"AH!!" I shrieked, breaking the log in half. Whiteclaw flinched as pieces and splinters of wood flew past him from my overpowered jaws. I clutched my teeth tightly, embracing the burning sensation that scarred my brain.
"Stay still!"
"It hurts!" I screeched back, trembling hard. Intense pain throbbed in my calf, and though I couldn't look back, I didn't need to. I was already straining myself to not cry. My arms were quivering, and I'm sure I've broken through three sticks.
It wasn't enough.
"Another log?" Drexel huffed, pushing one in. Stella nodded, examining my unknown injury.
"Yeah, he might need to bite down on it. He's been burned badly. Look, look at this. His bone's showing too."
"MY WHAT?!" I cried out in a muffled voice, before another spasm of agony struck. I let out a painful muffled cry, cracking the new log already from my jaws. Whiteclaw jerked back as the log went concave in my jaws. Sweat poured from my face, and my jaws hurt as the crush became too strong. Stronger than I've ever bitten before. I was out of breath, pleading silently to make the suffering end. Whiteclaw crossed his arms over his chest and looked at Drexel with uncertainty.
"Told you this would happen," Drexel hissed under his breath, sitting down on his underbelly, watching Stella work on my leg to stop the bleeding. I shot him a look of hatred and annoyance, then winced.
"Why would the geyser explode like that?" Whiteclaw then asked, "It wasn't doing that before. None of them were." Drexel didn't say a word though. He too seemed speechless on this type of topic.
"Actually they have," Stella responded back, tilting her huge frilled skull, "In some other geysers. You guys just experienced your first one."
"So it's been doing this for a while?" Whiteclaw shuddered, "Well...why hasn't nobody told us about it?" Stella just looked up at him and sighed, then quickly spun her attention to my calf.
"I don't know. It's just some stupid explosion. Nothing to worry about." Whiteclaw eyed her then shrugged.
"Ugh, worried!" I growled from within the log, "I'm more so worried than all of you--Gahh!!" I crushed my jaws again, and the wood split in a dark line through its bark, like an earthquake. I felt small tears sprout on my eyes, but I closed my eyes to hold in the terror and sorrow of my own agony.
"Please stop..." I wept like a child, moving my excruciating leg around away from Stella, "Please...It hurts."
"Shadow, if I don't do anything, it'll be infected!" Stella snapped, then sighed behind my back, "If I can do anything."
"What do you mean?" I felt my heartbeat quicken when the pain subsided in a throbbing sensation, "You can't do anything?"
"It's already infected?!" Whiteclaw's eyes popped. Stella sniffed my calf, and I could feel droplets of blood slip down my leg and stain the dust from a hot wind.
"No...not yet. Though it smells like it. And it might as well have been."
This time, I dared myself to look at my wound, and quickly, I curled my head around to take a long stare.
I regretting every picture I captured with my carnivorous eyes.
My calf was bloody and red. From the backside of my knee down, my scales were steamed and blackened, as if something hot wiped its fiery hand down my calf to the bottom of my foot. Surely enough, a slim bit of my white bone, which was bloody, yet unbroken, gleamed out of the wound. It looked as if either my leg got burned up, or my calf got opened by an alligator. Either or, I wasn't pleased by the sight, and felt my stomach do a flip within my belly. Or should I say I got sick immediately from the sight. I couldn't describe how I felt, it was just awful. I turned back to Stella, panicked and disgusted, wanting to know if there was an alternative. If there was something out there to help my wound.
"There's nothing out there to help the wound," She said to Whiteclaw, "The plants are dying. There's no sap, no honey, no yarrow. Not even anymore cobwebs. Everything is disappearing for some reason."
"Those are all natural stuff," I spoke, realizing what she meant. Nature truly was gone. The plants were all dead. The trees were all dried out. The ground was barren. There really was nothing left. But what scared me more than the condition I was in was Stella's own. She and her herd of 6 especially. They're plant eaters. Herbivores eat plants. If plants die out, they'll die out too. And if they die out...
"Drexel," Whiteclaw muttered, looking at the sitting Utahraptor with his hand over his frontal mouth area, "You're being charismatic. You haven't even said anything." Drexel sighed, then shook his head angrily.
"What is there to say?" He hissed, turning to the Deinonychus, "Literally what is there to say?! Do we not realize what is going on? Everything that was on that stupid clock is coming true! Can't we see that?" Whiteclaw opened his mouth to say something, then went quiet. Surely enough, he did have a point. The clock that I saw last time was edging closer to the 33rd day. Meat was becoming scarce for us. We finished mostly all of it, even the organs of our feasts, except for the scraps that were 'uneatable' or 'indigestible' to us. Less and less herbivores were coming to us, and sometimes, we even failed to take down some. We were truly losing this 'war'.
"So we're all gonna die?" I sniveled. Drexel just glanced down at me from above, sighing. He couldn't say anything. Stella gaped her mouth open a little bit, turning her attention to the Utahraptor. But Drexel just huffed once, snorting hot air into the air, then twirled around, walking away with speed. Whiteclaw licked his lips then dipped his head to Stella.
"I'm going to go catch up with him. I'll be back in a few..." Then his albino body vanished with a dashing noise, then settled back down into sorrowful silence. Stella heaved a sheltered and old inhale, then laid on her chest, splaying her legs forwards to relax herself. I dropped the log from my mouth and pushed it to my right into the searing heat from the darkness above.
"Is it true?" I wondered. I felt kiddush asking a question that sounds cowardly and fearful, but I needed to know. Stella turned her Triceratops head around to me and just smiled.
"I don't know yet Shadow," She breathed, "I don't know. But....it doesn't mean you have to believe everything. I'm sure it's just a misconception."
"But we have to be certain of things," I countered, "Don't we? We don't know which way it could go." Stella tried to reassure me.
"Just because it's prophesied doesn't make it reality. Some things are just there in this world to......well....scare us, and to make us afraid. We have to be steady on what we believe is true, and what is just an imaginative state in our minds." I listened to her words carefully and nodded without question.
"Okay."
Stella overlooked my face, and somehow noticed something deeply hidden behind the pupils of my eyes.
"Is there something wrong? How's the leg?"
"Wrong?" I raised my scaled eyebrow, "Nothing's wrong. What do ya mean, nothing's really wrong, though nothing's right either! Ha ha..."
"You're a very good liar," She cooed. I lowered my playful voice and grin, then groaned, and then exhaled.
"Yes...something's wrong."
I thought back to the battle with me and T-Rex, and the first thought was on the strange vision during the battle. The Clock talked to me. I kept thinking that it was imagined. But I knew it was real. Too real. I didn't know how or why, but it did. And it scared me in a dark and evil-like tone that made me feel like a mouse trapped in eternal darkness, and everywhere you'd look, a face of your past would appear. A face that you'd thought you'd forgotten. There was something in my past that was locked. Something Thunder hid from me.
"Wanna talk about it?" She wondered.
"Hm? Oh no, no, no, it's okay.....I'm good," I shifted my body over from Stella to face the outside world, "I'm good. It's just....some..... dream.... I had. It scared me."
"Well, if you insist," She muttered, growing back up to her feet, then stomped away slowly to the Open Zone. I shrunk back, moving my shoulders a bit to relax. My eyes settled upon a cool spot in the earth that was blackened once before.
Blackclaw vanished mysteriously a few days ago, and nobody saw him awaken or make noise. He just vanished. It seemed to good to be true. Or more so, awfully strange and inconsiderate of him by Whiteclaw's standards. But Blackclaw's disappearance were the least of my worries.
A few hours passed while I laid there, my leg twitching irritatingly with a few bark bits closed up on my sickening burn when I felt Amberclaw's light feet tip tap on the earth as if he was running. I lifted my head up slowly, squinting from my blurred vision to spot him rushing up, out of breath and alert. His eyes glowed low on me, and he made his way towards my huge body, looking around every few seconds.
"Hey, Shadow," He heaved, sucking in deep breaths, swallowed, then panted again, "Where's.....where's Whiteclaw?...."
Whiteclaw? I lifted my head up high, surveillancing the area with sight, sound and scent. I didn't catch an albino deinonychus from my perspective though.
"I don't know, last I saw he was walking after Drexel cause of an argument....but....," I glanced around, moving my giant skull from side to side, "Is there something wrong?"
"Something is wrong.....yeah," Amberclaw flexed his jaws and bent his knees, to lower down to me, "Something terribly wrong."
"With what?"
"The clock."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
143.
That was our population: 143.
143 lives still out there. Thus excluding ours which consisted of me, Amberclaw, Blackclaw (who is unknown at this point), Stella and her two last Triceratops, and Whiteclaw, that leaves 137 other lives out there. Days ago it was in the 1,000s. Now it's lower than ever. And this meant one terrifying thing.
"We're seriously going extinct," Amberclaw puffed, shaking his head at the symbols carved in the luminous clock. I stared at the huge golden clock shimmer like some kind of omen, and its light flicker, then blink twice.
141.
"We fell below the threshold didn't we?" I sighed, "That means there's no way to come back."
"Threshold?"
"Yeah," I tried to sound charismatic and intellectually smart to the deinonychus, like how dad outsmarts me often times when I was younger, "All species have it. If there's enough of us to, y'know, have eggs, then we'd be okay and we could restart our lives. But if there aren't enough of us...."
The clock blinked again: 134.
Drexel sighed and inhaled once, "What are we going to do..."
"I don't think there is anything we could do..." I whispered, trailing my eyes over the shimmering hardware. The hand was on another symbol: 20, and only a few ways away from 33. I didn't need to look at its countdown to figure out how much time we had left. It was staring at me like the skull from before. Just waiting for something to happen until it was too late. It this clock foretold the death of all our species, then how would we die? We were thriving more so than those out in the open world, so clearly they were doomed. But where were the signs that we were doomed as well? I sniffed the wall, tasting the aroma of new cold metal scar my nostrils. It was an odd smell, and I didn't really understand why it did smell the way it did, or more like why it even existed in this world.
"I'm going to go look for Whiteclaw again," Amberclaw clicked, walking backwards, "Don't do anything stupid."
I groaned.
"You don't have to baby me all the time y'know. I'm bigger and stronger than you!" I called back. I saw Amberclaw's tail flicker away following his humorous laughter until it faded to darkness. Sudden darkness swallowed me in the silence of the cave, and only the light from the clock gave way to the black world that whispered secret hymns through its dry walls. I looked down at my foot again, which was losing the bandage of leaves from Stella's aide.
Soon enough it would start bleeding again.
I twisted my body around a bit, preparing the leave the cave, but part of me wanted to stay.
For some reason that I couldn't signify.
I suddenly felt my leg twist, and my whole body followed, suddenly realizing that I was stomping back towards the clock. Confusion flooded through my veins as I stared at its incredible size and power in awe, unable to say anything major to clarify my details on this mechanical structure. I sniffed it again. Nothing seemed strange about it. It was just....there.
Then a memory swarmed through my brain, a few days old memory that I could recall very clearly. It was my first nightmare after the impact. I remember the clock while I was sleeping, seeing it pull me like some kind of sinister force, tricking me into touching it. And I did anyways, only to watch a horrifying sight that pierced my soul ever since then. I inhaled deeply, shaking my head. I wasn't going to touch it again. I wouldn't. Couldn't. Can't....
Maybe?
I edged closer, feeling my heart pound. Why was I getting closer? Didn't I know what this thing did to me before? All that pain, all the images that scarred my brain still remained, and I didn't want the same fate to happen twice. I felt my sharp teeth from my overbite chatter, and I inhaled once again, shaking the thought out.
Don't touch it.
Don't touch it.
Don't touch it Shadow.
All the voices, all those strange voices, I could still feel their presence darken within me. Like the dream from this morning. Or even the voice from the fight. Something wanted me to touch the clock. I still didn't know why, though the clues were clearly lying before me.
On the clock.
I felt as though the clock 'knew' me more than I know about myself. As if he was in my memories the entire time. I, for sure, know that it wouldn't make sense for something that you don't know understand more about you than yourself. Doesn't make sense at all right?
So why was I hesitant in knowing the truth? Clearly my dead mother told me that it hurt to know the truth. So was it pain that I was afraid of?
Or fear itself?
I had to get a grip on myself. And yet, I still couldn't pull me away, hypnotised by the golden glow of the clock. Then a new thought bloomed in my gut.
Touch it.
Touch it.
Don't say it or think it, just touch it.
I gulped hard, swaying my tail a bit, lowering myself in a bent knee with a growl. It was back in my head again. It was in my head again! I tried to flush away the thought, but it grew larger and larger.
Touch it.
No....
Touch it-
NO!
A headache throbbed in my skull, and I cowered back as the pain increased. I stumbled back, watching the clock glow evilly
What was wrong with me? What was happening to me?
Touch it!
Why? I squeezed my eyes shut, gritted my teeth in pain before its final response.
Don't you want to know the truth?
The truth?
The pain suddenly stopped, leaving me out of breath and a few inches away from the clock. My nostrils flared and shrunk as I calmed my heaving to normal state. However, my heart was beating faster and faster, but my brain seemed reset in a whole new mode:
I needed to touch it.
I didn't know the truth of course. But it's better off that I do. Something in my past was locked from me. And it was time to unlock it for once. With a deep inhale of pure horror, my snout went forwards a bit, hesitant every few seconds, close enough where I could feel its own structure emit a cold feeling towards me. I swallowed again and leaned forwards, closing my eyes, and pressed my scales into the metallic doomsday clock.