Perversely enough, we defined geographic periods by the periodic and mysterious mass extinctions we discovered in the fossil record. Species flourished for thousands of years, millions of years, and then in the blink of a cosmic eye they vanished. With each ghostly echo of cataclysm that we found in the rocks we started time over again and gave it a new name. The Triassic Period. The Jurassic. The Cretaceous, and then the less spectacular (to all, perhaps, except those who perished) Oligocene and Pleistocene. Each ended abruptly, dozens of species all at once swept clean from the face of the earth. Theories abounded, of course, everything from volcanoes to climate changes to comet impacts, but nobody could ever say for certain why. People kept arguing the point right up until our own era came to an end. Understanding of the true cause of those great extinctions finally came about with our own.

We called our epoch the Holocene, those hundred or so centuries since human beings first started to use primitive tools. It was ended by a being that I have come to call Talos, after the indestructible giant of Greek myth whose story can be found in one of the books that I shall soon be sealing away along with this narrative. I have imagined him moving from world to world, returning now and again to see what might have grown back since his last visit, like a farmer harvesting apples from a tree every year. It is certain that our ancient ancestors witnessed him feasting upon the mastodon and titanothere and kept the image alive in a racial memory that, as we grew, we began to dismiss as fanciful legend. Those ancestors survived doubtless because they were beneath his notice at the time -- too small, too few alongside the meatier and more plentiful beasts. Talos left them alone then, but upon his return he found that they had prospered, grown ripe for the picking, and unlike his mythical namesake there was no vein in his ankle to be opened, no Medea to rise and save us.

The final days of the Holocene were signaled by the annihilation of Shanghai in the People's Republic of China. Nearly ten million voices literally went silent one day when without warning all communications from the city ceased abruptly. No radio signals. No computer traffic. Telephone conversations were cut off in mid-word. It was as if a great curtain had been drawn in an instant around the city. The Chinese were a secretive people and distrustful of outsiders, and thus they greeted all inquiries from abroad with a curt dismissal. A power failure, they said. All was well.

The next day, however, foreign satellites spied a massive plume of smoke rising from the region. Normal optics could not penetrate it; curiously, though, even the heat sensing eyes of the military were rendered blind, revealing only a featureless red haze. The offerings of assistance from abroad became more urgent only to be met with indignation by the Chinese government. It was two weeks before the smoke began to clear and the infrared cameras hovering over the region could suddenly see again. They revealed to a stunned world a smoldering, blighted landscape. Of the ten million inhabitants not one could be confirmed alive.

Finally the government grudgingly confessed that "something of a grave catastrophe" had taken place, but rather than asking for help they began to hurl accusations at their rivals. They proclaimed that an enemy state had attacked Shanghai with an atomic weapon. Rescue crews that had charged into the smoke had vanished without a trace. The few dazed survivors who stumbled out reported that every piece of electrical equipment in their possession had inexplicably failed. Radios went silent, vehicles sputtered to a halt, leaving the teams to grope their way blindly back to their staging areas. Most did not make it. The Chinese cried out for vengeance and threatened to mobilize their army. Diplomats from all over the world appealed to them to be calm, pointing out that no where was there a trace of radioactivity to be seen, not from the ground nor from space, so it was quite improbable that a nuclear device had been detonated. Wouldn't China allow foreign scientists the chance to examine the remains of some of the victims to determine what had actually occurred?

The bitter reply: "We cannot find them!"

The end might have come very quickly as tempers flared and all parties began to prepare for war had not an ominous silence befallen Seoul, in South Korea. A city almost as large as Shanghai, Seoul disappeared the same way, first into silence, and then beneath a black cloud. Military and news media rushed to the scene only to find their sophisticated equipment rendered useless, their aircraft falling helplessly from the sky. Breathless reports from observers near the outskirts of the city told of great shrieking crowds and tumbling buildings, of fires and of "something moving" before their voices faded into the static.

There was nothing that could be done. Mankind's great technological and military might was powerless against this mysterious force. Nearly everyone who ventured into the choking haze never came out again. Of those that did, most had only managed to grope their way blindly back to safety. A very few, however, returned wide-eyed and screaming and babbling barely coherent stories of giant monsters stalking through the streets. Naturally these were dismissed but only at first, for the few ragged and stunned survivors that began to stagger toward the military perimeter all stammered the same story. One managed to scrawl a picture of a black demonic shape before collapsing in convulsions and dying. The rest were spirited away to military enclosures, but not before their breathless tales were flashed in news reports around the world, touching off an international panic. Riots broke out in many major cities and had to be quelled by police and local militia. Politicians berated their citizenry for giving in to hysteria and listening to the ravings of a few poor souls who had been driven to insanity by an indescribable trauma.

Monster or weapon, it left nothing of Seoul behind but a burning wasteland. TV cameras swarmed over the rubble the very moment Mankind's expensive toys started working again. They found not one building left intact, just acres of pulverized wreckage. Scientists diligently searched for a blast pattern; they found none. They hunted for chemical residues and quickly discovered enormous levels of iridium in the ashes. Some put forth the argument that this was certain evidence of a meteor impact, or perhaps even a cluster, similar to the impact that (they believed) had snuffed out the great dinosaurs. The theory was scoffed at by others who asked how a meteor would leave behind so few survivors and even fewer bodies. More visionary thinkers concentrated on deep craters beneath the rubble that looked suspiciously like footprints. The survivors' wild tales would seem to support that conclusion, and that was the first time that the name of Talos was proposed in the headlines.

The debate was positively savage. For every great thinker who held that the evidence pointed to a giant living creature as the cause of the destruction there was an equally great thinker who pointed out that creatures of such size could not simply evaporate into thin air when they were through. Conspiracy theories arose that the dragon stories had been created by a sinister corporate conglomerate to hide their plan to employ nuclear suicide bombers to destroy all but a few centers of commerce. Religious zealots proclaimed that the Almighty was punishing mankind for his sins, that only the righteous would be saved while the rest would be doomed to extinction.

I laughed at them along with everyone else who never imagined that it was the zealots who were closest to the truth. I became a believer on the day that the force of extinction turned its hungry eye upon the city where I lived and worked. It was on that day that I along with the millions of souls around me would cower before the might of Talos.

His arrival was heralded by a clap of thunder that drew me to my window, puzzled by such a noise from a sky that held no hint of rain. The clouds were white and billowy, but then an odd sight struck me. Overhead there was a disturbance, a great swirling and spinning of the cloud mass. It looked like water draining from a tub. The center of the spiral turned black and crackled with lightning, then all at once drew in on itself and formed a shape. Huge wings beat the surrounding clouds into froth as behind me the desk lamp faded and the computer sighed into silence.

Talos had come.

I stood transfixed as he descended upon us, his titanic body swallowing the light as it loomed larger and larger, dwarfing the great skyscrapers below it. One wing dropped and he banked, swooping across the dome of the sky. A wave of white-hot energy burst from his maw, kindling the buildings instantly into flame in a miles-long swath beneath him. He rose at the end and spun about, wings beating to a hover. I could see him clearly then, a living shadow, a dragon more terrible, more unbelievable to behold than any storybook creation. His gaze swept from side to side at the expanse of the city below him and I saw his long tongue slither out of his jaws and sweep up over his lips, and then he dropped

A nearby grocery store where I used to buy my food was crushed instantly as a foot larger than the building itself landed upon it. The dragon's hind legs flexed momentarily beneath the impact and then he rose to his full height, towering over even the bank building on the corner. The structure was dark, even its garish rooftop sign extingished by the peculiar energy that I realized at that moment was a part of the monster's being. Forty stories of concrete and steel stood silent and motionless. Talos gazed down upon it for a brief moment, then with an air of contempt he placed a mighty hand upon its facade and shoved it aside as casually as a man might brush aside a sapling standing in his path.

Someone seized me by the arm and tore me away from the sight seconds before the windows exploded inward. Next there was a wild jumble of dark corridors, of rushing bodies and my feet stumbling down endless flights of stairs. I remember being swept into the street in a veritable wave of humanity, many of them falling into a tangled pile just outside the doors. I do not know how I managed to escape being trampled as the crowd carried me along with it. Dazed, I looked up to where the dragon had stood and saw only the dazzlingly bright sky. The sight was disorienting. The sky had always been hidden behind the bank building, which like Talos had disappeared into thin air. In its place was a mountain of twisted puzzle-pieces, of brick and masonry from which dust and curls of smoke rose all over.

The upper floors of the building which I had just vacated suddenly exploded into a blinding ball of orange fire. The roar of the flames drowned out the wild screams of those around me as the populace became a human river sweeping me down the street. It was a ceaseless battle simply to stay on one's feet. Those who fell were dead within seconds. I would later envy them.

The fires seemed to follow us at every turn. The mob's numbers swelled as untold hundreds poured in shrieking waves from doorways while smoke billowed behind them and rubble rained down from the heavens. I could not see where I was or where I was being carried. My mind was preoccupied with keeping myself from drowning in the sea of panicked men and women.

I recall briefly seeing the morning sun framed in the broad avenue ahead of me before it was suddenly snuffed out. In its place a leg rose before me, and quickly a second strode into view. Each stood as tall as a skyscraper, twin towers of muscle sheathed in volcanic rock. I raised my eyes, higher, higher. I could not hear the shouts of those around me. I could not even hear my own scream of terror. There was only the sound of my own heartbeat thudding in my ears.

Talos stood in our path, upright, his tail snaking behind him into the smoke-filled distance, his head lowered toward us. His blazing eyes glittered as they shifted slowly, playing over the thousands of shocked upturned faces far below. They were not the cold and mindless eyes of a reptile, no. Those eyes were thoughtful and cunning and branded me with a malevolence that was almost as physical a presence as the dragon himself. The monster's lips drew back from glittering white teeth. It was a sneer whose depth of scorn was made sickeningly clear with the raising of a mammoth foot. It shifted slowly forward, just a little, just enough to cover those closest to him.

And then he stepped on them. Just like that.

They vanished beneath his foot amidst a rolling wave of crimson. My hearing returned with the sound of their bodies being pressed flat, accompanied by a multitudinous shriek of terror from the crowd. The jostling and clawing became frantic around me, shredding my jacket and tie to tatters in an instant. On all sides people were struggling to turn themselves around, their minds fixed numbly on fleeing from the danger even though the crush of people around them made it impossible to move either forward or backward. The gigantic foot rose ponderously, casting us in its shadow as it swept forward and then paused overhead. A steady shower of pulverized pavement and bits of raw meat rained down upon our heads.

It did not fall; rather, it simply hung tormentingly in the sky above us. At one point I ventured to glance upward and saw the pitifully tiny outlines of bodies dotting the vast undersurface There seemed to be hundreds of them, all twisted into grotesque shapes, each mashed as flat as paper and stuck to the gargantuan sole by a wet red paste. The great foot began to glide steadily from side to side, shifting the awful spectacle tauntingly over first one part of the crowd and then another.

Those behind me were pushing hard, squeezing the breath from me. Seconds before I would have suffocated from the pressure the people before me lurched forward. The mob had at last managed to reverse its direction and had begun its ponderous retreat. I saw the shadow of the dragon's toes disappear as I fought my way forward, and then behind me I heard the voices rise into a pitched squeal. Glancing over my shoulder I saw that the gigantic foot had at last come down. Its vast bulk settled with agonizing slowness onto their heads, pushing them down into a huddle and then covering them. The huge toes settled last of all, the tips of their talons digging into the pavement as if into a sandy beach. They shifted apart as the dragon's weight came to bear on them and a hideous crunching noise filled the air. I could see a few pathetic survivors jerking and kicking beneath. The toes dragged from side to side, brutally rolling the survivors for an agonizing second before grinding their bodies into hamburger. A few seconds later the foot rose again into the sky, and I could not bear to look at what was left.

Talos watched the desperate struggling from on high with cold amusement, then raised his head to the heavens and loosed a roar of laughter. He laughed! The sound itself struck many senseless with horror, myself nearly among them. We understood then that this was no brainless animal. This was a malignant force, the very embodiment of cruelty, a monster who had just deliberately snuffed out countless lives underfoot for nothing more than savage amusement. Moreover, I realized with jolt of panic that the monster had been herding us -- was still herding us, in fact. His steps were short and deliberate, and we were fleeing from the crushing weight of his tread exactly as he had anticipated we would. Talos dropped to all fours behind us, his saurian head swaying slowly to and fro as he regarded us in our wild flight. His eyes betrayed his satisfaction as the sea of humanity continued its sluggish retreat before him. I wanted desperately to call out to my fellow citizens not to let themselves be driven but it was beyond hopeless. I could do nothing but flee with the rest of the herd and try to survive as best I could. Behind us Talos paused a moment, then took one more thundering step and instantly closed the distance we had gained. His forefoot rose and then slashed viciously forward, sending broken bodies cartwheeling over our heads to smack into the walls on either side of us. In this fashion he drove us forward, the crowd blindly obeying their terrible master and fighting their way through the burning canyon in a great shrieking mass.

And then, alas, there was nowhere left to go. A mountain of rubble lay before us, hellfires licking out from countess of broken window frames across its face. Crumbling, smoking buildings formed impenetrable walls to either side. The crowd behind me continued to push, immobilizing me once again in its painful embrace.

Talos stepped up behind us at his lazy, calculated pace. His forefeet came down side by side across the width of the street and he slowly sat down, his haunches and legs forming a wall as impenetrable as those around us. For a moment he studied us with cool indifference, and then his nightmarish head swiftly descended, snaking upon its long neck. The people fought to retreat but were so tightly packed into the makeshift corral that they could do nothing more than jerk their heads and scream as the dragon's nose swept by, drawing in great draughts of breath and blowing it back out violently. He sniffed them casually, examining, pondering....

...deciding. His muzzle lifted slightly and from between the inky black lips slipped a long, long tongue, its surface glistening with firelight reflected from above. It thrust down into the thick of the crowd and writhed among them. When it rose again I could see a huge number of kicking figures surrounded in its coiled length and being hauled skyward. Yet more were stuck oddly to its wet surface, their limbs dancing and flailing but not pulling free. The great jaws parted, flashing the tips of white fangs and echoing with a contented rumble. The dragon's tongue slithered rapidly inside, dragging the helpless victims along with it. His lips closed behind them and he swallowed, an enormous lump rolling smoothly down the length of his throat. Briefly his eyes closed and he was motionless, as though savoring the struggles of his prey. When his eyes opened again they gleamed with savage delight, and his tongue dipped down for more.

I do not know how many hundreds of my fellow human beings I saw being eaten alive that day. The awful tongue thrust forth again and again, snatching people up in huge bunches and pulling them into the dragon's mouth to be swallowed whole. Our corral became the scene of a hellish fight for survival as people clawed at one another, literally tearing their neighbors apart in their effort to avoid being licked up like ants. Talos steadily thinned the crowd as he fed so that ultimately there was room enough for us to rush this way and that. The great tongue chased after us, at one point sweeping close enough to me that one of its struggling victims was able to reach out and seize my arm in a death grip. Instantly I was hauled into the air. In utter panic I spun about and broke the grasping arm like a twig over my knee. Freed, I fell to the pavement and watched as the man's despairing face vanished behind the dragon's teeth.

Talos swallowed that mouthful and then raised his haunches and shifted forward. He would have sat on me had I not scrambled to my feet and darted out of his way. I felt the warmth radiating from his tongue behind me as I ran and threw myself down to the pavement. Tons of wet, pink muscle snaked past and then withdrew, carrying with it a fresh, squalling catch. The corral was smaller now, and those of us still alive were rushing about in ever-increasing desperation, grabbing at those around us and attempting to push them up toward the dragon's tongue in our stead, sacrificing them for a few more precious seconds of life.

I ran blindly, dodging where I could, punching and kicking at those who would try to feed me to the dragon ahead of them. Talos lapped at the areas where the crowd was thickest, but as our numbers grew thinner and thinner he began to herd us with his hands, gathering us up in clawed fingers and casually stuffing us into his mouth. The raw terror of the moment has left me with mercifully little memory of the next few moments. I do know that I was caught once but managed to wriggle free, a sharp talon-tip ripping what was left of my shirt from my body. I remember leaping and ducking, dodging both the dragon's hand and the other fear-crazed people trapped with me, again and again and again.

Suddenly there was nowhere left to run. I found myself backed against the barrier of rubble that Talos had used to entrap us. The pieces of concrete were glowing hot from the fires that burned beneath and seared my skin as I tried to cower against them. As sparse as is my memory of escaping the dragon's clutches I remember the next moment with nightmarish clarity. Talos loomed above, gazing almost straight down upon me. Save for myself there was no one left between the dragon's haunches and the fiery walls. The corral was empty, but strangely I could still hear the wailing of countless voices, muffled and dissonant. The sound was precisely that which one would hear from a distant football stadium when a touchdown was made, and I remember having the insane thought, "How could they be playing a game at a time like this?"

Then I realized with a horror that cannot be described that the cries were coming from within the dragon's stomach. Behind that towering wall of muscle and scales before me they were still alive, struggling, screaming, slowly being digested.

At that moment, mercifully, I fainted.

It might have been days before I awoke again; I do not know. The horrific sound was still in my ears and I rolled over and was sick. The smoke had settled to a dull gray haze. There was no sign of Talos. I lay where I had fallen for a long time before I gathered the strength to climb to my feet. It took even longer for me to find the courage to inch my way out of the corral and into the remains of the city.

No. It was not a city any longer. These were not streets. Surrounding me were mountains of debris, twisted girders rising like skeletal fingers from beneath. Great works of man, once proud symbols of creativity and skill, all toppled like children's sandcastles. I began to stumble among their remains, terrorized now and then by a sudden roaring and crashing. Certain that the dragon had returned to finish me off I would hide, only to find that the noises came from weakened buildings finally succumbing to the battering. Fire was everywhere, and so were the bodies. I could not walk more than a few yards without finding the remains of some poor soul squashed flat against the ground. Seagulls and crows were already quarrelling over them. As I passed by them the birds fussed and glowered at me but did not fly away. It was almost as though they, too, now held my kind in disdain.

I came at last to a great pile of wreckage that stretched high over my head and into the hazy distance to either side. I thought to find my way around it but was struck by a sudden realization. A collapsed building left behind a mound of girders and concrete. This one was a jumble of those things, but also mangled vehicles. At first I imagined it was a fallen parking garage, but then I saw mailboxes and light posts amidst the wreckage and realized that this mountain had not been formed by a simple collapse; it had been piled there.

Hope welled up in me. This seemed to me to be a sign that the onslaught had ended and that the sad clean up had begun. I was certain that there would be an army of workers on the other side, wearily shoveling the wreckage and adding it to this pile as they searched for survivors. "I'm here!" I shouted. Thinking only of salvation I leaped up onto a jagged piece of masonry and began to climb. It was a painful ascent. Shards of glass bit into my fingers but I did not care. Pieces of wreckage shifted crazily beneath me but I did not stop climbing. I had no other thought in my head than reaching the top.

At last, nearly exhausted, I grasped the bumper of a flattened sportscar with a bleeding hand and hauled myself up to the summit. There I loosed a whoop of joy and scrambled forward to peer at my rescuers...only to have my hopes extinguished. Below me was a broad oblong clearing, its opposite end obscured by a black wall of smoke. It was clear that the wreckage had been purposefully swept from that area to form the mountain upon which I was now perched, but no workmen were in sight, nor was there any heavy machinery. The inner walls of the enclosure were much steeper than the slope I had just climbed, making descent that way impossible.

Descent, or ascent.

My gut froze. I suddenly realized that I had seen this before.

Then I heard screaming.

It began as a faint siren-wail in the distance but quickly grew in volume. From the smoky pall a few rushing figures emerged, followed by a veritable torrent of humanity that poured into the clearing. Those at the forefront tried to stop as they recognized that they had fled into a dead end; they were pushed down instantly and overrun as the human tide flowed over them. Within moments the enclosure below filled with people, packing themselves in tightly and forming a shifting, fluid mass. I wished that I could reach down to snatch even one of them up with me to safety.

Inevitably, from the vale of smoke in the distance Talos appeared.

I froze, my fingers clenching around the wreckage to which I clung. The dragon's head swayed slowly from side to side, peering down at the tiny creatures that fled before him, just as he had done when I myself was among his intended victims. Bit by bit his long neck emerged from the smoke, his shoulders fading into view, and I watched as his head dropped downward. With his tongue he swept up another untold number of running figurers and drew them into his mouth. His eyes narrowed to contented slits and his jaw began working, chewing them. Huge pieces of crimson meat fell from his lips and landed amongst the crowd, whipping them into an even wilder frenzy. It was just as I had seen before.

The number of people rushing out of the smoke trickled to a few. The dragon's immense body continued to advance, gradually emerging into view, his forelegs and broad chest appearing. He peered with obvious satisfaction at the sea of humans who were now trapped before him, then once again he loosed that hideous laugh and stepped into their very midst. He ignored those who were crushed beneath his feet and lumbered forward, and once his hind feet framed those at the rear of the enclosure he callously sat down on them, trapping the remainder in dreadfully familiar fashion. My stomach lurched to see so many tiny hands thrusting upward in such a pitiful effort to ward off their doom.

Thousands were now trapped as I had been. I could not help them. I could not even move for fear that the dragon would notice me and flick me down into the enclosure to suffer the fate I had previously escaped. I could only stare as the horrific scene unfolded before me. If he had only devoured them it would have been appalling, but what he did instead was unbelievably worse.

For some time Talos paid no attention to the screeching mob below him and merely sat regally in place, at one point even twisting his head about to nibble at an annoying itch on his back. When his gaze returned to his captives I noted with revulsion that he had become visibly and hideously aroused. Even before I could fully grasp what was happening he reached forward with a nimble foreclaw and scooped a great throng of flailing bodies beneath him and -- god help me -- used them to pleasure himself. Used them! I can still hear the horrendous sounds they made as they were crushed to death, sacrificed to the dragon's obscene pleasure. Unsatisfied with the frailty of the first handful the dragon reached for more, and then again, and yet again, squashing them by the handful. I felt lightheaded, sick with dread and with rising anger. Yes, anger. In a perverse sense I believe I could have accepted the fate of man to be preyed upon by a more powerful being, a fate which our kind had unwittingly been spared for countless centuries but which is the inevitable destiny of all creatures in nature. But this was not predation. It was sport.

The slaughter went on as the dragon continued to amuse himself with his captives, until finally he loosed a roar that shook the air around me and his climax burst forth in a geyser that blasted a long, straight swath through the survivors. Many were dashed to pieces against the wall below me by the force of the stream; others nearby were mired in the thick slime and mercifully suffocated. Most of the crowd were gone, their bodies reduced to a grotesque mush that lay in steaming piles before the dragon's haunches. Nowhere among it was there any sign that they had once been human beings.

Some had survived. They huddled, whimpering and sobbing out desperate prayers, at the base of the wall directly below me. Talos eyed them coolly and then stalked forward. I cringed as his head loomed over me and uttered my own prayers that I would not be spotted. I watched as he settled himself once again and amused himself for a time with the remaining victims, scooping them away from the wall with his claws and hurling them into the pools of his seed. He soon grew bored with that game, however, and all at once he swept them with both foreclaws into a squirming pile before him. Rising to his hind legs, he turned full around and squatted over them, and then in a most shocking display of contempt he buried them in the sad remains of those whom he had devoured.

I felt my gorge rise at the sight as Talos turned again and dropped to all fours, and then with a mighty foreclaw he raked at the wall of rubble and brought it tumbling down atop his spoor. The car to which I was clinging shuddered and began to topple forward. With a wild cry I let go of the bumper and scrambled for a handhold in the shifting debris but finding none. The entire mountain was collapsing into the pit and carrying me along with it.

Something hard rose up from below and knocked the wind out of me. I had resigned myself to being pulverized by the avalanche of debris but after a few seconds passed I realized that I was being held aloft even while tumbling bricks and glass shards cascaded downward before me. I noticed that I was rising higher, being lifted into the air. I saw a forest of claws jutting skyward before me, felt warmth beneath my body.

I knew where I was, and surprisingly I was not afraid. What good is fear, after all, when you are lying in the palm of a dragon's hand? I felt unnaturally calm, and in fact almost exhilarated. How foolish I had been! All of that wasted effort to survive, only to prolong the inevitable. It had all been a game that Talos had just won. Smiling with the thought I turned myself around and gazed up into Talos's burning eyes. "Tag!" I called gleefully.

He made no move other than a flaring of his nostrils. I stared at him and began to grow annoyed. "Well?" I shouted. "What's the hold up?" Climbing to my feet, I snatched up a small piece of brick that had fallen into his hand along with me. "What, am I not amusing enough for you? Come on, let's get it over with. I'm sick of it, and frankly, I'm sick of you."

Still he did not move. Angrily I hurled the chunk of brick as hard as I could against his muzzle looming far overhead. "What's the matter? Oh, oh, wait. I get it. You're the god, right? I forgot about that. What's it going to be, then? Am I righteous enough for you, or am I just another sinner?"

My ears rang with a sudden growl like a thunderclap. At the same time the great hand shifted violently, throwing me off my feet. I landed with a grunt and tried to sit up, but the dragon's palm tilted, spilling me off and sending me rolling wildly on the ground.

When my vision cleared he was gone. I was left alone in a lifeless city.

That was almost ten years ago. I have not seen another living human being for the last two. Some might be in hiding but I do not think it likely. One cannot hide from extinction. I've seen the pits left behind after Talos has dug them out of their shelters. I suppose that if there are any others left alive on other continents that they are afraid to gather in any sizeable groups for fear of attracting his notice. That puts us back to the beginning, back to the first days of the Holocene when we were few, feeble and nomadic.

Every day I ask myself why I was spared. Was it cruel whimsy? Did my defiance spark some glimmer of admiration in him, enough to earn me my life? Or was he indeed a god, and I, unwitting and ignorant, one of the righteous? I suppose I shall never know. What I do know is that I may well be the only one left in the world who knows the entire story. Perhaps it is because I am destined to tell the tale that I have been spared.

I do not hold out much hope that my species will survive. Talos's hunger is insatiable and I sadly believe that by the time he has grown weary of this planet and decides to move on to other hunting grounds, there will be too few of us left to thrive. Those of us who were not digested or ground into dust beneath his feet, our bones will be found someday by whoever succeeds us in naming the eras. With luck, this record and the books that accompany it will survive the passage of time and will be found by someone who is able to understand what I have written. My legacy to you is the answer to the question of why a species, why even a great and thriving civilization, can be cast so suddenly into oblivion.

May I humbly suggest, as my final words to posterity, that the era that will dawn with my death be named the Talosian. It seems only fitting. I wish you peace and prosperity and happiness for all the years that you will enjoy before Talos comes for you as well.