He did not hate them. He pitied them. They were mayflies, building castles on the skin of a sleeper.
Where is the ocean?
“Identify,” he whispered. Then, louder: “Identify!” the visitor godzilla
He was ancient. That was the first thought that silenced the panic. Not old like a battleship or a redwood—old like the first time a fish crawled onto land and looked up at the stars. His hide was not scales but something else: basalt veined with phosphorus, the scars of eons mapped in healed cracks that glowed faintly, like dying embers. His dorsal plates rose in a crooked spine of cathedral spires, some broken, some still sharp enough to split the low clouds. He did not hate them
