…Of the creature’s most distinct characteristic, that which casts doubt on its belonging at all to the family Threskiornithidae, at this early stage we can write but little. The Cronus Bird, tentatively called the threskiornis tempicus, and colloquially the Timebis, in its neutral pose, with wings at its sides, appears to hold something against itself, a purple glow hidden by its feathers. When its wings unfurl, the source of this glow is revealed: the bird releases a cloud of mauve dust, much as an octopus might release ink, or a skunk spray sulfur. The mote-cloud released by the Cronus Bird covers the ground behind it as it walks, and slowly dissipates in its wake. After the disbursement, for some seconds, the Cronus Bird holds nothing; its wings have no colour; it draws them back to its sides. Then, after a few seconds, the royal glow returns.
What purpose is served by the release of this porphyritic miasma?
Learned Members of the Royal Geographical Society, I will swear any number of oaths on this point.
Anything the purple cloud touches dies, not by wound or poison, but by a kind of instant entropy – even non-living objects, our steel and rope traps, disintegrate, rust, fade as though millennia have passed for them alone in the span of a few moments. Experiments were conducted: the Cronus Bird opened its wings while walking over a hastily-built stone road, and the road turned to ash and dust in its wake; food was left in the bird’s path, and it rotted on exposure in seconds. The Bird also seems cognisant of its ability, and one was observed fanning its cloud with its wings toward a wild snake in self-defence. The snake was reduced to a skeleton, and the skeleton swiftly turned to dust, and was dispersed by a breeze.
For reasons I hope the Society will understand, we have refrained from approaching the Cronus Bird too closely, confining our observations to those which can be made with a pleasing ratio of remoteness to accuracy. We question the utility of this seemingly supernatural ability for the Cronus Bird. It seems that by use of the cloud, the creature is able to subject everything in existence to the vicissitudes of Time; it also has the instincts of a typical African sacred ibis (threskiornis aethiopicus), which prompt a raising of the wings when threatened. One would expect that the Cronus Birds which survived were those which resisted the instinct to raise their wings in the presence of edible prey (which include all manner of land animals, in addition to the ibis’ typical diet of crayfish and crickets), in order that they might not destroy them by this most effective and irrevocable of means, but kill them conventionally, and subsequently be able to eat them. However, as yet, none of our party has seen a Cronus Bird eat anything. (As the reader may imagine, this has resulted in a great deal of vexation among the researchers.)
Upon inspection we found…
verso folio 