He did not attack.
The jets came. Missiles streaked in, broke against his shoulder like glass rain. He did not flinch. He raised one clawed hand—slowly, deliberately—and placed it on the tallest building he could reach. Not crushing it. Just touching. A geologist reading a rock. the visitor godzilla
He looked confused.
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 attack