The Story of Life Goes On

Ten million years have passed since the end of the world as we knew it. The Thermocene-Pangeacene boundary, or the "armageddon", was a three million year long slow death for over 99% of all Serinan life. Caused by extreme volcanism related to the formation of a supercontinent, over the course of this extinction event virtually all of the land region of Striata was buried beneath several miles of magma as a result of a massive volcanic eruption that would be just one of many as an enormous mantle plume formed beneath the continents now broke free through the crust. Volcanic debris blots out the sun, producing ice ages lasting as long as twenty thousand years. In between such glacial spells, vast quantities of carbon dioxide result in a superheated atmosphere, causing extreme droughts and rendering much of the world lifeless. Terrestrial plants survive only along a narrow coastal ridge at the southernmost edge of the new supercontinent, and seas become anoxic, tepid soups uninhabitable to any vertebrate animal. The loss of plant life, coupled with volcanism, reduced atmospheric oxygen, causing ozone layer thinning and an increase in harmful solar radiation forcing many survivor lineages to retreat below ground during the day, though the intermittent hothouse climate produced a sheltering cover of clouds which persisted, for the most part, over the polar regions during the hottest spells, providing some semblance of relief, and allowing sparrowgull birds to survive even without burrowing adaptations.

In the smallest of forest refugia, life survived. When all was said and done, freshwater fish returned to an empty sea, mirroring the very beginnings of Serina. But though perching birds did remain, other land animals left to reclaim a quiet world were vastly unlike any at Serina's start. The Pangeacene would usher in the age of the tribbetheres, a warm-blooded, active clade of tribbets which took advantage of the ecological upheaval and mass extinction of bird lineages to equal the playing field.

Ten million years have passed since the start of a world we could never have expected. This is a green land again, rich in life, filled with beauty and diversity. A red hot anger in the earth has subsided, and a cool rain falls in a continent-spanning woodland of trees. They aren't bamboo, but sunflowers, having acquired a tree form with the loss of their own plant competitors to reach up and flourish in a new, clear sky. And below their shady canopies, the ancient game of life - and of death - plays out again. A nutcracker is feeding on a fallen sunflower seed in a clearing. As big as a kitten, it is cute, in a strange sort of way. It resembles its hopper ancestors, but it is primarily an herbivore and a specialist in hard-shelled plant foods. In its jaws, batteries of small, peg-shaped teeth grow tightly together, forming a crushing surface. Its upper jaw is highly mobile, like its aquatic teleost fish ancestors, and now it chews its food by flexing its premaxilla back and forth within its mouth to form a grinding implement with its upper teeth against its lower. New teeth constantly erupt from its gums, pushing out the older, worn-down teeth every few months and keeping its bite sharp and strong. From a distance, its hundreds of tiny, close-set teeth resemble a single pair of much larger teeth, and this animal's lineage are indeed on their way to evolving a fused beak as the teeth evolve to grow ever closer together in a plate-like formation, maximizing their feeding efficiency. These creatures may have evolved to take advantage of seed resources in fringe habitable areas outside the tolerance of birds during radiated periods, but now they compete alongside them effectively, having an advantage of jaw strength relative to their size to open larger seeds than a bird of similar scale could manage.

Suddenly, a rustle in the foliage nearby sends the nutcracker bounding away. A burrow entrance is a few meters away, tucked beneath the gnarled roots of an old, fallen tree. With a powerful hopping hind leg, the nutcracker is just a few leaps away from safety. But its enemy, too, shares this limb, and its legs are longer. Having crept up on the nutcracker so that it was just a few leaps away from being on top of it, it catches up quickly. A family resemblance is shared between the two species, for both are hoppers, diverged shortly after the extinction event's end some 7 million years ago. But while the nutcracker is an herbivore with grinding teeth, the necksnapper is a predator. Its jaws, too resemble those of fish precursors, but rather than fold inwards to chew its mouth extends outward with each bite, reaching forward to snag and pull in prey with hooked teeth. The nutcracker shrieks as its distant cousin catches hold of its hip and swings it around. The hapless prey turns to fight, but is too slow; the hunter pushes it down with a swift swing of a forefoot, and closes its teeth again, now on its victim's throat. With a sudden, violent jerk upward its head, it breaks the nutcracker's neck, and it falls still. The forest, too, is quiet. Gentle rain drops fall on the leaves and soil all around the hunter, a shower which has quieted the songbirds. The silence makes the hunter uneasy. It looks all around now, giving an impression of guilt for what it has done, when really it is only taking the quiet to mean that an enemy of its own could be out there waiting for it.

But that's life. It can endure the end of worlds, but it remains a delicate thing, easily lost. Here one day, gone the next, it survives in the long-term only as a collective. For the necksnapper, too, any moment could be the last. But animals don't worry about the future so much as the now, and soon hunger wins out against the predator's own nervousness. It will take its meal into the thickets of the forest for its litter of pups, just a few days old and far more vulnerable than was this fully-grown prey animal. If they are to last and play a part in the story of life, she must rear them as quickly as possible, and do her best to keep their own terrors away from them. It seems an insurmountable challenge, but it happens every moment of every day, here and everywhere that living things exist.

That's the story of life, carrying on through the adversity.

Doing the best that we can.