With every new year, the sense of permanence of life as it always existed takes deeper root within the human conscious. We feel the reduction of our own time left, or we feel like we've grown older, but we rarely assume that the new year would be the harbinger of death and destruction.
For the new year, Alex Riley had resolved himself to a challenging adventure to mark a new beginning. Nothing, he thought, could be more remarkable than climbing Mount Everest during the peak of winter, from the difficult Tibetan ascent and using no oxygen for the climb.
At the age of 21, the brown haired Alex was considered a bit of a 'wild guy' even among his own mates at the University of Berlin. He was known to be a vicariously wealthy fellow with an obsession with thrill seeking and the outdoors. Even what they knew about him was mostly hearsay, because Alex was notoriously quiet about his own past.
As the sun began to rise over the horizon, the bone chilling winds above 8000 meters were burning Alex's lungs as he struggled to gasp for breaths while simultaneously finding the foothold for the ascent along the steep climbing trail. The constant fall of snow had solidified into brittle glacial structures that portrayed an illusion of strength but were death traps for a more than ugly fall deep into the valley.
Alex chuckled at the challenge in front of him. When he'd arrived at the sight, he was with a team. But the other experienced climbers backed out due to the signs of harsh weather. They warned Alex that climbing now would just be like signing a death warrant, but this only appeared to raise his excitement even further.
Now, a terrifying thirteen day steep ascent later, Alex was almost at the summit just as the sun was going to kiss the horizon goodmorning. He could feel the tiredness in his feet, but he clasped on and climbed further, until he had reached onto the silent head that spanned above every terestrial landmass on the planet.
Despite the sun now being in the sky, the ceiling was still covered in shallow darkness, a not uncommon sight for the skies at this altitude. Alex quietly stood and took in the view and the monument of his own achievement to heart and savored the moment of a lifetime. It was then, that something changed.
Like the flip of a switch, Alex's vision was drastically altered. The one perennially yellow sun suddenly turned bright blue and the navy blue horizon had shifted in tint to a deep purple. Frightened, Alex checked his blood oxygen level in worries that he might be suffering from a silent hypoxia, but the numbers were within controllable levels. Was the shocking change he observed not an illusion?
Then in the far distance, on a parallel mountain almoat as tall as Everest itself, Alex observed a baffling sight. A gigantic creature unfurled its wings made of ice and crystals skywards. At atleast twenty meters tall, this winged reptilian made of ice completely overshadowed most large land animals Alex could think of.
Just as the mysterious creature gave off a giant roar into the air which echoed around the various mountain peaks, Alex's eyes widened in absolute terror. The silhouette of a larger variant of the icy creature suddenly appeared in the sky, flying. It was at least a few hundred meters in wing span and its reflecting roar was absolutely tyrannical, reminding Alex of the sounds from the movie Jurassic Park.
Out of the mouth of the flying being, accompanying the outrageous roar was a beam of ice and wind that turned into a massive blizzard that completely upturned the weather cycle. Alex watched the scene in fear and wretched excitement, one word resounding loudly within his own mind. Dragon!
The descent is arguably the toughest part of scaling a peak. It was arguably made even more difficult by the fact that Alex was doubting his own sanity at this point. For once in his life, his flight or fight instincts turned towards cautious evasive measures instead of blind thrill seeking. He decided to immediately descend through the relatively easier trajectory into Nepal.
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U.S. Military Base, Guam.
"Sir, we've discovered anomalous signatures to the north west. Two F-16s have been scrambled to check the airspace violaters." The radar operator saluted and briefed the base commander. The older man nodded as a sign to let the operator be at ease as he glanced towards the green monochromatic radar screen.
A green radial line routinely circled the perimeter around the base, notifying the detector of any intruders. The commander could observe five foreign objects in no particular formation.
"Russians?" The commander asked with a peculiarly raised eyebrow. However the doubt on the operator's face appeared to reject this hypothesis.
"Command. This is scrambler, approaching intruding target." One of the two pilots suddenly spoke through the radio, his voice clearly sounding so unnerved that he forgot to use the code language standard.
"Describe your status, Pilot." The radar operator barked back through the transponder.
"This...This can't be happening!" The pilot acreamed in panic as a gigantic roar could be heard through the radio before turning to static. The signals of the two jets on the radar screen correapondingly disappeared as well.
"We've lost them sir."
"Call out an emergency alert. Inform the Pentagon. Get me eyes on the intruder. Now!"
At that moment, a group of army captains quickly rushed to the commander with urgent eyes.
"What is it?" The commander barked back in a gruff voice?
"The sky, commander. The sky has changed."
The commander rushed towards the observation deck to gaze at the sky and was paralyzed in shock and puzzlement. He saw the same changes Alex did, the yellow sun turning blue, the sky turning purple and the clouds... the clouds were blood red. However, in the distance was an abomination that even the upturned sky couldn't match. A giant nine headed creature emerging out of the sea, causing massive tides to surface around as a result. Those supposed intruders on the radar were the nine heads of this monster.