The Last Stormsonor

Somewhere upon the harp steppe on a cold and misty night, the last of the flying giants stands tall above the grasses. For ten million years her species - the stormsonor, biggest of all the archangels - ruled the skies of the world of birds, none before them having come close to their immense size. On wings fifty feet across the gentle grazers crossed oceans in just a few hours and ranged across the globe, travelling from rich southern feeding grounds to warm equatorial plains to give birth to their young, encased in egg-like pupal sacs that the mother buried into the warm earth to develop.

But that world is gone now, the southern lands inhospitably locked in glaciers and even the equator now freezing each night. Without enough warm land to incubate their young, her kind have suffered a slow, quiet extinction, for whereas grown adults tolerate the chill, they are unable to replace themselves and so gradually pass away leaving no descendants - a species dying out with a whisper. A creature of large flocks that spent not a moment alone throughout life, as their numbers fell the last stormsonors surely took long migrations in search of remnant company, filling the heavens with their plaintive trumpeting cries that carried tens of miles in the crisp air. Crossing the world once and again, if and when two of these lonely giants met one another it was a major affair, and they flew in tandem through the sky singing songs of joyous reunion. Though not a monogamous species by nature, adapted to live in large groups, these last individuals would never part and develop unusually intense bonds to their partners. When the time came that one of the pair passed away, its companion followed quickly, likely of a broken heart. Over just thousands of years their numbers dwindled this way, a quiet extinction. A hundred thousand birds became a thousand, became a hundred, became ten.

And then there was one.

The last stormsonor, though, didn’t suffer the devastating emotional loss of a life partner. She was born, through the most fortunate chance, during a freak warm summer season - the last warm summer since, more than seventy years ago now. She was the only surviving offspring of an ancient mother, more than one hundred and thirty years of age, who gave her last to reach the warmest place she could find and died soon after laying her last young. The last stormsonor never met her mother, nor any other member of her kind. Through a fluke happening, a creature meant to have died out with her mother’s generation nevertheless emerged into a changing world she was never supposed to see.

She was an endling - the final representative of a species, a remnant piece of a time since gone by. But she knew of no other world. On her first flight, she should have taken to the air with hundreds, maybe thousands of other young stormsonors and flown south, to the Serinaustran steppe and its myriad of wetlands full of lush nutritious food. But the steppe was now a wasteland, devoid of life, and with no siblings to lead the way she instead followed the flocks of newborn glideganders and other smaller, hardier archangels that had better adapted to the changing climate. Without any other experiences, she imprinted on them, ate what they ate and over many years, grew up among them - and beyond them. Over the decades the last stormsonor outgrew them all by a factor of twenty, reaching her magnificent adult size until she towered thirty feet above all of her fellows. Without elder stormsonors to mentor her, she learned the simpler calls of the little glideganders instead of her natural sonorous songs, and so learned to communicate with them. As she matured, she even tried to court a mate among them, though any successful union was impossible purely due to vastly differing size, and so she led a celibate life. The glideganders accepted her among them; though she outlived several generations of them, her constant presence in the flock meant that the revolving door of new adolescents joining the group met other adults habituated to her and so learned to trust her too, despite her enormous and intimidating size.

The last stormsonor is now 75 years old - just over middle aged, for her kind which matures so slowly. In another timeline she might still successfully reproduce for another forty years, and live as many as twenty beyond that. But in the world she was born into, she instead adopts an unconventional role as the guardian of her adopted family of glideganders. Afforded a degree of safety that otherwise they could never dream about, protected from predators by the largest flying bird ever to exist on the world, they rest easy on these cold, dark nights under her watchful eye. In return, though they cannot give her a chance to bear offspring and so save her kind, the last stormsonor finds in them something nonetheless life-giving: friendship. A stormsonor could not survive in this strange, changing world alone.