Hibernation

For how long will you stay here?

Looking outside, there was nothing. 

The land was bare, devoid of intelligent life. Plants grew weakly in their soil. He realized he was standing atop a large Cliff. And when he looked down, he could see this giant crater. This giant crater was filled with white snow that was very powdery and very cold. There was a great big dragon who slept in a little corner of the cliffs. Its tremendously large body blended in with the color of the landscape. Its thick skin was so rugged and so textured that he almost mistook it for the landscape itself.

There was the coward mage who had decided he wanted to destroy the beast. And wow, he was such a coward. One could see him sprawled upon the ground, trembling in fear of the rumbling of the dragon's every breath.

The dragon had no intelligence. It was an animal driven by instinct to survive. It knew only of eating, hunting, resting and sustaining this tremendous body of a dragon. In the north, the weather was incredibly skewed. Half the year was summer and the other half of the year was winter. In winter, there was no light. The days would usually be dark and dreary for months on end. And it was in the dark and dreary days that the dragon would sleep. It would hibernate deep beneath the powdered snow of the crater.

However, during most of the summer time, it would be out and about crawling atop the landscape of earth. Yes, this dragon had wings, but to save energy, even in the summer when it was cold, it was still cold. In the summer it would crawl like a lizard on top of the rugged earth. The dragon moved very slowly. Oftentimes, one would be unable to tell if the dragon was awake or if it was hibernating. Only when one was suddenly crushed by a quick and uncharacteristically fast movement of a dragon's body. The dragon ate all kinds of creatures, all sorts of flesh, anything that would sustain itself.

Those who had witnessed Dragons and lived to tell the tale described them as giant moving mountains that should be avoided at all costs. And there used to be many, many more Dragons in the past centuries, but they've all died out by now because of the lack of food and the fact that they were such massive creatures that they couldn't sustain their own colossal bodies.

All life on this planet evolved from tiny little organisms. Even the giant dragon that lay in the snow field. 

......

Luci had somehow dragged the sleeping pod out of the little base that was flooded. Finding it again, he realized how uncomfortable it was. There were grains of sand that were in the pod. It was difficult to clean and no matter what he did, there always seemed to be little grains of rocks and random stuff hanging about in there. Additionally, there was also the smell of the eroding plastic lining within the incubator.

He really wanted to ask himself why? Why did you buy such a cheap incubation chamber? Luci certainly did not remember how cheap he was. He could barely afford such an extravagance of sleeping within an incubation pod for a few centuries, nonetheless, a pod that was higher in quality. He even had his memory wiped so that he wouldn't know, overloading his memories and becoming a shaking mess of a vegetable person.

In the time when he was last conscious. Luci had known being incubated had become a very popular trend amongst the youth and the wealthy. A few centuries ago, he spent his life savings to buy this incubation chamber from a famous company that sold such products. It was the company's cheapest model.

It was time to go back to hibernation, often would think to himself. He hoped that the incubation chamber would hold up for a few more centuries. Perhaps before he returned to his slumber, he would complete the mission of finding a souvenir from the timeline that he awoke. He could bring with him a small keepsake that would remind him of his awareness.