#extinction

Early on the male protagonist meets a female who voices her desire to never build a nest, to not have her entire life be bound to taking care of chicks and taking care of elderly of the flock until she herself is too old to go fishing for her own food. Recently their flock had suffered an attack by a predator, who killed most of that year's chicks, so the female is concerned, that other members of her flock might not be understanding of her decision since new chicks are desperately needed. The protagonist reminds her that (being based on birds as they are) one of the core values of their culture is the phrase "The female's choice is sacred." No one is allowed to critizise a female's choice of a mate, even if she chooses to pick a mate from a different flock, from a different species, to mate with another female resulting in unfertilized eggs or if she chooses to not mate at all.

I make the protagonist say the words, "Even if you were the last fertile female of our species, you'd still not owe anyone chicks. If our species can't survive without forcing a female to mate against her will, we deserve to go extinct." To him, this is of course just a speculative scenario that he presents to the female who is doubting her choice, to convince her not to compromise her true wishes. At this point of the story, their species is numerous and neither of them consider extinction to be a realistic scenario. The doubting female thanks protagonist for his encouraging words and desides to follow her heart, leaving the flock to explore the world and have adventures of her own.

After the protagonist and the doubting female have parted ways, many world-changing events take place. The fantasy world they live in goes through a cataclysmic change, spirits wage wars against each other over mortals and the land where the bird people live falls under the rule of the greatest of the evil spirits. Much like the passenger pigeon, which once was among the most numerous birds, the rapid hunting of the bird people by the evil spirits drives the bird people to extinction. With the exception of protagonist and the one lone female, who had left their homeland before shit hit the fan.

The great evil spirit regrets allowing her servants to kill the bird people in such an uncontrollable manner. When she finds the last surviving male and female, she imprisons them and demands them to repopulate. "Surely you understand the responsibility you have for the future of your species." Terrified of her, they pretend to agree.

After being left alone, they speak their true feelings. "Do you still stand by those words, that I don't owe chicks to anyone, even if I was the last female of our species?" the female asks. Protagonist has not changed his opinion on the subject. "We disgrace our culture if we repopulate our homeland by violating the sanctity of a female's choice and bring forth a generation of chicks whose fate is to increase the numbers of our species through incest."

Together they come up with a plan to trick the evil spirit and instead of reproducing themselves, they secretly help a member of a different species to bring into the world a new species, which turns out to be the one who can defeat the evil spirits. The great spirit war comes to an end, the world is stable again, though drasticly changed. This is where my original story had its happy ending.

I wrote an epilogue, in which protagonist visits last female on her deathbed. She doesn't regret her choice to never breed, but doesn't handwave the burden that such a decision brought her. "Historians may not paint a favorable image of me. I predict I will be seen as a selfish female, who had the chance to save our species and cruelly decided not to. There will be many, who think I should have set aside my own wishes for the benefit of our kind." "Humans and other uncivilized folks may think so." protagonist says, "But we were a civilized race. The fate of a nation must not be decided in a female's genitals. All living creatures will once meet their death, every species will one day march into the Chamber of Extinction. Our species had a long and successful reign but now we must step aside and make way for something new to take our place."

Through fiction, through fantasy, I wanted to try to imagine what it would be like to be a woman in that kind of a speculative scenario. The heavy burden of having the fate of an entire species pushed upon you. I feel that fantasy setting with several sentient species doesn't quite work, since if humans went extinct in our world, there would be no one to judge the last woman in books of history.

I don't know if my thought experiment led to anything meaningful, but it was a fascinating scenario for a fantasy story. At least it made me realize one of the reasons why I find the "we must ensure the survival of humanity as a species no matter what" stuff found in post-apocalyptic stories so distasteful: when there's only a handful of survivors, their offspring will end up forming incestuous pairs and perhaps we as a species should rather die out than try to stay alive by crawling in the low end of the gene pool.