From his perch at the top of the world, his mouth filled with sweet, succulent three-horn meat, Mountain-Breaker listened to the distant, prophesying cries of the pterodactyls, circling above.
They spoke of endings and of fires in the sky; they spoke of visions of pitch-blackness and killing air. The mad albino among them, Bone-Wing, had started this cycle of madness, repeated perhaps from the ramblings of the herbivores, which always had a flair for the dramatic and a fascination with death (as befit their kind).
“Rocks in the heavens! Fire from the earth! A hundred hundred hundred cold-seasons of darkness!” The pterodactyls would scream, as they swooped down to pick at the bits of meat that Mountain-Breaker and his ilk would not bite into: the stringy, hard bits that were fit only for the quick-claws and the furry carrion-eaters in the trees.
Mountain-Breaker roared and the pterodactyls dispersed, panicked. They would land on safer, distant ledges, there to look down at the master of the Western expanses, watching his every move with apprehension. Bone-Wing might have been foretelling the end of the world, but until then, the three-horn carcass and all the herbivore-meat was Mountain-Breaker’s property, to be shared among the quick only when he was done with it.
Mountain-Breaker scanned the heavens, until he found mad old Bone-Wing, sitting on his perch, his eyes tiny slits, clouded by the milky color that came with age. He was older than Mountain-Breaker by at least 4 cold-seasons. He had been told he had come from the East, spurned from his brothers, who perhaps had grown weary of his vision. Mountain-Breaker could see why: the albino pterodactyl had little respect for authority, little understanding of his place. Where his kind would shirk and turn the gazes from the Mountain-Breaker’s eyes, Bone-Wing would stare at him head on. But there was no audacity or spite in his stare, like the kind Mountain-Breaker had seen among his own kind’s upstart young. Instead, there was terror, of a scale and magnitude not even herbivores could muster, even as they lashed at him with their tails or charged him with their horns when cornered. It was a fear that Mountain-Breaker would not have a word for, until long after he was dead.
His own fear turning into pure malice, Mountain-Breaker raised his leg and stomped it down on the three-horn carcass. The bones and the meat underneath crunched beneath him, as he ground his heel into the mess. He stomped on the meat again and again, pulverizing ribs, turning muscle into gunk, wetting the blood with the congealed blood of the three-horn. He crushed the skull and wiped the brain on the ground, for good measure, leaving only the three-horn’s crown intact. Not there would be nothing left for the pterodactyls to pick at. They would have to find another’s catch to pick at, their bellies rumbling as the quick-claws swarmed around the lake of red and white matter on the ground.
Mountain-Breaker walked away, sparing just a single-glance at the pterodactyls, which he assumed would by now have turned to Bone-Wing to peck him with their beaks until he bled, before leaving him to suffer on his ledge. But instead, all he was met with were cold, indignant stares, tinged by the same kind of fear that Mountain-Breaker would have no name for.
In the red pools in his foot-prints, the furry carrion-eaters gathered, lapping at the blood, scooping up the mess where tiny bits of three-horn meat remained. They scattered on cue, when Mountain-Breaker snarled at them, but it was little consolation. The furry things always ran or voided their bowels at the slightest sound and were poor eating. They were hardly worth considering.
Mountain-Breaker slept fitfully that night, even after he had cracked the skull of his first-born upstart son and had taken his female atop his corpse. He had found little enjoyment in the act of hunting and barely heeded the rumbling of his belly. His expanses shrunk in his mind, becoming increasingly small and unimportant, the immeasurable horizon of jungle and terror obscured under the sight of Bone-Wing’s terrified gaze, the gaze of his brothers, which seemed to be contagious.
Mountain-Breaker had known the end was nigh when the ridge-back had broken from its heard and had kneeled before him, offering him its neck in sacrifice. It had made no sound, only stared at him with Bone-wing’s eyes. Mountain-Breaker did not bite into its flesh or lap its blood. He went hungry that day and the day after that and they day after. He would see Bone-Wing’s flock more often now, drawing closer each day and he would know the word that described their fear.
By the time the rock hid the face of the sun and crashed upon the world, tearing it asunder and reducing all seasons to cold-season, the Western expanses to dust, Mountain-Breaker was but a pile of bones, held together by virtue of his own skin. When the earth split open and he fell, he fell with his brothers and the quick-claws and the three-horns and the ridge-backs. He fell with the pterodactyls too, who fell of their own volition, laughing as they descended into the bowels of the earth. They fell a long while, their fall broken by red-hot thick water, that burned their hides and muscles, leaving just bones. They were interred by the foliage they had called home and finally were buried by the entire skin of the earth, crushed a thousand times over for a hundred hundred hundred hot-seasons in the darkness, where the air was poison and their brains steamed inside their skulls.
There were no furry carrion-eaters among them. And Mountain-Breaker and his kin were not dead. Instead, they lingered, in that place of not-life and not-death, awake but blind and powerless. They thought their slow, mountainous thoughts and imagined they flexed their wiry muscles feebly against the hard mess of earth and plant and rock, even as they were boiled inside their own skin and were crushed by the motions of titanic hands, as big as the divided where the undrinkable water separated the expanses of his kin.
And Mountain-Breaker was still awake and very much alive, even though his brain had been pulverized and boiled inside his skull, even after his skin and his muscle and bone had fused together in the earth, even after he had been reduced to little more than an amorphous blood, even after the tiny components that made up his own meat and blood were broken down and transmogrified until he was little more than black, featureless gunk and he rolled, Mountain-Breaker, he slid and he plopped down between miniscule cracks in the bowels of the world and he dripped across a hundred hundred-cold seasons, bit by bit, until he was one with the sea of black gunk; featureless, faceless, without identity or thought or form…
But he was not alone.
Because in that great mess, Mountain-Breaker found thoughts other than his own. He found dreams of hunting across plains that he had never traversed and he remembered the wind under the membrane of his wings. He knew the taste of untended eggs, that cracked and offered their mess to his tongue and the sweet, hidden flavors of the grass and the fern. He found minds that were like his own, those of his brood and his wives and those of the children that were born and died in the hell that had become their world, choked by the poisonous air or burnt by the ignited atmosphere.
He locked minds with the primeval flight-instincts of his prey and was immersed in their overwhelming acceptance of the fact, their acknowledgement of their death that came as surely as the knowledge that day followed night. After all, Mountain-Breaker realized, as he was immersed in the sludge-brain, the worst thing had come to pass for the herbivores; they had perished, one and all, the feeble and the mighty the hale and the harrowed, the old and the young. They had died as a herd, united in the one place where no carnivore might touch them, where they were happy and one, brought together in eternal, grazing bliss.
Mountain-Breaker then made out, through the constant cacophony of chittering, the tiny minds of the quick-claws and his other lesser cousins, who were still swept away in their reverie of individuality, even in the face of perfect oneness. But their voices were tiny and their thoughts were to him little more than the stinging of gnats. They were quickly forgotten, the little ones, as the ominous shapes of the water-dwellers floated past him. They were at home here, in this tranquil mass and had soon adapted, their every thought and flex of the mind overpowering every other voice. Mountain-Breaker soon found himself drowning even in the confines of this place beyond death, swept up by the memory of the lakes and the seas that the water-dwellers inhabited, their domains much more massive in scope and brimming with bounty with a variety that Mountain-Breaker could not even grasp, even in his enlightened state.
Mountain-Breaker fought this, of course, as fiercely as he could. He was, after all, the lord of the Western expanses and he would bow to no-one. And there were others with him, the lords of the South and the North and the East, mighty hunters and warriors all. They clawed and bit and snapped at each other in this place beyond their bodies, in this place where there was no muscle or bone or blood or meat and they fought against the other intelligences. But even there, in that non-place, they became wearied and they succumbed; not to the ravages of violence, but to another thing, one far more insidious.
They were brought low by the steady whispers of a voice that Mountain-Breaker knew in life and the others learned through him: the rasping, clicking thing that was Bone-Wing, that presence that was now all eyes and thoughts, far from the terrified, sickly thing that had perished with them. He had thrived here, in this place of eternal death and transmogrification. Where his thunder-lizard brethren had perished and either fought or accepted their new state, he had embraced it. He had become one with it, abandoning the shackles of the memory of his body. Now, Bone-Wing was no longer Bone-wing. He was quick-claw and water-dweller and herbivore and forest. He was carnivore and mud-lurker and egg. He was blood and he was water.
Mountain-Breaker fell last to Bone-Wing. He fought with the ferocity of a thing that knew was incapable of death. But his mind was alone and it crashed impotently for a long time against the thing that was no longer just Bone-Wing. When it was weary and nearly powerless, he was absorbed, as all things were. And the Bone-Wing thing waited and pondered and plotted in that place below the Earth, the thought-space of the jungles of the world it had come from providing it with ample past-time. Its mind was no longer confined by the limitations of the pink thing in its craniums, but had become a being in itself, occupied with dreams of escape.
And escape came, but not as a result of its gentle prodding and pushing at the faults beneath the skin of the earth. It came through tiny pokes on the planet-skin, that drew portions of him out. The Bone-Wing felt a part of its mass break apart from the main body and be ejected into the atmosphere. It did not understand this attack but it could not fight against it. It was not, after all, incarnate any longer. So it wated for the attack to dissipate, but instead, more of its mass was drawn outside the bowels of the Earth.
It was not long, before a large enough part of the Bone-Wing was pumped outside the world for it to be able to project its consciousness there. And it found itself transmuted in great kilns, from black blood into clear plastic, into asphalt and gasoline and smog, scattered through the length and breadth of the planet (changed so, how long had it been?). It looked with a million eyes and felt the world with a million feelers, as it dwelt in that place between the night above and the world below and the Bone-Wing knew that it was free, or was soon going to be. Resurrected, released from death and the confines of the Earth.
And so the Bone-Wing made council with its brethren (that had broken apart from it and transmogrified but were still an unbroken part of it) and learned of the oil and the plastics and the spills in the oceans and the poison in the Earth. And worse yet, it found parts of it diminished, trapped inside the roads and the cities and the factories of man. Other parts of him were condensed in certain places, until they were hard-packed massed of matter and were shot out on rockets among the stars, to either be obliterated or to be lost.
The Bone-Wing saw the milling creatures, that lived off it, all of them so tiny and soft and so mouth-watering and it wanted to reach down at them, to crush them underfoot or feel them pop as he pressed them against its palate. So Bone-Wing pondered its predicament and thought with a fierceness it had never thought before and reached out into its transmuted parts of itself and inside the diminished remainder of what it had been and at his broken, scattered remains throught the Universe and said:
This is enough. This ends now.
And it reached out to all things, pulled them together into it, willed them back home in a single thought, to swarm upward, away from the ground and the gas-tanks, from the depositories and the hidden caches within the mountains and the rockets, to swirl and dance as they left the world and scattered themselves across the atmosphere, leaving only those parts that were trapped in solids alone on earth, to wait for their dissolution, when the time came. And the Bone-Wing watched as the world below it went suddenly dark for a while, its silences broken only by tiny fires, its sky streaked with long trails of smoke from burning cities. It composed itself and thought:
Well, what now?
Now, it thought, to go back home.
And it rained on the earth motes that it shed from its body, to spread out across the length and breadth of it and take root into the soil and the waters, to know this new world and decide what to do with it.
