AN ELEPHANT NEVER FORGETS
Bestiary writers from Pliny on through DaVinci wrote of the legendary battles between elephants and dragons; two titanic beasts, evenly matched, their corpses found entangled throughout Africa and Asia. We can presume the surviving species of Proboscidea eventually won their war, for there are no true dragons left, and contemporary accounts of their existence ceased several centuries ago. Some extremists have taken their absence to its epistemological limits, arguing that there were never any dragons at all, maintaining a highly anthropocentric concept of extinction.
This widespread skepticism has not deterred speculative biologists at the University Beneath St. Paul, who have reconstructed the evolutionary history of Draconidae through the emerging field of narrative paleontology. The fire and ash from Chixculub’s cauldron was not enough to drive these pseudodinosaurs to extinction, as they slept through the asteroid’s arrival and most of its aftermath while nesting in caves of volcanic rock, emerging to the sunless surface only occasionally to prey on the struggling herds that still wandered a broken planet.
As ecosystems stabilized throughout the following eras, a new class of mammal emerged with natural weapons that allowed them to stand on even ground with these last few terrible lizards. They grew in sheer bulk to match their foe’s weight class, with lance-like tusks to pierce scales and split gastralia, leathered skin to withstand infected fangs and acidic blood, and a trunk that could coil inward to prevent inhalation of suffocating vapors that burst from inflicted wounds. The ancestors of modern elephants evolved these martial features as a response to dragon predation on their young, and through their descendants, the nature and form of their missing rivals can once again be known.
When the humors of dragons and elephants mixed, they congealed into cinnabar, a red mineral mined today for its high mercury content. Compounds of the liquid metal were present alongside high concentrations of sulfuric acid in the dragon’s venom and bile, which the unique leukocytes in elephant blood broke down and purged at sites of injury, forming large deposits. This stone's widespread presence in the geological record tells a hideous tale, that of the longest war ever fought on the Earth's surface.
To this day, African elephants continue to journey in single file, with the largest matriarch often leading the convoy, ready to defend her family against any monstrosity. They no longer face challenges requiring all the weapons and defenses at their disposal, and have even begun to favor shorter tusks, selected for survival by human rifles. Even so, they remain conditioned to battle something that is now but a few thin stitches in their genes, only known through word and dream.