Eoraptor Sunset

A Story by R-Gii

Two eoraptors stood together looking out at the Late Triassic Sun as it dipped its way toward the edge of the horizon.

"Can you believe," he said to her, "that it's taken us over four billion cycles of the sun for us to get to where we are now?"

"And think of how many there will be to follow after us," she said to him, "sometimes even a day seems like forever, imagine what it'll be when even a quarter of those billion sun cycles have passed beyond us. Think of how many millions of lifetimes we could have lived. It seems so far away that it feels unfathomable that such a time could ever come to pass."

He gently rested his claws on her, "perhaps such a time will come to pass, but right now we're here together, so let's let these moments last forever."

So there they stood together, watching the Sun fall below the horizon, one fragment in time.

228 million years later, a young couple stands on the balcony of their honeymoon suite, watching the Sun set out over the ocean, hands intertwined, thinking these same thoughts, the future so far away, so uncertain, that a quarter billion years from now seems beyond all comprehension. But this too will pass, as it once had for those two eoraptors, standing to watch the sunset so long ago, so too will it pass for anyone who has ever lived to walk this Earth. For such is the nature of time, so vast and incomprehensible, that even that which now seems like forever will someday fade into the far distances of eternity.