Crocodile — -2000-

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.

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.”

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.

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. crocodile -2000-

Hunger. That was all that was left. The oldest, stupidest, strongest thing in his brain.

He did not think attack . He simply moved.

The disc spat out a man. Not a reed-man or a mud-man. This one wore a smooth, white skin over his body and a clear shell over his face. He carried a stick that sparked. K’tharr, the river’s oldest crocodile, was not a

He settled back onto his mudbank, the one he had guarded for two thousand years before this moment. He closed his bad eye.

He dragged the man under the dark water. The silver disc on the man’s wrist blinked. ERROR. Temporal anchor lost. Paradox imminent.

Then the disc went dark.

Year: 2000 BC. Location: The lush, unnamed delta of a river that will one day be called the Nile.

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.

K’tharr rose from the river an hour later, mud dripping from his snout. The fog was gone. The tadpoles wiggled. The fish swam. And in his ancient, aching gut, he felt something new: a small, hard knot of wrongness. A piece of the future, digesting. Older than the village built from reeds

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.