Frozen North

295 Million Years Post-Establishment

Somewhere in the far north of Serinarcta's east coast, a solitary pretenguin has inexplicably wandered over twenty five miles from the shore, walking for days on end far into a land it does not know and does not belong. What has driven its migration can only be speculated. Perhaps it is deranged, and is behaving in ways that cannot be justified, that are not based in reality. But perhaps sometimes such an inescapable urge to wander in some individuals might benefit a species, allowing it to establish a new colony in a distant location previously unknown. Not often, perhaps, but just enough that the tendency remains in some, when their colonies get crowded, to see what lies just beyond. Maybe sometimes they find what they seek.

But not this time. Stranded and lost in a snowstorm, the disoriented pretenguin is tired now. He can go no further. Why he has taken this risk is known to himself only, but what is clear now is that it has been a gamble that did not pay off. It could be said that as it ended in failure, the journey was in vain. But as the silence of that dark night is broken by the company of another, the struggling ahklut perceives its sacrifice as a blessing. Having lost track of the herds it followed almost a week ago, this will be just enough to keep it going another day until it reaches the sea, where more food awaits. It will survive... for now.

But with the hothouse come and gone, this is again a very harsh world in which to live, and there are no promises of tomorrow.

As Serinarcta undergoes global cooling after the hothouse ends, a tropical world comes to an end, and a new world of winter becomes familiar after a 20 million year summer.

The former upperglades is among the last regions outside low-lying lake beds and cave systems to retain abundant surface moisture and high precipitation. Now a resurrecting set of biomes not seen for twenty million years will spread again across the polar circle, frigid in winter - but in brief summer months they still support a verdant, life-filled refugia worth enduring the bitterness of winter for. They encompass grasslands, alpine regions, wind-swept coastlines, and polar tundras. This is the frozen north.

~~~

The tundra, though a far cry from the grasslands of the hothouse, is now a life line for many. Yet as the world changes quickly, its resurgence here will be short-lived, for the ice age now falling across Serina is different from those before it in being exceptionally arid, and eventually, not enough precipitation will fall to support it.

Yet for now, in a short window of time, this is now the home of many herbivorous remnants of the former ecosystems of a hotter world including crested thorngrazers, skungaroos, trunkos, and gantuans, though the latter are now dwarves in comparison to their predecessors. These grazers are all migratory, nomads which wander north to feed in the brief summer but are often forced to flee to southerly, drier locales to endure the cruel winters - only a few species remain the year-round.

The denebiel is near the end of an ancient line. A species of ptoose, by 295 MPE, it is now among the last few archangels with four wings. Archangels - a group of large placental birds whose larval young gestate partially internally before being born during their pupation in an egg-like sac - were incredibly abundant and diverse during the early and mid Ultimocene. The first representatives were large grazers which soared long distances by supplementing the powered flight of their primary wings with gliding support from additional sets of feathers on each hind leg. Though many archangels survived the end of the ice age and the start of the hothouse, very wet ground conditions and abundant green vegetation to eat pushed most lineages to lose their hind wings altogether, which got in the way of wading, and were not needed to fly long distances to find a meal. Only one lineage retained them, descendants of the ptundra ptoose which remained small and little-changed throughout the hothouse's 20 million year span. Overshadowed by more impressive and far larger relatives, they were waterfowl-like birds, common to the point of mundanity. They had little reason to change, and throughout the hothouse were some of the least-modified archangels relative to the very first ones, except for being only a tiny fraction of their ancestor's impressive size - their diminutive stature, broadly alike ducks and geese, made their leg wings less of a hazard, as they were small enough to fold up as the birds swam on the surface of the abundant waterways, rather than waded.

But there is nothing mundane about the denebiel. With the return of the tundra, it has grown to over 60 pounds - a giant among dwarves, if still a dwarf relative to ancient precursors that stood tall over almost all other animals. These are no longer the largest flying birds - two-winged archangels still stand taller. But they make up for it in their spectacular colors, and the huge flocks of millions they can now gather in on the summer breeding grounds. Spending the summers in small groups traveling widely across the steppe from one patch of rain-nourished land to another, they can find new green grass from very far away, and their calls are often relied upon by larger herds of land-dwelling grazers, which trail them to locate fresh grazing. They are relatively drab birds with gray and tan and white plumage. But come the arctic summer, they gather in their droves, and molt their plumage, trading neutral tones for brilliant black, white, blue and orange. Both sexes are similar, but only males sprout streamer-long blue feathers on their wings which drape over their short tail feathers like a peacock's train. Males court females with aerial displays, flashing starry-night patterns of white speckles and blue eye-like spots on the undersides of their wings, while their plumes trail behind them like the tail of a comet. Couples form, but only for a few days, and then the male departs to take another mate. In the short, splendid arctic summer, the female soon lays several pupal 'eggs' in a nest of moss and her own plucked downy feathers. She broods them alone, but in the company of many other nesting females.

When the young hatch, they are more independent than most contemporary seraphs, for they depend on a food source the adults cannot partake in - flying insects. Built more like swifts and swallows than geese, young denebiels are short-necked, long-winged and wide-mouthed agile fliers that hawk bugs on the wing. Repaying the favors of the winter, when herds follow the denebiel to good grazing, now the young denebiels follow the herds. They snap up insects disturbed from the grass as they graze, and also on the abundant parasites which bite and drain the grazers of blood. They grow quickly enough on this meat diet in the short summer months to undergo a significant change, their necks elongating and their mouth becoming proportionally smaller, just in time to rejoin the adults in time for fall migration and begin transitioning to a diet of mostly vegetation. Though far smaller than their parents by the time the flocks migrate south to avoid the winter, they are functionally like miniature versions of the adult by just 100 days of age. This rapid change of niche between birth and adulthood is, in a way, a second (albeit less extreme) sort of larval stage which has built off the tendency for metamorph birds to have very dramatic transformations throughout the lifetime of a single individual.

~~~

A much larger but still nomadic species of the tundra, the downy duckbuck of Serinarcta's far northern regions is a large skungaru classified in a genus distinct from the crater duckbucks, but closely related. They are only one of the herd animals that follow the denebiel and are followed by its chicks in turn, but they are among the largest. These skuorcs are more thickly feathered with very soft insulating plumage, lack the exposed spinal crests, and have smaller nostril crests as well as fully feathered faces, all to protect their skin against the cold. Their crests arc forward, lending them an intimidating visage, though they are mostly decorative and not used as horns; they do, however, warm air before inhalation, assisting in keeping them active even in very cold conditions. These creatures don't have the comfort of the craterlands to protect them, and must instead brave some of the coldest and most hostile regions on all of Serina on their own - the northern realm, where the flatlands give way to tundra, trading oppressive daytime radiation but lack of water, for even soil moisture but bitterly cold winters. They wander in large herds, moving at speed on two legs but grazing on all fours, and their versatile locomotion lends them their genus name, translating to "walks two ways". Summer at the high latitudes they dwell in is quite livable, for the sun's intense radiation is no concern in the boreal region, and grass and prostrate deciduous shrubs and flowers grow lush in the brief warm season. But come winter, almost 100% of their diet is reduced to dry moss and lichen, the most successful flora in the coldest regions where short summers limit the growth of the vascular plants to a few months each year. Then life is difficult, and they must shovel away the snow to reach every hardly nourishing morsel, which they most often accomplish with sweeping motions of their long, feather-duster tails.

Because their winter diet is very slow growing, taking years to recover from grazing, the downy duckbuck is always on the move and may never visit the same place twice. Though they follow general north- and southward movements with the seasons, they wander widely east and west without fixed patterns, and can be found from the west coast to the crescent, all the way around the polar basin and down the hurricane coast. Downy duckbucks are similar to the decorated duckbuck in requiring abundant moisture to survive in any region long-term (though they can use snow for their hydration needs), and lack tolerance for drought. This keeps them out of the flatlands, but where rainfall is sufficient for drinking water to be available and where the wind is consistent enough to cool them by day, they can be found quite far south, usually near the oceans.

Reliant on social cooperation to survive the cold downy duckbucks are gentle amongst each other and rarely fight; on winter nights, the herd keeps warm by laying shoulder to shoulder facing outward in a wide circle, keeping their youngest in the safety of the middle while males are kept to the outer edges. Females lead the herds always, and while males compete for chance to breed with them in late winter, their contests are highly ritualized posturing which feature loud, reverberating calls that toll like bells; it is very rare for any individual to physically fight with any other. Two young are born, almost never more or less, in the late spring when the days are warmest and plant growth is in full spring, and they are guarded by all females in communal creches for safety. Born around thirty pounds, they need no direct care from their mother's beyond protection, and can feed themselves from birth. They eat almost anything, being more omnivorous than the adult tends to be, and will graze constantly to grow as fast as possible, reaching around a third of adult weight by winter, but then taking another two years before full adulthood and their maximum size of around 1000 lbs.

Downy duckbucks are big enough and very well organized so as to put up a substantial defensive front, and so they have relatively few natural predators, but those they do have are formidable. Occasionally in the south of their range the corocotta can pose a danger. But their primary, and most feared enemy, is something much closer to themselves. Another skungaru, and yet one of diametrically opposed temperament, the akhlut is one of the polar region's apex predators.

Named after a fierce beast in Inuit folklore, said to be able to shapeshift between the form of a wolf and an orca and to kill humans, this predator is a descendant of the tacklesnatcher, and like its namesake, is a fierce, amphibious hunter of cold coastal regions. Akhluts can weigh over 1,500 pounds and stretch 15 feet nose to tail and have evolved to kill anything they can overpower, grappling with their very powerful forearms and slicing deep wounds with their sickle-like thumb claws, often in the throat of their prey, which they try to catch from behind. Too big to hop, akhluts alternate between a fast bipedal walking gait and a more stable quadrupedal one, depending on the terrain, with the latter being useful when traversing thin sea ice, while the former is energy efficient over level ground.

As the hothouse world gave way to a cooler and drier one at the end of the era, tacklesnatchers were able to increase in size as other, more specialized carnivores became scarcer. Today, these skungarus have no significant enemies and can prey on animals even larger than themselves, on both land and at sea, for it is a strong swimmer too, using a crocodile-like tail for propulsion. Akhluts are adaptable hunters, and they stalk the rocky coastline and ambush resting molodonts and pretenguins. Akhluts can even dive underwater, grabbing marine life - seahorses and even large snarks - and then hauling them to the beach to feed. Akhluts put on substantial fat stores prior to winter, depositing blubber on their scaly tails and abdomens which aids in keeping warm in the longdark season. The back, shoulders, and neck are well-insulated with thick feathered plumage. The akhlut evolved along the sea coasts of northeast Serinarcta in the early final stretch, and is still most common there, but has now begun to spread across northeast Serinarcta as a land-based predator of the duckbuck herds, which often take it quite far from water. This can be a risky gamble, though, for if the akhlut loses track of the herds it can become lost and starve in the vast and unforgiving inland landscape so different from where it evolved to live.

Though solitary by nature, female ahkluts are good mothers, and a single chick spends as long as three full years with her before it goes its own way, learning many techniques to find food in the harsh polar climate until that time. Females put so much energy into a chick's survival that they they will stop at little to defend it while it is with her; once over a year of age, its only significant predator is a larger male ahklut. The chick does have one defense of its own, however - an oily, foul-smelling secretion of stomach acid and the semi-digested fat of its food is stored in a gland in the stomach and can be vomited accurately at an enemy from up to 25 feet away, often aimed at the eyes. 

~~~

The cold northern regions are inhabited by many large semi-quadruped birds, especially skungaru skuorcs, which fill both herbivore and carnivore roles in these environs. But the tripeds too are common here, especially the loopalope and unicorn clades of crested thorngrazer. These animals, though limited to smaller sizes than some birds, are efficient grazers that can chew their food, letting them survive on coarse grass, thorny cactaiga, and the dormant woody sticks and twigs of low-growing bushes rather than softer, scarcer fare like lichens.

Descendants of the frosthopper, a species that originated on the cool alpine firmament, are now the most successful loopalopes. They were pre-adapted to low oxygen air and cold weather, and as the hothouse came to an end these nimble grazers quickly spread out across the drying landscape in the place of hothouse specialists that did not adapt well to such changes. These thorngrazers are spectacularly special for being bioluminescent - or rather, hosting bacteria that are so, which dwell in the warm shelter of their nasal crests. All species have the ability to turn on or off their glow by contracting their soft crests into their fur or inflating them to stretch the skin and reveal the light within, letting them use their light to communicate with others both near and far, while also being able to vanish into the night and hide from danger.

~~~ 

Imagine for a moment that you are alone on a cold night far out on the central steppe of Serinarcta, a region characterized by an arid climate and extreme swings of temperature, including frigid, snowy winters. The air is thin, like it once would have been only at high altitude, and what little plant life grows clings close to the earth, coarse and unnourishing. Yet life - large, complex and even beautiful life - nonetheless clings on. The steppe is home to a range of varied grazers, but the most notable are still the thorngrazers. By now, most of them are either the hardy unicorns or the tank-like armored ridicupines. Loopalopes, once the most diverse continental crested thorngrazers, are now reduced to a fraction of their hothouse diversity. Yet those which remain are among the most astonishing of any to have yet lived.

The world is dark and silent; it is late winter, and snow is lightly falling, but the bitter winds of the early winter have begun to recede. In two months time, the world will thaw with spring's return, and life will briefly have a reprieve as the melting snow seeps into the soil, allowing a brief flush of greenery to cover the plains now currently brown, the dried grass barely more nutritious than cardboard. For the animals of the steppe, even though those warmer days are still far ahead, it is time to plan for their arrival. For the lampelopes, it is time to mate. And the males of these strange loopalopes, to get a mate means to stand out in an extraordinary way.

Suddenly, pinpoints of green-blue light begin to appear in the distance. They shine like beacons through the falling snow, a signal impossible to miss. Each flash of light lasts two or three seconds, accompanied by a loud bell-like toll, and then disappears. But dozens more flicker on as soon as any one turns off, as an entire herd of male common lampelopes begins their nighttime display. The males and females of this gracile, deer-like loopalopes spend most of the year apart - males live further north than females, for they can subsist on less nourishing food without needing to raise young. But now, in the worst part of winter, even they have been pushed to migrate south, and now their ranges overlap. The males are ready to mate, and now they advertise their arrival to female herds by singing and flashing their lights, produced by beneficial, bioluminescent bacteria which make their home inside the warm, sheltered spaces in their nasal cavities. The lampelopes are descendants of the fanfaloot [which was recently retconned to be bio-luminescent too, because people kept saying the art appeared to be - see its entry here] and have further adapted to use their symbiotes in a more controlled manner. With their crests now covered in thick, insulating hair, at rest the lighted bacterial colonies inside, which also serve the helpful purpose of protecting the animal from infection by harmful bacteria and to keep the sinus clear of dried mucous, are not visible. But when air is drawn up into the crest, and the six nostril openings are closed, a large membrane in the center of the crest as well as six finger-like soft tissue valves fill with air, and the hair overlaying them parts to reveal translucent tissue that shines brightly in the darkness. A large central light is then surrounded by six moving, twinkling stars, a dazzling display which when seen in a group, all displaying at once, is an eerily beautiful natural phenomenon. Females can see these lights from over a mile away on the flat, vast landscape, and come to meet and mate. If predators spot the lights, the males can quickly deflate their crests and so effectively turn them off, make a run for it, and try again another time. In this way, though the males do still risk danger to attract a partner, they can at least hide their displays when conditions are dangerous - an improvement over their ancestor, which had no control over the intensity of its lights. 

~~~ 

The slynx is a rare pursuit predator native to the northern tundras of post-hothouse Serinarcta. Though very wide ranging, its population is small and widely scattered. With a thick coat of dappled silver fur, they closely match a backdrop of mottled snow, sand, and stone, letting them avoid detection as they trail those glowing herds of loopalope thorngrazers, like an ever-present specter of death to keep them moving ever onward through the long winters. Named for its low, slinking gait, it moves quickly and yet silently over the ground with wide, furry paw pads that dampen the noise of each step, crouching and freezing if its prey turn to look at it, and so vanishing into the background. It can keep up with the herds indefinitely - it can't afford to lose track of them, for they are its lifeline. Predator and prey will cover as many as 50 miles in a day in an uneasy and yet inescapable march together, eking out their sparse lives on the fringes of the habitable world.

The slynx is a heelhound sawjaw, and as such its tail is molded into a flexible scythe through which it can strike to the side and catch the hind leg of its quarry, dragging them off their feet like a sheperd's hook. Once tripped, the prey animal has but a second to recover itself before the hunter is on top of it, grappling with hooked hand-claws, and serrated tooth-jaws are cutting through its throat like a knife through warm butter. It hunts almost exclusively the young thorngrazers, for they are small enough to eat before the herds have run off too far to find again, and because the slynx is resourceful enough to recognize that if it takes the calves, mothers will bear more again, but if it takes the adult, it deprives itself of future opportunity. Millions of years of this hunting pressure has led the loopalopes to bear two young nearly always, with the expectation one will always die to predators so that the other may live: a sacrifice to the ghost which always lurks just beyond the herd's edges, so that the rest may continue their endless journey. Occasionally it supplements its diet, in the summer time mainly, with young duckbuck chicks; adults however are simply much too big to be threatened by it.

The slynx itself is solitary, coming together with others only to mate; though multiple animals may follow a single herd of prey, they favor different sides of the group from which to strike, and will defend these moveable territories from each other. Females alone care for a single young, which in typical sawjaw style is kept with her even from its earliest days by clinging to her back; the ability of the slynx to keep moving even with newborns, without needing to settle at a den sight, makes them ideally suited to a permanently nomadic way of life. They rest only when the herds do, often in short, fleeting moments during the worst snowstorms when travel becomes impossible. To sleep, the slynx will cover itself - and its young - with its tail, which is thickly covered in insulating fur, to shelter from the worst of the weather.

~~~

The snawfus is perhaps the most ethereal of the frosthoppers, for its crests are the most ornately branched. This is a creature with no fewer than six nostril openings, for long ago the two nasal passages of its ancestors diverged into additional channels as the crest grew more complex in shape. But among loopalopes, only the frosthopper sometimes has even more than this; it can develop as many as twelve, exhibiting a highly varied crest morphology that, at least in the male, continues to grow slowly more complex through the animal's life. Its crests broadly resemble branches of glowing blossoms, arcing up and behind the animal's head. Each nostril is born on a retractable stalk which can be pulled into one of two ossified but hollow "horns" that grow from its head, to prevent frostbite. They are expanded with air and extended out from this warm shelter only for short duration, during which the light within is visible like a beacon. Snawfus, which live in large nomadic herds, communicate one to one with a code-like visual language of just a few flashes at a time, while males will extend all of their nostrils together to put on a stunning light show when strutting in search of a mate. Because their display relies on darkness so their lights are visible, snawfus court in the late winter, shortly before the polar darkness gives way to the light of spring.

Snawfus are the only loopalope that undergoes seasonal change of color, molting from a banded brown form in summer to a leucistic though not fully white pelage in the winter. Males take on a brighter white than females and may lose almost all traces of banded pattern, perhaps to better stand out in the dark, while females always retain faint striping and grey fur on their lower legs.The snawfus is relatively wide ranging east to west around the polar north, but a lack of tolerance to heat firmly limits its range to where daytime temperatures don't surpass 75 degrees Fahrenheit (24C). Despite a need for cold weather, snawfus are otherwise well suited to endure dry conditions, able to condense water out of the air in their sinuses to supplement their hydration when temperatures are above freezing, and this lets them thrive on the dry northernmost flatlands where fewer herds gather. While many animals migrate south to avoid the polar tundra as it freezes, snawfus may move north then to avoid such competitors that have migrated into their summer territories, for it is only in winter that such regions become dry enough for their comfort. The damp summer weather on the tundra makes the land boggy and the air too wet, which can cause pathogenic bacteria to take hold in their sinuses and displace their symbiotic colonies, causing illness.  But in winter, when the air is frozen, they find comfortable conditions. Able to kick through the snow as a united force, each individual in herds of several hundred making quicker work of the job than any could by itself in order to graze the woody plants and grasses buried down below. The fastest loopalope, snawfus can sustain speeds of 40 miles per hour and are thus very difficult for even such persistent hunters as the slynx to catch; though it may threaten them in the summer seasons, it does not usually follow them through the winter, preferring to stick closer to the lampelope herds that are its primary food source. But this hardly means the snawfus is without any enemies...

~~~

The polar vulpynx is the co-evolved predator of the snawfus, an animal that comprises around 75% of its annual diet, but almost 100% throughout the winter season. This is the only polar carnivore with the endurance to let it keep up with their herds constant movement, and also the ability to generate a faster burst of speed on top of it to run down individual targets. Polar vulpynx, descendants of the smaller and more gracile plains species of five million years earlier, are somewhat uncommon in that they are capable of both brief bursts of very intense running and prolonged periods of sustained pacing, so that they spend all the winter following within a mile or two of the herds. Part wolf and part wild cat, this animal has evolved to run near the limits of energy efficiency and has been shaped into a ruthlessly effective predator by the strict constraints of the polar environment where to fail at anything meant starvation in the dark, open landscape far from any source of food. Most individuals have become pale, white with feint silver traces of their former spotted pattern, but around 25% are still darker, resembling their ancestor though now turned gray instead of gold. While lighter individuals have better hunting success, darker ones have better immunity and higher fertility, and may be more likely to survive infancy, so that they continue to exist even when they stand out more in the snow.

Most predators struggle to keep up with the snawfus herds, for the snowfall quickly buries tracks and scent trails. But these animals don't hunt by scent. Instead they have excellent eyesight, and the snawfus' way to maintain contact in dark, blizzard conditions now betrays them to their enemy, which can detect the faintest pinpoints of bio-light on the tundra ahead of it, traces too dim for most animals to see even at a distance of over two miles, and so remain on track behind their food source. Traveling dozens of miles a day unseen in the shadows and the storms, they can still exert themselves further at the final moment to rush the herd, run down a single target, and make the kill. While their traveling pace usually matches that of their prey at around 25 miles per hour, during this final, brief exertion it can exceed 60 miles, faster than any snawfus even when well-rested. But already pushed near the limits of its activity by constantly walking after its prey, it can sustain this speed for less than 30 seconds, so timing is essential if it is to succeed in tripping its prey and quickly biting its throat to kill it with its fangs. Though hidden in its lips at rest, its needle-like canine teeth on the upper and lower jaws both exceed 1.5 inches in length, giving this predator two sets of miniature daggers to make as quick of work as possible of killing its target by puncturing the windpipe.

Male polar vulpynx are social while females are "solitary", though only in regards to living with other mature adults, as most of their lives are spent with their offspring. Males are always found in pairs or rarely larger groups, and don't participate in childcare. These may be related, but can also form from strangers around adolescence which both come together for need of company. Pairs may have greater hunting success, but this may be countered by needing twice as much food to survive the winter. Females always hunt alone, and natural selection has apparently favored the greater proportion of meat one can keep from its less common kills; she has just one or two cubs at a time, and if they had to compete at each of her kills with another adult, it is unlikely they would have enough to eat to survive the difficult winter season. Cubs are born in the spring when the tundra thaws and life is briefly warm and welcoming. At this time, the vulpynx takes other prey which gather here only seasonally, and may hunt mostly birds like pteese - which it can catch even in the air with a leap up to ten feet high - as well as their pupa, which it deftly steals from their nests. Avian prey, as well as small molodonts, are also the first quarry that vulpynx cubs will be able to catch on their own, beginning from just a month of age - almost a year before they can potentially kill a snawfus on their own. Full independence may take as long as three years, and for at least two of those, their own cub(s) will help their mother hunt at least some of the time. But her relationships with her offspring are temporary in all cases, and they inevitably leave her by the age of three. So she remains, at heart, a solo hunter, her social life limited to transient and inevitably ending bonds with only her own young. Adult females never live together, and visit males only for a few days in the polar summer between litters. They mate almost a year before giving birth, for at other times finding a mate is all but impossible, and to ensure their cubs are born at the best time of year, a mother will delay the implantation of her embryos for up to nine months, as otherwise they could never survive being born in the coldest time of year.

~~~

The igloose, like most polar grazers, is always on the move through the long northern winters to find enough to eat, but unlike the downy duckbuck or the snawfus, it always returns to the same place at least once each year, always at the same time each spring. For this flightless sparrowgull, a hefty, 250 lb descendant of the carriageoose separately evolved from the horstrich, is solitary for much of the year. Males and females alike go their own ways in the autumn, heading south, but not together. Where each one ends up will be unique to it, and while individuals may stick to familiar routes year after year, the species as a whole does not share them. They do this because it is their own way to ensure they don't deplete their limited winter food supply, composed of many of the same bryophyte plants as the duckbucks also partake. And they do it because it makes it not worthwhile for predators to follow them, as they instead trail the large herds of duckbucks and other grazers to pick off the weak ones always lagging behind.

But when spring arrives and the first warm light of spring hits the tundra, the igleese gather to socialize. They all come together in one place, the tundra just west of the polar basin. It has been their rendezvous site for hundreds of thousands of years, and by all converging here once a year, they can court and couple and mate, sharing the best parts of life together in one short, sweet season when the tundra falls green. Green food is, for a brief time, all but unlimited, and now so many igleese all together in their prime provide safety from predators, for any which were weak or sick would not have made it through the winter. This species is dimorphic, and so the males are easily spotted by their colorful purple and blue cheeks and a flash of teal on their upper wings. They quickly start strutting and displaying to the females as soon as they arrive; the air fills with their joyous honking as they take turns lifting their long wing and tail feathers upwards and rattling them in frenzied excitement. Unlike many animals, these males don't fight; they are not the ones competing here. For males are the sex which is in-demand in this species, as he alone provides child-care, taking over two years to raise a single chick. This means that while a female can lay a single egg annually, only around half the adult males will ever be free to raise it. Females must compete fiercely for the limited suitors as those suitors call and dance oblivious.

The hens first posture, sizing up one another. Most often, a larger and older female will win with no blood drawn, and she will select the largest and most handsome male of the lot, and so on down the line with those who fall beneath her in the hierarchy. But when equally matched opponents meet, whether high or low in the order, they may take to striking one another with powerful kicks; their spur-like first toe might have evolved to fend off predators, but now these ladies use them in combat against one another to secure a chance to perpetuate their genes another generation. Especially as the available males run out, the last females, already beaten by many larger rivals, become increasingly desperate and take out their frustrations on one another. Inevitably, when all is done, several of the most unfortunate have lost their lives in the frantic fight to breed, left with deep lacerations from the claws of competitors who proved just a little more desperate. In just a week or two, every available male is taken and defended by a partner, and the last unfortunate hens resign to their fate. They will not reproduce successfully this year. The loss is made more significant because they will still lay an egg, whether fertilized or not. With no hope to hatch and no one to try raising it, these hens simply abandon them where they lay for scavengers to collect. They can only look on then as the more successful females lay their own eggs, just one each, which is immediately taken in the two-lobed hands of the male and carefully pushed beneath one of his armpits. A locking tendon in his wing will hold it in an upright, closed position for the next 35 days as it incubates in this makeshift and mobile nest of feathers and flesh. By the time it hatches, its mother will have moved on and left the male behind. The time to be social is fleeting, lasting less than six weeks in total, and now the igleese scatter across the tundra once again.

The bond between the single father and his single child is the strongest bond an igloose will ever know. This species devotes a very long time to ensure just one baby grows up strong, and the male will do everything in his power to keep it safe. This species gets its name from the structure of his wings and tail feathers, which arc over his back like a domed igloo, sheltering his chick once it is born from cold, rain, and predatory animals alike. For at least two months it never touches the ground, and he provides it all the food it needs direct from his mouth. Thereafter, just as the summer comes to an end, he may let it walk around for short duration; it is extremely fluffy, down to the nails on its feet, and so by this age it can even waddle about on ice and snow without harm, though he will only allow it a few minutes of such exercise until it reaches around five months age. Then it can begin to walk close by him, or rather just behind him, so as to walk in his footsteps in the snow and avoid being bogged down. But even then, he will lift it onto his back to protect it from any threat; this tendency will not fully fade away until the chick is around nine months old and some 120 lbs, and at last becomes too big to fit in the shelter its father can provide for it. From then on, for the next 15 months or so, it will stay at his side. They will wander the wild north together all winter, return to the green tundra for one more summer, and then remain together for another winter before finally parting in the chick's third spring. Then it will be old enough to begin thinking about taking a mate of its own, and if it is a male it may put on its first show, but it will not likely succeed in mating for one or two years more, when its full adult plumage tells the females he is mature enough to entrust with their precious eggs. Females may have to wait even longer to succeed in claiming a male, up to five years; their solitary and elusive lifestyle means they have few predators, and so they can eventually compensate for this late start in reproducing by laying an egg every year for a long life of 50 years or more.

~~~

Banded blankettails are an extremely abundant species of flagtail gantuan, but as they don't aggregate in large herds, in any one location they are likely to seem rare. This is a grazing herbivore with an extraordinary range: it can be found from east coast to west and from frozen north as far south as Solitary Crater, hundreds of miles southeast of Sanctuary Crater. A small, very fast animal, they now reach adulthood in an immature state compared to their larger hothouse ancestor. Though such sudden changes in size take much longer for many animals, it is commonly seen in skuorcs because they already begin life already very developed, independent, and functionally adult in proportions, and to shrink only requires lower concentrations of growth hormone and earlier sexual maturity. Ceasing development at an earlier ontogenetic stage stage is indeed an ancestral trait to all skuorcs, which retain tails as adults, a trait only seen in the larvae of most related metamorph birds. In the blankettail, their truncated growth also means the adult retains a full-body covering of downy plumage now vital to its survival in this much colder landscape.

Banded blankettails are indeed very well suited to endure the cold, but what may come as as a surprise is that the heat, too, does not stop them, and this allows them to live over such a vast continental range, including much further south than many other tundra species. They can survive all manners of harsh extremes of climate, with a head to toe covering of long, airy feathers that insulate against both hot and cold by trapping a mildly warm pocked of air near the skin. Longer white feathers hang down from the back and reflect solar radiation in hot weather, but can be lifted to reveal black bands of shorter down feathers that can be exposed to the sun to absorb heat in cold weather. By constricting or expanding blood vessels within the skin on the tail, this creature can also directly regulate its body temperature. A flexible tail as long as the rest of its body works as a blanket to curl around itself on cool nights with the plumage tucked against the skin and blood vessels tightened, and then becomes a radiator in the heat when the feathers spread out to let heat pass from the bare skin below into the air with vessels expanded. Thanks to these multi-purpose adaptations, blankettails can live in many habitats from desert-like flatlands near the equator all the way to the polar tundra. Their incredible tails can even assist them in acquiring precious drinking water in desert conditions; they can raise it into the air to collect morning dew along the many fine feather strands, which transfer it one drop at a time down the length of the tail to the base of the back, where the animal can drink it with its tongue.

Because the tail now serves so many vital uses for day to day survival, blankettails only autotomize the tip of their tail as a last resort to escape predation, and typically carry it curled above their back when running. Because they are littler than their ancestor species, they are much quicker, now able to reach speeds of 60 miles per hour for short distances, enough to leave almost all predators behind; only the polar vulpynx can keep up with them, but the blankettail has superior endurance and can often outmaneuver its pursuer due to its tail working like a rudder, letting it turn faster and shake off its enemies. Their social lives, based on small herds of only a couple dozen that may only mingle with outsiders a few times each year, make them difficult to track on the very wide and empty environments in which they occur. But because they are so widespread, their scarcity in any given place betrays the reality of their population: Thanks to their suite of versatile adaptations and their very few predators, over 30 million of these animals are likely to live at any one time across Serinarcta, making this the most successful skuorc of all. Not only that, but all of them comprise one intermixing population in which individuals may travel thousands of miles in a lifetime, and through which genes can spread from one extreme of latitude and longitude to another in only a few decades as a result. No distinct subspecies of banded blankettail exist, not even in the hottest or coldest extent of their range. Rather, the entire species is capable of seasonal adjustments to its body that increase efficiency in one extreme or another; those which migrate into colder regions grow more black feathers and fewer white feathers, but the latter will be of a longer length. The same individuals moving south will do the reverse, and the transition takes as little as two months.

Both sexes of the banded blankettail are similar in appearance, and young are born more or less the same, though their colors are initially more faded and brighten with age. Both exhibit orange to red highlights to their black and white plumage, which might actually help to break up their outline against their environments, especially at dawn and dusk when they are often most active, when they can blend into the orange hue of a low sun. Their black and white bands are also surprisingly effective camouflage in both tundra and desert regions, blending into a matrix of snow and bare ground and one of sand and rock and low vegetation almost equally well when the group lays down in close formation to rest. Blankettails can be found near the north pole in summer, but avoid the most northern reaches of their range in winter, migrating south before heavy snowfall. They are always very common in middle latitude areas where winter snow is light and infrequent, for this is where their camouflage works best. Mixed sex herds are most common in which males compete for the most breeding access - mainly with display rather than combat - but females accept many partners when in season, so most males will manage to breed even if one does so more often. This ensures multiple males will help protect her young, as this species exhibits parental care and stable family dynamics where offspring stick near their parents for at least one year. Usually a single offspring is born in the spring, with twins around 40% of the time. Though the young can run within minutes of its birth, it has less endurance than the adult and will instinctively lay low to the ground and cover itself with its tail when threatened, as its parents inititally run away; its tail feathers are a mottled tan and white at birth, helping match various substrates to hide it from sight among rocks or short vegetation. Its herd will return for it when the danger has passed; this behavior gradually disappears by 3 weeks of age, when the youngster can keep pace with the adults and then begins to molt into a more contrasted set of feathers. The tail, being very mobile, is used for silent communication when the herd is running, and can give directions for which way to run or indicate whether the threat has passed without every member of the herd having to look back for itself.

~~~

The high "alpine" regions of hothouse Serina, formed by sky islands, ultimately led several animal lineages toward adaptations that now let them thrive in a colder world with thinner air. Prancelopes, a type of skyrax, once lived thousands of feet up on sky island summit. Now they run on the ground near sea level, in similar atmospheric conditions. This is a common, small thorngrazer that slightly resembles a little unicorn, but comes from the jackalope, at the time of its existence one of the smallest thorngrazers living.

The prancelope is still much smaller than other thorngrazers it now coexists with, but the need to stay warm and have some chance to outrun predators has nonetheless resulted in a size increase; it now stands a little under knee high and weighs about 20 lbs. It is a selective grazer, preferring soft plants like moss and forbs over grasses, and it benefits from larger grazers clearing away tough brush in the warm season so as to encourage new, softer growth to grow shortly after. In its niche, this agile animal is somewhere between a hare and a gazelle, but still retains traits from its former niche - that of an unusually tiny goat - such as its very tall and narrow hooves that once helped it cling to small cliff ledges. Now the prancelope bounds on level ground, reaching a top speed of 50+ miles, though only for very short distances, with a running speed around 35 miles per hour being more typically sustained. It excels at darting away from a surprise attack, and its fastest speed comes at the very start of a run, going from 0 to 50 miles per hour in about one second, a rate of acceleration no other animal can match. It's slower overall than the fastest burst of a polar vulpynx, but it's also very nimble. When threatened, its very first action is to begin casually leaping very high into the air, a behavior known as pronking. Perhaps this shows how fit it is, telling a predator that it will have no luck here and not to even try. But if it does find itself chased, it does something else its predators don't expect as it quickly bolts away; rather than dodge sideways, something a vulpynx is also good at, the prancelope will wait until nearly the last moment and then leap again, this time vaulting itself vertically as high as seven feet. It then turns in the air, and as its pursuer runs right beneath it, it immediately hits the ground running in the opposite direction; by the time its enemy has caught on, the prancelope has put too much distance between the two for it to ever hope to catch back up. With such a clever strategy to survive, the adult prancelope has fewer predators than would be expected for an animal of its size. Its small group size, from a single pair to more commonly ten or fifteen adults at most, also helps it avoid attracting attention from hunters that trail the larger herds of loopalopes. These little groups are necessary for the prancelope to find enough of the choice tidbits of greenery it needs to eat; it can't just eat every plant it comes across, something the more gregarious grazers are able to do, and too many together would mean too much competition for a limited supply.

Though males and females are largely similar in their colors, prancelopes are dimorphic in the shape and color of their crests, which in this species as in earlier jackalopes are hardened into hard, defensive weapons with nostrils at their very base. Males have larger horns that arc gracefully behind them, serving as a signal to attract mates, while their shape permits males to rut and butt horns together when competing over access to those mates. Females' horns might be littler, but they angle sharply forward: a pair of daggers with which they will charge predators coming after their fawns in the springtime, before the youngsters can readily run away from danger. This aggression is a last resort, though, because while she is very fast, directly charging a foe can also result in her being caught instead. Given the chance, she will utilize more clever, long-distance strategies to keep her young safe first. Like some birds, a mother prancelope will feign her own injury to distract a predator away from where her fawn may be hidden, leaping around as if one of her front legs is broken and emitting a sharp squeak like that of an injured young animal. She may keep up the ruse for up to one mile before darting away back to her baby, a sudden and miraculous recovery.

~~~

The muff is a small tuskbilled snort (specifically, it is descended from the scruff of the polar plain) which is now among the hardiest of any tundra creature. It does not migrate at all, wintering over unaided in the most northern reaches of the tundra where very little else remains. The muff's plumage is the densest of any bird which has ever lived, each of its fine hair-like quills set closer together than even a penguin's insulating feathers, and with this coat around them they endure the polar winds for months each year in total darkness with very little to eat. Relying on heavy fat deposits laid down in a frantic summer-long buffet on the short lived vegetation that rushes to grow in the warm months, over winter they lose up to half their body weight. But it's worth it, because staying over winter when nothing else does means that their predators all leave, too; the muff alone cannot support carnivore population, for it it is small and scattered too much to be reliable. Not even the snow rover remains so far north, retreating to where snow cover is just a little thinner, the storms less frequent, and where hunting is easier. So the muff can hunker down in the worst of winter, keeping together in small coveys for warmth. And then they brood their eggs, beginning their reproductive season far before any other animal, so that with the first green grass of spring their babies can hatch from their neck pouches and make the most of the brief time of plenty.

Muffs change color with the season, an adaptation they must have acquired before they isolated themselves so far to the north that no predators at all threatened them in winter. Spending the warm time of the year scattered and scurrying over the thawed tundra, a white plumage would be a death sentence, and they shed all their white feathers in an explosive molt called the burst within a single week in mid spring, just after their eggs hatch and shortly before the return of the migrating herds and the predators that follow. Their summer coat is still insulating, but significantly sleeker, and its speckled brown, black, olive and rusty hues hide them flawlessly against a backdrop of mud, moss, lichens, and short polar grasses. It is quite an energetic animal that runs around in its foraging at this time of year, for it has only a little time to fatten itself up for the next winter. It feeds on almost anything - green plants, seeds, flowers, roots, tubers, insects, small animals like ticklears, and scraps of carrion left behind by large predators. Its long bill is sharp and multi-purpose, able to dig in the mud, select fine seeds off the ground, or pick meat from bones. Despite its frantic activity in the summer, however, the muff instinctively freezes when danger is near and in doing so can vanish into the landscape and go unnoticed. Though its vision is decent to spot enemies, it feeds mainly by scent. With nostrils low to the ground and near the end of its short trunk, it sniffs out all the many tasty things it likes to eat. In winter, the long nasal cavities that extend down its trunk also let it warm the air it breathes before inhaling into its lungs, keeping it from becoming chilled.

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The snow rover is a polar-adapted descendant of the common rover that still exists, and to which it is now contemporary. It originates from a population of that species only 1.5 million years ago which stopped migrating as it learned to hunt seedsnatcher molodonts that remained even in high north regions by burrowing underneath snow. Its hind leg has grown much more robust to facilitate punching through the hard surface layer of frozen snow to break open the tunnels of its prey, which it does through athletic dives in which it first flies swiftly upwards, then descends into a rapid swoop with its hind leg held out ahead of self. Remarkably, it always avoids ever punching into snow too hard or too shallow, and risking breaking its leg - a death sentence. With acute hearing, it can judge the depth of the snow pack beneath its feet before diving, just as it can pinpoint the precise location of scurrying animals so as to line its strike up just right to reach them. It adjusts its height and the speed of its dive to the conditions of the snow, and though it does not not always emerge with a meal grasped firmly in its talons, it does so more often then any other polar predator, succeeding in over 50% of its attempts. Virtually their entire winter diet is small molodonts, but in summer when common rovers join them on the tundra, their diet broadens to other prey and sometimes includes that species, which is now small enough in comparison to catch and overpower, especially when young. 

Snow rovers don't fly habitually south for winter, as common ones do, which means that the cold season is theirs and theirs alone in which to prosper. They are solitary for this time of the year, traveling widely over the frozen north with no particular pattern of movement, but always remaining above the snow line. This can take them as far south as the northern craterlands in some years, though they depart well before the spring thaw. They must be active in all levels of daylight by necessity as the polar region slowly cycles from the longdark winter to the sunlit summer, with periods of both day and night in between. Their eyesight is adapted to all these conditions, and their sensitivity to different light levels causes changes in the eyes' structure and subsequent appearance as the seasons change, too. The snow rover in late winter, just as they begin to form pairs to breed in the coming spring, shows very light blue eyes, contrasting their pupils to make them more attractive to a mate with little other markings on their mottled white pelage. This pale eye color is unusual for an animal of the final stretch, as it requires little melanin in the iris, which subjects it to high radiation levels and can cause eye damage. The snow rover can only maintain its striking eyes until the sun is midway up the sky, and then its eyes become a brilliant dark gold. By then pairs have formed, and the striking visual contrast is no longer needed. Come the next winter, their eyes return to blue again. The process occurs as the pupils dilate for weeks and months on end in the winter, which causes a small level of swelling and reduces the amount of fluid from the eyeballs. Collagen fibers in the tapetum of the eye - the reflective layer responsible for the eyeshine effect in most animals when light is shone into their eyes - are squeezed closer together. Thus golden summer eyes, with fibers further apart, reflect a golden color, while winter ones - clustered together - reflect shorter blue wavelengths. In fact, during the darkest winter months, the eyes go from light blue to a violet color. During the polar winter, the snow rover's eyes no longer block UV light, but let as much of it in as possible. The reason? While snow reflects this purple-hued light, the coats of molodonts adapted to hide in shadows and burrows, are not reflective. In most conditions, this benefits them - they can vanish from the eyesight of diurnal predatory birds. But they stand out like a beacon of shadow in a violet-hued nighttime world, and by flooding its vision with UV light, it can better track and capture them in this strange, frozen landscape.

The snow rover mirrors the moonbeasts in its owl-like niche here, and that no moonbeast has successfully adapted to this polar region as they did in the previous ice age is testament to how efficient and competitive the flutterfoxes have become as predators even so early in their evolutionary history. In the case of the snow rover, its changeable eyesight may be its most important adaptation to have given it advantage here, since moonbeasts have very little ability to see UV light at all, as it is not usually beneficial at night except in these specifically barren, snowy environments. Having three talons instead of two, along with longer jaws to reach into burrows if the initial attack with the claws fails, seem to have also helped it to hold onto this niche and prevent remaining moonbeasts from ever getting another strong hold on tundra environs. Though flutterfoxes do not have have quite as specialized hearing as moonbeasts, they have evolved along similar lines, and a more primitive facial disc exists in this species around the face to carry sound to the ears (though it is formed largely from specialized bristled hairs, than from flesh or bone.)

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Some of the most numerous animals of the frozen north are not easily seen. They are not big, majestic, strong, powerful, fast, or especially clever. But they are very, very cute. Ticklears, a fuzzy, round genus of molodont descended from the starrybara, are found widely over the northern continent, and are unmistakable for their long, feather-like ear tufts which are used as sensory organs and in social communication. Most ticklears weigh only a couple of ounces and dig burrows underground, which makes them resilient to all extremes of temperature. Individually they need only a few scraps of greenery and an occasional seed. Their teeth are not always tinted red as their ancestors' were, because the soil over much of the arid landscape they inhabit is alkaline and relatively low in soluble iron, though in certain regions they still show this trait. Because they have descended out of the sky islands and down to the soil where their claws are now their main digging tools, the lack of this strengthening factor in their teeth is not highly problematic: the enamel of their teeth alone is still plenty to strong to gnaw plant stems and crack seeds. While they live in colonies, ticklears can split up widely to collect the food they need in a way a single larger animal could not. Like the thorngrazers they are distant kin to, ticklears can also digest cellulose, though they cannot produce the enzyme necessary to turn it to sugar on their own, and rely on symbiotic gut bacteria just as thorngrazers once did. These combinations of traits let them survive even in the harshest and driest of biomes where no megafauna at all can live year-round, where for part of the year there may be nothing of any value to eat except for dried out grasses and sticks with scarcely more nutrition than cardboard.

But the tundra is not a region scarce in resources, only one where survival is difficult due to the bitter cold of winter. But tundra ticklears, which share warmth and food resources in complex underground warrens, are the most abundant of any species in their genus. Long summer days in the polar realm of the frozen north brings verdant plant growth, and then the ticklears gather all they can and store it for later while reproducing at a rapid rate: females may bear a litter every three weeks for four or five months back to back, resulting in annual population explosions. They have to breed fast, because in the summer everything eats these bite-sized morsels; indeed, they are almost the entire diet of the snow rover. In winter, many predators leave, but so too does the food, and the ticklears then spend most of their time hidden away. They will then extend their burrows up to the surface, beneath the snow, for it is actually warmer here, as snow is an excellent insulator. This puts them up above the permafrost that never thaws, and that's good for their comfort. But the trade-off here is that the snow is a less protective ceiling over their homes than the earth, and the snow rover can punch through and steal them away. Many ticklears meet their end this way, and they are very well adapted to high mortality due to their fast rate of reproduction. But these creatures are not completely defenseless, and they cooperate to reduce the rate that they are hunted, lest entire colonies die out over winter. As every member of the colony scurries around beneath the snow, it keeps its ear tips to the roof, and sounds travel through the cartilage of its ears directly into its skull. While snow has sound-dampening properties from above, the air spaces within it transmit vibrations down to these little listeners who always have an ear to the wall, and in this way they can hear the snow rover's flight as it approaches. This is the one way in which the rover is inferior to the moonbeasts it seems to have replaced; its ability to fly is still a new one, and it has not yet evolved its own sound-dampening effects. It flaps noisily, and this can give the ticklears a chance to dash for cover just before it strikes. When any one individual hears a suspicious flutter, it lets out an alarm, a high-pitched squeak that might give away its own location - something the rover likely already knows, if it's close enough to hear, and so by then there is nothing to lose if it will save others in the group. The rest bolt down down tunnels to safety below the ground, and so the first to hear the danger can save countless others even if it gets captured and has no time to flee itself. At all other times, ticklears are effectively mute; they communicate in silence through only scent cues and touch, brushing their ears together with their neighbors in a tactile language comprised of gestures that are felt, not seen.

Though the tundra ticklear is very social and relies on working together to find food, keep warm, and avoid enemies, it is not a creature without conflict. Within each colony, there is a constant competition between females for dominance, as those highest in the hierarchy will gain the most access to food stores and preferred attention from the biggest and most desirable males, and this will in turn let them reproduce first and bear the largest litters in the spring. A small number of dominant females tends to form a coalition together, an alliance maintained only by their mutual conflict with all lower-ranking females. As long as there are others weaker than themselves to boss around, then the inevitable battle for dominance between themselves is kept mostly at a truce. Every female wants to raise her own rank, but it comes at a very real cost: it is very hard, if not impossible, for a single female to go up against the united force of the coalition on her own. One way to rise in the ranks is to grovel; grooming your superiors, sharing what little food you do get, and making them feel you are absolutely not a threat might encourage them to accept you, too, into their fold... it's a long game, but a relatively safe one. But lower ranking females, united by their shared goals to dethrone their superiors, also form coalitions that are stable as long as they, too, can focus all of their attention on a common enemy. And sometimes they go for a faster, but much riskier route to the top by attacking the dominant females by surprise. Sometimes they succeed, replacing them, and evicting their former rulers out of the colony. They scatter over the tundra, and the snow rover picks most of them off easily; it's rare for its prey to run out in the open, but its acute eyesight is quick to spot them and take full advantage. But just as likely, the resident bosses will win, and the mutineers will be the ones tossed out into the cold. Such conflicts are much more common in winters following very productive summer seasons, when the colonies are crowded and even predation has not lowered their numbers enough to match the availability of resources now that the green tundra has frozen over. In contrast, the species is much more amicable when there are fewer of them; dominant coalitions all but cease to exist, and with a surplus of food, every individual can have equal access. The tundra ticklear's social behavior is malleable depending on conditions, and thus its population as a whole can remain healthy both in times of abundance and in scarcity.

~~~

From the smallest of prey to the largest of predators: the snowshoe snagglejaw is a descendant species of arctic snagglejaw, and one of the biggest remaining land animals of the far northern latitudes. Its range is still restricted, however, to the polar basin, though the warm water world its ancestors knew is very long gone now. Polar regions were the first to be affected by end-hothouse climate change, their forests vanishing to be replaced with soggy, frigid tundras that now thaw only a few months per year. The polar basin remains, but now freezes over for roughly half the year; its location away from the equator will prevent it from drying up as more southern lakes now are, as Serina's magnetic field is strongest here and the atmosphere comparatively thicker, and cool temperatures stall rapid evaporation.

Snowshoe snagglejaws are roughly as large as their predecessors, but different in proportions. They have very long legs, but comparatively short bodies, so that hind- and forelegs sit closely together. A towering hump of muscle on the shoulders anchors their arms, providing extraordinary pushing power, which these predators use to break holes through sea ice up to 3 feet thick throughout winter; these openings in turn attract large marine animals like sea horses needing to breathe, functioning as traps. The snowshoe snagglejaw's compacted and very tall body shape is an adaptation toward increased time spent out of water; it must travel most of the time over sea ice, traveling at times up to 30 miles per day. Its hump provides a forward center of balance, and a long robust neck counterbalances a relatively weak hind limb, making walking easier and more energy efficient on only three legs even at a weight where most tripeds find it difficult to move quickly, as their limb arrangement requires they always bear their entire body weight on their forearms alone for part of every walk cycle, in a sort of slow-motion gallop. Prey is caught by ambush at the edge of a hole pushed through the sea ice, gripped with both teeth and with talons up to a foot in length, and hauled out of the water to be killed and consumed. The jaws are massive and the teeth conical and backward-hooked, adapted to hold prey and not let go, but not very good at chewing. Carcasses are torn apart with force rather than precision, eaten in large chunks, to be broken down in an exceptional efficient stomach - bones, hide, fur, feathers, and all.

Solitary by necessity through the winter months, snowshoe snagglejaws come together in summer when the sea thaws and they gather along the shore. It is at this time they mate, but also reaffirm old bonds, especially between mothers and their offspring. Behaviorally adaptable and broad in diet, they thrive in both winter and summer seasons and change their hunting techniques as needed. When the ice is gone, they move inland and feed on the nests of vast flocks of migratory birds and upon the young of the great herds of thorngrazers and other grazers that move north with the sun to prosper on the short summer flush of greenery. They can travel much further from water than their ancestor as a result of their modified body shape, but it comes at the expense of much of their swimming ability. It is now a poor diver, its stocky shape awkward in the water, and it is now not a very effective aquatic forager. Large lobed feet lend it is common name, for they now serve primarily to spread out its body weight on sea ice and muddy tundra ground, not to swim. As its body weight is carried mainly on the front legs, its hands are especially wide, spreading up to 40 inches across so as to prevent itself sinking through unstable substrates.

~~~

The icebreaker sea horse survives the polar winter by making its own breathing holes, and in doing so it performs a role as a keystone species that supports the survival of other marine life here in the polar basin, a place now at the fringes of livability for air-breathing animals. Growing to 30 feet long, this descendant of the arctic seahorse is comparatively small, stunted by the limited food supply its habitat provides it through the winter months, yet it is extremely strong. Huge muscles in its neck power extraordinary upward strikes of its head against the sea ice; horns formed from dense keratin line forehead and chin, battering rams used to condense all of its upward force into a few narrow pinpoints to crack and shatter the ice, creating gaps in which it - and smaller animals unable to make their own air holes - can breathe. But others with deadly intentions exploit the benevolent horse's air holes; snowshoe snagglejaws punch through the ice, mimicking a safe breathing hole, which draws in wary divers of smaller species that this hunter then swiftly pulls out from the water with its deadly grip and kills in the terrifying world above. This hunter only rarely succeeds in hunting this sea horse itself; the size of the adult makes it a difficult kill, and the horns that line its head serve to protect its skull from a hunter's deadly grasp. Only the young and inexperienced sometimes go to the wrong air hole, and there meet a grisly end. Normally the sea horse effectively avoids its enemies, for its eyes - split down the middle with skin tissue, with two distinct pupils - lend it double vision, each divided eye peering both skyward and down toward the darkness below. Few enemies, above or below the ice, can sneak up on it.

While in summer the icebreaker sea horse can travel in groups and feed leisurely on the temporary summer surge of floating plant life that comes with the sun, winter brings scarcity and requires the horses go independently in order to each eke by on what still can be found. Most basin plants are annual; they die with the cold, to be reborn from dormant seeds and stems that sink into the mud in the shallow coastal waters. The sea horse can dig up the buried roots and rhizomes of the few perennial plants that grow in the near-shore shallows only until the ice pack extends out from the shore and renders them inaccessibly locked out of reach. Then it must dive deeper, into the darkness, to the lowest depths of the basin where stranger things grow.

At the lowest levels of the lake, waterwhips survive in countless quantity. Pale, sickly-looking stranglesnares - carnivorous plants with fungal genes that let them digest food - they scarcely look like plants at all and cannot photosynthesize. Instead they feed on organic matter, digesting particles of other life forms which fall down from the productive ecosystems far above. A steady rain of scraps falls down to them throughout the year, but the death of the plants at the surface each autumn brings their heaviest annual meal; the waterwhips grow during the frigid, dark winter when nothing else does. And though they are unpalatable, their tissues coarse and grisly, and lined with irritating hairs which they use to collect their food, these become the sea horse's food through the winter months. They dive down, holding their breath up to 25 minutes as they descend into shadow and silence, a forgotten realm at the basement of their ecosystem where little stirs. The waterwhips vary in form; some drift along connected to gas bags; these will rise to the surface in spring, getting closer to their food supply. Others are sedentary, adhered to rocks, rooted in the sediment. These are the most numerous, forming monocultures across much of the basin floor: expansive fields of ghostly pale carnivorous tendrils unfurled like feathers, collecting particles of marine snow and any tiny invertebrate or larval fish that gets stuck in their grip. The sea horse gnaws at them with its grinding teeth, the silica within them wearing its jaws almost as fast as its teeth can grow. It eats hundreds of pounds a day, seemingly destroying whole tracts of the abyssal garden. Each individual plant cannot endure such destruction, but there are so many that the horse scarcely impacts their total numbers; the grazed patches fill in again by summer, as thousands of inter tangled plants replace only a small portion of their total body mass that has been lost, regenerating from energy stored in other tissues and in roots below the sediment. These plants are low in calories and in nutrients, but they sustain this strangest of molodonts through the harshest time of the year, a lifeline in a time of need.

~~~

The snowshoe snagglejaw may threaten sea horses, but it forms a lifeline to certain other species.

Snappish and scrappy are words to describe the snaggleling, a polar descendant of the scissorsprink that has survived the end of the hothouse by its resourcefulness and its bold nature. Descended from the tiniest sawjaw ever to live, the snaggleling has reverted to a larger size in the face of frigid polar winters, but still weighs just five to eight pounds; its diminutive form is hidden beneath plush, insulating white fur. Scissorsprinks dwelled in the sand dunes along the coast of the polar basin; today, their descendant is much more closely associated with the water, for this is now where the food is most available. In summer it resembles its precursor much more than in winter, for pale winter coats drop out, revealing short, sleek summer hair with brown spots and mottled markings. Then the snagglelings hunt the lake shore, feeding greedy on the carcasses revealed with the spring thaw, exploiting the losses suffered by the less fortunate to make their own living. They couple and breed, raising small litters in dens dug into the remaining dunes, feeding their pups on fish, insects, and the eggs and chicks of the visiting migratory birds. They cache a fleeting surplus of food across their territories, which will sustain them into the autumn once such easy pickings become scarce. But even that will not last them through the long, pitch black winter season.

Summer in the basin is now short-lived, and very soon that dreadful winter returns. As the sun fades and now takes the warmth with it, the snagglelings split up and families go their own ways. Their fur thickens, growing lengthy and soft, camouflaging spots replaced by an opaque snowy veil. The lake freezes over, a vast expanse of solid water expanding their world considerably, and adaptations once used to traverse sand, such as its furry wide-splayed feet, now let it easily run over snow and ice. Yet the riches that still lie beneath the ice are soon unattainable to the snaggleling, which has no capacity to cut through the ice to reach food still abundant beneath its surface. But the snaggleling is smart and observant; it survives by watching others around it, and taking advantage of them - rushing a nest as a mother looks away for but a second and stealing a chick is a common tactic in the summer. Now the snaggleling looks for someone stronger to shadow, someone else to take advantage of. It can't break through that ice, but it knows who can.

Snagglelings get their name for their habit of trailing the snowshoe snagglejaw as it moves out onto the pack ice in winter to hunt for prey beneath. Not all snagglelings do this - some remain inland, hunkering down in dens dug out below the snow, making forays when the wind dies down to hunt for molodonts hiding in their own tunnels in the powder. For following such giants, many times their size, is a decision of great risk but also great potential reward. A snagglejaw can survive a long time between meals on account of its bulk, but a snaggleling is small and its metabolism runs hot; it must eat often to maintain its body heat in the cold, even though it can conserve its heat by wrapping itself in its long tail to endure the cold, windy nights on the pack ice. Yet the snagglejaw, when it does succeed in pulling some great, struggling thing through the holes it has punched through the ice and darkens the white land with its hot blood, provides an incredible opportunity. So small and agile, their huge, unwitting host can do little to stop them from darting in and taking morsels of meat with their long, slender jaws. And further, the snagglejaw has little reason to bother; the food requirements of its ever-present shadow are meager in comparison to its own and hardly affect its own survival. Meanwhile the snaggleling becomes defensive of its host, if only for its own benefit; it tolerates no other creature intruding upon their "personal" relationship, fiercely attacking scavenging birds and other small pests with its nimble, striking tail claws - occasionally, it succeeds in downing such a pesky animal and quickly dismembers it as another meal for itself.

The snagglejaw, a social animal at its core despite the circumstances of its life requiring to spend the long winters in solitude, at times seems to not just tolerate but even appreciate the snagglelings presence, as indicated by the way some snagglejaws will allow them to sleep close against their own bodies for additional warmth with no intent to eat them even when they could. And though the snaggleling is typically a hostile, reserved animal - quick to bite, for its life depends on its wit and willingness to fight for scraps and make do in scarcity - it often becomes quite tame and gentle with its host. What often begins as a pesky, exploitative relationship can sometimes become a sort of alliance, and strangers can become companions. Though such pairs always part ways at the first thawing of spring and return to their own kinds for the breeding season, many snagglelings seek out the same snagglejaw to follow onto the ice every winter, and over the years of their lives such odd couples may develop a very relaxed and familiar way of interacting together, the result of so much time spent in one another's company. It is hard to view this as anything else but pet-keeping, on the part of the snagglejaw; it gains nothing of practical value from its tiny follower, and indeed loses food in keeping it around. But its 'pest' lends company to it in a lonely time of life, a sense of closeness, and a reminder of the little things life is about, bridging the end of one warm summer with the start of another. And that, alone, may boost morale enough to improve winter survival. 

It is not the first unlikely relationship to have occurred between disparate species on Serina.

And it will not be the last.

~~~

The haarvulture also calls the polar basin its home, soaring widely around that ring of open water through the short summer season and then wandering south to find new territory when the ice returns, sometimes widely across the continent - or beyond. Stocky and densely feathered from beak to talon with plush, silver-white feathers, the haarvulture little resembles its gangly and gigantic ancestor of twenty million before, the stormshadow; a need to retain heat has rendered it sturdy, short-necked and short-legged, and covered even the skin membranes of its wings in plush plumage. It has shrunk to a fraction of its former size - a need to survive on much more meager meals - and on all fours it now stands only four feet high. An apex predator it is no longer. But it is a survivor, and it is now the only aukvulture to spend the whole year in the boreal region.

Haarvultures are wide-ranging omnivores. In summer, they fly alone and follow the interior coastline, swooping to swipe fish from the water with their sharp beaks; like other giant aukvultures, their feet are all but useless to grab with. As fall brings a deep freeze, they may spend several weeks following the snowshoe snagglejaw, contenting themselves upon the scraps of its kills as it hunts near the breathing holes of marine birds beneath the ice. But as winter takes hold, they move south, away from the water, and follow herds of large grazers, surviving off the dead and the dying as an ever-waiting specter of death. Now they gather in flocks around food sources, and in their dozens, they hasten the death of the old and sick, biting relentlessly until they collapse in a death by thousands of small cuts. Taking advantage of the close company, this is also their mating season, and courting couples perform dramatic, descending flights while locking their jaws on one another's heavily feathered necks, a mutual test of strength and of nerve, with each partner only letting go of the embrace at the last moment before striking the ground. Come spring, females which have bred will brood a small clutch of pupa in a nest on the ground on her own, and then she will lead the resulting two to five chicks, which fly from a day of age, with her throughout the summer along the coast. She only breeds in alternate years, and rarely successfully raises more than one chick, for the most dominant gets the most food and may ultimately cannibalize weaker siblings except in bumper crop seasons where food is unusually abundant.

Occasional vagrant haarvultures may end up far outside expected range during severe weather events, as far south as the seaway between northern and southern continents. Once there, they may become disoriented, and continue heading south instead of turning back north to return home. Such birds, finding themselves at the southern pole in unfamiliar lands, often perish. The rare appearance of a haarvulture may be seen as an omen of bad fortune by the sylvanspark, most of all if it is discovered in death. 

~~~

The frigid north is not a strictly defined biome like savannah, nor is it a single cohesive region like Sanctuary Crater. It covers a wide range of area across the northern half of Serinarcta, anywhere with particularly frigid winters for at least a few months each year, where temperatures fall far below freezing. It encompasses everything from tundra to desert, cold wind-beaten coastlines, and even pseudo-alpine habitats in the northernmost crater known as Upper Valley. Several hundred miles separate this smaller crater from Sanctuary, and a tract of passable grassland which is green each summer connects the two, so that both craters share many of the same large animal species, creatures like the silky cygnosaur and highland unicorn, often summer here and move back south in autumn. But it lies directly south of barren wastelands with dusty, saline soil where few plants can grow, and where few animals can pass. That was a region that not too long ago was the flooded upperglades wetland, its last remnants now evaporated into scattered salt lakes. This cold, dry desert of salt now separates the craterlands from the tundra further north still.

This crater, specifically its steep mountainous walls, is the home of the highland molmoon. It is related to the lowland species found further south, but is quite different in appearance and habits, being placed in a genus all its own. Traversing such a distance of open landscape between craters is much more difficult for these smaller and still semi-arboreal animals than for larger species, and so the two ancestral populations which colonized each crater after the hothouse have diverged into different species that have not interbred in 4 million years. While lowland molmoons adapted to live in a warm, bottomland habitat where vegetation is abundant, highland molmoons live exclusively on cliffs. Further, their crater is further north and subject to worse winters, which they face the brunt of living high on the walls and exposed to winds from the polar region beyond, with nothing but the empty desert to the north to block them. 

Upper Valley is a windy place, especially on these walls, and so fewer seeds of plants can manage to take root, making its cliffs relatively barren. This means the highland molmoon is much more limited in food; it eats mostly lichen, which clings to the rocks in huge amounts, and supplements this meager and un-nourishing diet with small amounts of grass and other weeds it finds growing in sheltered cracks. It must feed year-round to stay alive, though it may spend more time each day asleep in the coldest time of the year. In severe winter storms, it might not feed for as long as three days as it remains holed up in a cave for shelter, but it will have to recover its lost energy reserves once the weather clears and may then stay awake for over 24 hours eating to do so. Margins for survival in such a scarce habitat as this are razor thin.

 Many of the lichen it eats are toxic, especially harmful to its liver, and so to compensate that organ is enormous in order to help process chemicals in its diet out of its system before it becomes sick. Its stomach, too, is vast and leaves it potbellied, for lichen is very low in calories and so the molmoon must eat huge amounts just to survive. Indeed it grazes for almost all of its waking hours, stopping only to sleep, which it does whilst hugging the cliffs tightly with its long, powerful fingers. It feeds and sleeps alike in a permanently hunched or sprawling posture, its form hidden from predators against the background by a short but thick coat of insulating, mottled fur as it scrapes the rocks for food with its teeth. While lowland molmoons are fast runners with adaptations to lengthen their stride, highland molmoons are pitifully slow to move and cannot stand upright at all; adapted to cling to sheer rock faces and move in sideways swings, on flat surfaces they can only drag themselves with their arms with their hind leg splayed out to one side or another. A fall to the bottom of the crater, though rare, is fatal if they cannot immediately climb back to safety, for they are no match for the faster predators that lurk in that mysterious world down below. Bad-tempered if ever confronted, the solitary highland molmoon must do all it can to protect itself, for it has no social group to fall back on in dire straits. It roars and grumbles, strikes out with its large claws, and raises the front half of its body to reveal a striking white and black marking on its chest that somewhat resembles its own face, or perhaps its own skull. Each molmoon needs a large area of cliff to find enough lichen to support itself, so they may also show this marking to make themselves visible at a distance and keep intruders from coming too close.

~~~

Trees have been growing rarer on Serina again as a global ice age falls upon the world, this in time in conjunction with extreme aridity. Forests require a lot of water to grow, and now reduce greatly in spread. Those that remain can mainly be found only in coastal regions, craterlands, and near the south pole. While trees require regular water to survive, though, they are capable of enduring quite significant cold, so long as there is enough annual warmth to allow them to grow and reproduce. Where they can still occur, they can provide a lifeline to certain animals of the frozen north.

Tappatusks are a species of cyclops molodont from the forested region of the Fortune River Valley in near-coastal northeast Serinarcta that has survived the end of the hothouse by growing a thick, insulating fur coat. Despite this, they retain hairless inner ears lined with iridescent orange skin, which they still can flash at each other as a sudden silent signal, helping groups coordinate their activities and see each other at a distance in snowy conditions. They can eat almost any food and this benefits them now at a time where resources are scarce and inconsistent. Like the primitive thorngrazers before them, before such animals specialized into such odd and more specialized animals as unicorns and loopalopes, they graze all manner of plants, including very low nutrient woody material, and just as readily eat carrion. They are one of the more successful colonists of this cold new world, reproducing relatively quickly with up to six small, precocious young at one time, and moving across the land in bands for protection from predators. They retain their ancestor's paired tooth overgrowths that function like tusks, and groups stick together to defend themselves. Single, their slashing bite can kill any predator that is not very, very careful in its attack, making it a difficult prey even though it is only about as big as a large, stout dog. As a cohesive unit cooperating for everyone's safety, they are extremely dangerous adversaries, and can even drive off larger but solitary carnivores from their own kills to pilfer the food all for themselves. But none of these habits lends the tappatusk its name.

This molodont is named for one of its surprisingly gentle and forward-thinking behaviors, namely tapping forest trees for their sap in the late winter months, when other food is at its rarest. They use their tusks to cut deep, narrow lines in the bark, down into the living tissue. Sap flows slowly from marked trees too slowly to be a viable immediate food source, and it would seem more likely that the animal would simply eat the bark instead - something a tappatusk definitely does do with smaller saplings. But the tappatusk is smart enough to have a concept of delayed gratification. It will return to a marked tree the next day or even later, by which time the sweet liquid will have collected along the trunk where it slowly leaked out over many hours. Using its upper lips like a sponge, the tappatusk sops up the sugary material, and then cuts its lines just a little deeper to freshen the wound and keep the juice flowing. By maintaining many sap flows, a small group of tappatusks can ensure they can get a little bit of additional food every day, rather than one meal and then face hunger thereafter. Older and more dominant tappatusks seem to teach their offspring by example in just how to tap through the bark, and will reprimand others which are destructive or wasteful. The tappatusk has become a sort of natural gardener, and though it does damage the trees a little to do it, overall it serves to maintain their health and even drive away other herbivores that might simply strip their bark, potentially killing them. Other animals, especially birds, quickly learn to visit the tappatusk's trees for a potentially life-saving boost of sugar too, making this a keystone species in the deciduous woodlands of northeast Serinarcta.

~~~

The mowa is the largest land animal of Solitary Island, the most distant large island off the west coast of Serinarcta, which is now an isolated tundra environment with no land predators, where the frigid chill of winter is the greatest threat to life. On this chilly island, the mowa's ancestor (the horned mowerbird) was able to establish and lose its power of flight without terrestrial enemies from which to flee, and over around ten million years this species has now reached substantial size, making them more efficient grazers on a diet of mostly puffgrasses, specifically their starchy roots and the thick bases of their leaf blades, where the plants store energy for spring growth. Female mowas are largest of all, weighing up to 250 lbs and standing 5 feet high, but males - though around 2/3 this size - are the only ones still decorated with a fully developed pair of exotic head plumes that they use in display (in females these feathers are reduced to a pair of small "spikes" about half as long, and lacking the racket-like cluster of plumes at their tip.) Mowas are solitary animals for most of the year, but males form leks in late winter in order to attract mates, and there compete against one another as they form small territories defended with vigorous staccato calls, fluffed up plumage, and a bouncing dance in which their head crests spring up and fall down along their neck in rapid succession, in time with their calls. If one male steps into the territory of another, the two may fight fiercely with kicks and bites.

Females peruse their options in the lek one at a time, each one given the full focus of every male around her. Most years a majority of females will choose just 5% available males of the population, leaving a few with many offspring, but most of the others without success. This could lead to a low level of genetic diversity in a short time, but the mowa has adapted to an environment in which this is dealt with through other means. Most successful males will only rule the lek once or twice, because to maintain their positions in the group means they must battle rivals day in and day out, having no time to rest or feed. And when the breeding season ends and the flocks scatter, these males will have a disadvantage for their own survival compared to their rivals. There is only one predator on Solitary Island that threatens the adult mowa: the haarvulture, the only large flying carnivore which has also settled on this distant isle. It does not usually attack the female, for she is just slightly too large and potentially can kill her attacker. The male, though, is just the right size. Most of the year, solitary mowas are not so easy to track down; their mossy plumage hides them against the tundra, and they lay down motionless when they spot an aerial threat approaching. But cunning and calculating, it knows that during the lekking season the mowas will come together. It watches the leks with distant interest, taking note of the fitness of each male almost as much as the females of their own species do. And when those males are unwary, if they try to rest for just a moment, that is when it strikes. Taking advantage of the tiredness of the most aggressive males, it often kills those which have mated most, and which are left most exhausted after their seasons end, functioning to ensure next time other males get a chance to breed, and keeping the population of its prey genetically diverse. The size difference between the mowa's sexes likely evolved to reduce female mortality, as only the female raises a single egg and hatches a chick each year, and her death will also result in that of her offspring. The male is inherently more expendable on a population level due to their manner of mating in which a surplus of them always exists. It is an uncommon example of a species where those which are the fittest and which reproduce the most are also the shortest-lived individually, an example of a dramatic trade-off between lifespan and reproductive success. On Solitary Island, if the population is to remain healthy as a whole, the male mowa can not have both.

The whisperwraithe is the sister species of the whisperwing, diverged now about one million years ago. It represents the northern radiation of the bright-eyed bogglebird's increasingly intelligent descendants. Whisperwraithes are around 20% larger than their counterparts on average, but can be bigger in the far north extent of their range. They are wider-spread than whisperwings, found across the continent though most concentrated in the north and west, but they are not as gregarious and rarely form large flocks. Though they are distributed over a very large part of the northern continent, they appear most adapted to cold, northern regions and avoid central wastelands entirely; they seem to have migrated along Serinarcta's temperate east coast upon crossing the seaway from Serinaustra, and from there hopped along northwards, their spread west prevented by deserts until they reached the polar regions and there dispersed across the tundra, today the region the majority of the population is found. They have settled in the craterlands most recently, within 10,000 years, having crossed the greenbelt steppe region from the east coast and not south from the tundra, as an arid salt plain prevents their travel there just as it inhibits the migration of many other species. Though capable of flight, whisperwraithes do so less than whisperwings and have reduced endurance, preferring to travel over land.

Whisperwraithes are not quite as culturally complex as whisperwings and use a more limited toolset, being firmly within their own stone age. Though intelligence is difficult to measure comparatively, the whisperwraithe might come across as "simpler" than its sister kind, not quite as innovative, but also much more introverted and reclusive, traits that can skew how they are perceived. Their languages, though complex by animal standards, are still very simplistic, and even the concept of individual names seems lacking in their social groups. Whisperwraithes are often superstitious - a precursor to religion, which they do not seem to quite have developed, and they assign many powers to aspects of their world around them as a way to try and make sense things they do not yet understand.

Whisperwraithes do excel in certain ways better than whisperwings: they are natural pack hunters and prefer large vertebrate prey to all other food sources, skillfully knapping stone tools used to kill them in culturally transmitted methods which have remained almost identical for tens of thousands of years. Whisperwings, in contrast, rarely hunt cooperatively, and are much more inclined to exploit the hunting abilities of larger carnivores for their own benefit - something whisperwraithes don't even seem to consider. Though they work very well in small, familiar groups, whisperwraithes are more tribalistic than whisperwings and inter-group cooperation is very rarely seen, a factor that seems to prevent their formation of larger societies and so far keeps them thinly distributed. The concept of marriage, where two paired individuals unite their clans together in a sort of social contract, does not seem to exist in this species either, and juveniles of both sexes are likely to leave their birth groups at adulthood around four years of age to begin new groups that will disperse far from where they came from. There is very little immigration between clans, and so they are sustained through continued reproduction from a small starting group of siblings and their unrelated mates and fall apart when the founders surpass breeding age. Whisperwraithes and whisperwings are very close relatives that remain fully cross-fertile and could reproduce together if they coexisted. For now, they do not meet their sister species to let this occur... but this is soon to change as that highly successful species is beginning to venture far away from its ancestral homeland and colonize new lands. What will happen when the two eventually meet again remains unknown, but if first contact is aggressive then it is likely the whisperwraith to become further adapted to an increasingly cold and polar habitat to avoid competition with their more enterprising cousins. It is likely that once other species in this genus reach Serinarcta, they too will find themselves cut off from their own kinds and that this genus will soon grow to include several more species. Perhaps in the coming era, a whole complex of related sapients will soon be interacting across the world... alongside others far more distant. 

Who will be friends and who will be foes in this future that is now on the horizon - one growing ever colder, but still so full of new life - is yet to be seen...