dogpiled by all manner of foe. Mizu and Doragon had never seen the tender, gentle giant so ferocious. They got their answer as to why when the great ape slowly raised its hand and opened it.
Green and blue glows closed in upon and gazed at a tiny, furred form. It was sickly in appearance, covered in ash and bits of tar from the festered land with visible ribs and reddened eyes. No larger than a shrew, the corpse appeared as such for a moment; before slowly stirring. Beady eyes beheld the enormities above it. The animal was nothing spectacular in size or ability, but that mattered naught to the warden of the land. As soon as it saw the little creature threatened by the battle, it had scooped it up and carefully held it close to save it. It was an advanced therapsid, something man would one day recognize as the progenitor of mammals. And in the Permian, the first of its kind.
Enjin held it close protectively, a bit of magic working out of its palm to clean the grime off the creature’s fur and heal its wounds, a solemn look slowly crossing the primate-like aspects face. The therapsid, curious as to the living mountain before it, sniffled at the land aspect’s cheek and curled up against the warmth. The message was clear as day, even in a landscape with permanent smog cover, burning earth, and blackened seas:
They couldn’t leave. How could they, with such miracles to tend to?
The three approached one another, bowed in camaraderie born over four billion years. If this was to be their end, they wouldn’t end it in a quiet affair. Teleporting to the center of the continent, every invader on the planet soon sensed their presence and converged.
The world shook as Enjin gripped the ground, tearing open the crust to create a volcano beneath its feet. Mizu called forth torrents of waters from hundreds of kilometers away, encircling the magma and creating enormous clouds of steam. Doragon rapidly encircled the clouds, whipping them into a hurricane with the volcano at the eye. The three Aspects formed up, sacrificing their ability to ever leave the Sol system again to permanently tie them to it, becoming anointed in the world's elements. Encased in raging tidal waves, geysers of magma, and roaring winds; they remained in place as the demonic hordes and their possessed fauna closed in to finish them off.
They were caught totally off guard when a massive tidal wave flooded most of the continent center. Those that could fly were forced to the ground by a roaring hurricane and legions of tornadoes that drove them to the sea. The airspace was a cornucopia of shrieking gales and the desperate cackles of demons either forced into the sea by the moving air or by having their wings torn off in the tornadoes. With the very waters gripping them and pulling them to its depths, the very continent beneath the tides started to violently split apart. Millions of the infernal and their corrupted hosts met their end getting torn apart by razor edged winds, drowning in roaring seas, or being burnt down to nothing in the magma beneath the tides that burst from Pangea’s ruptured tectonic seams. Between the storming skies and constant pyroclastic flows from numerous volcanic chimneys, the world seemed to darken from the elements fighting back.
All that remained were the few uncorrupted kaiju, a few million demons too large to be affected, and the invader’s leaders, the titanic archdemons. Each of the latter, which ranged from humanoid to grotesque abominations of flesh, exoskeletons, and metal ranging from vague scorpion-like to misshapen chimeras, could level cities and drive civilizations to madness and carnage on their own. Over fifty dozen in number, their leader charged the combined elemental structure in the eye of the hurricane. He’d previously defeated Doragon in battle alongside his legion. He expected to finally rip the serpent from its wings and turn it into a trophy. He didn’t expect a massive torrent of sapphire blue energy to fire out of the monolith and instantly vaporize him. The beam kept going, cleaving into another aggressor in the manner of a titanic sword before swinging up to the sky and parting it.
What came exploding out from the cocoon into the chaotic landscape of roaring elements was beyond measure. The fused entity didn’t bear the power of its components added together, but multiplied to an exponent. If their power increased in proximity to one another, they couldn’t be any closer than sharing a body. Power skyrocketing every second, any who tried to gauge it were driven mad. If the sight that followed didn’t already do that from sheer terror. The elements sang in destructive symphony as over 200,000 tons of the fused Aspects thundered across the flooded landscape. Their form was almost amorphous at first, constantly shifting and adapting as they fought in one body.
At first they looked like a chimera of their features combined together in a line almost like a living totem pole when they plowed into the horde. Seizing two possessed kaiju by the throat and continuing their momentum, Terra's defense smashed against and through a mountain. By the time they burst out the other side, the possessed and their occupied no longer of the living, their body was solid contrasting reds with black armor and wings mounted on the arms. That form crushed an archdemon’s head in their jaws before firing a beam attack through the body to vaporize it and several of its kind behind it.
Again they changed mid-attack, now one solid color of ivory and resembling an elephantine dragon with massive tusks that bursts of energy arced between. Barrages of beams sprung forth and carved into the invader's numbers with such rapidity it would take hours to count the slain. Another archdemon, one bearing a form similar to a headless, green torso with blades emitting from its fingers and gaping maw on its chest, swung down upon it from behind. Shifting to block a blow from the invader with an energized forelimb that caught the blades, the body of the Aspects again morphed to sprout massive shoulder spines studded with gem-like eyes. Bolts of lightning discharged like a salvo of bullets, eviscerating legions of smaller demons and pouncing altered gorgonopsid-like hellhounds surrounding them as the Aspects rammed their crackling tail through the archdemon. Impaled through the maw on its stomach, the demon couldn't cry out when the energy coursed through it and blew the fiend apart from the inside out.
The Aspects gazed upwards when the sky lit up. Dozens of the remaining invading leaders all converged their attacks upon them. An unrelenting onslaught of hellfire, lightning, flechette storms of ivory and ichors, and more rained down upon it. They contemplated the hordes. Did they not know what they had done? Was these fouling their choices or their nature? Did they, the Aspects, know what they had done? The fusion, having literal Hell and havoc rain down upon it from all angles, could only suppose no one would know this day.
Through the blinding execution, the Aspects stood back up. Tusks morphed into a pair of horns, more armor plating emerged, and the whole body grew in size. The swell of power was palpable through the onslaught, the leaders of the hellish realms such as Zenith finally tasting fear when despite their best efforts, the strength of the foe they faced kept multiplying higher and higher.
With a roar that sounded in three voices, a blinding shockwave sprung forth to vaporize anything around the entity in an expanding bubble that negated the Archdemons' attacks and stretched for half a kilometer. The bubble turned into a near-blinding pillar of energy. Visible for kilometers, the glowing torrent folded out to reveal itself as a massive pair of energy-based wings that shone like the sun. They flapped once in a great gale to take to the air, burning any demons they touched in their movements. At their epicenter hovered a titan, majestic as it was powerful with three horns crowning its bronze-hued body. Feeling the wretched sting of a sensation never felt before, the fused Aspect sneered as a bolt of terror ran across the demonic hordes. They felt such agony and they were keen to share. They were wardens of life, but they would not permit any of this legion to leave this world alive. For the first time in over forty thousand hundred thousand years, they'd take life and take millions in one day...
An army of millions stood against an army of one. Thunder cracked, oceans roared, and volcanoes bellowed when the latter charged the stunned horde with crackling power that rattled every atom of Terra.
With a swipe of its talon through the air that released blades of energy hundreds of meters long, it cleaved archdemon and mountain alike in two. Reflective barriers which sparked and blinded redirected attacks back at their source with double the force. Diamond-shaped bursts ejected from the back, targeted by multiple sets of eyes so they chased their targets down across the sky before erupting with such force to make man’s greatest bombs seem paltry. The battle flew across the supercontinent, constantly with odds of thousands upon thousands to one.
But that too gradually began to shift. Terra summoned its reinforcements, invigorated to fight by the Aspects’ war. Bursting from the seas, several spine backed reptilians lead by the greatest of their kind assaulted the invaders with tooth, claw, and blue fires. Coming forth from the mountains the parasites broke the airspace with their electromagnetic pulses as they laid into the invaders under their mighty talons. A dark storm of clouds made of ten thousand individuals working in tandem as a flock of manta-ray shaped swarms of death descended on the transgressors. And tunneling from under the ground, the two limbed legions bearing a skull-like face slithered, snapped, and swatted at the smaller demons whilst dogpiling the larger ones.
While still drastically outnumbered, the dozens of natural kaiju put aside instinctual rivalries to throw themselves into the fray alongside the Aspects in a united front. Three massive horns were borne upon the crown of the first King of the Monsters.
Facing the brunt of the enemy on its own however, the Aspect was enveloped as it slew thousands with every blow as the battle raged across the entirety of Pangaea. Battered from all angles and constantly taking fire their barrier couldn’t always reflect, they still threw themselves into harm's way to protect the uncorrupted life; taking blows that would shatter skyscrapers for the sake of a herd of dicynodonts saved under their bulk and another time blocking a blow that would have ended a pinned parasite so it could get free.
But they couldn't save them all. Across the warzone that engulfed Terra, hundreds of thousands of lives were being lost every moment, every fraction of a second.
A massive blast of hellfire engulfed the sky, frying several Swarms of Death and raining down as a barrage of fireballs. Shielding the surviving kaiju, animals, and forests in a bubble of energy, the combined Aspect responded to the assault by firing itself through the enemy ranks. They seized the offending shooter, a fusion chimera of several archdemons. Evidently they attempted the same strategy the Aspects had by consuming one another to form a 140 meter tall goliath. The combined Aspects gripped them by the head and foot before pulling aside. They quickly sent one half of the Archdemon chimera to what would one day be South Africa and throwing the other half to Europe.
But more and more kept coming, blackening the sky and land in their number. They couldn’t see, they couldn’t hear, they couldn’t experience anything but a literal storm of invaders eager to rend, consume, and twist it. Several archdemons attempted to force their way with their mind, to seize their body. They were repulsed back, but responded by hammering down blow after blow after a thousand blows upon the Aspects.
As enemies began to pile on top of it, Terra’s guardian glowed with a blinding brilliance. The invaders were thrown back and the Aspects took flight. Rocketing up to the highest atmosphere, through the thunderstorms and into the rays of the rising sun, they went. Soon anointed by Terra’s mother star, glowing wings of energy spread to gather and collect. First hundreds, then thousands of meters, hundreds of kilometers, thousands of kilometers across. A claw motioned a pattern, the resulting beam of energy emitting from them like a wave of sword blades to carve the symbol into the surface of the planet far below, slicing any caught in its path to ribbons. Enemies, undeterred closing in from all sides, forming dark spires made of twisting masses of fel fire, teeth, cruel weapon and crueler mind. The rune was cut into Terra itself with the army between it and the Aspect. A single word was uttered.
“Cease.”
In a uproar of light that engulfed everything across the supercontinent, they… It, for the Aspects had finally sacrificed their individual minds, utterly annihilated the remaining invaders in one last blow. Billions of possessed animals, millions of free roaming demons, hundreds of corrupted and controlled kaiju, and over fifty dozen archdemons met their end that day in that moment that was heard and felt around the world. The only survivors were those unpossessed life secure inside the shields. The Permian period ended with over 95% of all life on the planet perishing from its invasion and exorcism.
The Aspect, singular now and alone for the first time in billions of years, closes its eyes. Alone. A telepathic outcry to others was given only silent static in response. It was a sensation foreign to it, once able to hear two other consciousness tied to itself. A single tear slips from its form as it lets itself fall to the earth in the form of a falling star....
Awakening in a crater a month later, its eyes slowly open to behold a slightly clearer sky, a fullness of daylight finally blessing the world below. A tiny, furry form it recognizes paces closer, chirping and snuggling up beside its savior’s eyelid. The Aspect smiles, letting it and many other surrounding, surviving fauna do the same. Regardless, it felt very alone now that it has just one mind instead of three connected ones. But its reasons that the sacrifice had been for a good cause.
The aftermath of the battle is long and tedious, rebalancing the ecosystem to its former glory in the Triassic. The guardian reforges the rampant magical and radioactive energies left over from the invasion and transforms it into the mana stream, a pool of constant magical energy that runs through the world’s core and across its surface. This influences the evolution of some lifeforms and accelerates the healing.
Lacking most of their food, the few surviving radiovore kaiju largely go dormant and slumber deep in the earth, taking in some energy given off by the mana stream’s exit points such as deep sea volcanic vents. Smaller extinction events are allowed to happen, so long as they have natural causes.
The sole active archdemon that still rules their realm was the only one smart enough to stay out of the invasion: The Lord of Zenith, its name being a phrase of insanity whose closest approximate is RED.
one of the archdemons is the not-gigan from the creepypasta
noice
Pretty cool.
And I hope you read this, and have a chance to talk back. At least so you know how much I enjoyed, and appreciated this story. It actually was the best thing i’ve read in a long, good while.:)
This is epic.
And turns out there was more to Reijuu's fusion dance than we thought, given he didn't do it to take out the mega fauna, but the demons possessing them and invading Terra.
Damn... Anyway, I'm glad to see that you're still doing fine. I can't wait to see part 2 of this, and chapter 47. So what can we expect from those?
So... This is how Bagan was formed...
I am cursing my morning and afternoon road trip because I missed the chance of posting my thoughts on this when it first came out. I have to say that this was a magnificent origin story for Bagan and a swan song for the original three Aspects. Even though the Aspects had no words, you managed to convey Enjin as a pacifistic and nurturing being that contrasts his ruthless murderous being from the future. You also made Mizu into a well-meaning yet temperamental being and Doragon into an entity that warrants accepteance of one’s situation over needless fighting. The best part is that, despite their views nearly causing them to come to blows, it is Enjin that convinces them to band together by showing them that life could exist in mammals.
The fight against the demons and archedemons was epic as the creation of Reijuu was like natural disasters combining and forming a living god that shredded the opposition. Seriously, the tone was more epic and fantastic than the Bridge, almost Tolkien-like in describing the battle, especially when you mentioned the reinforcements in the shape of Gojira, the MUTO, and other famous Kaiju. In the end, the combined might of all the Kaiju and Reijuu sacrificing his ability to separate gave rise to the finishing blow that annihilated the demons. Reijuu himself seems more simple in terms of demeanor compared to Bagan, simply communicating non verbally as he was born and devoting its energy in repopulating the planet and forming mana pools. This story also gives street cred to RED, the archdemon we meet near the beginning of the series, as he actually managed to fight and survive against Bagan, which is impressive considering the asswhooping Reijuu gave to his nearly all demons the moment it was born. Thanks for 5e magnificent story, Tarb.
Omg another so me expansion! Wow this is very interesting it like history to me, I love this honestly. Take as much time as you need because I want to read more of this.
A new Tarbanto post?! How could I have missed it?!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntQyD11VAj4
4951210
Nah, this is how Reijuu was created
I don't read much of your short stories anymore (really going to reconsider and going back to read them). I'm really glad I read this once. That was magnificent! And we see the first Gojiras!!!!
Alright, first batch of responses!
4951085
Ah good, you caught that one!
4951131
Thanks ^^
4951170
Yep, always did like turning things on their head.
4951175
If I get a free day, I could get part 2 done in a day. Chapter 47 will be some weeks sadly because my pace has slowed so much.
4951134
I thought on it and basically went, "Well I'm not restricted by stunt men in suits, so what sort of crazy stuff could I pull to also make Bagan/Reijuu different from others?" and from there I just decided to go all out!
4951604
And you sure as hell did that. I was amazingly intrigued when the trinity’s fusion took on all of those transformations. They were epic references that deserve their attention. Though It wasn’t as interesting as the fact the demons, and Archdemons were actually the enemies from Zenith. It certainly adds another flare to this universe, especially when we have the kaiju of the Monsterverse serving as the opposing army against them. Lucky this was a time when there was alot of them.:) Not so lucky they ended up all but extinct in order to save Terra, and the Universe.:(
4951604
forgot to add that the fusion of all the archdemons was the Chimera from the same creepypasta
4951606
Thanks my friend :)
Believe it or not those were late additions. I did like the idea of referencing Totem Bakan/Bagan beforehand but as I was writing and reviewing Bagan lore I remembered just how many times Mr. Tanaka's personal OC almost made it into film and how much the design kept shifting in the early years. So I decided "Well, it's power is still stabilizing and growing, why wouldn't it look different for those stages of rapid metamorphosis?"
And at that point I collectively had a "Screw it, time to have some fun!" and had all the surviving natural kaiju pile in behind Reijuu.
https://youtu.be/eRD4QZyeDT4
I like how you took the idea of a morphing Bagan, before he reached his final form.
4951630
And I can assuredly see you had fun with that moment. And I don’t blame you in the slightest: it was easily one of the best parts of this backstory.:)
A nice bit of backstory. There is one thing I noticed.....
Might this, perhaps, be the seed that will one day sprout to mark Raiju's end, and Bagon's rise?
Perhaps we will learn..... In Part 2.
So this is how everything played out the day Reijuu came to be and brought about the end of all but one of the archdemons. Additional lore on the god of extinction is always nice. Looking forward to part 2.
Interesting, though I do wonder how the Precursors fall into what I would believe would be the first time that the Anteverse sent forth a few Kaiju as scouts and to gather information, which to be honest would explain how Bagan knows about the Anteverse Kaiju.
But there is something that I wanted to know, how does the Hollow Earth fall under this, cause I honestly believe that the Hollow Earth is older than the surface of Terra, more so cause it definitely seems to be older and the environments are a whole lot bigger than the largest of Titans/Kaiju. Realm of the Titans indeed.