Ebb Gork

265 Million Years Post-Establishment

When the last of the woodcrafters migrated south out of their dying forests and settled along the coast, they encountered strange giants already inhabiting the shores. They stood over twice their height and weighed four hundred pounds. The gravediggers called them trolls, and the woodcrafters at first feared them as savage wild-men, but their fierce appearance was deceptive. These animals were the last of the gorks, eking out an existence after their own inland marsh and river habitats had become inhospitable and frozen in the changing climate tens of thousands of years before.

The ebb gorks were the end of their line and among the last of the circuagodont clades, alongside the woodcrafter itself (already nearing extinction and accepting of their fate) and the hardy and inscrutable scorplear. Of the three they grew the biggest; they had been forced out of the inland regions earlier than others, and had learned to scrounge for scraps along the seashore. Rich, cold waters up-welled piles of seaweed and molluscs and all manner of carrion, together forming a buffet of mysterious pickings from a world alien to those who walk the land. The ebb gorks partook in everything that washed ashore, becoming an odd animal inhabiting the narrowest edge between land and sea, dependent on both. It became a scavenger of the ocean age that could walk and swim, but neither run nor dive; it was ungainly, for it was large and heavy to retain its body heat against cold waters and colder wind, insulated by thick hide and thicker fat that protected it in some ways and yet in others left it vulnerable; it could only exist at the very margins of two worlds, unable to flee into either. Walking on two legs in chest-high water while kicking their flattened tails to propel themselves, on drier land they propped themselves up with those sturdy tails to graze. The last woodcrafters would follow their lead finding food, learning to gather seaweed and other unfamiliar and yet nourishing meals that their new home could offer them once they knew where to look. And the ebb gork was no longer a troll, but a guide. A quiet and contemplative animal, it rarely showed aggression and so the two circuagodont kinds - one person, the other still beast - walked side by side, together in peace.

When the final woodcrafter died, the ebb gorks were left to walk the line of sand and sea alone once again. They would outlive them by only around 1,000 years; their extinction would come well before the ability of the sea to provide for them ran out. Land carnivores like bumblebears and circuagodogs seeking food themselves would increasingly move down to the seashore, and the awkward, slow-moving ebb gork would frequently fall prey. And if they didn't then, the now sea-faring gravediggers were rapidly expanding their ranges all around the coastal waters, arriving in their boats and hunting anything that was easy to catch. Pressed by enemies from both land and sea, the ebb gork became rare and widely dispersed until it ultimately dwindled away quietly. There may have been no singular endling in any one place, but rather many of them left isolated across the coasts and the outlying islands. Like the woodcrafters before them, the last few scattered individuals may have lived long lives and never faced persecution simply due to their isolation, but with wide distances between them, also never found one another to mate. They became another species to vanish with a whisper.