"Spirit of the Marshlands"

My consciousness hovered just outside the tangled reeds of the riverbank, where mud oozed cold between my claws. Water slid over scales like silk, and the smells were sharp: algae, fish, bodies of friends and foes. Sometimes I still couldn’t tell whether I was dreaming, or truly become the Spinosaurus—the ancient hunter, the lumbering shadow in the water.

But then Jack’s voice echoed in my mind, thin and human, slicing through instinct. *“You back, Sam? We need eyes.”*

Through my elongated jaws I tried to growl, but it came out as a low bass rumble, the language of my spirit form. All I could do was nod my massive head, frill crest sweeping reeds aside. The others—Dana as a fox, light-quick on the banks, and Yusuf, black bear, lumbering carefully—were invisible predators in the shade. We had learned to shift into our spirit shapes months ago, but the weight of my new body, the confusion between eras, never faded.

It was meant to be safe in the marshlands outside town. Stealth mission. Warning some dryads—yes, actual dryads, long story—about the biohazard team with their drones and tranquilizer rifles. No one needed to get hurt.

But the tranquilizer dart’s hiss was louder than the rainfall. Something hammered into my flank, fire streaking through scales into muscle. I reared up, shrieking. The world tipped: reeds snapped, the world blurred. I tumbled into the river, a meteoric crash, limbs thrashing.

*Don't black out. Can't let go. They're counting on me.*

Water filled my nostrils. Panic thudded into a heavy drum. I tried to swim, but the sleek precision of my dinosaur body was gone—now just deadweight, tail trailing, one inert leg twisted at the wrong angle. The dart must've hit an artery.

*Sam, can you hear me?* Dana’s voice, flaring in the mind-link we shared when shaped. *Hold on. We're coming.*

I wanted to respond—to say anything. Instead, I snapped my jaws and forced myself to think past the animal terror. Long neck, powerful tail, but only one good leg for propulsion. The river wanted to pull me under. My head broke the surface; air burned my lungs.

A glint of orange: Dana, her fox form a streak of flame, circling to distract the biohazard team. Yusuf’s shape hit the water with a huge splash. I could barely drag myself onto his back.

Pain burned. Nausea spun my vision. The suit-clad men shouted, firing more darts, too slow to hit Yusuf’s bear bulk as he heaved us upstream.

My tail, a rudder in the murky flow, thrashed weakly. I remembered being a boy with hands, with feet, with the promise of college applications and Friday night pizza, before all this.

Now I was a prehistoric monster, bleeding bright red, holding on because my friends believed I could.

We crashed through reeds and vanished into deeper forest, panting, soaked, limbs trembling. My eyes fluttered as the pain spiked. I felt hands—Dana’s, shaped back human now—touch my ancient snout and whisper desperate words.

“Stay with us, Sam. You’re not just a dinosaur. You’re *our* dinosaur.”

Her eyes were wide and shining as Yusuf wrapped heavy arms around my neck, anchoring me to this timeline, these friends.

I let the world blur and swirl, hoping the dream would hold me. Because in this impossible existence—half boy, half beast—it was friendship that mattered. Even as darkness crept in on the edge of my sight, I knew: I was going to fight my way back. For them. For us.

This story was generated by user kade with assistance by one of OpenAI’s large-scale language-generation model; prompts used to help generate the story are shown below.

Images were generated with OpenAI's AI system, DALL·E 2, or uploaded by the user.

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