Quarry Stratum

The exposed stratum cuts a jagged gash across the quarry's muddy floor, its layers pressed into a geological palimpsest under twelve million years of compressed silt and marine deposition. Here, the limestone matrix fractures into irregular slabs where Sarah Jane's fossilized discovery juts from the rock face—three finger-like protrusions of blackened chitin encased in petrified bone. The stratum hums with damp chill despite the midday sun, its interstices weeping brackish water that beads on the alien hand like tears. Abbott's boot crunches through a nest of shattered ammonite shells, their iridescent fragments glinting as they tumble into the gouge left by the hand's extraction. Strands of algae stretch from the wet rock toward the chitin, as if the ancient ocean still claims what was never meant for air. The air carries the mineral weight of deep time and the sharp iron tang of disturbed earth, while the quarry's distant machinery thrums like a dissonant heartbeat across this frozen moment of collision between epochs.