The first thing Sekitanki learned about the Carboniferous Period was that silence didn't exist here.
He crouched behind the fern tree, pressing his spine against bark that felt like wet leather, and listened to the world ending over and over again in every direction. Wings the size of doors beat overhead. Something screamed in a frequency that made his teeth ache. The mud itself seemed alive—bubbling, shifting, exhaling gases that smelled like iron and decay.
His leg throbbed where the root had torn it open. Blood soaked through his pants, mixing with mud and plant matter into a paste that probably contained bacteria that wouldn't be named for another 359 million years. The thought would have been funny if he weren't trying not to vomit from fear.
Breathe. Just breathe. But breathing here was like drinking. Each inhalation filled his lungs with air so oxygen-rich it made him dizzy. His vision sparkled at the edges. Too much oxygen. His body wasn't designed for this—humans evolved in an atmosphere with half the O2 concentration. Here, every breath was intoxication and poison at once.
The chittering had stopped. That was somehow worse than when it was chasing him. Sekitanki forced himself to think. The technique his father had taught him when he was seven, before physics consumed him, before he stopped being a child and became a prodigy. When you're scared, make a list. Give your fear structure. Fear with structure is just a problem. And problems have solutions.
His father's voice felt impossibly distant now. Like a transmission from another universe.
List: He was trapped 359 million years in the past. The time machine was destroyed. He had no weapons. No food. No shelter. No way home. And something that could crush industrial-grade steel with its mouth wanted to eat him.
The structure didn't help. Sekitanki's hands shook as he pulled himself up, using the tree for support. Through gaps in the alien foliage, he could see where he'd emerged—a clearing now dominated by the twisted wreckage of humanity's first time machine. The centipede had moved on, but pieces of metal lay scattered like bones. Sparks still fountained from severed cables, each one a tiny firework marking the death of his only escape.
I should go back. Salvage what I can.
But his legs wouldn't move. Because returning meant crossing open ground, and open ground meant being seen, and being seen meant—a shadow passed overhead. Sekitanki looked up and forgot how to breathe.
The dragonfly was shiny in the way a samurai sword is glimmered—perfect geometry designed for a single purpose. Its wingspan stretched four meters, maybe five, membranous wings catching light and scattering it into rainbows. Its body was segmented blue-black chitin, mechanical in its precision. Compound eyes bulged like twin obsidian domes, each facet a window into alien intelligence.
It hovered there, suspended in the thick air, head swiveling with the smooth articulation of well-oiled joints. Looking for prey. Sekitanki pressed himself flat against the tree, making his body as small as possible. He thought of every nature documentary he'd ever half-watched during sleepless nights in the lab. Predators tracked movement. Stay still. Don't breathe. Don't think too loud.
The dragonfly's head snapped toward him. Oh god oh god oh god—then it dove. Not at him. At something in the undergrowth twenty meters to his left—a smaller insect, beetle-like, the size of a house cat. The dragonfly struck with the speed of a bullet. Its mandibles closed around the beetle's carapace. There was a wet crack like a watermelon splitting. Fluid sprayed—not red, but greenish-yellow, viscous and wrong.
The beetle thrashed. Its legs kicked uselessly as the dragonfly carried it upward, still alive, still screaming in frequencies Sekitanki felt in his bones rather than heard. The dragonfly landed on a branch. And began to feed.
Sekitanki watched—couldn't look away—as the predator methodically disassembled its prey. Mandibles working like surgical instruments. Wings still twitching. The sounds were clinical, precise. Chitin peeling. Soft tissue exposing. The beetle's movements growing weaker, then stopping, then just the mechanical chewing of the victor.
When he finally vomited, Sekitanki had the presence of mind to do it silently, biting his sleeve, letting the bile soak into fabric instead of splashing onto leaves.
This is real. This is actually real.
Back home—was there still a home?—insects were things you stepped on. Annoyances. Background noise in summer. Here, they were apex predators. Here, humans would be the insects.
Here, he was prey. The realization settled into his mind like ice water. Everything he'd ever accomplished—the papers, the awards, the recognition—meant nothing to the dragonfly still feeding above him. It didn't care that he was a genius. It didn't care that he'd unlocked time travel. It didn't even register him as something worth caring about.
For someone who'd spent his whole life being special, the utter insignificance was almost liberating. Almost. The dragonfly finished its meal and took flight, disappearing into the canopy with the sound of tearing silk. Sekitanki waited five full minutes before moving. His muscles screamed from holding still. When he finally stepped out from behind the tree, his legs nearly gave out.
The forest stretched endlessly in every direction, each direction identical—towering plants, thick undergrowth, green light filtered through alien leaves. No landmarks. No sun visible through the canopy. No way to navigate.
Think. You're smart. Use it.
But intelligence designed for quantum physics felt useless here. This wasn't a problem you could solve with equations. This was survival in its rawest form—eat or be eaten, hide or die.
His stomach growled, reminding him that lunch had been fourteen hours and 359 million years ago. Food. Water. Shelter. In that order.
Sekitanki started walking, choosing a direction at random because any direction was better than standing still. The ground sucked at his shoes with each step, making obscene sounds. Mud caked his legs up to his knees. Something crawled across his neck—he slapped it away without looking, feeling chitin crunch under his palm.
The forest was a maze of fallen logs covered in fungus that glowed faintly in the dim light. Club mosses rose like pillars supporting a cathedral roof. Ferns the size of his apartment building swayed in wind that tasted of sulfur and chlorophyll.
Beautiful. Alien. Utterly hostile. He found water after an hour—a stream flowing sluggishly through ancient peat. The water was brown, nearly opaque, probably filled with enough prehistoric bacteria to kill him six different ways. He stared at it, throat burning with thirst.
Boiling. I need to boil it. But he had nothing to boil it in. No container. No fire. No—movement in the water made him freeze.
Something surfaced. An amphibian, maybe, though calling it that felt inadequate. It was three meters long, thick-bodied, with a head like a shovel and eyes that tracked him with calculating hunger. Primordial. Ancient beyond ancient.
They looked at each other across the stream—the first human and something that had never seen a human, would never see another human, existed in a world where humans were impossible. The amphibian opened its mouth. Rows of needle teeth glistened.
Sekitanki backed away slowly. One step. Two steps. The creature watched but didn't follow. Territorial, maybe. Or just not hungry enough. He kept walking.
By the time the light started to fade—was that sunset? Could you even see sunset through this canopy?—Sekitanki had covered maybe two kilometers. His clothes were shredded. His hands bled from a dozen cuts. His leg wound had stopped bleeding but felt hot and swollen.
Infection. Probably.
I'm going to die here, he thought, and the thought arrived with strange calmness. Not panic. Just acknowledgment. He'd solved the equation. All variables accounted for. Result: death, probably within a week. Possibly within days if the infection was bad enough.
He should feel more about that. Terror. Rage. Something. Instead, he felt... curious? Like he was observing his own death from outside his body, taking notes for a paper he'd never write.
Is this shock? Or have I always been this empty? The answer felt important, but his mind was too fogged to grasp it.
He found shelter as darkness fell—a hollow beneath a massive fallen log, partially protected by the log's bulk. Not perfect. Not even good. But it would keep the rain off if it rained, and it was better than being completely exposed.
Sekitanki crawled inside, pulling his torn lab coat around himself. The fabric was supposed to be flame-resistant, chemically treated, designed to protect researchers from laboratory accidents. Now it was just a filthy rag barely keeping him warm in air that probably never dropped below thirty degrees Celsius.
The sounds of the Carboniferous night began. First: a thrumming. Deep. Rhythmic. Like a generator running in the distance. Some massive insect calling for It's prey? Establishing territory? He didn't know enough entomology to guess. Then: clicking. Hundreds of clicks, overlapping, creating polyrhythms that would have been fascinating to him if they weren't so clearly the sounds of things that wanted to eat him.
Then: the scream. It started low and climbed into registers that made his skull vibrate. Not pain. Not fear. Just... communication. Some creature telling the night that it existed, that it claimed this space, that challengers would face consequences.
Sekitanki pressed his hands over his ears, but the sound came through bone, through skull, directly into his brain. When it finally stopped, the silence felt like physical relief.
He laughed. Couldn't help it. A tiny, broken sound that dissolved into something close to sobbing. Mom was right to be worried. I should have been scared.
But he hadn't been scared. He'd been empty. So empty that risking his life had felt like a reasonable trade for maybe—maybe—finding the thing that would fill the hole inside him.
And now he'd found it. Not meaning. Not purpose. Just death. Wearing the face of the world's most horrid nightmare.
His eyes drifted closed despite himself. Exhaustion pulling him under like the mud had tried to do earlier. Sleep felt dangerous—sleeping meant not being vigilant, and not being vigilant meant being prey—but his body didn't care what his mind thought.
The last thing he heard before consciousness slipped away was chittering. Close. Maybe ten meters away. Multiple sources. Circling.
When Sekitanki Hankō suru hito finally slept, he dreamed of his mother's kitchen—the smell of miso soup, the sound of his father reading the newspaper, sunlight through windows in a world where insects were small and time only moved forward.
And when he woke six hours later, covered in dew that felt like cold sweat, the first thing he saw was a centipede—not the massive one from before, but smaller, only two meters long—watching him from the entrance of his shelter.
Its mandibles clicked together softly. Almost like it was thinking.
Almost like it was deciding.
Sekitanki met its compound eyes and felt something inside himself crystallize. Not hope. Not despair. Something harder. Something that tasted like iron and rage and the absolute refusal to die without fighting.
You want to eat me? he thought, staring into those alien eyes. You'll have to work for it. His hand closed around a sharp piece of wood he didn't remember picking up. The centipede's antennae twitched. And the second day of survival began.
TO BE CONTINUED... [NEXT EPISODE: "Meganeura's Shadow"]