Taramandu stood motionless, surveying the valley laid out before him; an undulating blanket of green, speckled with thick clusters of trees and foliage, and literally teaming with herbivorous species (or ‘lunch’ as he preferred to think of it). High on the ridge beneath a trailing sun, his huge frame cast an ominous shadow, like a ruthless General calmly analysing the battlefield before unleashing a ferocious and merciless onslaught. This was his land and he was dominant; an unsparing, depraved monarch.
He had stood in this spot countless times before; a visible, towering beacon of death, a figure so powerful and grotesque he struck unadulterated panic into any creature that set eyes upon him. And their hysteria was warranted; Taramandu used the valley as his personal playground, terrorising its inhabitants, scything them down indiscriminately by wielding his long rows of serrated fangs. Those who he found unpalatable, or who he had not earmarked for consumption, he maimed for sadistic amusement. The ones that managed to escape he would taunt by telling them that they’d be hunted on his inevitable return.
He was soulless; a monster...a giant, villainous oppressor. He harboured no real empathy, just a deep-seated visceral desire to cause fear and misery which extended not only to those he saw as his enemies, but also to those that were close to him. His peers, and creatures that were too big even for him to tackle, were the subject of relentless psychological abuse. Taramandu was a creature whose sole intent was to be as loathsome and as objectionable as possible. Taramandu was a T-Rex.
Although his reign was long and painful for the other dinosaurs, he was far from infallible, and, shortly after his twenty sixth birthday, he contracted a virus which ravaged his mighty figure and rendered him incapacitated. The illness lasted only a matter of weeks before he breathed his last breath, expiring in a quiet glade under a canopy of towering dawn redwoods. Those that chanced upon his body felt comfort that they were finally free of his tyranny, his carcass gradually decomposing and transforming itself into carbon; a resolving rondo to the fabric of existence. And although Taramandu the T-Rex was no more, his carbon permeated the soil to be reborn in the form of plants and vegetation, thus perpetuating the circle of life and ensuring that the spirit of that mighty creature lived on.
Approximately sixty eight million years later, a young Dutch woman, giddy with excitement, anticipation and gas and air, gave birth to a child in a small, bare hospital room in Rome. She had looked after herself well throughout her pregnancy consuming all manner of sustenance that would encourage her unborn offspring to grow strong and healthy enough to be delivered without complication, and in doing so, had unwittingly ingested a significant quantity of the remnants of Taramandu’s carbon, thus transferring a portion of that terrible creature’s DNA to her child.
And that, I can only assume, is the reason that I am such an utter dick.
