The storm had not yet broken, but the air thrummed with its promise. Salt stung Vesper's nostrils as he banked low over the roiling sea, his obsidian wings slicing through the humid dusk. Below him, the waves churned unnaturally—not from the coming squall, but from the force of something ancient rising from the abyss.

He landed just as the water erupted.

Godzilla emerged like a mountain birthed from the deep, seawater sheeting off his jagged, armored plates. Though Vesper stood nearly as tall as his father, he felt small in his shadow—not in stature, but in presence. Where Godzilla's scales were volcanic, cragged and smoldering with latent heat, Vesper's sleek, draconic form shimmered with constellations of bioluminescent light, a starry echo of Mothra's cosmic patterns dancing beneath his inky hide. His wings, folded tight against his back, twitched reflexively as Godzilla's reverberating growl shook the beach.

"Where have you strayed?" The words were not spoken, not in any human tongue, but pulsed—a basso profundo roar that translated as meaning in Vesper's bones.

Vesper snorted, a sound like a landslide of pebbles. "Exploring," he rumbled back, tilting his head with deliberate nonchalance. His tail lashed, carving a furrow through the sand. "The island's western caves were unstable. I secured them."

Godzilla's molten gaze narrowed. He leaned down, his breath a furnace gust that made Vesper's wings flutter. "Alone?"

"Mothra guided me."

A rumble, this one deeper. Approving. The great Titan's spines flickered cobalt, the only tell of his pride. Without warning, he bumped his massive brow against Vesper's—a gesture that would have leveled a city block. Vesper staggered, his own spines flaring bright indigo in surprise, but a rumble of laughter escaped him.

"You smell of her webs," Godzilla grunted, though his tone had softened. He turned toward the horizon, where the last embers of sunlight gilded his jagged silhouette. "She worries needlessly."

Vesper stepped closer, the tide foaming around their claws. "The humans are digging again. Near the trenches."

The sea trembled as Godzilla's tail slammed the shallows. "Let them dredge their graves," he growled, but Vesper saw the tension in his father's hunched shoulders, the way his claws curled into the bedrock beneath the sand.

"They don't fear you," Vesper pressed, his voice quieter. "They should."

Godzilla turned, his gaze lingering on the hairline fracture in Vesper's left dorsal plate—a scar from their last battle together. A beat passed, the storm's first thunderclap rolling in the distance.

"They will," Godzilla said at last. "When the hour comes, they will fear you."

Before Vesper could reply, the Titan pivoted and surged back into the waves, the ocean swallowing him whole. Vesper hesitated, then plunged after him, his bioluminescence cutting through the dark water like a comet. Above, the clouds finally split, rain hissing as it struck the shore where two gods had stood.

SCENEBREAKJ

The Golden Gate Bridge lay in ruins, its rusted carcass half-submerged in the bay like the bones of a long-dead leviathan. Vesper circled above, the downdraft from his wings scattering gulls from crumbling pylons. Even now, years after the M.U.T.O.s' defeat, the air here tasted metallic—blood and rust and lingering radiation. But beneath it all, faint as a heartbeat, was the ozone crackle of her.

Synrahtus.

Godzilla surged from the waves below, his arrival splitting the fog. Seawater sluiced down his scarred plates, pooling around claws that still bore scorch marks from the Storm Queen's lightning. He did not roar, but the ground shuddered as his tail swept the shoreline—a signal. Vesper dove, banking sharply to avoid the skeletal remains of a downed fighter jet lodged in the cliffs.

"Here?" Vesper's voice was a thunderclap, higher-pitched than his father's but threaded with the same tectonic resonance. He landed beside a crater, its edges fused to glass from decades-old atomic fire. "The pods took root here?"

Godzilla's answering growl was a landslide compressed into sound. He pressed a claw into the earth, and the beach quivered. Tendrils of blackened biomass erupted—gnarled, pulsing things that writhed like decapitated serpent heads. M.U.T.O. offspring, dormant but not dead.

"They fester in the rot their progenitors left," Godzilla rumbled. His spines flared, casting jagged blue shadows across the ruins. "You know this scent."

Vesper did. It clung to his earliest memories: the acrid stench of M.U.T.O. ichor, his mother's snarl as she razed their nesting grounds, the way her storm clouds had mirrored Godzilla's atomic fury. A mated pair, Mothra had once told him, her wings dusting his brow with melancholy phosphorescence. Titans bound not by love, but by fire.

Now, Vesper watched as Godzilla methodically crushed the pods, each stomp of his claw unleashing a geyser of putrid steam. He moved with the precision of a creature who had razed kingdoms—no wasted motion, no hesitation.

"Should I scorch the cliffs?" Vesper called out, his own spines sparking with arcs of blue-white lightning. Synrahtus' gift.

Godzilla paused. For a heartbeat, the only sound was the drip of condensate sliding down the bridge's remains.

"No." A plume of radioactive steam hissed from his nostrils. "The nests are shallow. But watch the water."

Vesper leapt skyward, wings snapping taut. From his perch atop the bridge's fractured tower, he scanned the bay. The pods weren't just on land. Below the surface, their tendrils coiled around sunken tanks, feeding on rust and fallout. He snarled, a sound that rippled the waves.

"They're in the wreckage!"

Godzilla was already moving. His tail carved a trench through the bay, churning up decades of debris—and the pods with it. Vesper plunged after him, claws shredding through rubbery biomass. For a moment, they moved in tandem, father and son, their shadows merging with the ghost of Synrahtus' storm.

When it was done, Godzilla stood waist-deep in the bay, water boiling around his legs. His gaze locked onto Vesper, lingering on the faint storm patterns glowing beneath the younger Titan's scales.

"She would have burned them faster," Godzilla said, a grudging warmth in his rumble.

Vesper huffed, shaking muck from his wings. "She also would've melted the bridge for spite."

A sound almost like laughter shook the bay. Above them, the first drops of rain began to fall—warm and charged, as if the sky itself remembered the Storm Queen's wrath.

. Godzilla stood motionless in the bay, his spines cutting jagged silhouettes against the bruised sky. Above, the clouds shuddered—then split. Rodan tore through the atmosphere, his wings shearing the tempest into ribbons of fire and ash. Molten feathers rained down, hissing as they struck the water, each one a smoldering reminder of the Titan's volcanic wrath.

"You dare drag the whelp into your petty wars?" Rodan's voice was a tectonic rasp, the air rippling around his words. He circled lower, his shadow swallowing the ruins of the Golden Gate Bridge. "The island was his shield. Now you make him your pawn."

Godzilla's growl began as a subsonic rumble, building until the bay itself trembled. Seawater sluiced from his scarred plates as he reared, atomic light pulsing in the cavern of his throat. "You, who reduced continents to cinder, dare lecture me on guardianship?" His tail lashed, uprooting a sunken tanker. "How many fledglings did your flames devour when the skies burned?"

Vesper pressed himself against the cliffs, his bioluminescent scales flickering storm-gray. He knew Rodan's fury—had felt the Titan's searing gusts when he first tested his fledgling wings—but this was different. Raw. Personal. The air reeked of ozone and scorched metal, and beneath it, the acrid tang of something older: grudges buried deep as mantle rock.

"I chose this!" Vesper roared, lightning crackling along his spine. The words felt hollow, swallowed by the cacophony.

Rodan banked sharply, his laughter a cascade of igneous shards. "Choice? You regurgitate his rhetoric, little stormling." A molten feather grazed Vesper's wing, searing a hairline fracture into the membrane. "Your mother's blood ran hotter. She would have razed this wretched place to glass."

Godzilla struck. Atomic fire erupted from his jaws, meeting Rodan's dive in a cataclysm of light and sound. The Titans collided, claws and talons scoring deep furrows into each other's hides. Vesper stumbled as the shockwave hit, salt spray blinding him. When he blinked the sting away, Rodan was ascending again, a smoldering gash across his chest.

"Synrahtus understood balance," Godzilla snarled, blood pooling around his claws. "Not your ceaseless hunger for ruin."

"Balance?" Rodan swooped low, his wingbeat flattening the waves. "You cower behind mercy. Let the humans fester. Let their poisons seep into the deeps—"

The backdraft caught Vesper mid-retort, hurling him toward the cliffs. He slammed into the rock, scales flashing panic-bright as he clawed for purchase. Above, the Titans' roars intertwined—Godzilla's a tectonic snarl, Rodan's a pyroclastic shriek—each a mirror of the other's unyielding pride.

Gritting his teeth, Vesper hauled himself onto a glass-smooth promontory, its surface fused by his mother's lightning decades past. From this vantage, the battle unfolded like some primordial dance: Godzilla's atomic fury met Rodan's incendiary wrath in strikes that shook the bedrock. Vesper's chest ached, not from the fall, but from the futility of it.

This is what they are, he realized, watching Rodan rake Godzilla's flank. Not guardians. Not kings. Just forces, colliding.

Yet beneath the fury, he sensed the fractures. Rodan's taunts laced with something akin to envy. Godzilla's retorts edged with the ghost of loss. Vesper's claws flexed, his scales dimming to a bruised violet. The Titans saw only his inadequacies—his father's shadow, his mother's absence—never the ember of something new kindling in his ribs.

As the clash reverberated through the cliffs, Vesper lifted his gaze. Beyond the storm, a faint melody threaded through the chaos—a harmonic hum, felt more than heard. Mothra's song, weaving through the rage. A reminder that not all bonds were forged in fire.

Vesper's spines flared, their usual storm-gray hue shifting to a seething cobalt as energy pooled in his throat. The taste was acrid, metallic—his mother's lightning refined by his father's atomic fire. He hesitated, just for a heartbeat, as Rodan swooped low to rake Godzilla's flank.

"Enough!"

The plasma bolt erupted in a jagged helix of blue and silver, striking the water between the Titans. Steam exploded skyward, momentarily veiling Rodan in a scalding curtain. The fire-born Titan shrieked, wings beating backward in a frantic retreat as molten feathers hissed against the deluge.

Godzilla turned, his growl a subterranean roll of thunder. "You dare?"

"I do," Vesper snarled, scales still flickering with residual energy. "The pods are spreading while you two relive ancient grudges. We're meant to be stewards, not—"

"Stewards?" Rodan's laughter crackled through the steam, raw and jagged. A gash smoldered across his chest where Vesper's plasma had grazed him. "You preach like a hatchling who's never seen the world burn. Your father knows—balance is forged in fire!"

Godzilla's tail lashed, cleaving a warship wreck in half. "And you are a relic, Phoenix, reborn only to repeat your mistakes." He turned to Vesper, his gaze piercing even in the gloom. "Destroy the pods yourself. Prove you're more than her shadow."

The words struck deeper than any claw. Vesper recoiled, the storm patterns beneath his scales pulsing erratically. Her shadow. Synrahtus' legacy—a tempest contained in his blood, as much a curse as a gift.

"You'd abandon your own task out of spite?" Vesper hissed.

Godzilla's spines dimmed, the atomic light receding into a cold, cobalt glow. "I abandon nothing. You claim maturity? Then act it." With a final rumble, he submerged, the wake of his descent swallowing the bay's surface in a whirlpool of debris.

Rodan hovered, his wings shedding embers like dying stars. "He fears your spark, stormling," he rasped, though the mockery in his voice had dulled to something almost rueful. "Fire that burns too bright risks consuming even kings."

"And what do you risk?" Vesper shot back, lightning arcing between his claws. "Smoldering alone in your ashes?"

Rodan's answering screech split the clouds. He ascended, his silhouette bleeding into the storm's underbelly until only his molten trail remained—a scar across the sky.

Alone, Vesper stared at the churning bay. The pods' tendrils had already begun regrowing, threading through the wreckage like blackened veins. He crushed one underfoot, its death-rattle hissing through his teeth. Fine. Let them doubt.

As he turned toward the cliffs, the first distant rumble of thunder echoed—not Rodan's fury, nor Godzilla's wrath, but hers. A true storm, rising from the deep. Synrahtus' answer, perhaps. Or a challenge.

Vesper bared his fangs, lightning dancing across his jaws.

Let it come.