(reading time: 1 hour, 11 minutes)
Dinosaur
The tip had come to Lindwurm from a trilophosaur, and so was taken with the utmost seriousness. No family was more devoted to the cause than the trilophosaurs, even across their many species. Most of them were forever cut off from man, unable to experience their appreciation across the gulf of time, because few of their fossils would ever be found, and when they were they were not representative. Continue reading
Only finding fossils, we never suspected the flesh of the dinosaurs could’ve been so strange, could’ve climbed off whenever it felt like it and even borrowed our shape. That is the forgotten clade thanazoa, but they know of us, thanks to communing with their fungus-like oracle Atropos.
A defeated villain resurfaces to abuse those predictions, her predatory eyes set on the future she thinks she is denied. Discover a brand new world on familiar bones in this wildly speculative novella of the Triassic period.
(reading time: 1 hour, 13 minutes) (reading time for entire novella: 2 hours, 24 minutes)
Taxa Disaster
by
Blaine Arcade
‘Even if, one day, we had access to perfectly preserved fossils, a vital aspect of animal life would still elude our grasp. Behavior is almost entirely lost in the fossil record. Imagine the richness and strange wonder of animal life today. The eerie, ululating songs of whales, the elaborate middens of bowerbirds and the surreal spectacle of a peacock’s display could never be deduced from inanimate remains.
Likewise, some of the most spectacular sights of the past will never be seen, or even guessed.’
– All Yesterdays
Centipede
The insects were reluctant to touch it, and that reluctance continued on down to everything that could be called life. The fungi refused to take the first bite. The bacteria self-destructed rather than continue touching it for more than a moment. It was as if they knew what kind of will had inhabited it just one day prior. Continue reading
Prompt: The prompt for this story was actually a drawing of a small fishing boat near two giant creatures, one submerged in the water and one flying nearby.
The pterafriend pumped its wings and pulled them through the clouds swiftly, so its passenger wouldn’t get too wet in the process. What the passenger wanted to do exactly was not clear, he had some sort of strange vessel, but he was friendly enough, and the pterafriend offered rides to anyone and anything that was friendly enough. Continue reading
The oviraptor was an egg thief, one of the best of the Mesozoic, but one of their number failed so spectacularly that history did more than record it. It became a story told across super-continents, across ages, and even between the planets of the Milky Way. The oviraptor, were she intelligent enough to speak, would not call her heist a failure.
The egg was special; she knew that the moment she snatched it. It had a shell of two components: half metal and half glass. The glass was full of a reddish-amber liquid, like the blood of ancient trees happily spilled. Within the liquid grew an embryo, unlike one that came out of Mesozoic eggs. The first thing they learned was that it couldn’t be eaten, at all. The strongest beaks and claws had no effect on its material. They dropped rocks on it. Not a scratch. Defeated and hungry, the oviraptors didn’t know what else to do with it. They threw it in with their own eggs and waited, occasionally mesmerized by its pulsing warmth. Continue reading
Blaine Arcade 