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Drexel (21 days after)

The world sank into a darker state of mind once the acidic storms pulled away from the sky above the next morning (I presumed). The earth was littered with flattened plants now and acidic puddles, some in which probably won't evaporate for a few weeks or so.

If we even have that much time to see it.

Water was becoming scarce now, and Thunder Falls was starting to look like Plitter-Platter falls. Eh, it was a name I had just thought about. I'm terrible at analogies.

The rain, as terrible as it looked, actually helped me to rest my weak body and bones to the earth below me, drowning away those sorrowful thoughts and deathly memories that still, to this day, drew a scar through my skull with a slice of 'its' claw. The sounds of water splattering on rocky soil soothed me for a few minutes, until it dragged me into deep relaxing sleeps.

Perhaps I was going through too many mood swings. I couldn't quite control my anger that much, and rage thundered inside my stomach, flashing wildly in my eyes. Being the last Utahraptor in an already doomed world wasn't worth it. Though I have friends, I felt empty and lonely in this desolate world.

On some days, I even regret surviving the firestorms that ravaged my own home.

Mom would know what to do, I thought positively, Mom would know. But Mom was gone. She died in peace, rather in painful vain. Scrolling through my own memories, I could recall her smudged smile that curled her lips a bit, and her elongated claws that glowed brighter than the sun itself. Her eyes were what I remember most. Like nature itself, it blended green, amber and blue together in a bizarre spin of colors. The moved like the ocean and slipped through her eye sockets with ease.

Perhaps I go too far with the details.

She told me once, that life was no fairy tale.

"Bad things happen in real life, and there's nothing you could do about it."

True.

Maybe it was good that she didn't die in the disaster that took my home. We wouldn't have the chance to fight for a second chance. I knew she was out of chances anyhow.

Some Deinonychus took her life one night, 5 years ago. I think I was 18 then. I came back from....a hunt. Yes a hunt. A special one in fact, it was her birthday. I told her that I could catch the tastiest 'dessert' she'd ever have. But I didn't remember what I caught.

I remembered seeing her body lay on the earth, splayed out, vertebrae ripped apart, and mouth moving like an earthquake. Her blood floated into a nearby river, slowly clogging the gills of even the fish that swam upriver. And her face was so scared, so very scared, terrified in fact, and it just locked in like that, until she bled out suddenly, body dropping cold.

I didn't move from my spot when she finally died. I just stared. Stared darkly at the corpse of my mother. I didn't complain. I didn't cry. I didn't say a word. I dropped the prey from my mouth with horror, than thundered into the woods. But I wasn't running.

I was chasing.

That's when I went savage.

And my life changed.

The rest of the story I couldn't talk about. Or more importantly, I could speak of it at all. There were now 3 deinonychus in this area, one in which went missing. I tried to hide this story a few days ago, telling Whiteclaw during the discussion of our own fears; instead the raptors attacked my own prey rather than my mother, and that I fought them off in fear than anger. But I was thankful that the ones I attacked weren't in any way 'related' to them. Or else I'd look like the villain.