Storm on Mu Merai

(four days and forty-five minutes before The End of the Universe)

A horde of passenger pigeons darken the endocellular sky, fleeing from the weather. The clouds roll in far faster than normal and it is quickly apparent that this is not the normal moisture cycle. The storm spreads with such alacrity that Taxchan Choth barely lifts his head from feeding – half-chewed and spit-soaked cycad leaves hang from his jaws like green slaver – before the sky is flooded with the black, thunder-laced clouds. The clouds split and rain washes down his back, cutting channels in the dust and moss. The mortal things dwelling in the Salvage Gardens cower as the storm rages and the ark’s outer shell threatens to crack.

Mu Merai shakes, and the dinosaur rocks back and forth on two, then three, then all of his limbs and his tail. The winds roar. Mu Merai’s cell wall has been fractured. Everything, all the resident remnants and nearly-dead things creeping and humming about the little world will be pulled into space. Taxchan can only crouch under his shell and prepare for the rush of new forms as the sky breaks above him. He looks upward. The sky of Mu Merai turns green as the cell wall floods with protoplasm in a last ditch effort to buffer the internal pressures before – it shatters, and his heart stops – that, or it leaps a million-million times, for it is a familiar and terrifying scene to him a trillion times over. The sky explodes, the night rushes over him like sackcloth vertigo, swallows him like a bag.

The seams of the bag tear, and there is















Nothing.
Something died.
More than died.

Fossils reduce to dust. Memories slip away. Shades dissipate into ectoplasm. Taxchan Choth, The Last Dinosaur, knows. He is the Stone of Forms, he is where shapes pass when they no longer live, but the shape of some form now escapes him.

Which facet had been wiped from the Stone? He isn’t sure, but . . . What was it? What was its flesh made of? It might have had wings, or pinchers. Did it have descendants? Was it something simple or something complex?

Did it make music?

Did it build?

Was it cute?





If so, it is all gone now.
The clouds and everything are gone, Mu Merai is moving along peacefully through space, again in loose orbit around the gas titan Ewewawa. Taxchan is standing on the trusty toe-hooves of an ornithopod.
Things seem a-okay.
But the ache persists – a feeling of guilt - heartbreak - like having passed an egg into a pile of mulch or having lost touch with your friend. Something significant has been extinguished, dragged beyond extinction. Obliviated. He understands. The extinct species - its memories - its shells or buildings or burrows or petrified stool - the few ghosts of its kind still wandering - had been gathered up and destroyed - subjected to utter consumption, a terribly extravagant act of sacrifice.
Some form will never again be achieved.

The Salvage Gardens of Mu Merai are well, but Taxchan Choth's light has dimmed.