Sic Semper Tyrannis
When the rexling awoke in the slate grey dawn, he shivered and snuggled close to his brother beside him. It had rained hard overnight and though they’d found shelter under a fallen araucaria their peach fuzz feathers were still soaked in ashen paste. His sibling yawned, blue eyes fluttering open from what dreams his brother knew not. His own were grey, as grey as the world he had hatched into.
Three months had passed since the Earth died, but the rexlings knew nothing of this. When they hatched it was already over and they knew only the ash and the cold and the hunger in their bellies. Itinerant brothers wandering the cauterized land with nothing to their names except their teeth, their claws, and each other.
They rose and shook themselves of the wet ash as best they could. Some of the slurry had frozen in beads to the tips of their feathers and they clinked like pearls when the hatchlings sloughed them off onto the greyscale soil.
The grey-eyed one hopped atop their log shelter and faced east to where a dim bruise on the horizon commenced another transit of the vanished sun. Their log was but one of a legion of fallen trees whose charred trunks had been painted grey by the unending ashfall. Everything varying shades of grey and black, as if the world were the canvas of a monochromatic madman.
The rexling stretched his young muscles and looked around for signs of food or danger in the scablands sprawled out before him. Nothing moved. Nothing but flurries of ash carried on the skirling wind.
He shivered against the gale and leapt back off the log to his brother’s side. Another morning would pass in hunger. Game was scarce beyond all reckoning. They knew what they had to hunt- frogs and lizards and mammals and the hatchlings of other dinosaurs. And they had chased after many a quickly glimpsed tail, or followed vainly after a faint squeal carried on the sepulchral winds. But their quarry almost always eluded them, and their confused instincts whispered to them that this was wrong, all so terribly wrong. It was the only world they had ever known, but it wasn’t the right world. Something had been broken, something they had no part in causing and could not fix.
They wandered the dead forest for weeks like a pair of ants trapped in a crematoria. Scavenging on beetles and such anonymous carrion as presented itself. A putrescent bird here. An incinerate carcass there. Occasionally they chanced upon the more substantial remains of a duckbill or three-horn, but these always had been ransacked long ago by adults of their own kind, leaving only cagmag crumbs to sate their growling bellies. Once, the grey-eyed one caught a snake. Dragging it out of its burrow by the tip of its tail and holding it in his jaws as if it were some exotic delicacy. He shared the prize reluctantly with his brother and the hollow emptiness inside each of them was filled in a small way for the night.
Late in the day as evening congealed upon the shrouded world like the slow draw of a curtain the blue-eyed rexling perked up at the stench of carrion on the west wind. Faint but rich. Irresistible. His brother smelt it too and mewled in yearning for the promise of meat. They should have sought shelter against the onset of the night’s blinding cold. But they were starving and the hunger in their bellies won over their dread of the icy dark.
They stole furtively through the silent deadfalls as if each charcoal trunk were a sleeping ogre which would groan to its feet and gobble them up if awoken. It was cold. Cold to kill. The rexlings shivered convulsively. Icy needles boring into them until they could scarcely feel their own hearts beating.
They followed the scent until they couldn’t feel their toes anymore and then they relented from the trail and curled up into the burnt hollow of a stump. Only by snuggling close together and sharing their meager warmth did they live to see the frostbitten sun rise again though the cinereous haze, as indifferent to their plight as a heart of stone. After that dreary dawn, they trudged onward through the ash.
At last they came to where their noses spoke of food. A broad valley where a vast herd of duckbills had laid down and died all at once like the consummation of a suicide pact. The waterhole they’d come to visit reduced to a frozen playa. They had outlasted the tyrants, for their bodies were as untouched by predators as if they were the holy relics of saints. Their skin dried and drawn, ligaments taut as wires. Heads thrown back like antediluvian swans. But their flesh was still rich and red beneath their icetanned hides and the brothers began trotting down the hillslope to feast on the mummied herd.
A few blackened witchfinger trees still stood askew from the shockwave. Splashes of mud and ice rearing up at intervals where they had coagulated in place, bursting out of the ashen lakebed like inlapidated trolls. The charnel vale reeked of decay but it was the most blessed sight the young tyrants had ever seen. They staggered down the hill half-dead. Gaunt, exhausted trellises of their kind. Their ribs laddered, hollow eyes sunk deep into their skulls. Covered in ash and grime, their soft down soaked through like so many rags.
Yards away from the excarnate potter’s field, the blue-eyed rexling stumbled beside a frozen puddle and could not rise again. Didn’t even whine. He only lifted his little head and looked beseechingly at his sibling who paced before him mewling pitifully for his brother and himself and all the sorrows of the silenced world.
The grey-eyed one remained with his stricken brother for three days. Wandering the midden of titans and carrying back hardtack morsels of frozen jerky to nurse his comrade. Trying by whines and gentle nuzzles to encourage him to move.
When another alien dawn broke on the fourth day, he was dead and the grey-eyed one could only whine at the pitiless sky. He nuzzled against his sibling that night as all the nights before but his warmth had gone away with all the rest of the world.
Two barrows of ash lay on the gray valley floor. The drifts pile high in efficient silence until the graves are thoroughly concealed, and then the chthonic soot sets impassively about infilling the rest of the valley to resign it to the tomes of the Earth. It leaves no missive to tell that hearts could be as broken as worlds and ash and hunger and flame were not the only instruments of murder in that bleak year.
Blood Tide
Sulphur evening. The tide a quivering crimson that dully cast back the balefires still raging on the seashore cliffs as darkness descended upon the land.
It began with a pod of plesiosaurs. Driven mad by the underwater concussions that had pealed through all the seas of the world after impact. Earsplitting rumbles that bounced off seamounts and trench walls and rang and rang inside their heads. When first one beached another followed and then another and another. Their love for each other was deeper than their love of life and so long as any one of them possessed the labored breath to cry for help they would not abandon him, would throw themselves onto the beach to die at his side rather than allow him to go into the darkness alone.
After these first martyrs came legions of others. The sea-dragons and giant turtles. Their own distant kin the pliosaurs and polycotylids. Each hurling itself ashore after its own kind in mass ritual suicide. The wrackline but a demarcation between two provinces of Hell. One vast mortuary wrapping round every island and continent. The sea soon to be an ashen vat below which swam only the hardiest bottom feeders who waited with hungry bellies for the next sun to bleed through and deliver them from the leaden sky.
A wounded azhdarchid was drawn to the smell of death. His wing membranes had been immolated by meteoric buckshot. He needed red meat to heal and the crescent sweep of the shore was a buffet stretching as far as the eye could see.
He did not spurn the carrion. But a dim instinct ticking deep within his skull warned of the terrible wrongness of the seaside morgue sprawled out before him. Some hideous truth he could not comprehend. His bill pierced the hide of one of the plesiosaurs, spilling its salty guts upon the sand, and the disorienting sensation went away. For awhile.
Choosers of the Slain
The exiled sun had not shone for five days but though the skies were black as coal the world was still brightly illuminated by glashes of hellfire. The colors of all things reduced down to a deadly palette of two- the black of night, the orange of flame.
Stalking among the many tongues of the firestorm were three stilt-legged Angels of Death. Improbable chimeras of stork and bat, never again to perform in the theater of life once the ashes settled. To be dimly remembered later as fossil embossments on shale folios, christened with the arcane title of Hatzegopteryx. But tonight they were alive, acting out the dénouement to their hundred-and-sixty million year saga.
A duckbill hatchling darted across the clearing, fleeing from a treacherous upwelling of molten rock bleeding out of the Medean Earth as she tore herself open in grief.
The hatchling wept. The Angel gnashed her bill.
The dread sisters had lived like this since the evening the comet struck. Making victims yet of the survivors, exploiting the recursive layers of suffering ubiquitous to life. Yet even these mishmash Valkyries had their expiry stamped indelibly upon them on that selfsame day.
When all is burnt and there are none left to choose, whither shall the Angels of Death go?
Seedling
The death song of the tyrant reverberated mournfully across the lake where the ducks had taken refuge from the all-consuming blaze. Here, floating atop a calm crescent of water, they were safe.
But safety for any living thing is always a relative thing. A startled quack- one of the ducks was pulled under by an alligator who was bothered not the slightest bit by the flames or the rapidly encroaching darkness. When the still black water of the lake froze in the coming weeks, the gator would simply stick his round snout just above the iceline so breath could yet be drawn into his slow-pumping lungs while he slept soundly through the long winter to follow.
Elsewhere on the pond, a standing stone held a bale of turtles that basked in the rich warmth of the wildfire. They, too, would sleep through the deadly winter, burying themselves beneath a blanket of lakebed silt, to wake when the world was reborn.
Above, the trees burned and from them were disgorged vast quantities of moths and beetles, to be snatched on the wing by the greedy fliers of four widely divergent lineages. The largest and oldest of these, the pterosaurs, would not live through the descending night, nor would the feathered birds who had stubbornly kept their teeth and claws. It was only the birds that had given up their fangs for bills and surrendered their clawed hands which would see the next dawn; they and the newest comers to the aerial menagerie. Bats flitted about the flickering flames with the same agility as pterosaurs, but their infrasonic radars would allow them to go on ruthlessly pursuing insects long after the last of the great flying reptiles passed on.
Ashore, more lilliputian creatures scurried between the raging flames. The earliest ancestors of rodents and primates and everything with paws and hooves all fled from the bursting trees to quiver in the burrows of tortoises, whilst the precursors of owls stole silently through the smoke to reap their share of souls even amidst the apocalypse.
As the old world sang its requiem, the seedstock of the new was already taking advantage of what ashes remained.
Firebird
High on the North Slope of Alaska, the end was late in coming. It wasn’t until after midnight that the tephra finally rained back down upon the boreal woodlands and turned the green shoots of the Arctic spring into so many matchsticks. The forests and fern prairies here burned as easily as they already had in the lower latitudes.
Troodon did not know what caused the forest to suddenly burst into flames. He knew only that it was an opportunity. As the fire spread, it flushed out game which normally would have remained elusive, and soon his lithe legs were pumping, hot on the trail of a beaver-sized mammal, a cimolodont.
They raced through the blazing woods. Predator and prey. Leaping over and ducking under the charred, fallen trees as they always had before, as if the world was not coming to a conflagratory around them. Each creature’s heart pumping enginelike in his chest, the urgency of the chase swelling with every strumming beat. At last, with a mighty pounce, Troodon scooped up the squealing cimolodont in his jaws. One swift bite to the neck and the frantic squeaks cut off abruptly.
The dinosaur turned his back to the encroaching fire, trying to recall the way back to his nest. His hatchlings were hungry, and he thought the slain fuzzball might keep them fed through the night, a night which would be far, far longer than he anticipated.
The cimolodont’s own children, left hidden in a deep burrow where the flames could lick them not, would outlive his by thirty-five million years.
I’d Rather Die Fighting!
Grunt. Rasp. Shove. Forward. Roar. Back. Forward again.
The two Triceratops bulls had been engaged in battle for three hours. Their casus belli was mating rights over the herd of cows their keen noses had led both of them to simultaneously.
The older male snorted and stamped his feet, puffing out his scarlet nasal sacs to assert his dominance, his will to fight.
His young challenger’s frill was flushed a vermiculate turquoise in the heat of musth. His eyes blazed hatefully and wept oily rivulets of testosterone. He, too, stamped his feet and inflated his nose sacs. Then he lowered his head and shook it vigorously from side to side, brandishing his mighty horns. The display was pure affrontery and the older male grunted back his fury and frustration.
They circled each other in the clearing. Each combatant sizing up his rival like a pair of boxers. The youngster handily outweighed the old bull; the old bull’s horns were longer, and whetted with the scars of a hundred skirmishes.
The youngster charged first. The old bull obliged him, and the battle was joined.
Blood pulsing in their ears muffled the sound of the sky splitting in two. The youngster buried his twin lances in the older bull’s frill. Their horns shielded their eyes from the white flash far to the south. The old buck pushed back like a bulldozer and shoved the youngster aside. And since their herd resided high in the hill country, they were unaware and unperturbed by the successive tsunamis destroying the coasts while they waged war on each other.
Their first and only sign that something was amiss was the forest suddenly bursting into flames around them as the comet’s ejecta reentered the atmosphere in a billion incendiary fragments. Both sensing the heat of the flames but neither willing to back down, the two bulls simply yielded ground in tandem, slowly carrying their rut further up the fuming hillside. Neither heeded the fact that the contested cows had fled long ago. The battle had become its own force of nature, a self-perpetuating gyre of rage as fierce as the fire that crept ever closer.
Now they were at the summit and there was nowhere to go. The forest burned in all directions and their ears were filled with the crackling of wood and the screams of the immolated. Still they fought. With a titanic shove, the older bull pushed his challenger off and roared in triumph. He was still roaring when the youngster bore back in with bruised fury.
The youngster rammed into his rival’s skull with the force of a dreadnought and locked horns with the old bull once more. For a moment, the collision of horn upon horn cracked louder than any of the exploding trees, and the belted snorts of the combatants were a dissonant bridge to the orchestra of destruction sounding across the world.
When the old bull shoved back in kind, their horns grated ominously, and then each realized with a surge of confused anger that they were stuck. The curvature of their blades aligned just right to hook each other in an unbreakable knot. Fury quickly devolved into panic as they realized how trapped they were, how dangerous the wildfire around them was. The two bulls could only circle each other, futilely shaking their heads and trying in turns with all their herculean might to pull free of the deadly entanglement.
The acrid smoke stung their eyes and nostrils, and the fire skulked ever nearer. The flames were very hot.
“… And the Flood Gates of Heaven Were Opened.”
The dark emerald cycads were just tall enough to conceal Tyrannosaurus rex as he watched the mottled green hide of his quarry. An enormous Edmontosaurus, grazing on the ferns and grasses of the prairie. Every bit as bulky as the tyrant but the duckbill lacked teeth or claws with which to defend herself. She’d wandered far from her herd further down the vale, and had walked right into the tyrant’s ambush. He patiently watched her amble towards him. His massive muscles were all wound up tight as springs. Just another moment…
A long shear of light, far to the south. The duckbill reared up and stared at the new sun for as long as her eyes could tolerate it. She bleated fearfully at the sight and trotted away as the light began to fade. The tyrant looked up too, in annoyance, for now his prey had been startled out of the killzone and giving chase was futile.
He huffed his disappointment and left the cover of the cycads. Started marching silently after the duckbill, sticking to her trail like a bloodhound in the hope of gaining another chance to ambush her. For ten minutes, his life went on in this fashion. Much as it had for his entire adulthood, with the fading flash only a mild aberration to the normal running of the world.
The ground trembled below the tyrant. An icy tingle of fear pulsed through his veins, the first time he had ever felt such a dread sensation. His disquietude intensified into raw terror as the tremors rushed towards him, thundering through the earth like a subway train. To the west the infant Elkhorn Mountains shook like ferns in a stiff breeze. The tyrant tried retreating uphill but there was no sanctuary from the treacherous terrain and the ground continued to quake as if the world had been shorn of its foundation.
The tremors went on for three minutes and when the tyrant finally stumbled to the summit of a tall hill he sat squarely upon its crest to try to find some stability against the dreidelspin of the unmoored earth. He felt helpless as a hatchling. After a long concussive outro the quake finally faded and he rose cautiously, shakily, worried that the ground would betray his footing once again.
He looked to the east and saw the herd of duckbills he’d been shadowing running inland as fast as they could, snorting and bleating in naked terror. A few dozen meters beyond he saw the frothing foam of the first seiche wave smashing into the green shore. The Western Interior Seaway had been sloshed around like bathwater by the megaquake, rearing back and piling high into an unending procession of storm surges.
The tyrant knew nothing of the process. He only knew that the waves were coming. First thirty feet tall, then ninety, then three-hundred. He was just far enough inland to be spared these initial strikes but he fled anyway, fled as fast as his still-wobbly legs could carry him up into the hillcountry. He’d never experienced anything like it but by some innate instinct he knew what he needed to do- get to higher ground at any cost.
Behind him the coast bore the assault with the stalwart fortitude of a defending army, even as the waves washed right over the rampart breakers and shredded everything in their path. The tyrant was not alone in his departure from the lowlands. There was an ongoing exodus of every animal big enough to flee. He could see groups of Triceratops and Torosaurus stampeding his way as well, unmindful or uncaring of his presence. The invading sea nipping at their heels was a more dangerous adversary by far than ten tons of muscle and teeth and bone. A waddling pair of Ankylosaurus, a bash of domeheaded pachycephalosaurs, a lapis lazuli flash of feathers from the odd, delicious oviraptoran Anzu- all the beasts of Hell Creek were racing headlong towards him as if they had been summoned directly to his dinner plate. But he wasn’t the slightest bit hungry and as the next seiche crashed into the shore and swept away still more of the treeline he turned back to continue his speedy withdrawal.
While he cantered inland his brindled hide was stung when incendiary hail began raining from the sky. Smoldering tektites equal parts earth and alien arced down from space and struck the rich forest like matches to so much tinder and the trees burst into white-hot flames all around. He roared in pain and panic, picking up speed and running faster, mighty legs pounding like the pistons of a freight train.
Ahead of him a flock of ornithomimids were also fleeing madly from the advancing cataclysm. One of them suddenly keeled over and faceplanted in the dirt, its head smashed by a tephra bomb. Hot skystones continued to pelt the tyrant’s own body but he was large enough to bear the pins and needles assault.
He looked back over his shoulder towards the sea and his heart sank deep into the bowels of his empty stomach. The ocean was rushing towards him. A skyscraper wall of water heralded by the streaks of falling stars and flocks of panicked gulls. As the wrathful tide swept over the land, the burning trees were extinguished one by one. Water chasing flame, candlestick canopies snuffed almost as soon as they were lit.
The tyrant lizard king sprinted for his life. Lungs throbbing in his chest. Every breath a precious thing. His spirit flickered forth in intense clarity from the deep white meat of his muscles and the gray matter of his brain. Yearning for more. One more day under the sun. One more day of resting on beds of softly colored flowers, listening to the songs of birds. One more day of running free across the prairies, of wooing mates and besting rivals. The love of life cried out from deep within his heart and rippled out of his throat as a desperate, defiant roar.
When the water reached his heels he was swept away as if he were but a grain of sand. His body was commended to the sea, and his soul unto the stars.
Titanomachy
On the north shore of Texas, the world was ripped apart around Alamosaurus. She had been fortunate enough to be facing north at the instant of the flash, and so she was still sighted when the shockwave struck five minutes later.
She sensed it coming. Her keen ears and the pads in her feet picking up the concussive death-groans of the stricken Earth. Knew there was nowhere to flee even as the lilliputian dinosaurs far below her scattered in blind panic, so she simply stood her ground and braced.
It came down upon her as a hailstorm of ash and debris. Rocks and trees and the charred, eviscerated remains of dinosaurs hurtling past like the ruffling tirl of pages as the book of the Mesozoic rapidly closed itself. The dying scream of the Earth was beyond comprehension, a roaring howl of rage and remorse as if pealed forth from the throat of Ba’al.
She was strong enough to defy the wind, but not the shrapnel of her swiftly ending world. Lightning sizzled all about while meteoric tephra rained down upon her gray hide. Her neck and flanks were pelted by a fusillade of rocks and branches whipped up to supersonic speeds, boulders and bones thrown as effortlessly as leaves in a tempest. Her jaw cracked under the slingshot strike of an anonymous stone. Even as she was torn to pieces, she held her ground in defiance of Death and darkness.
Eighty tons of her stood alone against the storm.
You Have To Live.
The bird’s lungs were thickened with smoke. Acrid and foul. He looked down at the flames as they licked hungrily at the trunk of the gingko he’d taken refuge in. It would not be safe here for much longer.
But the need for safety was only one of many passions he held within his breast. Every creature is multitudes. To fight or flee, to hide or hunt. The world was broken but his heart was not, and the flame that burnt within equaled the intensity of the all-consuming inferno without.
He had neither seen nor heard another of his kind since this unending hell was wrought upon the land. The smoke obscured, the fire killed. It was unlikely he would be heard over the cacophonous crackling of the blaze. Unlikelier still that any were left alive to hear even if they could.
But it was Spring.
And so he sang.
Coda
Once there were oceans in Kansas. Dark shallows teeming with great serpents and sea dragons. If you saw their bones in a museum you could remember everything but what mattered. How they looked. Their scent. The songs they sang. Their passions and their loves. The maps etched into their brindled hides, of a world that had reached its proper perfection and could not be prolonged.
Stop. Freeze this frame. Tylosaurus. Tee-hol-tso-de. Tenocouny. Uktena. The zenith of a world which will end in moments. When she breached the inkwell sea the comet was falling and its long searing flash illuminated her. Warm water sloughing off her polished hide like a cascade of diamonds. Her sleek fins raked back behind her. The silhouetted epitome of primeval Earth, backlit in all her majesty by the very agent of her destruction.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
The Road: Dinosaur Edition.
Every few sentences there are words I want to borrow. You do the reptiles more than justice.
The ends of the Hell Creek rex and the rexlings sing. And, man, the ways some of these entries, like “Blood Tide”, start are beautiful.
Pliosaurs, polycotylids, and “sea-dragons” in time for Chicxulub? I think listing who the plesiosaurs are joining up on Death’s shore can work in the same spirit, but do you have a theory?
In the end, the end but not the end (of you writing about dinos). Hell yeah.
Beautiful! You mentioned bats in one of the stories. I didn't know they originated in the Mesozoic. I was under the impression that they arrived later.