Crocodile -2000- Apr 2026
He was not a guardian of history. He was not a hero. He was just a crocodile, doing what crocodiles do.
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.
K’tharr understood one thing. This thing was in his river. And it was trying to make the world go quiet.
He did not think attack . He simply moved. crocodile -2000-
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.
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?”
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. He was not a guardian of history
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.”
Hunger. That was all that was left. The oldest, stupidest, strongest thing in his brain.
Two thousand pounds of muscle exploded from the mud. The man from the disc had time to whisper, “But you’re just a—“ K’tharr rose from the river an hour later,
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 did not understand the words. But he understood the smell. The man’s stick hissed, and a grey fog rolled across the water. Where it touched, tadpoles froze mid-wiggle. Lily pads turned to dust. A fish floated to the surface, not dead, but unborn .
He dragged the man under the dark water. The silver disc on the man’s wrist blinked. ERROR. Temporal anchor lost. Paradox imminent.