A New Age

The matriarch’s exile marked the end of the war, but just because the immediate fighting ceased didn’t mean everyone’s problems were at once resolved. The remnants of the warmonger movement, now leaderless and with their formal social order severely disrupted, had no more fight to give and retreated. Their future at that time was very uncertain - they were refugees without a home, with enemies on both sides. They lived along a narrow boundary between the coasts and the open ocean. They no longer hunted the coastal people and instead broadened their diets - despite the difficulties involved, as daydreamers naturally imprint on what they recognize as food very early in life, and these people were primarily hunters of big game. But they were smart, and there was food to be found here. They still picked off pastoralist livestock, for they didn’t yet understand the concept of ownership of prey, but found that their younger members could get away with it without any repercussions most of the time. Their children, innocent to the sins of their parents, were perhaps key to their long-term integration into coastal societies, toward the pastoralists, fishers, and gravediggers too, since all of them had firmly-ingrained protectiveness and strong empathy toward children. And the warmongers, a tenacious lot, weren’t above being a little manipulative of their neighbor’s instincts to make their ends meet. If using their kids as beggars got the family fed, then it was a viable strategy.

The gravediggers returned to their lives foraging along the coastal sea, remaining in touch with the daydreamers. And over time, as the conflict became more distant in memory, the young warmongers, just as curious as their fisher relatives, would learn to speak to the gravedigger and offer up a partnership. These daydreamers could tow their boats and spread their nets down and around wherever they needed to go, saving the gravediggers much time and labor, in exchange for some scraps of the food. New hunting techniques, mutually beneficial to both land- and sea-peoples would develop from these first tentative cooperative acts, such as corralling groups of the swimming molodonts along the shore. Gravediggers would block escape of the prey onto the land while the warmongers would block retreat into the sea. With the gravedigger’s help and guidance, the warmongers now had access to a suitable food supply to help feed themselves without stealing, and learned how not to over-exploit it so that it remained available.

There were still hurdles to get through even then with so many different cultures now living in association. Fishers were strongly protective of one particular type of prey species to such an extent that they effectively treated them as extensions of themselves. To kill the ‘luddy’ was paramount to hunting fisher children and an utmost sin in this society. The warmongers initially had difficulties understanding the logic behind this seemingly arbitrary rule, and they were not the only ones for whom the luddy caused trouble. The gravediggers too, prior to first contact with the fishers, had hunted luddies unaware of their high degree of cognizance and upon realization of the fact the luddy too was a communicating animal were highly disturbed at their own conduct. Less perfect than they had viewed themselves, their introspection nonetheless strengthened their sympathy toward the warmongers in whose willingness to do what it took to survive they saw a little of themselves. Everybody only wanted to survive in a world where killing others for survival is the norm for all life. The gravedigger and all of the daydreamers were exceptions to an ancient rule, in that they could come together to end that - at least with one another.

The fishers faced their own ideological shift in realizing that even the ferocious warmongers whom they had so easily deconstructed into evil cannibals were also just people, the products of difficult circumstances struggling to survive. It was an eye-opener, and would lead to efforts on their part to aid the warmonger refugees later on by providing alternative ways to sustain themselves than by hurting other people. As the warmongers learned to corral the coastal molodonts and learned to ambush other alternative prey, such as seabirds resting on the surface, the fishers didn’t oppose, for both were big steps in a better direction - and the gravedigger also ate an equally wide diet. The warmongers’ physical adaptations made culturing them in the ways of their own lifestyle even more difficult than it was with pastoralist expats, but they were able to teach them novel behaviors that would accommodate their specific needs, such as utilizing their large teeth to dig out the big, slow-moving, burrowing fish from tunnels in the seabed which fishers were not well-suited to catch. Tools such as nets, borrowed from the gravediggers, would further help them all to acquire food even if they could not chase it down themselves in the weeds. The introduction of crafted tools into day to day life was itself revolutionary to all the daydreamers, who soon learned their own ways to weave and create with gravedigger-provided base materials to a remarkable degree using only their mouths and a bit of cooperation.

Having worked in close association during the duration of the conflict, the fishers and the pastoralists would still return to their own lifestyles when the war was over, but now there was a steady line of communication between the two people. Pastoralists would from then on be a little more open to outsider perspectives, and less restrictive in their beliefs. Banishing those which spoke to the others became an artifact of the past, as in the world they now found themselves in it became necessary and normalized. Different ideologies could coexist so long as a universal rule was established to protect people. The nop, with a tragic backstory from darker ancient times, could no longer be considered one, but there were still other species that it would be immoral to hunt given such a wide variety of alternatives and their protection would prevent the existence of any more tragic examples like it in the future. So the luddy found its circle of safety substantially expanded, and so now freed from a long evolutionary history as a prey animal, they began to find time to think about more than the business of survival and develop their own ideas. The nop meanwhile was already here and now key to the pastoralists lifestyle, and the fishers now realized that of any of the major players in the new order (except for the vegetarian luddy), it was the pastoralists who’s method of attaining food was perhaps the most ethical of them all. So it was the fishers who eventually suggested the pastoralists teach the warmongers to culture their own livestock, and so have another alternative way of life to distance themselves ever further from the old ways of life even they wished to forget.

~~~

Time went on as elders left the mortal coil and children of all creeds grew up without their parents’ uncomfortably tangled histories. They had children of their own, young ones that grew plump and played free of worry in clear blue waters under a bright sun. Over the following generations, warmongers and pastoralists and fishers would go on to become one single, diverse but tightly interconnected people without strong lines between ideologies and races. Physical phenotypes blended along with their perspectives. Different daydreamers might be better at different tasks, but in a large and cooperative society everyone found a role to play that they fit best. No entire culture needed to be a farmer, or a fighter, or a fisherman any longer if they did not want to. And the united daydreamer people forged a close spiritual bond with their terrestrial brother, the second counterpart, until both civilizations effectively merged as one. The gravediggers told the daydreamers of their own history and of the mythologized woodcrafter, a being with three legs and two hands, hands they never used to walk. Of how the woodcrafter brought them the gift of civilization. The daydreamers took this with great surprise, for their creation stories featured no fourth counterparts of such a role. But with time, they reformatted their beliefs and adjusted their perspective of them. The stories may be less literal than they were implied. The woodcrafter influenced the trajectory of the gravedigger so that they would one day meet and bring together the daydreamers. The woodcrafter and the gravedigger may both be the second counterpart, in different corporeal forms. The gravediggers now had picked up on philosophy from their counterparts however, and their stories had no mention of any other counterparts but rather a focus on finding other intelligent life. They remained more realistic than the daydreamers as a rule, with their stories being less central to their lives. From their viewpoint the existence of the luddy let alone their own lost counterpart of the woodcrafter suggested the daydreamer’s story was overly simplified. The mythical ‘wings’ might still be out there, or it might not. But it seemed likely there were still other people to find in a world still quite big and unknown. They wondered.. how would the daydreamers respond to find more that did not fit into their religion at all, if their stories were wholly unrelated to their own?

It was a lot for them all to think about.

~~~

Tens of years became centuries and centuries became millenia, and time continued its endless march onward. The sea’s multiple people - the varied coastal daydreamers, no longer divisible into further ecotypes, and the social gravediggers - moved on toward new adventures as well. Together the two species, as different as could be and yet now inextricably linked, ventured away from their coastal cradle to explore the wider world, so much bigger than any of them knew. On scales too long for any one lifetime to record, the sea continued to be lost to polar glaciation and so the productive shallows spread out and through even the final open water refuges. And it was there, some day long after when the warmongers' past was just a historic marker on a long oral history, that their descendants again met up with the Pelagans.

There were so few left now, and they knew they were the last. Their prey was gone, their child-bearing years so far behind them. Old, weak, but still strong of mind, they had come to terms with their fate as the last of the daydreamers, as the world they had known simply didn’t exist any longer. Discovering there were still others came as a revelation. They joined them, and so found peace and companionship - and full bellies - in the ends of their lives in a society that had managed to form from so many varied and rival factions and yet to come to the same conclusion as the pelagans that working together is the most ethical solution to survive. This unusual ‘coastal alliance’ had accomplished it so much better than they had, though. As a language barrier broke down over time and more complicated communication developed between the different people, the last of the pelagans were able to impart their own stories and history to a new generation and so keep a spark of themselves going after their deaths. The parallels of the situation were not lost on the gravediggers.

~~~

With the foundations of their civilization being ecologically sustainable and not inclined to rapid technological shifts, the coastal alliance of daydreamer and gravedigger persisted over a time scale no culture had even come close to before them. Thousands of years, tens of thousands, over a million and then far beyond. Their world continued to change around them, but slowly, and the people changed with it. While the daydreamers intermixed back into a single race, the gravedigger adapted and evolved to better survive along the ocean, becoming over the long spans of deep time a distinct species from its terrestrial ancestors. These gravediggers’ philanthropic ideology nonetheless carried over through deeper time and the alliance collectively played a supervisory role over the ocean, now all but entirely a green subaquatic garden rich with wildlife. It was the only home they had, after all, and so it was precious they maintained upon it a net positive impact in their lives.

The daydreamer's excellent memory meanwhile, and their inherent knack for maintaining vast stores of oral history, kept the fundamentals of ancient stories alive. In the generations close to the first contact between the two species, the daydreamers had come to expect that their third counterpart, the ‘wings’ of the creator, would arrive shortly after and so complete their prophecy. When no such thing ever happened, they gradually fell back to focusing on their daily lives. Over innumerable generations since, many of the daydreamers have become less fervently religious on a cultural level and more pragmatic like their allies. The most common perspective now would be that the wings were probably a myth like so many other myths (and one of the oldest and most forgettable ones at that), that the gravediggers were just fortunate timing, and the third counterpart is almost assuredly never coming and doesn’t even exist. But it doesn't matter anymore, for the alliance had made for itself a home here down on the physical world, and already achieved things their ancestors truly could only dream about.

~~~

But eventually their reign must end here, as has and has will that of every crowning lineage of the world of birds. As at last we jump further ahead in Serina's story, this enduring alliance will soon face their greatest trial yet, as the era they have called home since the dawn of both their ancestors’ civilizations approaches its end and a spiraling chain of events is soon to be unleashed that will ultimately change the climate yet again.