K-Pg Dragon: Life After Extinction

Life After Extinction

She flicks her barbed tongue over glossy black scales, taking care to lick every speck clean. Sun shines into her cave for a moment and she looks like a wicked streak of obsidian. She purrs and extends her wings to soak in the warmth.
There is a rumbling beneath her. The mountain stirs. She is on her feet the next instant. She runs to the ledge and pushes off, pursued by a roar and a rush of heat. She lets the heat carry her away, but beats her wings, faster. She has to be faster. The ash is already erupting behind her, ready to consume her, suffocate her.
But her wings are strong. She would not have chosen such a home if she couldn't depend on them, and now she is a black bullet rocketing above the pyroclastic flow.
Leaving the plentiful thermals of volcano country behind, she drops in the icy air and must work harder to keep her huge body aloft.
Her flight takes her above a frozen, empty world. The ground is monochromatic, black and white like the sky. Whether the white patches are snow or ash is hard to tell from up here. The black is of the forests that once were. They have already been decimated by the global firestorms. She keens for the incomprehensible loss of her hunting grounds, her home. All gone.
But it is time to move on.
Hunger paces inside her, growling. She echoes it.
She scans the landscape from above, but the wasteland is still. Then, a flicker. She draws closer to the earth, but it is nothing; ashes stirred by the wind. Her muscles tense with frustration. She needs to land, rest. Breaths grow heavier. Then she smells it, burnt flesh.
Her landing sweeps ashes into the wind. The delicate burnt ghost of a tree disintegrates. The ground is still hot here. She paces through the dust, searching. She flaps her wings, blowing away more ashes. There, a large charred body that will not be swept away.
She tears at the shell of burnt hide, straining to rip open the carcass. The meat is dry and tough, but it is meat. She rips off chunks of flesh and scarfs them down. In her frenzy, she almost misses the whiff of muskiness behind her.
She whirls in time to see the adult Alioramus, its feathers black and white and caked with ash. She crouches with a warning hiss. The carcass belongs to her.
The Tyranosaurid lunges for the exposed back of her neck. She rears up to deflect its jaws with a head-butt. Its teeth scrape her face, cutting her left eyelid.
She cries out and claws at her adversary. While she is distracted by the pain, it gets a grip on the underside of her neck. She writhes to get free, beating it with her wings, but its jaws only tighten.
Yet she is larger than it. She uses her weight to twist above it, pulling its head up, then slams herself down. There is a loud crack, then a whimper. The Alioramus' lower jaw is fractured, hanging limp with an unnatural gape.
She recoils and hisses. It is no warning this time. Her flint-tipped tongue clicks against the iron at the roof of her mouth as she unleashes methane breath. Flames whoosh to life, scorching the Alioramus. It flees screaming into the wasteland. It will not survive long. When she has finished with this carcass, she will track it to its deathbed.
She has held off starvation for a few more weeks.
~΅~•~΅~
Her eye hasn't healed, and she is blind to her left side. She stays longer in her burnt out territory than she should, pacing through the ash, seeking safety in what is known, but there is nothing left for her here.
It's past time to go. Finally, she charges into the unknown and opens her wings to the sky. She sets a pace, flying and trekking over the course many days. Then the wind turns.
Buffeted by flurries, her wings are becoming too cold for flight. She must find shelter before the blizzard hits full force. One black eye strains to see through the whiteness, seeking a ridge, a hollow, anywhere insulated.
The ice burns, and her wings grow numb. They collapse, and she plummets through the whirlwind. In the blank whiteness, it is hard to tell she is falling at all, the winds wrapping around her body give the illusion of soaring. She almost dreams about cutting through the air like a talon but, soon, she will tear through the ground, be torn up by the earth. With a last burst of strength blazing from her heart to her wings, she swerves, parallel to the ground, and skids through the snow, letting it embrace her, bury her.
She nestles down, digging a makeshift burrow insulated by snow. Then impact winter swallows the world whole.
~΅~•~΅~
The snow has melted, revealing a new world.
Her new territory encompasses the rainy side of a mountain. Trees grow here, and a small herd of Charontosauri come to browse. Clean water cascades from the mouths of many springs, like the one by her perch, down into a shimmering lake. At night, the Charontosauri gather by the lake, hooting musically to each other with their long, slender crests.
When the sun come out, as it does at times these days, she bathes in the warmth.
A breeze comes to her, carrying the scents of the earth, lake, and forest. Mingled with these, an unfamiliar musk. The scales between her wings prickle. It is an intruder. She leaps into the air, to seek it out, challenge it, but then—
He is a slate streak among the clouds. Her pitch black rises to meet him. The two circle each other. He is slick and serpentine. Her wings beat faster, he will do.
They do nothing so silly as romance. The world is too old for that, or maybe too new. But there are a few games left to them. He bolts, and she pursues, trailing him across the sky. The winds swirl around them as they chase through the sulfuric clouds. They fly higher, faster. He is quicker, but she is stronger, and so as the muscles of her wings burn with the strain she breaks through the top of the clouds.
The sky here is bluer than she has seen in an eternity. The air is thin and toxic, they can't stay. She catches him, their claws entwine, and they spiral down together in a mating dance.
~΅~•~΅~
The rain stings. Her wings are irritated but she must shelter her eggs from the acidity. She stays here for as long as it takes. She wouldn't move for thunder, snow, or firestorms. She does not eat, but her body falls into a sort of hibernation state, numb to anything but a direct threat to her eggs. She is a statue in her nest, under the treeline.
Then comes the morning she is greeted by shifting and chirping below her. She purrs, as much in satisfaction as encouragement to her young.
The first three erupt from their shells in quick succession, screeching to be fed.
She stretches her body, awakening herself enough to go hunting for the first time in months.
But the last one is taking its time. She shifts in circles around the nest, her purrs and chirps turned to irregular thrums of anxiety. The other hatchlings grow quiet, sensing her distress. Finally, the last chick breaks through its shell.
She nuzzles it, gingerly. The last hatchling is weak. She wants to stay a little longer, but the others continue their begging.
She makes short work of a burrow of mammals, and returns to her nest. The first three hatchlings jump on the meat. She purrs with pride. These are Hers.
The youngest moves too slow, no matter how much she coaxes it. She must hunt again.
This time she will go after a Charontosaurus, enough for herself and her young, for the moment. She prowls through the forest on foot. The herd is at the far edge, browsing near the plains. She selects an older one, deepest in the woods. If she had flown, the herd would have seen her silhouette and scattered into the trees. She stalks closer, her blackness a darker shadow among the shade. The herd's hooting and munching is enough to cover the susurrus that she makes through the scrub. She has come within a wingspan of her prey.
It sees her, and howls a warning, but it's too late for the Charontosaurus. The herd flees, but she is on her target the next instant. Her talons rend its hide, and she takes the fatal bite. Its lifeblood gushes down her throat.
She tears off chunks of meat and flies them back to the nest, piece by piece. Three of the hatchlings gobble up every bite. The last one doesn't make a move.
She places a piece of meat right before her youngest, but it doesn't even stir at the scent of blood. Its eyes stare into space, and it lies completely still. She nudges the baby with her nose. It is limp and cold.
The rain sickness has taken its life.
~΅~•~΅~
The Charontosauri are gone. She does not know where, but it doesn't matter. She can't leave her chicks. She has to scavenge what she can, and when she can't, watch them wither.
It doesn't take long for the smallest to die. She lets the remaining two devour its body. They are still hungry, always hungry, and she doesn't eat.
The hunger and weariness hang to her bones while she hunts, circling farther and farther from from the nest. They are an empty weight in her stomach. It is no surprise when the next chick dies. It adds to the weight. She would collapse if it weren't for the last one. But then, if it weren't for the last one, she would not be tethered here to starve.
She alights at the nest and looks at her tether. It is a deep green, but fading, waning. The chick mews. She growls and it flinches, curling within itself. She draws her neck back with a methane hiss. Then snaps her mouth shut and flies away.
Gales pull at her as she soars, pull her back but she fights through them. The weight grows and she fights that too. Wings beating wildly, her breaths are bitter and she roars out methane flames.
After a time, she comes to the other side of her mountain, the rainshadow. It is a desert. She glides down over the empty beige, empty as the weight within. She lets herself cry out for her lost young. She lets herself down in the sand.
The night comes and her body is covered in hoarfrost. In the morning she shifts to her feet and wanders. She is not the only life in the desert. She finds lizards sunning themselves on the rocks, flashing their red necks and blue sides. She sets them all alight and watches them dance in the flames, screaming, before she eats them.
That day she returns to the nest, leaves a few lizards, then flies on. High over the scrub plains, she spots the subtle change in hue of trampled ground. She follows the path, far from her territory, beyond the plains. Before her lies an inland sea, surrounded by lush forest.
Many herds of dinosaur are gathered here, including a herd of Charontosauri that carry the coniferous scent of her own forest. They are just now entering the woods.
She dives, setting fire to the trees before the herd. They bolt, every way they go, she's there. There is only one direction she lets them run: home. She keeps them going for several days over the scrub plains. Many die on the way, collapse foaming at the mouth with fear. She ends their suffering and makes good use of their death to keep her going. When she comes home, she is now filled with meat and power, enough to drag the latest carcass through the trees, all the way to the nest.
But there is no sign of her young. She calls out, and begins to keen. A chirp cuts her cry short. She inhales the scent of her chick, tracing it to a burrow. The youth climbs out of the ground and she wraps her wings around it.
Their faces touch under the translucent shroud, and now the child feasts.
~΅~•~΅~
Dawn comes early this morning, with a distant roar. She snaps awake. That is not sunrise. It's a firestorm.
If she were on her own, she could fly away. But she has to relocate her chick, who has grown to half her size and cannot fly. The firestorm will soon engulf the forest all around them. The only way to go is up the mountain.
She pushes her chick away from the nest. It chirps, trying to run around her as if this is a game. She growls and the chick stops short. She noses it up the terrain.
The make it barely above the treeline when she feels the heat bearing down on them. Her chick scrabbles on the rocks and she must catch it it a few times, pushing with encouraging chirps. The roaring increases as the day goes on and her wings ache to escape, but she climbs on with her young one.
As they come to the mountain pass, she turns back. The blaze thunders in her ears, and she is nearly blinded by the red and golden dancing spires. As she turns away, dazed, she can almost make out the shrieking hoots they're leaving behind.
~΅~•~΅~
The chick strains to see over the ledge, cautiously flapping its wings, as it does every day. She watches, as always, ready to leap up and catch her child should it fall, though it is larger than she is now.
Yet today, something is different. Today, the dust clouds have cleared just a little, enough for sunlight to warm the cliff face. A thermal catches the juvenile's wings, and they beat faster. Then, the chick is in the air. There is a moment of hovering, unsteady hesitation. Then it takes off with the confidence of instinct.
She rises to watch her child's deep green body soar over the desert. She doesn't go after it, but keeps vigil until the fledgling has flown too far to see, and for a while after that.