Purgatorius
The sun rose fierce and orange over a dragonless world. Gone were the great giants, the tyrants and thunder lizards who had reigned over Creation for a hundred and sixty million years. Gone the way of Ninevah, Tyre, Hellas, and Rome, and a thousand other kingdoms yet unborn. Dust, dust all.
The bitter ashes of their late world would circulate in the stratosphere for centuries to come, keeping the earth in cool mourning even as life began to recover. Sunrise and sunset boiling deepest orange against a thin haze of crimson, like blood seeping into water.
And yet life was indeed recovering, even on this first of the new dawns. Fiddleheads playfully poked their spiral crowns up through rich soil infused with dragon-ash. Rivers and streams flowed busily, trundling away clots of gray pus to its final disposal at sea, washing themselves like veins fighting an infection. Turtles emerged from bogs silted over with the dust of dead forests, venerable old heads poking out of knobby carapaces which had served them well as fallout shelters during their year-long hibernation. Their shells caked in thick slabs of ash now, but a few good swims in the fast-flowing creeks would cleanse them, revealing once more shining black scutes painted with angular labyrinths of gold. Carrying in these etched patterns maps of a world reborn, of the hope of all life for redemption and resurrection.
The dragon’s skull lay in a clearing that smoldered in the sienna dawn. Teeth which once rended flesh from bone now anchored skull to loam. Its shadowed lee provided a haven for a covey of fiddleheads, while the vaulted cavities of bone were shelter for a very different sort of greenery. Craving the warmth of morning, the serpent slithered out of the skull’s eye socket and tested the air with his flickering fork of a tongue. He had become accustomed to the taste of ash on the breeze, though that unwelcome tang had been lessening with each passing day. Scrying the world through slitted amber eyes, he watched for the thermal signatures of the giants who always threatened to crush him underfoot.
He found none. The only dragons left in the world were above him, perched on the branch of a gingko coming into leaf. Far removed from the roars and howls of their slain kin, these drakes chittered and sang. Mated bundles of feathers bringing each other gifts of grass and twigs with which to compose their futures. One distant day, their children would soar at His command. They would be the delight of a race yet to be, winging through open skies bearing gifts of plucked olive leaves to the captain of an ark, and the Spirit to the Son.
The serpent ignored them. He was cold and hungry and the birds could allay neither of these wants. He came to a flat stone baked ovenwarm by the sun and rested contentedly. Eyes curtained by cloudy blue brilles, only occasionally testing the air for the scent of prey as he basked luxuriantly.
From a cinderized stump on the other side of the clearing poked a snuffling little head. Nervous and fidgeting, she was also testing the air. She sniffed not for prey but for danger, for the serpents and the dragons that would gobble her up in a single bite. Satisfied that danger was not near, she rose- first the red drop of a nose, then the long, thickly whiskered snout, then huge eyes a uniform shade of deepest green. A branch shook above, and she darted back into the stump. Her most distant children would call her Purgatorius. They would be dirt that breathed, like her, yet they would also be made in His image, and after His likeness, but she knew none of this. She knew not the ultimate destiny of the young she carried in her womb. She knew only that they needed nourishment. Some minutes later she poked her head out of the hole once more, this time clenching a large worm in her teeth. Strong jaws rended it to bite-sized gruel in a few quick snaps, and then she hopped out of the stump and scampered across the clearing, carrying her pluming red tail high behind her like some primordial attempt at a squirrel, curled slightly over like the fiddleheads that she barely rose above.
The serpent’s eyes slowly opened as his tongue flicked out and detected the warm scent of mammal across the clearing. His blood was pleasantly hot now, his joints and muscles well-oiled by the long bask. He was ready to hunt. Languidly, he slid off the stone and slithered across the clearing toward the little mother to-be.
He outlived the dragons, to tempt fair Eve.