Let Your Heart Soar (teaser)

Bleeding Heart is a story set at 300 million years post-establishment. This era has become a bustling one, for as the world of Serina itself is experiencing drastic climate shifts and widespread desertification, in insular pockets across the world several civilizations rise and begin to meet. Bleeding Heart focuses on three main characters and many secondary characters, beginning with the eponymous Heart herself, a 'redcoat' sylvanspark scrounger who has been raised by everrunners, a different species entirely, and trained to fight against other redcoats, the first antagonists of the story.

The story focuses on several cultures coming together as a group of the whisperwings - crow-like people - seek to assist another race of sylvansparks whose existence is threatened by the rapid climate change. Heart has the opportunity to join the refugees and leave for the unknown northern crater city where the fierce leucrocotta - a thorngrazer sophont - have settled in a cooperative but subtly manipulated relationship with the whisperwings, but just before she does so has come to a realization that the redcoats who are her enemies are not a monolith. Getting to know one individual who she spared in combat for his ineptitude, she realizes that her greater purpose in saving her own (adoptive) people is not to destroy the redcoats, but to break up their regime from within. It will require the enlistment of spies to pick the enemy apart bit by bit and turn its people against their repressive dictators. Meanwhile, neither all leucrocotta nor all whisperwings are on board with the decisions made by their own kinds - they are not a monolith either. 

Bleeding Heart is such a large setting, it's been very hard to place when it will be ready to publish as a story, and thus when the worldbuilding around this era can also be released. But a ton of content for it be viewed on the patreon, going back about a year and a half. There are currently about twenty characters, and a dozen or more distinct variations on the sapient species of the era, which are highly diverse in culture, custom, and appearance: even within a single species. If the hothouse is Serina's most biodiverse setting, this era is its most politically developed and characterized by a wide margin!

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