Rivals

Centuries have come and gone since the Pelagans drove away the warmonger menace in a victorious final battle. Their enemies have not returned, yet life has not been prosperous. Everyone can see that the seas are changing. The herds are gone, each huge creature split up and gone its own way, and so the hunts are harder and often fail now. There have been no children for more than twenty years and without a change, there may never be another again.

Daydreamers are considered apex predators, having evolved without significant threats of their own. Yet they are not without rivals. An ancient animosity extends back long before the first seastriker seers even existed, since before the long-beaked dolfinches gave rise to any of the modern lineages. For tens of millions of years the dolfinches have been in competition with the similarly-adapted yet unrelated burdles. Though both of these aquatic bird groups swim with alternating pulses of two pairs of flippers and catch their food with serrated pseudotooth beaks, their last common ancestor lived in the Hypostecene. Though both are aardgeese, the dolfinches come from the bumblets and so are vivas, while burdles evolved from mucks and thus are serestriders. Widely different histories eventually converged on similar swimming adaptations and forged them both into large carnivores, but dolfinches specialized in social and intelligent hunting while burdles became solitary and belligerent.

The pelagans’ arch rivals were the tortorncas, massive heavy-jawed predator burdles which fed on the same prey they relied upon. Living alone and without packs to support, they were marginally better adapted to cruise the open oceans in pursuit of the fragmented herds of filter-feeding dolfinches than the clans of daydreamers were, but in turn required more food than any one daydreamer to support a larger body size. There was no sea hunter of any kind larger, in fact, than the sea rex - a superpredator tortornca that grew to more than fifty feet long, and one able to eat enough meat to feed a whole family of daydreamers for weeks in a single sitting. The pinnacle of marine megafauna hunters, the sea rex had ruled the oceans for more than five million years virtually unchanged and so pre-dated the daydreamers.

For most of that time it haunted the cold, turbulent icebox seaway which until recently was filled with tens of millions of maws and other massive prey animals which fed on abundant upwellings of plankton. As the sea level continues to recede however, sufficiently deep and open water to allow the proliferation of such animals has dwindled and finding food has become a struggle for all of the large hunters. This led to the sea rex turning its attention to an alternative food source. The pelagans, still living in clans, were suddenly the easiest dolfinches to find and to ambush for the giant, and strong enough hunger can drive any creature to exceptional boldness in their actions.

Faced with a predator for the very first time, the pelagans initiated another war - not upon other daydreamers this time, but against this far more primordial nemesis. In a desperate bid to conserve their food supply and protect themselves against predation the pelagans would systematically seek out the sea rex and exterminate them. It would prove more difficult than they hoped, however for adults of the beasts - over a century old, heavier than many daydreamers together and protected by a thick armor of scales - were virtually impossible to subdue. Their strength was incomparable, and they shook the daydreamers about as if they weighed nothing at all when enraged. Their jaws, built to destroy dolfinches and forged for the job by millions of years of evolution, were strong enough to crush their skulls in one bite.

To destroy the adults was impossible.

But the sea rex had a weakness that the pelagans would learn to take advantage of. Huge and deadly the grown tortorncas were, but they began their lives very much small and comparatively helpless… and unlike the daydreamers they did not protect their offspring. The pregnant females moved toward the creeping shallow coastlines to give birth and there their young grew, hunting fishes and small fast-moving prey, for many years before they returned to the open sea. In this way, adults and young filled different niches in the ecosystem. The newborns, swift and agile and most importantly able to hide in the weedy shallows were off-limits to the pelagans. Yet they returned to more open waters well before they attained their maximum size, and so the pelagic daydreamers sought out to kill these adolescents, each no larger than a single daydreamer and so powerless against a pack of them, before they could grow up big enough to move on from chasing the porplets and other similar-prey they hunted at that age to tackling the pelagan's primary food sources - and the pelagans themselves. Each rival put down at a tender age would mean dozens of meals left for them to eat instead every year after, and would also ensure the safety of their own kind later on when the giants, grown too big for their own good, might turn their attention to them. Focusing only on the young and giving those already big a wide berth would be a long game, taking decades until the old ones died off, but it would pay off in the end if they could prevent them from repopulating.

And so over the years, even as the sea got smaller and the prey wider-dispersed, the Pelagans caught and killed hundreds of tortorncas. Adults of the smaller, more common species were targeted too, as their diets still overlapped with the daydreamers in regards to smaller prey species, but most of the focus was on young sea rex for they were the only one that could threaten the daydreamers directly and those which ate the most food that they could instead be getting. The numbers of them that came from the coasts shrunk every year until they appeared only every two, three, five, and eventually ten years or more. When an ancient adult, sixty feet long sea rex was found floating dead - over 200 years old and weighing over 60 tons - the celebration was almost as big as the carcass that fed all of them near to bursting for weeks. For it meant they were winning, and soon - very soon - their rival would be vanquished.

And yet the herds never reassembled, but only grew sparser still - even as the tortorncas vanished. By the time the sea rex began desperately hunting its normally avoided rival for lack of any other choice, the end was inevitable. There would be no long-term revival of the pelagan people even after the deaths of most of the sea rexes. A hopeless last attempt at survival, the pelagans’ society, without new lives born, would collapse regardless. This was a war nobody would truly win.

For along with them, the sea rex too would disappear.

~~~

He was alone.

It was normal for his kind to be so for almost all of the time, so that didn’t particularly concern him… but it was long past time for a rendezvous with a partner. Another breeding season was nearly gone with no company to be found. As he had done millions of times now - constantly, for a few months every year since he was in his fifties - he inflated his throat with air and then slowly released it out his nostrils; the resulting reverberation, a bellow that could be felt in the blood and deafen small animals caught too close in the crosswires, carried for tens of miles. Yet no-one answered.

He couldn’t count, but if he could, he’d be checking off the fifty-second breeding season since he got a reply. Fifty-two years since the last female died. He didn’t know that though, wasn’t capable of thinking about things like extinction, or the future beyond the moment right now. Instinct simply compelled him to call, day and night, at least for another few weeks before his hormones quieted again until the next season. He bellowed into the sea through the day, into the night, and into the following day. Yet every breeding season he was forced to quit earlier, for his fat reserves grew more meager every trip around the sun and could no longer sustain such vigorous efforts. Hunting was hard work - the prey scattered to the winds and having gone silent, his nose was his best shot to locate them but the currents didn’t always flow in his favor. Following meager scent trails, the source frequently eluded him. When he did at last find something, he tore at the hapless beast with ravenous bloodlust, crushing bone and flesh and gulping huge chunks down until his stomach was grossly distended. But hunger pains could only be kept at bay for a short time before he had to start the search anew. It left little time for anything else… not that he was one for contemplative thoughts or hobbies.

He wasn’t the last one. He had met the other a half dozen or so times in his adult life although the expanse of the sea, however small it was becoming, still meant they rarely crossed paths. The other male was younger - so young that he had never seen a female in his life. They heard one another sing their lonely mating songs far across the water most years, but such calls fell to each on deaf ears; they were focused only on the sweet, succinct return song of a receptive female, a song already lost to time.

The older male, more experienced at finding what food still remained would keep singing another forty years. The younger, getting the worst lot all around, would get just five more before succumbing to starvation. His loss would provide just enough extra food to keep the old veteran going as long as he did. Swimming the sea now truly alone, he was immense - and yet the world was still so much bigger than himself, and larger than he would ever know.

The last pelagans would soon be found by others of their kind, bringing a chance at a better life and an ensured future to impart their knowledge toward. Such is the case of social animals - one does not need to bear offspring to matter, to be remembered, or to influence the future. Even after their physical end, the Pelagans essence was carried on. For the final sea rex, a failure to procreate meant their lineages, and soon all traces that their lives ever were lived, would disappear with the waves. After at last the old giant passed from old age and the struggles of a hard-lived life, once the scavengers have stripped clean his skeleton and the bonebreakers have cleaned up the last scraps of his corporeal form… was he ever really there at all?

The daydreamers would go on to last a long time as the ocean age progresses and everything changes around them, still remembering history of those lost along the way. But no-one records the love-songs of the final oceanic leviathan, a predator indomitable to all foes except the changing world itself, as it calls its last call for a partner already gone. Life goes on, the world shifts and swerves and changes, and another soul joins the billions of other endling strands already forgotten.

But as always, other strands would continue. For as long as life could persist, it would do so - and the epic story spanning trillions of lifetimes was far from complete.