Like the flatlands of Serinarcta, an open grassland is quickly becoming Serinaustra's dominant biome by 295 million years post-establishment. Surrounding the continent's wetter, remnant polar forest, the southern steppe, which you may have known as the Serinaustran steppe in its distant past life, has returned to Serina after 30 million years. After being first wiped away by glaciers that stripped the continent bare in the ocean age, this land spent the last 20+ million years as a wet and tropical one. But now that age, too, is done. With less rainfall and cooler temperatures, trees have now given way to hardy grasses, and plains once again stretch for thousands of miles. Though it has become a shadow of the biodiverse haven it was just five million years ago, not all animals have died out with the changing times; a few prosper in the new conditions they find themselves in, and this is also the home of new people, their ancestors pushed to sapience in order to adapt and overcome the hurdles of such wide-scale climactic shifts. Now they, too, begin to alter this landscape further, turning it into something even more distant and new from what it once was. The steppe region stretches from just a few hundred feet from the sea shore all the way to the edge of the austral swamp, often with wide areas of overlap between species. As such, certain organisms from coastal regions, as well as from other scattered habitats like sky island remnants which occur sporadically throughout the steppe, will also be covered in this post. 

As the trees grow sparse and the southern swamps dry out into arid savannahs after the hothouse comes to a close, many animals which evolved in this once prosperous world of water will go extinct.

But some will carry on, like the stilts, an old genus of large, primitive foxtrotters that appeared in the later hothouse. These animals evolved their extraordinary elongated features to facilitate wading through wetlands and catching fish, but never became so specialized as to forget other ways to find food. Now many of the waterways have disappeared, but the stilts haven't followed them. They now hunt the plains of northern Serinaustra under cover of night, using their height to spot the tiny movements of distant murds and other small animals on the grasslands.

Descended from the swampstilt, a species which persisted with little change for ten million years, the stridestilt is a little smaller and even more gracile, extremely well-adapted to trot over long distances in search of isolated small prey that is now sometimes hard to find. Stridestilts don't form territories - they are highly nomadic, covering up to 40 miles a day when food is scarce. Their jaws are shorter and weaker than those of their ancestors, resulting in a smaller skull overall, which gives the illusion of a longer neck, though its proportion is not significantly different from its predecessor. When quarry is detected, either via sight or a slight sound pinpointed along its disc-like facial structure into its satellite-like ears, the stridestilt approaches with a silent, slow stalk until within range to pounce. It catches its prey in its hands, then tosses its victim into the air and snatches it in its sharp teeth. It snaps its neck in a quick flinging movement, and eats it in a few quick bites before returning to the hunt for more. Each animal eaten averages just a few ounces, so the 120 pound stridestilt needs to find several dozen per night, making it one of the most bloodthirsty of large predators by average day to day kill count.

With food small and widely distributed, the stridestilt has a reduced social organization. While swampstilts were monogamous and males aided females in childcare, they often spent months apart at other times. This has become more extreme in this descendant species in which males and females may meet only once and go their separate ways, for there is no way to coordinate meetings without consistent territories. The female has to raise her single pup on her own and keeps its with her from birth as it clings to her back. She will care for it for two to three years and not breed again until it is fully independent. It takes several months to be strong enough to run along with its mother, and if threatened will hold tight on her fur like a jockey on a racehorse, as she bounds away from danger at up to 50 miles per hour - faster than a greyhound. Like the repandors from so long before her, her spine arcs dramatically at full speed, storing energy like a spring to help propel her as she covers great distance with her long stride. One of the fastest southern animals in her time, she has few enemies which can keep up. She may also use her speed to run down what cursorial prey persists in the open, sometimes hunting animals over half her own weight, though this is rare - her jaws aren't strong, and so killing such animals is very difficult for her to accomplish, requiring she hold the prey down with all of her strength and effectively strangle it with her forearms, which are her strongest appendages. In the rare chances she succeeds, however, it can greatly improve the chances of her pup's survival. They must gorge as soon as possible, eating up to 30 pounds of meat until their stomachs distend grotesquely, for the scent of carrion carries far and fast on the cool night air and will quickly draw in more powerful scavengers with no qualms about taking her hard-earned prize. 

The lush forests that grew on the peaks of sky islands were the first to die off in the drying climate, and by 3.5 million years ago, many of their inhabitant had already descended to the ground in search of food and suitable habitat. This migration means the extinct islands themselves have become relatively vacant - but this, in turn, allows other species to move in. 

While some foxtrotters were pre-adapted to survive the loss of forest, others were left in dire straits. Very few scamps last long into the final stretch. These arboreal foxtrotters all depended heavily on forests for their survival, and were evolved to live in ancient wooded habitats that had changed very little over more than 15 million years. Flutterfoxes, able to take to the skies in search of better living conditions, are the most notable exception. But scattered across the drying world, there are still some others.

Dewayos are large bubblerumblers which have moved down to the ground, forced to leave their comfortable treetop habitat as the gaps in the forest grew wider until now, when the woodlands left are little more than slowly dying islands in a vast, empty landscape. Their long limbs evolved to navigate the canopy now give them an awkward, stumbling appearance, and yet upon them they can reach high speeds and cross long distances in search of food. Solitary and nocturnal, the dewayo resembles something like a cat mixed with a baboon, all pasted together on the three-legged tribbethere form. It strides over the open plains under darkness, covering many miles a night if need be, in order to find small animal prey such as murds, as it is a strict carnivore with needle-like teeth and so is unable to chew the hard leaves and stems of the grassland plants. But it strongly prefers more elevated terrain to call its home, often settling its territory upon the eroding sky islands, where they scurry up the slopes with ease to avoid larger predators while being able to surprise prey by dropping down on it from a height.  Occasionally, dewayo can engage in monopedal leaping locomotion, albeit briefly and only at very high speeds, when they run so quickly that they no longer drop their forearms to the ground in each run cycle. This is fast but unstable, and can only be maintained in brief bursts.

A jumping ambush predator with feline-like reflexes, dewayos stalk their quarry slowly and quietly for a long time, and then capture it with a brief, rapid leap, snatching it in their hand-like forelimbs and stuffing it into their powerful jaws, which quickly snap its neck. They are strongly visual animals, with large eyes that are attuned to movement, and acute sight both in low light and at long distance, but their large triangular ears are also well-utilized for locating where prey may be moving even when it is completely dark, such as under cloud cover, or when it is hidden in tall grass.

Dewayos are a rare example of an antisocial foxtrotter; they have no social behaviors outside mating (and a brief bond between a mother and her kits, which grow up and reach independence in just a couple months.) A confrontation between two of any sex at any other time will result in a fight, which can be fatal, and which can result in cannibalism of the loser by the winner. But the species does have to come together at least sometimes if it is to breed, and so males have a system that lets them keep other males away, as well as to let females know where they are. They retain an inflatable gular pouch, albeit of reduced size relative to their hothouse ancestor, and males which have acquired a productive territory can afford to broadcast their availability to potential mates with deep, booming calls which carry over the plains between their elevated territories. Females are silent, but can pick up these songs even from several miles away, and if receptive will seek out the call which sounds the loudest, as it suggests the most fertile male. In fact, the male dwayo's call is not an entirely honest signal; its voice is at odds with its fertility, as a male can either be more virile but have a weaker voice, or be very loud but produce less sperm. In this way, males which are otherwise less ideal mates may compensate for their shortcomings by yelling louder than their counterparts.

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In coastal Serinaustra, the eroding remnants of once vast sky islands are now the domain of another even more formidable predator, the scowl: a 60 pound moonbeast that has all but lost the means to fly, but which has become a very effective terrestrial, climbing predator.

Scowls are now the biggest moonbeasts, and yet they descend from nearly the smallest, the meowl of the middle hothouse. This small predator was already the most terrestrial species of this clade by then, hunting insects on the forest floor with ruthless efficiency. Now, as many animals reduce in size to survive dwindling food resources, the meowl grew far larger, entering vacated niches and becoming a far more sizeable carnivore. There are few animals living on top of the islands now to sustain them, but many on the plains below. Their diet is now made up of mid-sized grassland vertebrates, prey that might sometimes include the dewayo, but mainly includes larger murds like duikerducks, and even molodonts - for the first time, small seed-snatchers have now colonized Serinaustra across a narrowing seaway, though for the time being they have changed very little from their most primitive and generalized forms. 

The scowl uses high ground to its advantage and centers its territory on the steep edges of the sky islands. Prey species take shelter from the weather in their shaded recesses, and it is here that the scowl ambushes them from above, leaping down upon them. It has evolved a wicked, specialized killing claw from its hind toe, which now folds up off the ground when walking to keep it sharp. Prey is restrained with both arms while this talon is sunk into their abdomen, causing fatal slicing wounds. Kills are quickly carried up the side of the cliff to keep them safe from competitors. Females likewise raise their kits in dens high above the ground, situated safely in high caves on the islands, where few enemies can find them. Scowls cannot take off from the ground; their wing fingers are short, and they have entirely lost their tail fans. They can, however, flutter from a height, controlling their descent on top of their victims by flapping their wings, and so also avoiding a collision with the rock. They are not the only creatures for whom flight is becoming difficult in the post-hothouse world.

295 million years PE, the oxygen levels in Serina's atmosphere are dropping, as the atmosphere itself is now being lost to space at a higher rate than ever before, due to the ongoing loss of Serina's magnetic field following the extinction of its volcanism underground. Air at sea level at the equator is now equivalent to mountain altitude of 13,000 feet on Earth, an oxygen level of around 12.5%. In more polar regions, it can be equivalent to 20,000 feet - an oxygen level of only 9%, which would already be intolerable to humans. But birds, as well as tribbets, have more efficient respiration than such mammals. As the changes have occurred over millions of years, there have not been widespread extinctions directly related to the lowering oxygen levels. There are, however, wide-reaching effects among animal behavior. 

For many flying animals, this means that flight is becoming much more tiring. Birds and tribbats that do not absolutely have to fly begin to lose the ability. Winged migration is now declining on the whole, as animals travel to the least oppressive environments and tend to remain there, as it is more difficult and dangerous to make seasonal voyages to distant lands for increasingly brief seasons of abundance. Soaring creatures continue to do better than those with energy-intensive flapping flight, the latter becoming more reduced to short-distance, localized exertions. Yet even some seademons, very efficient soarers, gradually stop their nomadic world-wandering flying lifestyles, staying closer to shore and in areas where food is more concentrated, and spending more of their time in the water - a process that quickly results in the reduction of their wingspans and furthers their evolutionary path toward being truly marine species.

Demingos are one genus of seademon tribbat which retains strong powered flight. Very large fliers - for tribbats - they reach heights of five feet, and weigh as much as 55 pounds. These tribbetheres have many adaptations that let them still soar the skies in a time where fewer animals can do so, with particularly efficient hemoglobin in their blood that lets them retain a much greater percentage of dissolved oxygen within their blood than most animals, and absolutely gigantic lungs which inflate upwards into their necks like balloons at full expansion, providing a huge amount of surface area for oxygen exchange. The most exerting activity of these animals' flight is lift-off, and to prepare for it, demingos are adapted to hyperventilate, effectively supercharging their blood with a surplus of oxygen that they then rely on during the brief, exhausting ascent into the air. Once at a sufficient height, their flight becomes nearly effortless in good winds, and they can recharge while soaring without using significant energy.

As a result of their specializations, these animals can still make use of seasonal food sources. They are filter-feeders, which have switched from airborne fishing to shallow-water wading. Most of the time, they forage in flocks along the ocean coast, collecting algae and small crustaceans from the tide with a multitude of very thin, bristle-like teeth in their lower jaws which function like sieves to sift water for nourishment. Yet they are not strictly plankton-eaters - a beak-like keratin nail on the edge of the upper beak lines up with sturdy lower incisors, and lets them also pick up larger single prey items, especially small fishes, like a set of tweezers. While feeding in a productive area, they spend days at a time without taking flight. They move in groups for defense against predators, for they cannot take flight quickly to escape enemies. Both sexes of the king demingo have large, red ears that are used simultaneously to shed excess heat and make themselves appear larger to intimidate foes. In males, the ears are tipped with several long whip-like cartilage rods and are further used in sexual display.

But though they are very well-adapted to terrestrial life, able to wander many miles on foot near the seashore on their long, hoofed wings, they are still capable of coordinated long-distance movements. When conditions are just right, these take them to the rainbow basin, the drying remnant of the great blue salt lake now isolated in the middle of the steppe.

The rainbow basin, most of the time, is now an inhospitable, brine pit colonized by colorful bacteria and extremophile insects. But once every few years, excessive rainfall temporarily restores it to life. A short-lived flood, lasting around 3-4 months from start to end, transforms the basin into a blossoming sea. As salinity drops toward a level just slightly saltier than the sea, the ecological community of the basin shifts drastically. Cyanobacteria that dominate during dry periods are outcompeted by green algae which remained dormant in the salt pan, changing the sea from red to aqua green, and the surge of lower-salinity water results in a mass hatching of billions of triops. It is this that the king demingo seeks out. Following the scent of the rain, they fly in to this basin in their thousands, from all around the coast. They gather to feed on the glut of food, which very little else can now reach, and here they nest and breed. Their pregnancies are very brief, and the young are born at just a few ounces, because they can grow fast on a constant supply of calorie-rich crustaceans, and fledge in just 8 weeks, weighing around 8 pounds. By the time the flood recedes and the basin begins to return to a salt plain, they can follow their parents back to the sea, where they will continue to grow for another three years before reaching their full size. The fledglings have advantages over the adults in being able to fly much more easily due to their lower weight, but are in turn less able to find food, for they cannot wade in deeper water the adults normally feed in. As a result, parental care is very prolonged - the pups, after migrating back to the ocean with their parents, continue to be aided in finding food by both of them until they are nearly adult. With breeding opportunities so scarce, and just one or two pups born to each pair, the adults do the most they can to ensure their young successfully reach adulthood in this changing, ever harsher world. Harem breeding behavior, which worked well for earlier ancestors of the demingo, has been abandoned as no longer viable for the current conditions that require both parents help to raise the young. Now these tribbats are monogamous, and this has gone hand-in-hand with the reduced sexual dimorphism of the genus. While females have begun to more resemble males, males have become more like females behaviorally, no longer being aggressive to each other, and being very attentive fathers.

But floods that render this lake attractive to animals as big as the demingo are only sporadic. As Serinaustra dries and sea levels fall, the great blue saltlake is slowly evaporating away, those freshwater deluges less common every decade. Already a highly concentrated brine in the hothouse - a closed bay of seawater cut off from the ocean in ancient times - it has reduced to 1/10th of its size at the start of the hothouse. The land immediately around it, once submerged, has become a salt pan, while its water at its lowest levels can concentrate into a toxic brine of salt six times saltier than the ocean. Though no longer suitable to sustain most organisms at such times, it still supports some life, mainly in the form of extremophile cyanobacteria that grow along the sediment and turn the lake unusual shades of red and purple, and thus giving it its name. Gnat-like saltflies also survive here, the larvae of which feed within the brine upon this singular plant food source, and the adults in turn feeding the flitterfilter, a small linialinguid skewer that is now one of only a few permanent vertebrate residents of the basin.

A sister group to the will-o-wisp, the flitterfilter is a flying skewer that rarely lands. To stay aloft nearly all the time without becoming winded, it relies heavily on thermals rising above the salt pan to stay aloft during the day, when it feeds, and at night it rises up and soars on the wind, sleeping one half of its brain (and one eyes) at a time while maintaining its position in the air on extremely long, graceful wings. It feeds in an unusual way: its ancestors evolved their specialized tongue into a different shape, in this lineage consisting of two primary fronds, each branching off into four smaller appendages which are lined with sticky hair-like cillia. The flitterfilter is a true filter-feeder, flying low over the lake in the evening hours when the insects rise from the brine and gather in nightly swarms to mate. The birds extend the furls of their tongue out either side of the mouth so that they trail below and behind them in flight, serving like flypaper to collect the bugs by the thousands with each sweeping pass.  When its nets fill up, the flitterfilter retracts them back into the mouth, rolling them up inside its throat where the food is scraped off against a baleen-like plate within the gizzard and then moved into the stomach.

Though the rainbow basin provides abundant food for the adult flitterfilter, the landscape - hot, caustic, and without natural shade - is not ideal for the survival of skewer larvae. But this branch of the linialinguid birds have an advantage over others to survive here. Their ancestors, toward the end of the hothouse, adopted more proactive parental care, and a method of it that was unlike any other clade of bird. The flitterfilter is a mouth-brooder, with the male nurturing a single larvae within his own gizzard, that clings to the hair-like cillia within his throat and is fed upon a portion of the food he consumes. This bizarre behavior originated in the more productive and competitive ecosystem of the salt swamp where these birds ancestors evolved as a practical way for the male, as he fertilized the eggs of the female, to protect them from abundant predators. Keeping the eggs safely within his throat pouch until they hatched and could be released, he could improve their survival rate, and females preferred males who were better parents. In the flitterfilter, this practice has been extrapolated upon and the care is very prolonged. The water and the ground of the rainbow basin is so saline, it would instantly kill the soft, unshelled eggs of the female, and so each male collects them directly from the female as she lays them, tucking them into its throat pouch - a transfer of cargo which occurs in flight.

This is the end of the female's job, but for the male, his is only just beginning. He now must land - something a flitterfilter will almost never otherwise do - and retires into a dark, sheltered crack in the salt pan to brood them. There he holds them for over ten days without feeding, relying on stored fat and entering a torpor-like state, as the first larvae to hatch consumes the eggs of the others and grows big enough that it will no longer fit down the narrow throat of the adult, which is adapted to swallow only plankton-like flying insects. Once it takes a secure grasp of the inside of the throat, and no longer has any eggs left to eat, the male resumes activity and returns to hunting. The young flitterfilter feeds itself on a portion of everything he swallows for up to a month, until it pupates, still secure within its father's throat. In another 3 weeks, a fully-developed little bird about one-sixth the size of the male is regurgitated, along with the remains of its pupal sac, and takes its maiden flight, fully independent and now able to fend for itself. No other bird upon Serina has ever evolved such a strange, yet effective, manner of rearing the next generation as these remarkable skewers.

In the face of climate change, the burdles are doing better in the face of these changes than most. Skin which is often armored and watertight protects against harsh sun and enemies in this exposed environment, and strong digging abilities allow them to shelter below ground. Diets based on social insects or on tough plant parts come in handy at a time when tower-forming ant colonies and grass begin to dominate the arid, more radiated landscape. As far from a life permanently aloft like that of the flitterfilter as can be, several kinds of burdles seek sanctuary from the cold winter temperatures and the drying sun of summer below the surface of the soil. These low-slung, sharp-clawed omnivores all descended from a fossorial ancestor in the previous ice age, and readily returned to their roots. 

Dagadillos are a clade of burdles evolved from the digdag, whose armor has evolved into a segmented shell that allows them to roll up when threatened, with only their sharp claws left out to defend their underbellies. Highly varied in size and behavior, some are large surface scavengers that wander over the land in search of anything they can eat. The rhinoceros dagadillo however, in amusing contrast to the associations carried by its grandiose name, is a tiny mole-like specialist of the underground realm - and it is also a vibrant shade of pink.

The rhinoceros dagadillo lives in northern Serinaustra, spending almost its entire life below the surface in an intricate network of tunnels, where it feeds on tubers. Rather than only eat new roots it comes across while digging, this burdle maintains its burrows for years at a time and over time the plants rooted above grow tubers directly down into them for it to sample. With a large enough territory, it can find all of its necessary food within its own home, taking care to only eat part of each one so it can heal over and continue to grow in the future. Males and females live alone, but in adjacent ranges in wider "cities" below ground, with some overlap in tunnels on the edge of each animal's territory with those of the opposite sex; male burrow systems usually meet up with several female ones, but females' don't overlap with females, and males' don't overlap with males. Males seeking to breed will go "door to door" on the edges of their range and tap their large claws on the tunnel walls to see if a female is receptive. If she is, she will respond by mirroring the number and frequency of his knocks. If she isn't, she will come out and bite him on the butt until he leaves her alone. The female raises a single offspring for more than two years - an amazing length of time for an animal weighing only 9 ounces, but their deep underground lifestyle protects them from enemies, and they live for a long time, sometimes more than twenty-five years. That is plenty of time to have a number of babies, especially since infant mortality is low

The rhinoceros dagadillo's bill horn, from which its name derives, is shared by both sexes and serves a practical purpose; it helps to dig a tunnel, reaching up to aid the arm claws which have a limited upward range of motion. Its bright pink color meanwhile comes from its diet of root vegetables rich in vitamin A, which is metabolized in its body as carotene pigment in a similar process to that which makes birds that eat crustaceans turn pink or red. Living in the darkness below ground, and not needing to hide from enemies with camouflage, it has lost most of the melanin pigment in its skin which would otherwise mask these colors. Yet because it lives in shaded tunnels, the rhinoceros does not know it is colorful - it is a byproduct of its diet and lifestyle without specific function.

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Murds, another group of widespread rodent-like burdles which evolved and radiated throughout the hothouse, also adapt to changing conditions with relative ease, and they too have produced skilled diggers to shelter under the earth. With a keratin sheath covering the entire tip of their forearm, and so rendering it one big claw, they use their wrists like pick-axes to claw through the baked earth below the plains and dig complex burrows in the cooler dirt down below. These murds are mostly predators of grass seeds, with large crushing beaks to open them that are reminiscent of those of early canaries - an example of convergent evolution to an ancient ancestor, or of evolution repeating itself under the same selective pressures. Slower metabolisms than many comparable birds let the murds get by on less food, and during the worst of times, many can enter hibernation to survive.

Some murds though have innovated other solutions to seasonal food scarcity. Farmurds are agriculturists, for not only do they store seeds below ground in large numbers, but also assist their host plants directly to grow by planting their seeds above their dens, fertilizing them with their droppings, and removing competing weeds from their plots. After rainy periods they reap the fruits of their labors, as their gardens bloom and set seed. Most of it they eat, but a small portion is set aside for later planting. Over millions of years, their selection process resulted in the domestication of a species of grass that grows especially big, heavy kernels that are now too heavy, and packed too tightly on a stem, to disperse without the murd's help. In addition to eating seeds, the farmurd also consumes potato-like tubers that develop on the grass's roots. Like its seeds, the roots have also changed with domestication, as a single large tuber in the ancestral species, vulnerable to infection if bitten by animals repeatedly, has evolved into many small bite-sized ones all along the root system which can be removed in moderate quantities without damage to the health of the plant. 

Farmurds are some of the most strongly social burdles, their lifestyle and predictable food supply even in uncertain environments allowing them to live together in colonies - which also make faster work of farming chores. In most farmurd species these groups are mixed sex and follow dominance hierarchies, with only the top female being able to breed and the rest being subservient and aiding her in raising her chicks. This strategy, however, means that each ruling female will eventually face attempts by her fellow females to overthrow her and take the throne, and fighting is common in the colony, with each leader's rule often being short.

The strange royal farmurd, though, has found a solution to that problem, and evolved a social structure that completely removes in-fighting, letting it form the most peaceful colonies of all. This murd species has strong sexual dimorphism, with the females being many times larger than the males, and larger than any other species of farmurd by a significant margin. This is because each colony has just one female, and she can thus monopolize all of the food resources toward herself and the production of her eggs. These eggs typically hatch into only males, thanks to the wonders of parthenogenesis. In some Earth avian species, parthenogenesis, the production of offspring without a fertilized egg, was rare but documented, resulting from the spontaneous conversion of haploid egg cells to diploid cells capable of development into a viable embryo, usually in the absence of a male. Birds have a ZW sex-determination system, and the result of this process means all parthenogenic offspring inherit two "Z" chromosomes from the "ZW" female, meaning they can only be male, while simultaneously inheriting all of the genes and alleles of their mother in the absence of a father to contribute any. A once spontaneous phenomenon has become a fixed trait in the royal farmurd, so that she naturally produces these male chicks through clutches of unfertilized eggs, and virtually all of her eggs can therefore hatch without her mating. 

She exploits the labors of her many loyal sons to care for her, to cultivate the gardens she plants when she first establishes a new burrow, and to store all of the food for her. Though she begins her adult life only slightly bigger than them, she continues to grow for several years longer and eventually, after gorging on the fruits of the labor of her offspring weighs up to twelve pounds, some thirty times their size. She can become grotesquely fat, spending her days living at leisure in her burrow and rarely leaving its safety while the colony males are entirely disposable, often being killed by predators when they go above ground at night to tend their crops; she is always hatching more to take their place. During good times, the colony may have a hundred males, known as serfs, maintaining it and serving their beloved matriarch. But when the dry seasons come and the grasses go dormant, she doesn't return the loyalty. All of the seeds they have painstakingly cultivated and stored, now piled high in chambers far below the earth, are not theirs to take. When the queen sees her subjects no longer bringing down new food to add to the stash, she grows more active. She tunnels out of her resting chambers and enlarges the tunnels, and she begins to systematically cull the colony down. One by one, she kills and consumes the serfs - her offspring, which serve only to supply her and will never breed - first to recycle the water and nutrients contained in their bodies, and then to ensure the stored food lasts her until the rains return. Small and loyal to the leader of the family, the expendable males are neither willing nor able to defend themselves from certain death. When the cull is done, the lonely queens retires back to her quarters, entering a quiet restful state where she emerges to feed on the seed stores only occasionally, and can remain in this state for as long as three years. Only once she detects rainfall, and the growth of the grasses again, will she rise and lay a new clutch of eggs, hatch a new brood of serfs, and slowly rebuild the colony into a peaceful - but very temporary - utopia. The cycle will repeat many times over a queen's life, which lasts decades -  compared to the several months of most males.

Thanks to their unusual biology and social structure, a female royal farmurd is a rarity, with a sex ratio across the population skewed to more than 100 males to each one. Each is produced only by the union of a female with a male, which occurs only when food is at its most abundant, during sporadic rainy seasons every few years, when she will accept a roaming male from outside the colony into her hearth to fertilize her eggs, and then hatch a clutch of both males and females. Colonies within a region synchronize their cycles with the weather so that these young males and females are chased out of the nests all around the same time, at night for a period of just a week or two. The males are sexually mature immediately, and they migrate, sometimes for miles, in search of a female receptive to breed. The females, however, will take about three weeks to be able to mate. By then the fertile males will be dead, for they focus only on mating and cease to feed. The females - the next generation of queens - will by then be settled in their own new burrows, and will soon lay their first clutches of infertile eggs - serfs to begin cultivating the crops that will sustain the queen. She will have no use for a mate for several years, until she is fully-grown and has a stable food supply, and by then it is also more likely that a visiting male will not be a close relative. While the males hatched from the queen's unfertilized eggs are not infertile, they are smaller and weaker than those produced from sexual reproduction and further inhibited from maturation by hormones produced by the queen, which generally do a good job to keep them from straying from the nest to seek out partners.

Able to make the most of limited food resources, survive long periods of harsh conditions, and to bounce back their numbers rapidly when things improve, farmurds are one of the groups best adapted to survive the rigors and challenges the final stretch will bring to Serina.

~~~

Related to the dagadillo is a very different animal, one that still braves the world above ground. This is the dagdragon - a 250 lb, heavily armored ant-eater. This animal, unlike its ancestors, is diurnal, foraging for food during the day. It shuffles along on all fours, but rises onto its hind legs when it comes across a suitable ant mound, which it now feeds from in the absence of forest logs filled with grubs. Using its foreleg claws to tear apart the clay, it gains access to the larvae inside which it removes with a sticky tongue almost 20 inches long, and its skin is so well-protected with armor plating and defensive scutes that it is virtually immune to the ants' stings. Even as insects swarm it, biting and trying to inject venom, they cannot get through its defenses - at most, they will cause the dragon to close its eyes and continue to feed, finding more insects by touch with its tongue, which itself is protected by a thick coating of mucous.

At night, dagdragons often rest by digging a hole in which they hide most of their bodies to help keep warm. Tucking their legs and necks under, they shuffle down in the soil so that only their protected backs are visible in the ground. Not only does this protect them from predators, but also grass fires, which flash over their spikes without reaching the rest of the animal buried in the cooler soil beneath. In the morning, shortly before sunrise, they rise and stand facing the sun. Small grooves in its skin collect dew in the humid night air, rolling droplets of water along channels to the sides of its mouth and allowing it to drink daily even without access to pooled water - a beneficial ability in a climate that will now only become drier.

Excellent parental care is also something the digdags have in their favor, and mothers raise just one baby at a time, for over a year. At night, they hide their newborn young under themselves keeping them safe from anything that could try to harm them until they are big enough to sleep on their own. While many baby burdles have very high mortality, most young dagdragons successfully reach maturity thanks to their mother's care and protection. 

~~~

Flutterfoxes are a rare example of an animal group that manages to diversify after the end of the hothouse age, and this is all the more noteworthy because they are flying animals evolving at a time where flight is becoming harder to make worth doing. Their acquisition of powered flight now allows these foxtrotters to cover long distances, searching for remnant pockets of suitable habitat in a much drier and less hospitable land, even though only a few of them are capable of soaring flight, and the rest must travel only in short excursions, effectively leaping across landscapes in distances of a few miles, then stopping to rest. Spreading to the corners of the world this way in small but steady jumps, they speciate rapidly as populations become isolated from one another. 

Vixtrels are a genus of mostly carnivorous flutterfoxes descended from the fidowl. They include both very small species, and several much larger, collectively evolving to fill many niches opened up in the shifting global ecosystem as more specialized hothouse species die out. Vixtrels have much in common with moonbeasts, and fall into the same size range. Both groups are monopods, with three-fingered wings and large ears. But moonbeasts had entirely membrane wings, while all flutterfoxes have three feather-like digits with interlocking hair bristles that provide lift as well as greater maneuverability. Both groups had keen hearing, but moonbeasts had a specialized facial disc to maximize their ability to detect slight noises, which vixtrels lack. Vixtrels compensate with a superior sense of smell and more generalized feeding habits. While moonbeasts hunted live prey nearly exclusively, vixtrels readily scavenge on the less fortunate casualties of the ongoing climate crisis. They are also much more social animals, and by cooperating to claim food resources and territory, they are now edging out the remaining solitary moonbeasts that still cling on. Interactions between the two are usually openly hostile, as packs of vixtrils fiercely seek out roosting moonbeasts, often killing them in unfairly matched battles of one against many.

The vermilion vixtrel is one of the larger volant flutterfoxes, reaching a weight of 18 pounds and a 5 foot wingspan. It is a powerful flier, able to cover great distances in search of food, and it is one of the most widespread species, only exceeded in global range by some of the rovers. Native to both continents, these raptorial predators hunt in groups of three to seven, preying on anything from small murds to animals as large as loopalopes, which they may strike from above with their talons to blind. Prey may be taken either on the ground or in the air. They are adaptable hunters, able to adopt solitary or social hunting habits depending on the type of prey available, but groups always roost together; a single mating pair brings up two young at a time, which are cared for by both parents and other pack members. Capable of both gliding and very fast flight, social hunting is often done in relays, which can allow them to chase down seraphs and other large, powerful birds in the air by driving them to exhaustion as individual vixtrils drop out of the chase and are replaced by others which have been waiting in the wings, gliding nearby at a slow pace. Their jaws are very elongated and powerful, able to crack bone but still reach deep into body cavities to feed on innards and organs. Both traits also make them effective scavengers, though they are much less specialized at this than the last living and contemporary aeracudas, which are better able to find carcasses first and take the choicest bits before rivals appear, and which are also relatively social, which allows them to compete against the vixtrel more effectively in conflict.

Vermilion vixtrels are mostly aerial hunters of open landscapes, but will also enter wooded areas to hunt if they must, even if they have to land and hop along or crawl along cliff faces to do so. They strongly prefer raised sites to gather and rest (though may nest on the ground on the open tundra) but these may be anything from remnant trees to sea cliffs, the remains of sky islands, or the walls of ancient lakes now turned craters. Breeding pairs create nests in which they raise their young for the first couple of months, normally in the summer. While feeding pups, packs become territorial, but once the young can fly they return to a nomadic and transient lifestyle, covering thousands of miles a year in the search for food. Packs are usually aggressive to rival groups, but not always - they may temporarily aggregate into super-packs of up to forty animals. These groups might be expected to form only during periods of food abundance, but in fact occur most often during times of scarcity. Such big packs can be effective killers even of large megafaunal land animals, a resource unavailable to smaller groups unless already dead. Hunting prey so much bigger than themselves is a team effort, and a dangerous one, likely to result in the deaths of several members. Yet when the going is tough, this may still be the benefit of the population as a whole, and the windfall of a big kill can sustain them all long enough for conditions to improve and bring out the smaller animals they normally feed on for most of the year. Occasionally, large groups of vixtrels will even hunt both lone sylvansparks and slaughtersprinters, and these tribbetheres are one of their relatively few surviving natural predators. 

~~~

It was once so favorable for survival that seraphs of hothouse Serinaustra lost their powers of flight and came to run the land. Giraffowl thrived on this continent just five million years ago. Now they are rare relicts; the transition of forest to field was swift, and the new opened landscape rife with dangers; fires roared over dry plains, and ruthless persistence predators, the slaughtersprinters, now exist here, able to ground-dwelling prey in relays to its exhaustion and death. While certain hardy giraffowl still thrive in the north, at the bottom of the world their ancestor's lost of flight has all but doomed them. But in their stead, distantly related relatives fall into their role, showing a glimpse into an alternate timeline. A world where the adult giraffowl didn't lose their wings.

Staganders aren't giraffowl, but they are seraphs, and they resemble their ancestors very closely, differing in major factors only by a lack of a brood-rearing pouch. They are beautiful, colorful descendants of the elegander, a large ptoose, and the steppe landscape which has proven so difficult for native land animals to survive has favored its rapid proliferation and extraordinary success. Staganders, now standing eight feet high on all fours, have vibrant speckled plumage that shimmers with changing iridescent colors, and the males sport knob-shaped range and black bill crests; both sexes have raised white bristles on the head. They are not just fast runners but strong soaring flier, thus able to rely on flight for long distance movement; they live a life equal parts aerial and terrestrial, and they now fill the niches formerly occupied by ground-dwellers such as giraffowl and lumpelope trunkos. Alongside scarce surviving ground-dwellers like the horse - which has its own ways of surviving intense predation pressure - the stagander feeds on the grasslands in vast numbers with some 50 million adults alive at any one time across Serinaustra, far and away its most abundant animal of equivalent size.

Staganders' success comes both from the adult's ability to take flight well in advance of their enemies' approach, and so escape the danger posed by slaughtersprinter's ground-based pursuit hunting methods, and from an r-strategist lifestyle. They breed from as young as two years old and are capable of producing large litters of 20-30 offspring at one time each spring; many chicks succumb to predators or the elements, for they are not attended at all after hatching and soon fly away. But some inevitably survive - their numbers overwhelm the capacity of predators to catch them all, and clouds of chicks darken the skies over their parent flocks as they take flight all in a matter of just one two days at the end of the synchronized breeding season. Chicks disperse across the continent into smaller flocks, but some are still big enough to blot out the sun as they pass by, the din of their chirping rising to a deafening, thunderous roar. Immediately post-fledging, the total species population of all ages can exceed 625 million birds. Juveniles spend a year migrating along waterways, feeding in the shallows on whatever they can catch before they join adult flocks in inland regions of the steppe when a little over half grown. Adult birds are nomadic too, moving across the southern landscape in a here today, gone tomorrow habit to take first advantage of any flush of green grass produced by rainfall, and they can live for decades, but do not have to live long lives to increase their populations with so many offspring born. Though ground-based hunters do not impact their numbers, they are hunted more effectively by certain aerial predators such as the vixtrel.

~~~

The most common and widespread fully-terrestrial grazer of Serinaustra is the horsquork, the biggest squaboon species. Descendants of the stricken squaboon, this species has evolved down a path of persecution as the prey of squabgoblins (now called slaughtersprinters.) Slaughtersprinters and these so-called horses have evolved in an arms race together in which both parties have become larger and faster in order to escape and to catch the other, respectively. Such a competition over the last five million years brought both species out of the forest and into the grasslands. As the slaughtersprinter grew smarter, its unrelenting pursuit made the horsquork's mind slow as its body became quick, focusing all of its energy onto its speed. Its evolutionary success now depended more on quick reproduction and early independence than long living individuals or cultural learning, and even their diet has been reduced to the simplest and most easily found food; they eat a diet almost totally comprised of grass, and to survive they feed most of their waking hours with little time for anything else. Horsquorks were never people, only related to the ancestors of people. But they are not terribly far off, in concept, from a post-sophont. They are one of the closest living relatives of sylvansparks, after all - much closer to them than they are to slaughtersprinters. And it is this closeness to 'humanity' that lends an air of depravity to the horse's existence; it is now very far-gone from what could have been.

'Horses' have extremely simplified social behavior versus any other primal scrounger, demonstrating the end stage of a breakdown of their social bonds. Relationships between individuals are short-lived and temporary; individuals live only a few years, growing rapidly to adulthood, breeding and dying mainly due to heavy predation. Males aggressively compete for control of female groups instinctively, and dominate other males through physical strength, kicking and biting one another; cast off males linger at the back of the herd and are likely to be hunted first, unwittingly protecting the breeding females and young. Males are larger than females by up to half again, and with females unable to form alliances for their own benefit, they submit to the wills of any male that wins control over the herd. Wild horses exhibit at times uncomfortable behaviors, especially when compared to their civilized relatives, as a result of their almost total loss of social order that has followed their lengthy persecution from predators; courtship is nonexistent, with mating being the choice of the lead male, and females have no say over where herds travel; they are constantly bitten and kicked by males to herd them wherever they decide, and they never fight back or the male is likely to kill them. Males fight one another continuously and show their dominance to its members each time they take over a new group with aggression, sometimes also killing the very small, dependent young. This becomes another strong selective pressure for offspring which can run almost as fast as adults (and excel at hiding in the tall grass when pursued) and can take care of themselves in as little as five days after hatching - quicker than in any other scrounger.

To the slaughtersprinter, the horse is prey. It is a wild thing that cannot be controlled, but which can be reliably found, which can be run down if they are at their quickest, and which is killed and eaten. As the ecosystem changes and grows drier, they and their precursors have already decimated many of the large grazers of the continent; caught between rapid climate change that cleared away the forest and predation from tool-wielding pursuit hunters that thrived in the new grasslands, many have already been lost. The horse, one of only a few prey animals to have coevolved with them, is now their most important food source and one of few still able to survive their predation, even though in managing this, they have lost much that they once were capable of. But to the sylvanspark, the horse is something different. More innovative, their own behavior less restricted by narrow parameters of survival, the sylvanspark has a wider diet and a more varied habitat, and it can afford to experiment and try new things more than the slaughtersprinter. To them, the horse becomes a tool, more useful alive than dead. By watching how males fight over herds and take control of them through dominance, they learn to do the same, catching the younger horses and taking the place of the herd leader. These horses don't fight back against leadership; they have no concept of free will, and thus no desire for it. Millions of years of intense hunting has rendered their existence a brief, harsh one where the only chance of survival is to go along with the strongest personality and do as they demand. A horse without a herd is a dead horse. So the horse always follows a leader. In the absence of a natural one, it follows a sylvanspark's lead as second nature, and it becomes a powerful extension of their abilities.

The female and the juvenile horse is easily trained; within days of capture and confinement on the end of a rope it can be ridden, and in a few weeks it can learn a set of simple commands and so be led to do the sylvanspark's bidding. The dominant male horse is at first a nuisance, ornery and intractable, and yet even it can be worn down to submission with persistence, as would occur with even the strongest males in nature eventually as they aged and their place was taken by stronger leaders. The survival of the wild horse is on a hair's edge; its life is fast and hard. But when led by the sylvanspark, the horse gains protection from its predator, and it can live considerably longer. It has no motivation to run off, even if untied, for once accustomed to captivity it views its captors as its new herd, and to leave a herd unattended by a new leader is to present itself to death by predation. So soon, captured horses stay with scrounger by choice; freedom is not a thing they understand, only safety, and a kind master in captivity is preferable to a cruel leader in the uncaring wild. Only when wild males come around to fight tamed ones, and try to take the females away in the night is there chance the horses may leave, and so the scroungers tether them at night. When the wild ones come round and bite their captives, they are quick to drive them off; the wild horse is still terrified of people, and so it flees at the first sign of their presence. Horses breed in captivity, and so there is no use in allowing any mingling of captive and wild lines. In only a few generations, tame and wild horses begin to diverge. The former become less timid, their frightened demeanor softened. Without need to fight over mates, the males become less domineering; every generation, the most docile are kept, and so the population becomes more tractable as a whole. The horses find time now to bond, and even to play. A tool becomes something more personal. The horse becomes a pet.

Soon sylvansparks are riding horses, once a novelty, in great numbers. They become an extension of themselves, giving them height, speed and endurance. The steppe is no longer so impassable. The slaughtersprinter loses its innate advantages. They do not understand at first. Initially they view their control over wild beasts with awe, then with envy, and then with fear, as they realize that their rival is now competitive in their own land. The horse now gains something else from its captors; the capacity for revenge. Horses carrying sylvan riders can outrun and kill slaughtersprinters; trusting their riders, they do as they ask, even if it means to chase down the very enemies that ran them down for millions of years. Slaughtersprinters have long and inflexible legs with little grasping ability; they are at a great disadvantage in riding the horse, even those who are willing to attempt it. Most of them thus reject its use; the horse becomes something more than just a meal; it becomes a symbol of an enemy. And with the increasing use and domestication of the horse, a deep rift will form between these sapient scroungers which will persist long through time, a jagged wound that will be hard to ever fully heal. Sylvansparks will take what they learn and expand it, coming to understand agriculture and the control of nature. Slaughtersprinters will become regressive, fearing change for the very real risk that it will upend everything they have and threaten them as the horse now does. The trajectory of their evolution will forever be changed, set in stone by new rules, all arising from the taming of the horse. The fall-out of this small decision will have effects lasting not hundreds, nor thousands, but millions of years.

The horse, at the center of everything, has found order from chaos. It is a better life than the alternative, and soon becomes the only life the domesticated horse ever knows. Content in their small worlds, they have no awareness of the impact they will have on the world in the time to come.

~~~

Though of lesser importance than horses, there are other species which exist in varying degrees of domestication by scrounger sapients. Though the slaughtersprinter never domesticated the horse, leaving this to be done by the sylvanspark instead, they have a history of taming other carnivores and using them as hunting tools in a different method of guiding their fellow species to suit their own needs. One such species is the stranther.

The stranther is a descendant of the skiger that has persisted through the hothouse's end. For that animal and most other griffons were ambush hunters of vegetated forest and swamp, a habitat type that has now become patchy and insular. Stranthers have adapted to hunt in more open habitats, and now make their homes in northern Serinaustra, still the most hospitable region on the continent. The  has not yet dried out as has much of the interior of the continent (the steppe), nor has it cooled like the far south (the boreal swamp). Overlooking a narrow stretch of coastal land north of the clearview mountains region (now little more than rolling hills), a savannah biome has developed in which the stranther can find sufficient, patchy cover to sneak up on its prey, and wide open spaces in which to pursue it.

Like its predecessor, the stranther has a weak bite - it is also even more gracile, meaning that most megafauna is out of its league. But it is now the fastest land predator on Serinaustra, albeit in short sprints, able to achieve speeds of 60 miles per hour with powerful bounding locomotion propelled by its hind legs, whose muscles anchor onto its tail for stability. It primarily targets small trunkos like lumpelopes and ratracers, small cursorial molodonts descended from fairly recent colonists from the north, and using its tail - which is very flexible - it can turn on a dime and outmaneuver is prey as long as it can get a head start and reach them before it tires. Prey is killed with the mouth alone, as the feet are specialized to run and not very dexterous, their claws blunt and of little help grasping. The upper jaw of the beak has a sharp, tooth-like notch behind the hook, which is used to bite into neck vertebrate and dislocate them to cause a rapid death, though larger prey may instead be strangled by the throat.

Stranthers are territorial, but differ from the skiger in being occasionally cooperative. Pairs are common, and such groups are same-sex, usually siblings or sometimes a mother and daughter, which may share a territory. In such instances, only the more dominant will reproduce, with its relative (very occasionally an unrelated animal) helping to provide food to its young. That stranthers provide parental care at all is unexpected, for though some other griffons like fanguars did so, they are not actually very close related to this branch of the family tree. Skigers simply left their young to hunt on their own from birth, giving them no further aid. The success of this species while other skigers have died out may be partly to do with it having developed a greater attachment to its chicks, keeping them close for up to six months, defending them from increasingly desperate predators and competitors, and providing them with food to supplement their own hunting of smaller prey. It is hard to say whether their increased sociability with other adults, which increases hunting success, led to more parental care, or vice-versa. But it is indisputable that the stranther has become much more social than its ancestors, and that its capacity to bond with other individuals has also not gone unnoticed. Slaughtersprinters sometimes capture chicks, and keep them as pets. Though perhaps the practice originated as a novelty, something to keep their own young entertained, the stranther - once bonded to the scroungers as if they were its own, is now sometimes utilized as an additional hunting tool, pursuing prey too fast for the scrounger to catch on their own with ease. This is not going unnoticed by the slaughtersprinter's southerly trade partners and part-time rivals, the sylvansparks, either, with such trained animals fetching high prices in interspecies trade, and now being transported beyond their natural range.

It's only one of the slaughtersprinter's very different relationships with two equally different griffons.

~~~

The regiuar is an apex predator of the southern steppe, and now Serinaustra's largest land carnivore. Another griffon skuorc but one far larger, it grows as long as 14 feet beak to tail and weighs up to 800 pounds, Its only challenger for the top predator role in its ecosystem is the slaughtersprinter, a social hunter that succeeds thanks to intellect and tool use. But these two species, wildly different from one another, do not share a combative relationship. They have co-evolved together, their fanguar and squabgoblin ancestors watching as the deep, dark forests vanished and the wide green plain took their place. Once enemies, by the end of the hothouse a mutual respect began to arise between the two. Each would be unrivaled in its dominance over the forest were it not for one another. They could have killed each other, and sometimes they did. Both had advantages, circumstances they would outmatch the other and get their chance. But these differences - the scrounger's strength in numbers and now its speed, and the griffon's elusive, sneaking nature and superior power - could also compliment one another. Focusing their differing skillset each toward a different type of prey, they found a coexistence where they had little reason to challenge each other.

While the slaughtersprinter became a pursuit predator suited to run such land animals as the scrounger horse to exhaustion over many miles, the regiuar remained elusive, quiet and hidden even in plain sight. The trees' disappearance changed the color of the land, and with it the coat of this hunter changed too, from a spectral shadowed black like the night to a golden-green, lightly spotted pelage that matched a background of wind-blown and ever-spreading grass. Though swift in brief bursts, the regiuar is not a runner by nature, and though it can hunt the horse, it's not its first choice of prey. Stranthers, a distant relative, excelled at the faster form of hunting lifestyle, and in doing so they competed directly with the sprinters until they learned to co-opt it and make it aid themselves in a precursor to domestication. Regiuars remained wild, never tamed, and to avoid competing excessively with the sprinters, they focused their eyes on the skies, on prey largely out of reach of those scroungers that were so quick but equally conspicuous. Incredible flocks of staganders occur across Serinaustra now, having taken advantage of the extinction of a once larger range of endemic herbivores, and they could escape most any threat, no matter how quick... as long as they could see it. Silent and stalking, its body low to the ground, the regiuar creeps through the grass, unheard and unnoticed, until it is in the midst of the swarm. Then it erupts from cover, an ambush none so close have time to avoid. In the seconds it takes the birds to take flight, the hunter leaps and snatches as many as it can out of the air, tearing their delicate forms with its wicked talons and throwing them to the ground with tremendous strength, leaving once beautiful, lively creatures once rulers of the sky crumpled and quiet. As quickly as it appeared, the predator collects its quarry in its large, hooked beak - holding the throats of three or even four at a time - and drags them off and away into the tall grass to feed at its leisure.

The regiuar's specialization in bird-hunting is a successful niche. It sustains itself easily on the seemingly endless flocks without making a significant dent in their numbers, for it breeds rarely, and is slow to outpace the resources available to it. Its niche is one of stability, rather than an ebb and flow of population rise and fall. Where so many species have recently fallen, the regiuar has quietly held on to its role at the top of its ecosystem, a long-reigning queen of the southern lands. Its success where others fail is not unnoticed by the slaughtersprinters, which observantly take note of its techniques, but struggle to replicate them - they are lanky and loud, with no adaptations to communicate in the tall grass to coordinate except to vocalize, and so their success at hunting staganders never approaches that of the silent and solitary griffon. They take notice of the regiuar's capacity to hunt more than it truly needs, the rapid-fire way it can down multiple birds in one strike. And they learn to steal its excess. The regiuar, already satiated, doesn't seek conflict with the sprinter's large packs, and it gives way - it can catch another meal another day and has little need to store for later. The sprinters, far from selfish, value the regiuar's contributions and come to honor it as a totem, an animal of high spiritual significance and cultural relevance. Generations come and go, and the relationship grows deeper. If the sylvanspark's nature god is the sunchaser, so the regiuar becomes one to the slaughtersprinter. Now during times of relative plenty, they return the favor that this griffon has lent them for thousands of years, and share offerings of their own kills with the regiuar. The sprinter can't hunt the stagander any better than the regiuar can hunt the horse. In sharing their spoils, both benefit, gaining what they'd otherwise lack. Where two competing hunters could have long ago fought to the death so that just one remained, here a mutually-beneficial bond developed, a respectful and reciprocated long-distance union lasting for countless generations. And then, as fear between both parties dwindles with familiarity, the bond grows closer. Eventually, families of sprinters and griffons often live side by side. More than simple pets, they become partners, each one's survival bettered by the help of the other, and each one caring, in its own way, for the other's well-being. Not simple domestication as with the horse, or a role where one dominates the other and uses it for its gain like with the stranther, here a true alliance has now formed. 

Sylvansparks might now have the horse, but slaughtersprinters have lions. And as scrounger politics grow unsteady and fragile truces unravel, the sprinters have their own powerful allies. They will not give way to their rivals without a fight. 

We end our exploration of the steppe's creatures with one last remarkable pair of allied creatures. 

When the hothouse came to its abrupt end and the warm, wet world became a cool and arid one, many species died out before they could adapt. A few, though, had help through the trials. Seaskippers, though once dependent on the lush wetlands that grew near a north pole now frigid, have survived into the final stretch by associating obligately with large seraphs. Five million years ago they learned to catch a ride on these migrating birds to avoid the seasonal die-off of plant life in the longdark winter. With that tropical and lushly green polar basin already a thing of the past, a new genus of seaskipper-descended snifflers now lives permanently as company to the birds, filling roles as pest-eating cleaners and feather caretakers in exchange for safety and warmth. Their long digits, once useful to sprint over water, now hold tight to feathers. They run up and down the huge birds like jungle gyms when their hosts are on the ground, but hunker down and hold tight once they take flight and cross continents on journeys to find sporadic flushes of food on the spreading grasslands. These new snifflers, which are collectively called jockeys, have spread across the world on the wings of their symbiotic partners, and split already into several distinct species, each with its own range of preferred host species.

The peacekeeper is the most basal species of jockey, and its bright coloring still harks back to its hothouse ancestor. It is a pair-bonding animal, always near its mate, and is confident and flamboyant; two raised yellow feather crests on its forehead are now obvious indicators of its mood, and rise when it is excited while flattening to near-invisibility when it is feeling subdued. Its home is the southern steppe of Serinarcta, and its host is the soaroch: a tall, elegant ptoose descended from the skyrider of split river, which itself was evolved from the earlier summer skycutter. Soarochs are very gregarious, living in flocks of anywhere from a few dozen to over ten thousand, depending on the time of year and density of resources. They feed mostly on plants - seeds, tubers and green shoots - both on land and in shallow water. Their flatter bills relative to other skycutters are indicative of this dietary preference in which far insects are eaten and where grazing has taken precedence over probing into soil, though the beak is still very long. The peacekeeper earns its keep for the soaroch's protection by continuously keeping its plumage clean and immaculately preened, not a single mite or louse to be found. Indeed, it does this so well that it must find most of its food off its host.

Once the soaroch has landed to graze, it kicks around the grass, driving away any small predator which could be hiding there, and only once the coast is clear does the little peacekeeper drop down from its feathers and begin hunting around its huge companion as it grazes. Each movement of the soaroch is certain to disturb small insects that were hidden in the grass; as the soaroch feeds on the vegetation, the peacekeeper dashes in between its feet and pounces on beetles, ants, earthworms and small snails. The two partner species mostly do not speak the same way - their communication is a sort of mutual understanding of the other's body language. But a few simple calls are shared between them. A short, sharp call of alarm from the soaroch sends the peacekeeper darting up its legs and beneath its wings - a predator was spotted, and it has to hide. A softer, more reassuring call indicates it is time to move on, and the peacekeeper will also return to its host, but that there is no rush, and it will usually sit on its back, more exposed, as they prepare to fly to their nest feeding site. Though less common, the peacekeeper will also use a very sharp screech to alert the soaroch to dangers if it sees them first, as one member of a peacekeeper pair may sometimes take up a sentry role on top of the soaroch if there are few other flock members around to keep watch for large predators. More actively, the peacekeeper performs important roles in protecting the soaroch's pupa as they are brooded in the nest before they hatch, as it can actively defend the nest from predatory insects which sometimes feed on them at night when the mother is unable to notice and take action. It may even assist the chicks when the time comes for them to emerge by carefully peeling back the pupal shell and aiding their escape, then cleaning the amniotic fluid from their plumage so that they dry off more quickly and have less odor to draw unwanted carnivores to the nest before they can fly.

The relationship between the soaroch and the peacekeeper is favorable to both parties. These two species have found a way to cooperate even in a time where life is often being forced into more competitive relationships as resources grow scarcer. But there are other jockeys, each one finding its own solution to the problems of survival. When they run out of pests to eat on the birds they have made their homes on, some of them turn to more selfish solutions. Elsewhere in the world, other examples of this symbiosis are now beginning to splinter apart. A particularly aggressive jockey which lives in larger flocks and which bites its hosts and feeds on their blood is spreading across many species of seraph. As it does so, it often kills their native jockeys and crudely takes their place. Species like the soaroch, which have come to need their partners to maintain the condition of their own feathers, may fare worst of all if and when these rival jockeys find them.