Hunger. That was all that was left. The oldest, stupidest, strongest thing in his brain.
The man looked into K’tharr’s one good eye. “You don’t… understand. I’m from the year… 3000 AD. You were supposed to be a specimen. Just a… crocodile.”
The fog reached K’tharr’s tail. A cold, wrong feeling shot up his spine. It wasn't pain. It was erasure. He felt his memories—the taste of a wildebeest calf, the heat of a sun from a thousand summers—flicker and die.
Year: 2000 BC. Location: The lush, unnamed delta of a river that will one day be called the Nile.
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.
K’tharr understood one thing. This thing was in his river. And it was trying to make the world go quiet.
Then the disc went dark.