The Bone Thieves
Some things were never meant to be taken.
1.5 million years ago, Olduvai Gorge.
The air smelled of rot and salt, of damp earth and dying things.
The heavy-horned one lifted its head from the river’s edge, ears twitching. Something was coming.
Not the shadow-claw. They moved unseen, slipping between the trees, their long teeth meant for the throat. Not the water-mouths…the great river-beast lay still, its vast jaws open like a broken branch, belly full and mind sluggish.
No, this was something else.
Something wrong.
The wind carried their scent.
Flesh-things. Small, but persistent. They had no fur, no scales, only dry, pale skin and patches of thin hair.
Across the plain, the long-tusks rumbled their warnings, low and uneasy. They had seen them too. The flesh-things creeping through the reeds with their sharp stones gleaming dully in the last light. Weak things, fragile things, but clever enough to make up for their brittle fangs. Always watching. Always waiting.
The heavy-horned one snorted and stepped back into the river, its hooves sinking into the soft, sucking mud. It had seen its kin fall by their stones. Their bodies left under the sun, the meat left to rot. They did not kill for hunger. Not for meat.
The flesh-things killed for the bones.
The herd had whispered of it, low groans in the night, warnings passed from mother to calf—they take what is ours. When the flesh is gone, when the breath has left, the bones must return. They sink into the earth, into the mud, into the dust. They become the land. That is the way of things. That is how it has always been.
But these flesh-things did not let them return. They stole them.
They held our bones in their hands, scraping them against stone until they became sharp like fangs of the ancient ones. Then they hacked and pierced our flesh, tearing, splitting, leaving wounds that did close. They turned our own bones against us, shaping them into things that should not be and spilled the blood of our kin onto the earth.
It was a grave insult. A defilement of the natural order.
And so, the long-tusks had learned to watch. To wait.
The reeds parted.
A glint of stone in a dirty hand.
The heavy-horned one charged forward with a deafening bellow, hooves thundering over the riverbed. The flesh-things shrieked, stumbling back, scrambling over themselves. Weak flesh-things. Soft flesh-things. One did not move fast enough. A horn found its belly, spearing through with a sickening crack, lifting it high before casting it back to the earth. The dirt drank its blood. More would follow.
The heavy-horned one had learned from them—watched as they stalked, how they trapped our kin, how they cut off every escape. And so, it did the same. The flesh-things turned to escape, but the long-tusks had already moved, their massive forms closing in like the walls of a canyon.
The long-tusks rumbled their fury, their trumpets splitting the night. One struck, tusks sweeping up a flesh-thing, its thin limbs flailing tossing its limp body aside into the reeds.
The flesh-things ran, but the heavy-horned one had driven them where it wanted. There was nowhere left to go.
Tonight, the earth shook beneath pounding hooves.
They had come for bones.
No more.
Tonight, they would leave their own.
For those who like to know the names: Heavy-Horned One: Elasmotherium. Shadow-claw: Dinofelis Water-Mouth: Crocodylus anthropophagus Long-tusks: Palaeoloxodon Keep in mind this is fiction so what even is accurate time periods.
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