King Kong of Skull Island by Joe DeVito/Brad Strickland

Author:Joe DeVito/Brad Strickland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Markosia Enterprises Ltd
Published: 2020-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

1

It was a world now forgotten. No calendars such as we know existed. The earth teemed with creatures of every kind, from exquisite flyers to lumbering behemoths that we now can only imagine. The land lay lush and fertile, the water clear and life-giving, but a change slowly came on and a nascent human civilization was even slower to acknowledge it. The altering world threatened their existence, though most ignored the signs — but some among them did not close their eyes. These read the portents clearly and prepared to grapple with their fate like the Titans they were.

The sky turned the color of a dead man’s face, gray-green, mottled darkly as though by blood congealing beneath the surface. Away to the north, twin peaks continued to erupt in unison, long thunderous explosions sounding and echoing, black clouds clotted and roiling, billowing upward until the winds far above the highest fight of birds seized the blackness and spread it out into a streaked dark fan from which ash sifted down.

Beneath Aton’s sandal-shod feet the earth shook as if in agony. Beside the man on the narrow, rough-hewn mountain trail loomed Krom, three times as tall as a human, scarred from a hundred battles, his fur now silvery-gray with age. He grumbled low in his throat, shook his head — hot ash had been settling on the fur of his crest — and tugged at Aton’s arm. Time to go.

“Wait,” Aton growled. “Something’s happening up there. I want to see.”

Man and Kong paused, both wary, the Kong so much so that he began to exude the natural, fear-inducing odor to enemies and prey, though it had no effect on his human counterpart. “Calm,” Aton murmured, as much to himself as to the Kong. “Calm. Calm.”

Five days before, he had warned the villagers of Kathat-Ran to flee. The mountains had already begun to tremble and belch, and he had seen a jagged crack spread along the shoulder of one, growing red-hot from the surging lava within. “This is going to be bad,” he had warned them. Three hundred families’ lives hung in the balance, he knew. Some of them, the youngest children, had the sense to be frightened.

The older ones smiled at him.

“We don’t need a Zan to tell us of the eruption,” they explained as though speaking to an ignorant boy. “This has all happened before.” They told him that in the months past they had sent back messengers from the Pendonjira, far to the south. A great exodus was supposed to commence there on the seacoast, but these inland villagers had never so much as seen the ocean, and they did not trust what they did not know. As they told Aton, they felt certain that what had always happened after a period of volcanic unrest would happen again: the mountains would send steam and ash into the air for a day, a week, maybe even a month, and then slumber again.

“You’re wrong,” Aton insisted. “This will be bigger than any eruption in memory.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.