It was a pterosaur who observed it: a little white smudge set in the crimson and purple horizon, just above the ridges of his home. It cracked the sky, like a piece of bone might break through a mottled hide long after the beast’s moment of death. It sat at a declension he had not seen in other bright objects over the valley, and seemed in fact to hover right over it, a sight which recommended to him an intimate relation between the new speck and the hollow and unyielding terra firma beneath his lookout. This thing was of kin to the Earth—far different from the sun which colored the clouds and the water and drew up the heads of flowers in the scrublands.

It made such an alteration to the skyline, in his feelings, that he could only reconcile himself to its reality by consultation with a land-walker, one who would be impartial to such changes as did not affect the scene he awoke and fell asleep to with each countless sun. He found a triceratops taking water at a rain pond under the drooping frond of a palm tree and descended to ask his opinion, pointing to a rippling white streak on the surface of the water as proof of his claim and argument for his case.

“It was only a matter of time,” the triceratops said, with somewhat prideful humor, as his great yellow-green visor reflected an evening glow over the pond. “Yes, just a question of time that a bigger rock would come to devour this small one that holds the valley. That is the law of the jungle. It is why an egg-stealer will never dominate the vale, because of the velociraptor, and the velociraptor will never dominate, because of the tyrannos. It should be no surprise to you that land should seek to dominate land.”

The pterosaur was embarrassed by his own naivety, and tried to save face. “But then, from what jungle does the Big Earth come?” he asked.

“How should we know?” the triceratops replied. “You’re looking too far into it.”

“And you’re avoiding the question,” the pterosaur replied weakly.

“A triceratops can’t stick his head through a log without getting himself stuck—and a flyer will use his imagination to avoid facing the truth. We creatures of the valley are each made from a single protruding sense. Let’s go and ask the egg-catchers what they think, for they are closest to the Earth, and are bound not to care about our problems.”

They went down into the cavity of the valley whose surrounding cliffs rose from the earth like the ribs of a hatchling, widening and strengthening in the hard flat heat of waning daylight. Down below, a shallow river creased through the center, dotted with dark green vegetation like the pubic fur of a mammal. The wind blew life’s breath, dry and odorous and sibilant through the giant leaves of fruit trees. The pterosaur and the triceratops soon found themselves amongst the egg thieves, and by them, perceived vaguely but at once that they had stepped back into the womb of spirit and flesh, a world where they were as necessary to the continuation of life as the patterned stones about their feet.

The egg thieves answered in regard to the watchful white eye that shone above them:

“The pterosaur knows the sky and the triceratops the mud which keeps it cool on hot afternoons. To us mammals, the world appears to be a giant egg. It is a mysterious thing, the symbol of our wealth and sorrow and the device of our toils in the holes and bushes where we carry out our lives.”

Then the reptiles said that they didn’t understand; and the egg thieves explained:

“Hatching an egg is a much different process than giving birth—one which, we will always admit, is hard for us to grasp from a psychological standpoint. Birth is a very singular and final transformation... An egg is a simulacrum, containing all the ingredients of a complete world. Its creator may confuse it for another and swallow it as its own food. And so it is with the Earth and with any other planet. The Creator has made a mistake, and it is time that we will be eaten.”

For the next few days, the dinosaurs and the creatures of the vale lived together and continued to come back to discussing their philosophies to help pass long, hot afternoons. Word of their talks began to spread through the valley as the brightness of the spot became larger, and by now it was certain that the new white star represented a total catastrophe of some kind. Other dinosaurs who, in the past, had spent some time in the vale came to pay respects and condolences to the creatures who lived there now; while others came to share in the arguments on the river bank, typically those who hadn’t even seen the orange cliffs in person.
In light of their imminent demise, after a time, and with the arrival of more dinosaurs of different kinds, something began to thaw in the hearts of the pterosaur, the triceratops, and the egg keepers. The smaller pressures of survival in the badlands, which weighed on them in the form of grotesque, hereditary adaptations, began to loosen.

“I am glad that we have had the chance to meet and establish friendship between us,” said the Triceratops as the rim above his head bobbed and glistened in the sun. “I wonder if it is another law of the jungle that rodents and dinosaurs must form alliances in order to laugh at the stubbornness of their own ways.”
One of the egg-stealers threw a nut which bounced off the old reptile’s noggin. “There’s your stubbornness! Maybe we will all be laughing, anyway, when the new Earth comes. How tiring it is, rummaging through dung and twigs in the hope of finding an egg.”

“I don’t think I will ever get bored of the colors here,” the pterosaur said, wistfully. The others respected the sorrow in his observation with a short silence.

“You’re right,” said the triceratops. “Yes, I can see it, too, believe it or not. It’s magnificent…”

The tyrannosaurs, who dwelled in the boneyards of their own making, reminded them how death is the sweetener of life. “Your love for the valley is symbolical,” they said, “something burning inside you, and clearly not residing in these scattered rocks and in the wafting smells of mud and carrion. And besides, don’t you notice that you have never pined more for the skies with all of their changes and tones, that reflect to you the movements of your own soul, then when you know that they will be removed from you forever?”

All the dinosaurs of the valley, living now under the growing Eye, agreed with this. They began to cajole and sing songs with one another in rasping voices, as though all enmity between them had disappeared. They found rocks to keep rhythm and they cavorted until their figures became silhouettes against the flaming horizon of the old Earth.

“Bring on the New World!” they said, their great cries echoing in the cliffs.

But days went by, and then weeks, and the Bright Eye shone in the sky like a new Moon, suspended. The egg-thieves made jokes about it, and about so many dinosaurs being gathered around the little rivulet, waiting for their demise. But soon, serious talk began to circulate about when the World was coming.

Dancing turned into bouts of languished praise of the dinosaurs’ good fortune to finally be free from the wretched vale, whatever may have awaited them on the other side. As they sat and wondered about the next life, the colors of the landscape began to deepen, as though everything was made up of embers and ready to give fire. The flowers on the banks of the stream flared red like fresh blood, and the dark tangled brush that ran beside it like a shadow said everything about isolation and the fearful loneliness of the valley in its sky-course. Patches of reflection on the surface of the rivulet became crystal blue like the veil of the thoughts of the waiters. And in the oranges and purples that concentrated everything was the inerasable vacuous white Eye, looming above the valley.

When the endurance of living between two worlds was overwhelming, the dinosaurs instead sought answers to the mystery in which wild nature had long surrounded them in their own bones. They searched inward for the mortal wheel upon which their appetites ran, and in this time, some of the smaller ones began to disappear—though whether back into the trees and burrows for fatigue of hope, or whether as sacrifice to the philosophic whim of some larger creature, none were inclined to ask.

Then one of the tyrannos, being unsatisfied even with this state of affairs, addressed the group in the following chord.

“Friends, if we have learned anything from our patient waiting, our reveling in absolution, from our close examination of the vale in the twilight of its existence, turning over its every granule to find its meaning—what we have seen is that, after all, we live in a valley of bones.

“All that can be said might be said by the land, and not us.

“And it is precisely this that we can no longer hold onto.

“All that there is for us to do is to express ourselves. And to do this, we must look back to the first dinosaur, the one to whom the riddle of our hard existence on this self-sufficing rock was first posed. We may trust that they were different from us, from how we are now, perhaps not so divided in their feelings and in their way of life as we are. So let us gather the bones of this world and put the Ancient back together, that we may finally be acquitted of that question which truly binds us to this place and all others.”

They pushed together sets of vertebrae to form a long rib that stuck out of the ground like the grates of a chamber, once filled with organs and flesh and desire that rent the land to a stifled will. The Ancient had the wings of a hatzegopteryx for soaring above the mountains and fins for keeping in dark water, away from the light of the sun. It had taloned running legs, like a bird which had been forced down to earth to chase for its sustenance and saw-tooth jaws locked into a gaping cry. Two hollows seemed bored into the skull where the eyes had gone, ever-unflinching, giving out but not receiving. In the Ancient, the dinosaurs saw the horror of their existence. Yet for some it was also a glorious striving and a reconciliation; and those that stayed felt satiated that they had glimpsed something of the truth, and had served comeuppance to a violent and cataclysmic order.

But still the new World did not come.

Many weeks passed. One day an oviraptor, slipping out of the jungle and into the gorge of the Ancient, with its little rill and sheer orange cliffs, found his contemporaries to be in a state of exhaustive struggle, though of a kind quite different than that which prevailed in the fertile terrains which he knew. When he spoke to the other dinosaurs they replied as sick hounds would, with strained moans. They laid about, cast down like steppe gravel, bereft of spirit and not even capable of vituperation to protect their territory. Yet—he had checked several times to make sure—they persisted among the living, though in a very odd and inscrutable way.

Being disappointed in their store of eggs (which had for a long time been depleted), the oviraptor prepared to make his way back to the jungle; when the pterosaur, clutching him at the ankle, spoke to him in a choking whisper.

“Don’t run away so quickly, living as you are, like we are, in this world…! For you are bound in your short and limited life to be deceived by the changes in nature. I saw a white light in the sky, and listened to my heart… And was crushed by the avalanche of my own bottomless vanity, what we have called ‘psychology’…! Curse this blasted word. There is nothing which is symbolical. Be grateful for your meal… stop not at colors and forms, for they are a path to death, one far more painful and unending than the bite of a tyrannosaur.”

He let go. As he wheezed out another breath, the oviraptor inspected him like an unknown hibiscus, comical in the shape and mixture of hues which had lead to its proliferation. Before the observer could reply, though, the triceratops had pulled himself over by the front legs, vying, it seemed, to get a word in, edgewise.

“Whatever you do,” he added as the band of his head fanned the air around the oviraptor’s feathers following a thunderous cough, “you should reject that fate has anything to do with you, silly creature! The world will end only because you have decided that it is so. Who are you, a mere mud bather, a mere egg poacher, to discern the rhythms of this rocky sleeper? Heed my warning—live in your world only or wind up like us, starving for freedom and dying in a vast, inestimable, interminable expanse.”

He collapsed onto the ground, allowing the oviraptor time to contemplate their exchange. It wasn’t the first time in his life that he forgot about eggs and the jungle; the oviraptor was, in fact, quite used to thinking by himself, on the long stretches of his travels from one end of the great Continent to the other. He understood the intent and meaning of the bone memorial to the ancient, for he supposed he had lived it, fully, in the vagaries of his wandering life. He snickered at the sight of so many different dinosaurs wasting away at its base.

“Listen, if you can even still hear me. You lived in anticipation of a new World, and now you’re dying for it. That is existence—not these old bones you have collected. I say, if the new World isn’t real, as you have learned, then we dinosaurs are not real, and neither are all the problems that arise out of our fixation on our own reality. Forget each other, forget psychology, forget the forms you see. Let it all wash away from you, just as the edge of a shore forms a beach.”

And with those words, the asteroid finally landed, taking with it the vale, and over the course of many millions of years, and through the starkest privations of nature, all that the dinosaurs had come to call the colors of truth.