Then the disc went dark.
The man saw K’tharr. His eyes went wide. “Alpha point located,” he said into a bead on his wrist. “Releasing temporal suppressant. Target: prehistoric Crocodylus niloticus . ETA to extinction: two thousand years.”
One evening, the sky did not bruise purple, but split open with a sound like a stone tablet cracking in half. A silver disc, no bigger than a scarab beetle, hovered over the river. Then it screamed. A high, thin noise that made K’tharr’s ancient bones hum. crocodile -2000-
He did not think attack . He simply moved.
He settled back onto his mudbank, the one he had guarded for two thousand years before this moment. He closed his bad eye. Then the disc went dark
But somewhere, in a timeline that would never exist, a team of scientists stared at a blank screen and whispered: “What happened to Unit 7?”
The disc spat out a man. Not a reed-man or a mud-man. This one wore a smooth, white skin over his body and a clear shell over his face. He carried a stick that sparked. “Alpha point located,” he said into a bead on his wrist
K’tharr did not understand the words. But he understood the smell. The man’s stick hissed, and a grey fog rolled across the water. Where it touched, tadpoles froze mid-wiggle. Lily pads turned to dust. A fish floated to the surface, not dead, but unborn .
K’tharr understood one thing. This thing was in his river. And it was trying to make the world go quiet.
The fog reached K’tharr’s tail. A cold, wrong feeling shot up his spine. It wasn't pain. It was erasure. He felt his memories—the taste of a wildebeest calf, the heat of a sun from a thousand summers—flicker and die.