Lonesome Company

The fork-tailed babbling jay was the culmination of the trend demonstrated among Serinan life toward ever-higher behavioral complexity over time. But it was an experiment that was short-lasting - forged and extinguished in just four thousand years. The species left behind two closely related species, but which lacked the same sort of circumstance that would leading them down the path toward developing their own civilization. Done in by climate change that shifted their habitat from desert to forest and the introduction of moisture-loving pathogens into a formerly arid environment where they were never previously exposed, the fork-tails succumbed quickly and quietly, with a whisper.

There was a small degree of immunity in a handful of individuals, but not enough to maintain their population for very long, which would have resulted in the final individual integrating into a social group with its next closest relatives. The hardier forest-dwelling white-winged babbling jays, Loquax albopteryx, looked very similar, and were also highly intelligent and shared many behaviors, but lacked the greater capacity for abstract thought, the spark which made the fork-tails what they were and let them begin building a world greater than that of day to day survival. Forming a pair bond with the closest approximation to his own kind, the union, being close, bore fertile offspring. Though none quite took after him, he was left with at least some semblance of company - a warm body in the night, and a flock to fly with by day - but alone with his thoughts. With no one truly able to understand his plight, he hoped one day to see his first family again... and though they were a secular culture, he may have even wondered for the first time if there could be an after-life after all, where he may one day meet them again.

Or could they really be gone for good... just like that?

Such was the endling fork-tail's life for many years that followed, for he was still young when he was left by himself. He became the leader of a thriving clan of white-winged babbling jays in the forest, his great intellect winning him many battles with rival groups and ensuring survival in the harsher seasons. But he was never fully fulfilled. When his body grew frail, he died in familiar company, but with questions left unanswered, about his own life and why the world works as it does. 

~~~~

Many years later, a distant granddaughter of the last fork-tail hatched nearby and took her first flight from her tall tree nest to the ground below. She was different from the rest in a way she didn't yet understand, and immediately found herself fixated upon the scenery; distant mountains in the morning light, shimmering blue lakes glistening like sparkling stars. While her brothers squabbled over a cricket dropped on the dirt by their father, she was engrossed in the beauty of her world in a way the others could not experience. So distracted was she by her ability to appreciate beauty that she didn't see the bigger bird drop from the sky until its beak closed tight around her throat and it uneventfully carried her off toward those beautiful mountains to feed to its own nestlings.

For the babbling-jays, it simply wouldn't pay off to be so smart any more, and so over the coming eons, they would revert wholly and completely back to an instinctive way of life, the spark of their ancestors soon all but forgotten, their ability to see the world for more than it was lost like leaves falling into water, as the business of day to day survival was again their entire existence.

But maybe, some day far off, that spark could yet return.