Curious Creatures of the Austral Swamp

A polar ring of temperate and boggy deciduous forest surrounding the south pole, the austral swamp is the home of the sylvanspark, but also of many other oddities. This biome is the remnant of the longdark swamp, no longer blessed with warmth through its long winter night, but still inhabited by many species found nowhere else in the world. 

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In the far south, where the world is still often cool, wet, and shrouded in mists, there are still mysteries to be found.

The Sylvans sometimes speak of a water monster that sometimes appears at the shores of cold lakes on dark, foggy nights or rainy evenings, and approaches fishermen or curious youth at the water's edge. Very elusive, it never falls for traps, but readily steals fish from nets and lines, unhooking them with delicate dexterity without ever becoming snared itself. It, too, seems curious of the people of the land. It is regarded as a slightly malicious trickster spirit of the wilderness, more often heard than seen, with a high-pitched, sing-song voice that is sometimes said to mimic the inflections of people speaking nearby. A telltale sign that the mugwump is nearby is a sudden jet of water that hits one's face; by the time the target of this prank looks up, only ripples linger on the surface to tell something was there. The mugwump, when it is seen, is especially notable for its uncomfortable resemblance to people, and for its ever-wandering eyes, which can look in two directions at once, and even wink. It almost never leaves the water, but rarely village children report seeing a belly-sliding beast waddling with haste over a trail between two ponds, usually during heavy rains, which always takes a moment to look them in the eye before slipping and sliding away into the murk. In winter, it is considered responsible for cutting mysterious, almost perfectly circular holes in lake ice, just a couple of inches across, through which some claim to see a hooked tentacle disappearing beneath the surface just as they approach. Some say, if you stare down these holes, you just might come face to face with the creature's all-seeing eye - but to do is ill-advised, for it is a harbinger of bad luck.

To most Sylvans, the mugwump is a cryptid, a monster of legend. But this animal is, in fact, very much flesh and blood. The only inland whelican this far along in time, it descends from the sniper whelican, which traveled upriver seeking food and freshwater as the seas became saltier and shallower.  It is now the only species which endures cold, temperate environments, which it does by maintaining many small breathing holes through the ice, and hunting for fish and crustaceans in the cold waters below which don't freeze solid. The mugwump is the smallest of all whelicans, growing to only 50 lbs. Mostly solitary, they communicate through the air on spring and summer nights with murmuring calls to find mates. Young mugwumps are brooded in their mother's throat pouch in lakeside burrows with underwater entrances, before they are old enough to venture out to swim with her. As they grow older, they learn their species' calls from their mother and other mugwumps they meet, imitating their elders specific dialects. Some young mugwumps will go through a phase of copying other intriguing noises before their vocabulary is fully developed, which can include a garbled version of the speech of sylvansparks passing nearby.

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A hardy descendant of the greater firefox, the yeti is a robust browser of the swamp. The grasses and woody plants that grow here are far harder to eat than the soft polepoa its predecessor lived on in the jungles now quickly vanishing, but the yeti has become rougher in turn to manage its new diet, its jaws becoming even more strongly muscled. Teeth that used to shed regularly to prevent dental decay now do so as they are worn down from heavy use. Especially apparent, even at a distance, are the enlarged canines of this species that now project from the mouth even at rest. They are used in both sexes to snap sapling trees and to scrape off the nutritious bark while also opening up the sap-rich pith, but are still largest in males. Life is less easy now than before, and resources are much more scarce, especially when the trees shed their leaves in the fall and the land is soon covered in snow and ice. This has forced the firefox to become more aggressive to survive, and those teeth are not just for gathering food. Yetis have deadly bites which both stab and crush, and they will use them against anything they deem necessary, including other herbivores in their territories, and even against one another. A patriarchal species, only one adult male, bigger than the female by 30%, ever lives within a troop, and it must protect its mates and young from both predatory animals and from rival males which would kill its offspring if they overtook the group. Scarcity has encouraged experimentation in diet in the yeti, too, and animals that are attacked defensively may become food themselves, especially when winter's bitter chill means that there is little other choice of fare.

Yetis are large enough, and social too, so that they do not have many regular predators. They live within large territories, but the importance of boundaries is much more defined in summer than winter. They travel always in close-knit social groups, and though they are more sedentary through the warm seasons and remain deeper in the forest, come winter they will migrate longer distances and cross open plains in search of food, disregarding territorial boundaries if food is not to be found within their normal range, even if this means they may come into conflict with other groups. Bands of yetis are known to be especially problematic pests to the Sylvans in the cold season, as they are dexterous enough, with their finger-like digits, to break into food stores and cause general havoc, and smart enough to continue to return to do it again once they've succeeded once.  Bachelor troops, which lack the need to be cautious in order to keep young ones safe, are the worst offenders and most prone to become problematic. Fatal attacks are not that rare, and occasional routine "man-eaters" that learn to eat Sylvan flesh are the subject of tales around the winter campfires, but killer yetis are made, not born; they naturally have a wariness of the scroungers and their settlements, and will flee if they are interrupted while attempting to steal food. They only become bold and dangerous to the scrounger people themselves when, in warmer times of plenty, they may be tempted to feed them scraps when the yetis are still young and endearing - something that is not wise to do, for the cute little cubs grow quickly into 300 pound, massively powerful beasts that will stop at nothing to feed themselves when they run out of easier options.  

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Some swamp beasts are eerie, but mostly harmless. Some are potentially dangerous, but it can be avoided with care. Others, though, are always deadly. Though this descendant of the bogbeast has shrunk in size over the eons due to scarcer food resources, and still eats more plants than anything else, the enormous hodag is aggressive and pugnacious, able to kill most enemies which dare threaten it. Weighing up to 3,500 pounds and growing to 16 feet long, it is still formidable, and both sexes now exhibit bony horns behind their eyes, derived from small cartilaginous tubercles present in earlier ancestors. These horns are just small nodules in females but become branching structures in males, and can grow throughout life, occasionally reaching over two feet long. Though mainly for show, they are used to cause damage to one another in confrontations by headbutting. Males also sport a feathery wattle below their chins, a simple display structure, and about as complex of soft tissue as can be maintained in a climate with cold winters that would freeze off more complex ones.

Hodags too are natives of the austral swamp region of Serinaustra, this heavily altered remnant of the longdark swamp ecosystem, and they are among the largest animals left here. The poles are now glaciated, which has pushed this biome north to a less extreme latitude. The air is thinner here than at the equator, mirroring high alpine regions on Earth, but it is not as dry, and during the short summers the swamp still transforms into a green oasis as short woody trees and tall grasses grow in the limited season of warm conditions before dying back in the winter when snow blankets the ground in tall drifts. The hodag lurks the swamps alone, coming together to mate in the autumn but otherwise living lonely lives save for the single chick which is raised by the female - the male has forgone all parental duty as it evolved to be larger and more adorned than its partner, with the female spending far less time with him and incubating her own egg. They forage most on aquatic plants ripped up from marshes, and this makes up the majority of their summer diet. Winter brings scarcity, as the water freezes and forces the hodag to move up into short, remnant forests where it strips branches and bark - and turns its eye toward meatier fare to fill in the gaps of its diet. While generally dangerous only when confronted in summer, winter makes the hodag deadlier as it becomes more predatory, stalking and striking other large animals and feasting on flesh. Its tentacles are more specialized to kill than in earlier forms, now sharply hooked into talons that, while still used to pluck water plants, now have a more violent primary function - hunting. They have the strength and dexterity to bring down prey and cut their own meat, and their size means that they can overpower nearly everything else that coexists with them. Yet they are slow and have little means to overcome strong armor, which limits their prey mainly to the old, young, or sick that linger behind their herds, and to small prey such as murds, which it may dig out of winter hibernation dens with its hind leg claws after locating them by scent.

Thick plumage insulates the hodag from environmental dangers and inconveniences. Its winter coat is over a foot thick, with two layers, the outermost being a greasy waterproof shield from the weather and the inner being a dense insulating layer of down. The latter is shed after winter ends and temperatures rise in an explosive event known as the "spring blizzard", in which almost all of it is molted away in just a couple weeks, blowing away in the wind like snowflakes as the animal scratches itself on tree trunks to aid the process. This keeps the animal cool and dry in the brief summer months when such insulation would have difficulty drying after swimming and would trap too much body heat. Birds follow the hodag and collect this discarded material for their nests during the molt, and some murd species use it to line winter roosts made in preparation for the cold season so that when it returns, they have a comfortable, warm place to hibernate.

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What is worse - a huge, but easily seen enemy, or a small, sinister one that stalks unseen? Lurking in the densest, most impenetrable peat bogs of the south polar region lives an elusive beast called the bogwalker kak. Very conscious of its surroundings, and aware of its own body, this descendant of the hawk-billed kak goes to great lengths to avoid being detected. Its movement is often stilted, lifting each leg up slowly, uncertainly, before taking a step, as if to mimic a branch blowing in the breeze. It holds its shaggy, mottled plumage tight against its body, and assumes a posture with its bill lifted nearly vertical, so as to resemble nothing more than a tree trunk. But the eye of the bogwalker is always watching. The eyes of this scrounger can move within their sockets to a greater degree than nearly any other birds, turning to face forward, sideways, and back, letting their owner keep a look out all around itself without giving away its cover. Part of this ruse is to remain unseen by bigger, badder animals that share its boreal home. But to others, this kak is the bigger animal.

An omnivore, but well armed with a huge, downward-hooked upper tentacle, the bogwalker sneaks close upon hapless smaller prey and then strikes, grasping the prey's head between all four tentacles, and either skewering it through the brain with the largest claw, or using it to rip out the throat. The hunt complete, it disappears quietly back into the thickets, vanishing among the reeds and twigs, to feed. Not rarely at all, the bogwalker's victim is the sylvanspark, to whom it must represent a terrifying, primordial fear - a huge, monstrous thing that appears from nowhere, and drags one away to certain death.

Bogwalker kaks have specialized toes which are lined with very long fringes of scales. Descended from an arboreal species which descended from jungle trees as the climate cooled and transformed the landscape, they retain a rotating hind toe, and walk with their digits splayed far apart, which combined with their weight-distributing toe scales allows this kak to step lightly over loose, soggy terrain other animals its size would become mired in. They frequently hunt on top of floating mats of moss and other vegetation, a common feature of the boreal swamp, comprised of plants which have spread across a bog from the shore over many years, forming a bouyant raft of accumulated living and dead material, which may extend across an entire pool of water, or break away and form a floating island. These habitats are common traps in the swamp, for at a glance an animal cannot always tell there is no solid ground beneath the often thin layer of green, which can cause animals to fall through and become trapped in the mud, or drown in deeper water. The bogwalker kak sometimes exploits its own ability to distribute its weight to chase prey out onto these floating mats; as the prey flees, it pays little attention to where it steps, and it may break through. As is sinks into the murk, the kak sprints lightly behind to catch it, confident that unlike its victims, it faces little risk of falling in.  And in winter, the bogwalker's adaptations are repurposed as snowshoes. With the water frozen, now it steps over drifting snow much faster and lighter than its prey, running over the snow while other species must slog through it one step after another, exhausting themselves, and making the kak's job easy. In addition to flesh foods, bogwalkers use their tentacle claws to strip tree branches of bark and green shoots, and may feed on the roots and tubers of water plants. 

These scroungers are successful predators, and so they are not rare. They are only rare to see, at least most of the time. But in spring, bogwalkers must find mates, and the males then advertise themselves to potential partners by calling - their voice is a loud, nasally honk, and is amplified by a swollen sac that can be extended around either nostril. The tissue of this sac is bright red with blood flow, and serves as well as a visual signal of the calling male, appearing in brief bursts in conjunction with its call, to guide females in their direction. Mating is surprisingly gentle, for such a fierce beast, but the bond is very brief, and they soon part ways. The female alone lays a single egg some weeks later, in a safe and sheltered thicket, usually on a floating island where few predators can reach it. The single chick that hatches initially camouflages to hide in place whenever its mother leaves, freezing against the substrate, blending in with mottled brown and green downy feathers that resemble moss and twigs. Later, it will follow her through the swamp, learning to be a good, secretive hunter, until they too part ways early in the next year.

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As the hothouse gave way to the final stretch, sea levels recede enough that Ansteva reconnected to Serinaustra's mainland, allowing surviving animals to migrate across a new land bridge. The heffalump was one such traveler, and over the last ten million years its surviving descendant has changed in big ways.

The heftalump of Serinaustra is one of the last sealumps. But this is not its most notable detail, for it is also the largest trunko ever to walk the land, and among Serina's heaviest ever bipeds, reaching a weight of five tons, or some 10,000 pounds, the same as the largest of the Cryocene serestriders that until now were unrivaled in size among birds that walked on just two legs. Immense pillar-like legs support this bird's weight, and the adult rarely lays down, for its legs can lock into position and allow it to sleep while standing. The entire body of this sealump is now feathered, for the world is now a cold and unforgiving one. Flanges below the eye, once used to expel heat, are now small and fuzzy, like mittens which can cover the eyes during cold, snowy nights as it sleeps while the primary flanges along the mouth have a tusk-like claw used to  rip bark and branches from trees. An herbivore once fully grown, the gigantic heftalump is an extremely destructive feeder, and so neither lives in groups larger than two or three, nor spends long in any one place, instead living a wandering life across the cold southern forests which become a white wasteland for half of each year.

The grown heftalump is invulnerable to every predator. Up to 21 feet tall, there is nothing which can threaten it. But its young must begin their lives far, far smaller. The size discrepancy between adult and young is more extreme in this species than in any other trunko, for as big as the adult can grow, its egg cannot exceed a size limit long ago reached. A newborn heftalump weighs only 20 lbs, meaning its parent can be 500 times it size. A 20 lb chick would not stand a chance in the polar winter, nor could its huge parents protect it from smaller, agile enemies, so the heftalump has evolved a different strategy for raising its young than other trunkos. The chick is born as small as any other, but looks very different at hatching. While other trunko chicks are born fluffy and alert, and can walk and run soon after birth, the heftalump is born very undeveloped. Featherless, floppy, fat and blind, it is the only truly altricial trunko, and has evolved to do most of its initial development out of the egg, safely within its parent's pouch. Two eggs are laid at a time near the beginning of winter- a very unusual time to breed. One each is incubated by the male and female, which live in long-lasting pairs. When the chicks hatch, some 7 weeks later, they are fed a nutritious secretion produced in the throat of the adult - crop milk - and remain in the pouch for the next four to five months before ever taking their first steps out into the world beyond. Only once they are as large as a human, weighing some 180 pounds, is a heftalump chick ready to begin walking, and alert enough to follow its parents through the swamp. Now winter has passed, and spring is returned to the land. Food is abundant, and the chick can begin feeding itself on rich green leaves and abundant insects. Yet even at this size the chick returns to the pouch to sleep or if any sort of danger threatens, the adults quickly lowering their heads and the chick rushing inside to safety. A young heftalump may be nearly 300 lbs before its parents finally stop letting it inside.

The juvenile heftalump, too large to hide in the pouch, but still so small relative to its parents, is at its most vulnerable, and over the next couple years many are lost to predators such as the fearsome hodag. Despite spending years rearing each chick to independence (which can take as long as 6 years), most chicks do not reach this milestone. A long adult lifespan helps ensure that, eventually, at least one chick will grow up and become a breeding adult, but some 90% of chicks will die before being old enough to fend for themselves, with predation being the primary cause of death, and their first few winters outside the pouch a close second. This is the harsh reality of life in a changing world, but also nature's way of balancing things out. If every young heftalump reached maturity, there would soon be no forests left at all to support them, or any other animal of the austral swamp. The huge size of the adult means nothing can threaten them, but leaves their offspring far more vulnerable than those of trunkos with a smaller disparity of size between young and adult. 

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The sylvansparks and the slaughtersprinters, though intelligent and capable of altering their environment to suit them, nonetheless live in a world of very many bigger, meaner animals, from which they are often under threat. There may be no beast the scrounger sophonts fear more, though, than the gumberoo.

A gumberoo's name may sound silly, even harmless, but the creature that carries it is neither. It is an 800 pound monster, low to the ground and built like a brick house, with a gigantic skull supporting jaws can crush a scrounger to a bloody pulp in a single snap. For scroungers standing about two and a half, maybe three feet tall, the gumberoo might as well be Godzilla. It is universally feared, and for good reason: it is extremely, astonishingly aggressive, and is an equal oppurtunity eater of basically anything, plant or animal. The gumberoo has no predators - its only threat is its own kind, which it is seemingly always fighting. Solitary, scarred gumberoos can be lurking in any deep body of water, hiding below the surface, munching on water plants with their huge tusk-like canine teeth. You can never quite know if one is lying in wait down there in the murk, ready to lunge upward with an explosive force, grab you and crush you and drown you and rend you all in a matter of seconds. This horrifying water-dwelling beast, evolved from the adactus of the hothouse's great blue salt lake, is in fact a foxtrotter, though you would be forgiven for being unable to tell. Except for its individual teeth - of which there are very many, and all very large - it far more resembles a thorngrazer, and has a temperament and a lifestyle much more in line with that group. But there are no thorngrazers on Serinaustra - not yet, anyway, with the ocean between these two continents still forming a barrier they cannot cross.

Gumberoos now make their home wherever they want; nothing alive can stop them. But the most suitable place for them now, in this chilling world, is the austral swamp. There they live their solitary lives, never gathering, meeting only to mate, and even that is an aggressive affair. Like their precursors, males fight often and bloodily, and few young males reach adulthood to claim a territory and take their place as slayers of their own kind. Females are left alive, though even they will be bitten and harassed if they overstay their welcome in a dominant male's territory. And though they do not generally kill each other, even females without young attending go out of their way to slay the pups of other females, taking out future competition for their own future offspring whenever it is possible to get away with it. Gumberoos exist as strange animals, living lives that seem excessively violent. And yet, this is how they have evolved. Any individual with a less hostile nature is quickly killed by its rivals. Now, if this didn't occur, they would have no limits to their survival, and could very well destroy entire biomes just by existing. Natural selection has runaway, unrestrained, making meaner and more aggressive animals, because if they were not this way, they would be wholly uncontrolled. Yet it is not entirely immune to the threats of its world. Sure, the gumberoo's thick skin may render it relatively impervious to most scrounger weapons. And yes, its catholic diet might let it survive on almost anything it can fit into its mouth. Technically, the gumberoo can be killed with fire, but good luck getting that to work when it spends nearly all of its time in the water. But what the gumberoo cannot endure is prolonged frozen conditions. And in this new ice age, its range is decreasing. Unable to survive winter at the pole where water freezes solid, it is now restricted to only a few patches of austral swamp, hemmed in by a wide, dry steppe to the north that they could not hope to pass, and by the encroaching polar winters of the south, worse each year.

In the end, the gumberoo will not last long into the final stretch, because this new, bitter cold - only set to get worse - is one thing that even this monster of monsters simply cannot fight off.

~~~

The gumberoo's close relatives are quite different from itself. The marimonstrum is a strange tribbethere by every account. It is, in almost every way, a representation of how the gumberoo's lineage could have turned out had it gone down the opposite route from carnivory to herbivory - and found greater success in this changing world. Weighing up to 600 pounds, it has shrunk from its manducus ancestor, but has acquired several unusual adaptations including very large recumbent upper canine tusks, and a fleshy, trunk-like nose which is used as a snorkel. This foxtrotter is still found along the margins of the austral swamp, but is especially common as a coastal, marine herbivore that now feeds mainly on aquatic puffgrasses in shallow sandy waters near the ocean. Its tusks are used to uproot clumps of this vegetation like the tines of a pitch fork, digging into the sand and then prying out the roots, so that the animal can then chew up the entire plant with its box-like, blunt molar teeth. Its nose is very mobile and allows it to breathe without surfacing the rest of its body.

These animals evolved quite recently from their terrestrial ancestor in response to changing climate conditions. The manducus itself, though terrestrial, had recent ancestors which fed only in marshlands and swamps, and after being displaced from these southern, inland habitats over time by other animals and cooling climate, the manducus was able to quickly expand its horizons, taking to a life near water as it traveled outwards from its inland home, toward where rivers met the ocean. Bear-like and robust, it is not yet entirely marine, and it spends much of its time on shore. But with large webbed feet, a mostly hairless coat, reduced ears, heavy bones that let it walk underwater, and of course its trunk-like nose, it is well on its way to a life comfortable at sea, and is one of the most marine foxtrotters of the era. Individuals are solitary but not especially territorial; bright, contrasting markings on the shoulder, head and neck allow individuals to see each other from far distances in foggy conditions, and so choose whether or not to interact without surprising each other and causing unnecessary fights.

Some 80-85% of the marimonstrum's diet is aquatic vegetation, making it a conventional herbivore. But it is still somewhat opportunistic, and will also feed on bivalve molluscs, worms, and occasionally benthic fish which it finds while foraging. The marimonstrum may also feed on carrion, but only if it is very fresh, as its stomach is weaker than its carnivore ancestors and can no longer tolerate rotting flesh - to eat anything which has gone bad would now make this animal, with its much longer, slower-moving digestive system, very ill, so it is must be more selective in its meals. Females raise a single offspring without any help from the male; the young has thick hair unlike the adult, which holds insulating air. This also means it can float from birth, so that the marimonstrum does not need to construct a den or leave its pup alone while it feeds. Like a sea otter, a mother marimonstrum will secure her pup safely by wrapping it in seaweed as she forages nearby, ensuring it does not float too far away; she returns to it at least hourly, allowing it to climb on her back, and grooming it to its fur coat stays clean and warm. Within a month it can swim freely and begin to nibble on solid foods, but it will stay with her for at least a year, learning all that it needs to survive.

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Though the marimonstrum is relatively docile, and not especially dangerous to sylvans who only rarely come across it, all in all the austral swamp is still a dangerous home, full of feared beasts that threaten the sophonts. Yet not every species is feared. Some are respected, even venerated. But even these bloodless relationships do not apply to all. 

Sunchaser is our protector. Wisest, fiercest, and most powerful of beasts, even sun and moon fear Him, and flee when He flies at morning and dusk, and so as He hunts the heavens, He ends each day and brings the next. Sunchaser demands respect. Those who defy Him will face his wrath, but those who regard Him as He deserves may receive his favor. Sunchaser appeased will bring fortune to His followers, but Sunchaser scorned will bring devastation.

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The sunchaser, Angusticristus apex (apex narrow-crest), is one of the last truly giant aukvultures, even though some smaller relatives still survive. A descendant of the great crested drakevulture, it is even larger than many hothouse relatives. It wanders a quiet world post-hothouse world wherever its wide wings, stretching 35 feet or more, will take it. It is the largest and surely most grand of several late-surviving aukvultures coming from this ancestor, which are known as wyvultures, a name inspired by the bipedal dragons, the wyverns, of mythology. Though a walking quadruped, these archangels frequently rise onto their hind legs for short periods, standing tall and showing off their awe-inspiring wingspans to intimidate rivals.

The sunchaser, an apex predator, inherits a world growing cold and inhospitable from hothouse relatives that have not adapted in time. To survive now it is resourceful and opportunistic, able to fly great distances and over seas and continents to find a meal and find a mate. Wide ranging and rare, they are not endemic to the austral swamp. In fact, they only rarely spend any length of time in a single place, and they live on a knife's edge, precariously balanced at the wavering top of an unstable ecosystem. Globally, their population may never exceed a thousand adults at any one time. Capable hunters, they more often scavenge the kills of other predators, none of which can now rival them when this giant drops from the heavens and takes claim over a carcass. Its jaws are fierce and sharp, its beak undershot like a hook to rip meat from bone in an upwards jerk, to pilfer carrion and fly away with a stolen prize. If here today, it will be gone tomorrow. An infrequent breeder, pairs may go apart for years only to rendezvous as if they never parted; highly intelligent, they seem capable of communicating and retaining information that will not be needed for years. They demonstrate a great awareness of the passing of time, and the capacity to understand and coordinate for the distant, unseen future. Their seeming wisdom, along with their incredible power, has inspired sapient cultures for thousands of years.

In Serinaustra's clearview mountains, just north of the swamp, the sunchaser is revered as a god by a culture of sylvansparks living here on the edge of their world. They ceremoniously feed the giants, and in doing so encourage them to remain around more than they otherwise would. This provides protection to them and their tamed animals from other less agreeable carnivores, which fear this dragon, and from certain rivals, too. Slaughtersprinters do not follow the sylvans in their beliefs. To many of their cultures, the sunchaser is a demon, a scourge that threatens their survival by stealing hard-earned kills and indiscriminately killing their own. Far from idolizing the sunchaser, they shoot it, they set traps. It is an enemy, and they seek to kill it. The dual nature of the scroungers' perceptions of the sunchaser are equally valid; it is an intelligent, adaptable animal, equally capable of coming to an agreement with an ally for a mutual benefit, and of perpetuating a hostile feud with an enemy. 

But these opposing views maintain an already deep rift between cultures prone to conflict, whose most peaceful ties are wary trade relations orchestrated by third parties with their own agendas; whether there is any hope of true alliance for sylvans and sprinters, if the god of one is a monster to another, still remains to be seen.