Leafclaw: The End of an Era

Chapter 4

Leafclaw awoke to blackness.

He tried to open his eyes, but the blackness remained, closing immensely tight around his small, shaky frame. Slightly panicked, Leafclaw blinked furiously, when he suddenly realized that his eyes were open.

Spinning around, he searched for a light, but his world was filled with shadows. Then he saw it: a small sliver of grey peeking through the dark ceiling above.

Leafclaw crawled towards it before realizing that it came from the entrance to his cave. Scuttling forward, he reached the short mouth of the tunnel where the light was more prominent. He tried to leave, but there was something in his way. He pressed his muzzle against the object. It was cool and left sooty traces on his nose, causing him to sneeze. Leafclaw's throat stung as he did so, his lungs burning from the sediment that had found its way into his hiding place. The object smelled of ash and dust, with vague traces of sweet cedar. It was then that he realized the thing was a tree, specifically the one that had fallen shut over his cave, shielding him from the horrors of the outside world.

Leafclaw threw his small body against the trunk, groaning as he tried to shove it out of the way. But his body was too weak, and his feet slipped uselessly in the ash-ridden soil. Still, he struggled for several minutes before his strength ran out and he collapsed to the floor.

The small dinosaur tried to warble, but his voice cracked painfully and he was instantly thrown into a violent coughing fit, choking on his dry airways.

Once he was finished, Leafclaw tried to swallow down the now persistent itch in the back of his throat, but he had no saliva left to sooth it. Feeling depleated, Leafclaw sunk to the cold floor.

For what seemed to be only a few moments, the world faded in and out of view as Leafclaw drifted along the edges of sleep. When he fully awoke once more, it took more effort then he had previously recalled to climb to his feet. Leafclaw tried to move the log again, but gave up after the first futile attempt.

He sighed, ready to give up. He hadn't eaten in hours, and the grit that filled his eyes and lungs prevented him from taking a true deep breath. His fingers and toes felt numb from lack of blood flow, and Leafclaw leaned against the tree trunk, exhausted. What had once been his savior was now his doom, forever trapping him in the clutches of this dark and empty cavern.

Leafclaw lazily stared, transfixed on the light from above. There was a small gap in between the entrance of the cave and the top of the tree trunk, maybe about six inches wide at the maximum. It suddenly occurred to the troodontid that he hadn't tried going up instead of forward.

With a small glimmer of hope in his heart, Leafclaw gripped the side of the trunk in his claws, heaving himself up towards the grey light. Upon reaching it, Leafclaw stuck his nose in the gap, and gathering the last of his strength, pushed.

The tree slid slightly, gaining him another inch.

Another.

And another.

Finally, barely able to whimper at the pain, the pectinodon pulled the rest of his body from the cave, then proceeded to flop down painfully on the ground below.

He lay there for a still moment, resting his aching muscles. In fact, Leafclaw was tempted to lay there forever, giving in to the exhaustion of his body and the slowed thrumming of his heart.

And he almost did.

But then a memory, one pulled from the depths of his mind, surfaced, and his eyes blinked open.

Through the thick, ghastly clouds overhead, a hint of moonlight glimmered through, shedding what small portion of light it could spare onto the soot filled Earth.

Leafclaw stared at it for a moment, the sliver glow glittering across his golden orbs. Hadn't it only been the night before when he had last gazed at the same moon, clear and bright in the brilliant sky above? Leafclaw took a deep, ragged breath.

He called upon the strength of his limbs once more, struggling to make them obey his weak demands. The pectinodon forced his arms underneath him, lifting his small body off the ground and shoving it to his shaky set of feet until he was standing once more.

It was then that Leafclaw finally had the chance to observe his surroundings.

The world around him was vastly different. The soil beneath his feet was black and charred, the majority now made up of crushed sediment and soot. The vast jungle that had once covered the land to his right was flatted, leaving nothing but a few wisps of trees and a massive, empty wasteland that stretched on as far as the eye could see. Any remaining vegetation was a bare, blackened shell of what it had once been. Steady fires burned throughout the landscape, chewing through the last remnants of the precious life that had once flourished on this very soil.

The sky was a threatening tar-black hue, filled to the brim with thick smoke that completely obscured all but a few thin rays of light from the moon.

Massive plumes of smoke rose in the distance, bleeding into the shadowed sky as the last pieces of life on Earth vanished into the blackness above.

Leafclaw choked in a breath, gagging on the scent of charred flesh and death that drifted past his nostrils. He turned in the direction of the lake, hobbling forward on unsteady legs in the hopes of finding some water.

Except the lake didn't exist anymore.

The once clear, refreshing body of water was now replaced with a hot, hellish expanse of bubbling lava drifting steadily downstream like a cauldron of liquified goo. The air around it seethed with ripples of heat, hissing angrily in Leafclaw's ears as his eyes watered profoundly. He watched, all hope diminished, as the lava pulled the crumbling skeleton of a tyrannosaurus into its smoldering maw.

Leafclaw stared across the open lava lands, allowing the heat to numb his brain. His home was gone. Destroyed. Not a single trace of another survivor remained, and the dark world closed around him, illuminated only by the flecks of fire dotting the scenery. There was no food, no water, and no place to go. He was all alone.

Ripping his thoughts away from the melting world in front of him, the pectinodon finally turned away from the lava lake.

As Leafclaw limped away, the skeleton of the tyrannosaurus made one last desperate reach for his leg before it was finally sucked away into the churning hellfire behind him.