Our Mammalian Family
Without precedent for years, the sun got through the dimness. There was as yet a whiff of smoke drifting from the dark mists, which covered the ground in shadow. Down underneath, the land was destroyed. It was all soil and mud, a no man's land missing any plant life or variety at all. Quiet hung in the breeze, penetrated simply by the beat of a waterway, its flows stopped up with sticks and stones and the buildup of rot.
The skeleton of a monster lay upon the riverbank. Its tissue and ligament were a distant memory, its bones a rotten beige. Its jaws were agape in a shout, its teeth busted and dispersed before its face. Everyone the size of a banana, with the sharp edges of a blade, the deadly weapons this beast had used to eviscerate and pulverize the bones of its prey.
It was, once, a Tyrannosaurus rex, the despot reptile, the King of the Dinosaurs, the oppressor of a landmass. Presently its whole species was no more. Also, little else appeared to be alive.
Then, at that point, from some place inside the behemoth, a delicate sound. A clicking babble, a ripple of strides. A little nose jabbed out between several T. rex ribs, slowly, as though hesitant to go any farther. Its bristles shuddered, in assumption for peril, yet it saw as none.