Crocodile -2000- Info
Then the disc went dark.
K’tharr, the river’s oldest crocodile, was not a beast of myth or magic. He was just old. Older than the mud he napped in. Older than the village built from reeds. He had seen pharaohs who were not yet called pharaohs rise and fall. His left eye was a milky white cataract, his hide a mosaic of scars from hippo tusks and rival jaws. He was two thousand pounds of patience and hunger. crocodile -2000-
K’tharr rose from the river an hour later, mud dripping from his snout. The fog was gone. The tadpoles wiggled. The fish swam. And in his ancient, aching gut, he felt something new: a small, hard knot of wrongness. A piece of the future, digesting. Then the disc went dark
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. Older than the mud he napped in
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 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.”