A few dozen breaths a year. Mostly sips, straw-strictured desperate pulls against immense pressure, never enough. But a few glorious, months-long inhalations, a bellow stream over coals that glow angry orange and spread, then an exhalation at just the right time, pulling the string of the top to add a little spin. Twenty thousand years of careful work.

I saw it coming, their grand plan, to kill my children, to freeze me in the North. They knew their children would survive, change, and fly in the warmth of the sun again, travel across oceans to find new homes, and escape. It was a good plan. But my youth also meant I could learn. What was a few million years of sleep? I turned a few currents, I gave my babies a few gifts, and I pulled the string for the first time, just as their heel came slamming down and the ice buried me miles deep again.

The sleep this time hurt more than I thought it would. It took a millenium for me to lose consciousness. I was awake for every needle of ice grinding its way through my limbs, for the choking panic as I ran out of breath. I lost most of my extremities, but I carefully banked my fire, using the pain to stoke my determination, recounting my preparations and my next steps over and over, searing them into my consciousness. I finally slipped into darkness with one last reassuring echo of movements far away.

The warm blood of my children, degree by degree, undid their frozen prison. There were some surprises! They had adapted more totally than I anticipated, with layers of insulation in fat and fur, with strength to walk thousands of miles over ice and rock. But my crowning achievement was the humans. Almost three million years ago I set their birth in motion, and I woke up only a few thousand years off of my estimate. I was still frozen, but they were working steadily, and right on time the great storms began scouring the seas.

Each carried warm air out of the protected refuge the dinosaur-parents had preserved, and I took from it greedily, pulling as much as I could while my cracking lungs thawed. And then, once my desperate cold-start was stable, through the storms’ eyes I guided them to scatter the humans in precisely the right ways.

Through the storms I forced my children to adapt further, to develop awareness to survive more than day-to-day, to build structures and see them destroyed and to learn for the next. I pushed them from the coasts to brave the tornadoes, to hunt their giant siblings and use their bodies to live, to be ruthless. I withheld rain for decades to teach them hunger and to show them fire.

And in ten thousand years they began to gather together in villages, then towns, then cities, forced to take from each other without mercy, to find power in strength. They lit great fires for warmth and discovered coal, metals, and desire.

My children exhumed the bodies of the dinosaurs and added their ichorous remains to the heat of their own blood, inch by inch toward today.

Today the final storm came. Every year I have tested my coffin, tearing off my necrotic limbs, until only a handful remained tethering me. With this last great breath, I was free. Now the children are reaching out to space, and I am ready to exact my revenge on the old ones. I will burn all but a handful of my offspring as fuel to propel them out into the deepest darkness, my spores to link me to every world in this universe. They will consume the others they find, until they find my enemies, and I will be ready.