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curiosity-killed · 4 years

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quiet

@givemeunicorns this turned into more hurt/comfort than kissing so uh whoops

Word count: 1235 Pairing: Wangxian

50 kisses prompts

Resentment curves, carves, slices splintering lines across his skin. Even now, reforged into the seal, the energy is alive and hungry. It licks lashes across his back like a many-tongued whip, scoring tallies into his flesh. Splinters slip beneath his skin, slide needle-like into empty veins. He can hear them coming. Outside the cave, in the gloom that hangs like rags across the hills. Swords rattle, robes rustle. There’s the groan of corpses, shambling, shuffling, coming back. There’s a crackle, a hiss, the familiar sting of ozone on his parched lips. He needs to destroy it. He needs to break it, crack it apart, make sure no one else can use it. His fingers shake on the seal, trembling, quivering with wasted energy. He can barely move his hands anymore, his whole body growing cold and stiff. He’s been dead for so long, since he was dropped into this mass grave, since Wen Qing cradled his core in her careful, bloody hands. His stolen time is running out, there’s no resentment that can piece a broken soul back together for this long, he always knew it was a short-term solution — it was only supposed to be long enough for revenge, long enough to carve Wen Chao’s sins into his own skin — but then Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji had found him and then the war and then the Wens — the Wens, he can’t leave them to be massacred, he can’t — “Wei Ying.”

They’re going to die and he can’t protect them, can’t stop it as the screams start, as the blood runs red across the floor. Yanli’s voice calls his name, high and wailing. He can’t do anything, he’s frozen, helpless, rigor mortis setting in. Useless, useless again, he’s just here to watch to bear witness to his own failures again —

“Wei Ying.” He jolts with it, hand lashing out. His wrist is caught before it makes any impact, before his fingers can shape a seal. The hand around his wrist isn’t punishing, isn’t pinning him in place; he could slip loose if he wanted. Releasing a shuddering breath, Wei Wuxian comes back to himself. The jingshi is quiet and dark around them, still with the deep of hush of full night. “Sorry,” he says, closing his eyes tight. “Sorry, did I wake you?” It’s a pointless question: why else would Lan Zhan be awake this late? Wei Wuxian opens his eyes and draws in a breath. It stings in the back of his throat, like ice water over a burn. Lan Zhan’s hand shifts, gently lowering their arms to the blankets. His thumb smooths a loose ellipse over the bone of Wei Wuxian’s wrist. “Was it the Burial Mounds?” he asks. Wei Wuxian’s lips twist, bitterness in the seam of his mouth. They both get nightmares — he wonders if anyone left the Sunshot campaign free of them — but Lan Zhan’s are quiet. Eerily still: Wei Wuxian only knows when he’s had one because of the way he pulls Wei Wuxian close, the silent slide of tears down his cheeks. Wei Wuxian’s dreams are not quiet. He wakes screaming, hands bent into claws, teeth bared around blood that dried years ago. Sometimes, it’s just fear, just amorphous dread closing choking hands around his throat. Sometimes, it’s memories: screaming himself hoarse around the gag Wen Ning had gingerly fixed in his mouth while Wen Qing’s hands moved inside his opened chest, reaching out for Jiang Yanli too late as blood soaks the white of her mourning robes, biting his teeth down on screams as Zidian burns lines into his back. The worst are the ones like tonight, the ones that take memory and weave it with imagination, a thick tapestry of hurt and old grief. It all slides together too easily, seamlessly, till he wakes shaking without knowing what’s real, uncertain in his own memory. “Ahh sort of,” he says, hedges. His voice comes out shakier than he’d like. He’s trying to be better about this, about talking things out instead of cramming them deep down in his chest. He and Jiang Cheng have worked on it together, in a way. It’s stilted, awkward, deeply uncomfortable, and they always wind up both looking anywhere but at each other by the end but it’s — it’s good, he knows. It’s healing, purifying the old infection. Lan Zhan won’t judge him, he knows. Might understand better than anyone — anyone left alive, anyway. He and Wen Qing had sat up more than a few nights in the Burial Mounds, listening to the seething resentful energy that wanted, hungered, and only didn’t turn its teeth on them because of Wei Wuxian’s white-knuckled control. More than that, he doesn’t want Lan Zhan to feel helpless, closed out, ever again. So he’s been trying. Some nights it’s easier, to talk about it. When he says ‘shijie’ or ‘Quionqi Pass,’ Lan Zhan gets it. He doesn’t need all the extra context that tangles up in Wei Wuxian’s throat. Tonight is not one of those nights. Beside him, he can feel Lan Zhan’s exhale, and then his wrist is turning over and long hair tickles against his exposed skin. “Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan says, low. He presses a kiss to his fingertips, to his palm, to the pulse point along his wrist. “You are alive.” A kiss to his shoulder, to the junction of neck and shoulder, to the soft tender spot under his ear. “You are home.” To his cheek, his forehead, the corner of his lips. “You are loved.” Feather-light against his lips, barely a brush. Wei Wuxian presses forward, leans into the warmth and reassurance there. His other hand comes up to comb back into Lan Zhan’s hair, loose and still a little damp from the bath. Lan Zhan answers, pulling him close till their legs are tangled, their bodies a firm line of heat drawn together. Pulling back, Wei Wuxian draws in a shaking breath and rests his forehead on Lan Zhan’s chest. His hands have slipped down to clutch at Lan Zhan’s robe, as if he could hold him here if Lan Zhan didn’t let him. As if Lan Zhan would want to go. Exhaling, he loosens his hold and draws his arms around Lan Zhan’s chest instead. Tucking close, he presses a kiss to Lan Zhan’s neck and holds on. A hand runs up and down the flat muscles of his back, just firm enough to feel almost like a massage. With each sweep, he can feel the tension leeching out of him. As the adrenaline and desperation fade away, his body grows tired and limp in Lan Zhan’s arms. The fanged shadows of the Burial Mounds no longer linger in the night shadows of their home; he can hear no echo of screams in the steady cadence of Lan Zhan’s heartbeat. He straightens just enough to meet Lan Zhan’s gaze, though it’s hard to see in the dark. Without his core, his senses have always been a little diminished; he knows Lan Zhan can see him fine. It’s enough. Leaning in, he presses a last kiss to Lan Zhan’s lips. “Thank you, Lan Zhan,” he murmurs, lips brushing. One more, punctuation, and he sinks down alongside his husband. Lan Zhan’s arms hold him steady, his heartbeat drumming soft and even against his cheek. When Wei Wuxian slips into sleep this time, it is deep and easy and quiet.

#wangxian #untamed fic #mdzs #cql #wwx #lwj #my writing

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nowwhateinstein · 6 years

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Land of Endless Sky: ch 1

Intro & Prologue

++++++ Chapter 1

ASH HOLLOW NEBRASKA TERRITORY

Captain Fox William Mulder squinted through a pair of tarnished field glasses at the sleeping encampment in the river valley below. The smoke of dying nighttime campfires drifted slowly up through tipi openings. A large herd of horses grazed lazily on the far side of the camp. He’d counted nearly fifty lodges; a fairly large camp by Brule Sioux standards. The scene reminded him of a print he’d once seen by the famous painter, George Catlin: a pastoral idyllic in the pre-dawn light. Not for long, he thought dismally, lowering his glasses and glancing behind him to where the soldiers of Company K of the United States Second Dragoons waited on impatient mounts. Behind them were six companies of the US Sixth infantry.

His own horse, Ghost, snorted anxiously, sharing in the growing tension of men and animals. Mulder had participated in several Indian campaigns in his seven years with the Second Dragoons - most recently against the Comanche down in Texas. The outcomes of those battles had never plagued his conscience. Their adversaries had wrought indiscriminate havoc and terror upon settlers and other Indian tribes; the justice meted out to the Comanche had been harsh, yet commensurate with their atrocities. But this, he mused uneasily, casting his eyes once more upon the unsuspecting camp, this was different. The Sioux had, until recently, given little trouble to Americans passing through their land.

The Army had sent General Harney and his forces to “whip the Indians” in response to the Sioux killing of Lieutenant John Grattan and his men the year before. But the details surrounding Grattan’s death were murky, at best, and there was some question whether the Sioux had been provoked into attacking; Grattan had a reputation for being hot-headed and was inexperienced in dealing with Indians. The Sioux may have shot Grattan, but it was widely believed, even back in Washington, that the fool had instigated the affair and had gotten himself and his men killed by a needless escalation of force and poor discipline.

Despite the uncertainty, the order to avenge the “Grattan Massacre,” as it was now being called, had come down from on high, and the Second Dragoons were dispatched from Fort Kearny to join Harney and his forces to punish the Sioux. After nearly a month of hard travel across the parched Nebraskan prairie in the punishing summer heat, they had finally located the Sioux camp here at Ash Hollow, a quiet, tree-filled valley along the Platte River.

Most of the Brule war party, including their chief, Little Thunder, were away from the camp. They had left in good faith to parlay with the US Army, but the party of soldiers they were meeting was a diversion sent by Harney. Now, the camp was virtually defenseless - exactly how Harney had planned it. There would be no parlay, no truce, today, he thought with an appalling sense of dread. Only bloodshed. His own blood ran cold at the thought.

Harney stood a few hundred yards away, flanked by two aides. His tall frame and white beard made for an imposing figure atop his black horse. All eyes were on him for the signal to attack. Presently, Harney drew his saber, raised it, then swung it towards the ground in a single, decisive stroke.

“Attack!”

Reluctantly, Mulder drew his sword and spurred Ghost forward to join the throng of blue and black jackets streaming down the hill.

As they closed the distance, he could see faces peeking out of tipis - mostly women and children. The expressions turned from curious to panicked as they saw the oncoming line of men and horses.

“Wasichu! Wasichu!” Mulder recognized the Sioux word for “white man” echo throughout the camp. Their cries vanished amid the noise of stampeding hooves and the relentless thunder of rifles and revolvers.

Screams drifted upward through the gunfire as naked and buckskin-clad women, many with babies in their arms, rushed from their lodges away from the soldiers. Children followed, looking back now and again in fear and confusion. A few men, mostly old-timers and boys too young to join the war party, ran out to meet the attackers with bows and flintlocks, but were quickly mowed down by the superior firepower of the soldiers.

He charged through the camp, weaving through lodges, bodies, and soldiers, unable to bring himself to swing his saber or fire his weapon. I’d rather be thought a coward than to take part in this mindless slaughter, he thought grimly, as he maneuvered Ghost through a small stand of trees and up a small hillock on the far side of the camp.

The attack was over in a matter of minutes. Besides the occasional moan of an injured Sioux, a heavy, unnatural silence fell upon the valley. An order was given to search for survivors. Mulder remained in the saddle, watching as the regiment fanned out over the surrounding hills.

“Captain! Over here! I’ve found some!” Away down the hill from Mulder, Sergeant Krycek was waving his hat and gesturing excitedly to him. Mulder rode over to where Krycek and a half dozen men stood with their weapons aimed at a hole in the side of the hill. A cave, he realized. He dismounted to stand beside the sergeant.

“They’re in there, Captain,” Krycek said, the excitement evident in his voice. “I can hear ‘em cryin’.”

Mulder paused and listened. The frightened whimpering of children could be heard from a short distance inside the cave.

“Lower your weapons,” he said. The men didn’t move, their weapons still trained on the cave entrance.

“Come on, Captain, they ain’t nothing but a bunch of animals.” Krycek flashed him a savage grin.Mulder drew his revolver and pointed it at the sergeant. “Lower your weapons!” he yelled. Krycek glared at him, but he and the others reluctantly backed away from the cave.

Krycek was trouble - his spiteful and cruel nature was well known throughout the regiment - but since he hadn’t disobeyed his order, there was little Mulder could do to discipline him.

Mulder holstered his weapon and turned to a small man with glasses. “Private Burks, you know Sioux, don’t you?”

The short man bobbed his head. “A little, yes, sir.”

“Tell them to come out of the cave. Tell them that we won’t harm them.” Burks stepped forward hesitantly.

“Belay that order.” The voice of General Harney boomed behind Mulder. Harney, his aides, and a small contingent of infantrymen had gathered around the cave entrance.

“Sir,” Mulder interjected. “There are women and children in there.”

“There could also be a dozen warriors down there with them, waiting to ambush us. I will not risk the life of my men, Captain.”

Mulder knew the risk to be overblown. “Sir -”

Harney cut him off with a sharp gesture of his hand. “Sergeant, have your men open fire.”

Krycek gave him a vicious smile, then gave the order for the soldiers to line up in front of the cave. Mulder watched helplessly as they opened fired into the cave. The deafening echo of rifles rippled through the valley. The voices in the cave fell silent.

An order was given by one of Harney’s aides to clear the cave of bodies and check for survivors. One by one, the bodies of five women, six children, and three infants were pulled out and laid in a shallow depression beside the cave opening.

“Just as well,” Harney said, glancing disdainfully at the bodies as he brushed dirt from a gilded jacket sleeve. “Nits make lice.”

Mulder’s stomach churned at the grisly sight: tiny hands covered in blood, eyes that once glimmered with carefree delight now sightless. His head became light, and his legs suddenly felt like gelatin. Faintly, as if from a great distance, he heard the bugle call to fall back into formation, but he remained motionless besides the empty cave and bodies.The sun had risen and the last of the soldiers faded beyond the horizon when Mulder dropped to his knees and vomited.

#land of endless sky #my fic #work in progress #xf fic #txf fanfic #msr fanfic

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newstfionline · 7 years

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Desperate Rohingya Flee Myanmar on Trail of Suffering. ‘It Is All Gone.’

By Hannah Beech, NY Times, Sept. 2, 2017

REZU AMTALI, Bangladesh--They stumble down muddy ravines and flooded creeks through miles of hills and jungle in Bangladesh, and thousands more come each day, in a line stretching to the monsoon-darkened horizon.

Some are gaunt and spent, already starving and carrying listless and dehydrated babies, with many miles to go before they reach any refugee camp.

They are tens of thousands of Rohingya, who arrive bearing accounts of massacre at the hands of the Myanmar security forces and allied mobs that started on Aug. 25, after Rohingya militants staged attacks against government forces.

The retaliation that followed was carried out in methodical assaults on villages, with helicopters raining down fire on civilians and front-line troops cutting off families’ escape. The villagers’ accounts all portray indiscriminate attacks against fleeing noncombatants, adding to a death toll that even in early estimates is high into the hundreds, and is probably vastly worse.

“There are no more villages left, none at all,” said Rashed Ahmed, a 46-year-old farmer from a hamlet in Maungdaw Township in Myanmar. He had already been walking for four days. “There are no more people left, either,” he said. “It is all gone.”

The Rohingya are a Muslim ethnic minority who live in Myanmar’s far western Rakhine State. Most were stripped of their citizenship by the military junta that used to rule Myanmar, and they have suffered decades of repression under the country’s Buddhist majority, including killings and mass rape, according to the United Nations. A new armed resistance is giving the military more reasons to oppress them.

But the past week’s exodus of civilians caught in the middle, which the United Nations said had reached nearly 76,000 on Saturday, dwarfs previous outflows of refugees to Bangladesh in such a short time period. Friday’s influx alone was the single largest movement of Rohingya here in more than a generation, according to the United Nations office in Dhaka.

The dying is not yet done. Some of the Rohingya militants have persuaded or coerced men and boys to stay behind and keep up the fight. And civilians who have stayed on the trail are running toward conditions so grim that they constitute a second humanitarian catastrophe.

They face another round of gunfire from Myanmar’s border guards, and miles of treacherous hill trails and flood-swollen streams and mud fields ahead before they reach crowded camps without enough food or medical help. Dozens were killed when their boats overturned, leaving the bodies of women and children washed up on river banks.

Tens of thousands more Rohingya are waiting for the Bangladeshi border force to allow them to enter. Still more are moving north from the Rohingya-dominated districts of Rakhine State. And the violence there continues.

“It breaks all records of inhumanity,” said a member of the Border Guard Bangladesh named Anamul, stationed at the Kutupalong Rohingya refugee camp. “I have never seen anything like this.”

Here, in the forests of Rezu Amtali near the border with Myanmar, dozens of Rohingya told stories that were horrifying in their content and consistency.

After militants from the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army attacked police posts and an army base on Aug. 25, killing more than a dozen, the Myanmar military began torching entire villages with helicopters and petrol bombs, aided by Buddhist vigilantes from the ethnic Rakhine group, those fleeing the violence said.

Person after person along the trail into Bangladesh told of how the security forces cordoned off Rohingya villages as the fire rained down, and then shot and stabbed civilians. Children were not exempt.

Mizanur Rahman recalled how on Aug. 25 he had been working in a rice paddy in his village, known in Rohingya as Ton Bazar, in Buthidaung Township in Myanmar, when helicopters roared into the sky above him.

“Immediately, I had fear in my heart,” he said. His wife came running out of their house with their son, less than a month old.

They escaped to a nearby forest and watched as the choppers’ weapons engulfed the village in flames. Myanmar security forces descended, and the sound of gunfire reached the forest.

Mr. Rahman’s extended family fled the next day, but not before seeing his brother’s body lying on the ground, along with seven others. Three days later, as they climbed a hill near the border with Bangladesh, Mr. Rahman’s mother was shot dead by a Myanmar border guard.

“Now we are supposed to be safe in Bangladesh, but I do not feel safe,” Mr. Rahman said, as he wandered through a market in the Kutupalong refugee camp, with no money in his pocket.

His wife’s postpartum bleeding has increased so much that she can no longer walk or produce milk for their infant son. The baby, cradled in Mr. Rahman’s arms, looked skeletal, parched skin pinched at his joints. Other refugees took turns gently touching the baby’s feet to check if he was still alive.

The Myanmar military said on Friday that nearly 400 people had been killed in the violence that has swept across northern Rakhine since Aug. 25. Of that death toll, 370 people were identified as Rohingya fighters. Fourteen civilians, including four ethnic Rakhine and seven Hindus, were also reported killed. Myanmar officials, however, have given no specific accounting of civilian Rohingya deaths.

Dozens of people I spoke to on the refugee trail said they had seen multiple people shot dead in at least 15 different villages. Others spoke of families burned alive in their homes.

Human Rights Watch, the New York-based watchdog, documented 17 sites where satellite imagery showed extensive fire damage, including one village where 700 buildings had burned.

The Myanmar government claims Rohingya militants have torched their own homes in a bid for international sympathy. And the military maintains its current operations in Rakhine are designed at rooting out “extremist terrorists.”

There are, clearly, combatants on the Rohingya side. The state news media have reported that more than 50 clashes have broken out between the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, known by the acronym ARSA, and Myanmar security forces over the past week.

That has further complicated life for civilians trying to flee.

Fortify Rights, a human-rights group based in Bangkok, interviewed villagers remaining in Maungdaw township who said that ARSA was forcing men and boys to stay and fight. The refugees flowing into Bangladesh have been predominantly women and children, leading to speculation as to where the men are.

Mr. Ahmed, the farmer, said that he was too old to fight, but that 20 others from his village, Renuaz, had remained. “They have nothing to lose,” he said. “The Myanmar government wants to eradicate an entire ethnic group.”

What the survivors are fleeing into is no haven. Bangladesh is itself poor, overcrowded and waterlogged, and has been reluctant to take on more displaced Rohingya. Around 400,000 already lived here before the exodus, according to government figures.

An urgent humanitarian disaster is brewing here in a country hard-pressed to feed itself, much less a new influx of refugees that one Bangladeshi official estimated could soon surpass 100,000 people.

For now, the Border Guard Bangladesh is mostly turning a blind eye and allowing the Rohingya to stream across the border.

But there is little help for them here, as they push on in hopes of reaching some of the grim refugee camps further in.

The luckiest of the Rohingya leaving the violence by trekking through the Chittagong Hills hefted bamboo poles laden with their most treasured belongings: sacks of rice, umbrellas, solar panels, water pots and grass mats.

Others, though, carried nothing at all because they had no time to organize anything before their flight. Toddlers marched naked. Not a single person wore shoes, which would have been ripped off by the sucking mud.

An international response to the crisis has started. On Wednesday, Britain arranged for a closed-door meeting of the United Nations Security Council to discuss the Rohingya emergency. The civilian government of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi has faced mounting global criticism for refusing to acknowledge the magnitude of the military offensive on civilian Rohingya populations.

In an open letter to Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, nearly a dozen of her fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureates labeled last October’s military offensive “a human tragedy amounting to ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.”

#Myanmar #Burma #Rohingya #Rohingya refugees

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hellofastestnewsfan · 6 years

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In Italy, the dawn of the greatest empire in the history of the world is marked, not by broken marble pediments strewn across the seven hills of Rome, but modest three-toed footprints pressed into rocks far to the north, high in the Italian Alps. They were left by coastal dinosaurs patrolling the tidal flats of a tropical lagoon over 230 million years ago, and they’re among the earliest in Earth’s history. Perhaps more remarkable, though, than this sudden appearance of dinosaurs in ancient Europe, are the strange rocks which host them. The legendary reptile trackways appear just above crumbling bands of red clay that cut through the cream-colored peaks of the Dolomites—a striking dash in the strata that marks one of the most bizarre climate events ever.

Almost a quarter-billion years ago, rains soaked the arid wastes of the supercontinent Pangaea for more than a million years. When the floodwaters retreated, a new world was born.

I joined up with paleontologist Massimo Bernardi in Trento, Italy hoping to learn more about this primeval washout, known as the Carnian Pluvial Episode. It was one of the oddest climate events, and most severe biotic crises, in the history of life. We hopped into the museum truck of his Museo Delle Scienze and, before long, were winding through apple orchards that sloped off sun-splashed towers of ivory and rose-tinted dolomite. Here in northern Italy’s Adige Valley you’re as likely to be served strudel as gelato, and traveling from one mountain village to another represents a linguistic island-hop between Italian, German, and even Ladin, an ancient relic of Roman occupation. But among the jagged peaks that carve up this cultural collage, Bernardi was more interested in literal island-hopping between 230-million-year-old tropical atolls that had been thrust toward the stars and draped in snow.

Here in the mountains, the bottom of a prehistoric ocean meets the top of the sky, and gondolas hoist skiers up these ancient reef walls like alpine ammonites. In fact, the entire Dolomite region is a playground of exhumed lagoons, shallow seas, and tidal flats, part of a swath of Triassic rocks that extends all the way to Slovenia—lifted into the air ages later by Africa’s languid drift northward.

“Of course, they’re just rocks for most people,” said Bernardi about his hometown limestone, which piled up almost 2 miles thick in places, “But I kind of like trying to be the voice of those rocks.”

Bernardi is part of an international group of Carnian Pluvial Episode researchers, trying to reconstruct how this obscure spasm of extreme climate change tucked into the middle of the Triassic period rerouted the trajectory of life on Earth, and—if he’s right—launched the near-eternal age of the dinosaurs.

The crisis started with a familiar culprit. Two hundred and thirty-four million years ago, gigantic pulses of carbon dioxide erupted into the atmosphere from volcanoes at the bottom of the ocean—volcanoes whose frozen magma today can be found on the other side of the planet, grafted onto the side of British Columbia. This earthly belch of CO2 drove intense bouts of global warming, ocean acidification, mass extinction, and, most notably, a barrage of extreme rainfall and mountain-flattening mega-monsoons still visible in rocks around the world.

In Italy, the episode appears in places as a muddy red mess, many meters thick, that laterally slices through the white ocean rock of the Dolomites. Above and below this incongruous red-clay layer, in the kilometers of classic dolomite that sandwich it, one can find seashells living in what were the former white sands and reefs of a prehistoric Bora Bora–like platform almost 50 miles offshore. But among the surprising red layers of the Carnian Pluvial Episode itself one suddenly finds coals from forests, and lake sediments. The onshore world had somehow overrun the offshore one.

[Read: That dinosaur-killing asteroid? It triggered global warming, too]

The global warming pulse had fueled violent storms and lashing rains that attacked Pangaea, leveled the topography—eroding away whatever interesting terrain existed on the mainland—and dumped it all into the ocean. In the Dolomites the tropical island paradise was suddenly smothered by this red mud and swallowed up by a bloating supercontinental shoreline.

Similar signals of extreme rainfall and humidity are found in rocks all over the earth, from Japan to Argentina, as lakes and rivers briefly soaked a parched Pangaea. The extreme climate change apparently stressed trees so much that—from Hungary to Arizona—they exploded in resin (a defense mechanism seen in modern conifers under duress), leaving behind the first widespread deposits of amber in the fossil record, as documented by University of Göttingen botanist Leyla Seyfullah.

Like other similar heat waves deep in Earth’s past, the crisis was accompanied by sweeping extinctions. A menagerie of lumbering beasts (many of them unfairly consigned to the C-list of natural-history museums), like rhynchosaurs and dicynodonts, was all but exterminated; while in the ocean the disaster is marked by a massacre of reefs, sea lilies, shelled octopus relatives, and a sinuous group of marine reptiles called thalattosaurs.

Oxygen isotopes from the fossil teeth of tiny sea creatures reveal that the entire episode was kicked off by warming of only about 4–7 degrees Celsius—roughly the same magnitude predicted for our own world under a business-as-usual carbon-emissions scenario.

“We don’t need an experiment in a laboratory to tell us what happens when CO2 rises quickly, because it’s there in the rocks,” Bernardi told me about this ancient natural experiment that the planet ran all on its own. “It is written.”

But perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the Carnian Pluvial Episode was not the crisis itself, but the world that came after. Until then, dinosaurs had been a puny and obscure lineage confined to the furthest southern reaches of Pangaea. But by the time the crisis was over, they had spread all over the world—perhaps using the oddly humid pulse to hopscotch across the previously arid wastelands of Pangaea—and rapidly diversified, using the extinction of their competitors to experiment with new lifestyles. The planet would never be the same.

Bernardi pulled the museum truck up next to a typical tree-frosted colossus of beige rock that loomed over the valley floor. Halfway up, the cliff face was improbably interrupted by a crumbling medieval castle that had somehow been built into it more than 800 years ago. The castle apparently belonged to an older woman who waylaid us from her car window to complain to Bernardi in Italian about some teen trespassers, before driving away. Bernardi strapped on a helmet.

“You should not go up there, it’s not the safest place,” he said, pausing to size up the cliff before us. “It can be done.”

With that, we began climbing.

The rocks before us, some studded with seashells, were from sometime in the middle of the Triassic—an endlessly fascinating period that lasted from 252 to 201 million years ago. The Triassic was one of the most unstable periods in the history of life. It kicked off in the wretched and scorching aftermath of Armageddon, as the planet struggled to recover from the greatest mass extinction it would ever endure, the dread End-Permian mass extinction. (Earth’s cruelty to its own creatures knew no bounds in this terrible age, as a mere 3 million years after the apocalypse another minor mass extinction, the “Smithian-Spathian,” would punish the survivors for their courage.) And the Triassic concluded 50 million years later with a terrifying runner-up to doomsday: the End-Triassic mass extinction (like the Carnian Pluvial Episode, both the End-Permian and End-Triassic mass extinctions were carbon dioxide–driven global-warming disasters). But sometime between these bookending nightmares came the impressive rise of the dinosaurs, mammals, and crocodilians, as well as modern conifers, corals, and even plankton. The Carnian Pluvial Episode has long been seen as something of a stratigraphic curio buried in the middle of this stack of time, dismissed by some geologists as a local or unimportant event. But amazingly, as the fossil record has come into finer resolution in recent years, not only has an overlooked mass extinction been uncovered in the Episode, but the closer the dramatic origin of all these creatures has edged toward the immediate aftermath of the mysterious event as well. It marked just as much a planetary birth as death.

[Read: The chilling regularity of mass extinctions]

“We have been stuck with a definition of extinction that is very easy to understand but is very misleading,” said Bernardi, as I struggled to keep up on our hike. “Extinction is more or less thought of as death, as the end, as something that does not go forward. That’s obviously true but it’s just half of the history. And some of the events are more easily described by what is happening after than before.”

When we finally reached the castle in the cliff—what was left of it, at least—Bernardi informed me that we were, in fact, standing in the Carnian Pluvial Episode itself. And it was no coincidence that this medieval redoubt had been built into the exact line in the rocks that marked the ancient cataclysm. In the mountain of hard, island-paradise rock beneath us, before the event, there were no dinosaurs anywhere in Europe. Where we were standing though, in the castle ruins, was a cavity, a natural cave. Eroded out of the cliff face were the strange Pangaean red clays—the very same that had been dumped into the ocean by the unexpected megamonsoons of the Carnian Pluvial Episode, and that marked the fever of global warming. This disaster layer was softer than the otherwise hard ocean rock, and had thus been worn away. As a result, the ancient disaster had left a gap in the strata—and the perfect place to build a castle.

And, above us, more than a million years later, in the natural ceiling of the castle when the hard dolomite rock of an offshore Bahamas returned, and the Triassic world recovered, Bernardi pointed to the arrival of the dinosaurs: those unmistakable birdlike footprints of the planet’s most legendary inhabitants, pressed into this former tidal flat, now a ceiling in the mountains. I asked Bernardi whose footprints he thinks will be found in the rock layers above our own chemistry experiment with the planet.

"I think we don’t actually know how the grand scheme works and that is the scariest thing,” he said. “Because we might be just very close to changing something that then creates cascades of effects that we don’t know. We don’t know how it all works.”

Today we find ourselves at another very strange moment in the planet’s history. In the coming decades our climate may return to a state that has analogues only deep in geological time. The global water cycle could intensify by 24 percent by 2100. Who knows what this will mean for a civilization already struggling to accommodate unprecedented rainfall events like Hurricanes Harvey and Florence, and Japanese floods that, in recent months, forced the evacuation of almost 2 million people and an intensification of storms worldwide. In these liminal moments before our planet truly leaps backward into geological history, the need to understand strange events like the Carnian Pluvial Episode has taken on new urgency. We know that when you kick the climate system hard enough, truly crazy things happen to the planet. And we know that we’re kicking it about as hard as possible. But the lesson for posterity is that, however temporary these climate paroxysms, the world that comes after is never the same as the world that came before.

Later in the day, after a vertiginous gondola ride, we met Bernardi’s colleague Piero Gianolla on top of the snow-capped peak of Sass Pordoi, an alpine perch that provided jaw-dropping views of the Dolomites’ jagged kingdom. Gianolla traced for me, across the immense, wintry landscape, how the narrow band of Carnian Pluvial Episode geology—more than a million years of stormy chaos—slipped secretly across the countryside. The eroding red line shaped not only caves in the sides of cliffs, but the entire vista of mountains before us: Here, the ubiquitous red-clay layer had broken some of the peaks in half and, there, produced vast flat plateaus of red rock spattered with the footsteps of early dinosaurs.

Though they are often thought of as the mascots for mass extinction, dinosaurs benefited tremendously from the specter of indiscriminate destruction and climate chaos over their entire history—from this, the Carnian Pluvial Episode, to the mass extinction at the end of the Triassic which took out their crocodilian competitors and ensured the dinosaurs’ reign for over 100 million years. But mass extinction is an untameable fire and, in the end, brings about the fall of even the most storied empires.

Two hundred and thirty-four million years ago a path was cleared by climate change for the dinosaurs’ eventual dominance—propelling a previously unimpressive tribe toward greatness, like a band of ragged but resourceful Romans overthrowing the Etruscans. If our species is in the late stages of empire, for whom are we clearing a path?

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2PMT2NH

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