Supercontinent Laurasia (present day France), Late Carboniferous

You've found an almost perfect spot. A ray of sunlight found its way through the lacy canopy above to anoint and soften your stiff wings. Now the dew that made them too heavy for you to even think about flying has all but evaporated. Despite the warmth and the soporific buzz of your surroundings, some instinct pulls you away from slumber, readying your body for the hunt. 

The signal travels through the nerves of your wings and they quiver into motion, lifting your body into the air with ease. As you spiral off your perch, the oxygen-rich air floods spiracles in your abdomen, feeding the ravenous muscle fibers that keep your wings buzzing.

Through the deep black orbs that dominate your head, you scan the swamp around you.

Ferns bending in a breeze tempt you momentarily, but you dart on, searching for animal flesh (for you are Meganeura, apex predator of the air). You avoid certain parts of the swamp, being too bulky to slip between a decaying log and the wiry club mosses branching wildly up from the damp ground. Any slick little amphibian hiding in their shade is safe today.

You dive, skimming the stagnant pond water and sending ripples that spook the lobe-finned fishes beneath the surface. Silent and fearless you wind around trunks and under arching branches until, just below… a dart.

Reflex kicks in. You dive, not headlong towards your quarry but angled just to the side.

As you pass, you lock eyes with the witless scorpionfly. Maybe it thinks you missed, poor creature.

Before circling back to your perch, you find a branch conveniently sized to fit between your tail and the chitinous spike that runs parallel. You wiggle your hindparts to dislodge the scorpionfly corpse and transfer it to the cradle in your legs.

When you alight on your favorite branch, the sun has slipped too low to warm you. Mouthparts quivering, you feast in the dying light.

The sun will rise again, and, again, you will prowl the skies. You will see 360 of these sunrises if you are lucky, and each day will resemble the one before. You will procreate and your children's children's children's children will live your life. Predator-less, they will exist without fear, only hunger. 

Generation upon generation, living, dying, decaying. Born on the branch of a tree that grew from their ancestor's remains. For 60 million years until your giant, glorious progeny are born to a world with air too thin to sustain them, and their slighter siblings survive them, whittling your descendants to mere figurines of their forebears. 

…

A little way underground, the carbon that was once your body rests atop the scorpionfly's carbon. The carbon of the clubmoss atop the decaying log. Deeper and deeper you're buried and the pressure builds. Your electrons meet the electrons of the scorpionfly, forming a crystalline molecular structure. Shiny black, it rests… and rests.

… 

Three hundred million years underground and you still remember the sun when you are exposed before it. Its rays wash over an enormous gash in the side of a bare mountain. Around you, in striations of black and gray, your entire bloodline and everything that grew around them lie prostrate before yellow arms with shovel faces that have come to take you away.

You lumber across a continent where regimented grasses and scraggly trees quiver around the margins of a concrete landscape. The pulsing hum of insects has become a monotonous roar of engines—a sound that accompanies you on winding roads, down mountains, and across bridges. The humming comes to an end and you roll from the truck bed to a pile of other carboniferous creatures. Distilled to shiny black coal, you ride one-by-one towards the orange glow of an underground sun.