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.
He dragged the man under the dark water. The silver disc on the man’s wrist blinked. ERROR. Temporal anchor lost. Paradox imminent.
K’tharr understood one thing. This thing was in his river. And it was trying to make the world go quiet.
Two thousand pounds of muscle exploded from the mud. The man from the disc had time to whisper, “But you’re just a—“ crocodile -2000-
Year: 2000 BC. Location: The lush, unnamed delta of a river that will one day be called the Nile.
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.”
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 fog reached K’tharr’s tail
He settled back onto his mudbank, the one he had guarded for two thousand years before this moment. He closed his bad eye.
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.
K’tharr’s jaws, strong enough to crush a turtle’s shell, strong enough to hold a drowning ox, closed around the man’s middle. The white suit cracked. The clear helmet shattered. The stick flew into the water, hissing impotently. It was erasure
He did not think attack . He simply moved.
Then the disc went dark.
The answer lay in the Nile, sleeping in the sun, with a taste of chrome on his tongue and all the time in the world.
He was not a guardian of history. He was not a hero. He was just a crocodile, doing what crocodiles do.