He Comes Alive at Midnight

(Parade Squid and Dew Vine) 

The Plains of Pangea 2 stretch across much of whats today the northern hemisphere. Like the mammoth step of Earth's Pleistocene, these lands are subject to extreme seasonal swings.   

Winter brings snow that would be up past a person's waist and temperatures that can drop to -30’s (86 Fahrenheit) 

In summer it’s a vast warm Stepp, with temperatures in the high 20s. Millions of animals spend their summer in these verdant grasslands but it is only at night under a sky of endless stars that some of the most spectacular creatures on earth can be found.    

Parade Squid are massive descendants of the Brute Grazer. Massive animals with large bulls standing up to 16 feet tall and weighing 16000 pounds this group is the largest Terra Squids to ever walk on land with the large healthy adults having no predators even the largest predators like the Saber Squid focusing their efforts on sub-adults. 

Being almost untouchable has allowed them to stand out without the need to camouflage. The resinating chambers in their sinus have expanded to the point that their nostrils now form a facial crest around their eyes, which makes them look more like the Siphons that Tera Squid nostrils derived from. 

With a deep breath before singing Parade Squid can produce the loudest calls of any living land animal, boat horn-like bellows that carry for miles. 

But it is on a mid-summer night that one can see these giants' most impressive trick.

In the nights during the breeding season, specialized Chromatophores around the male’s face flush deep alternating shades of pink the males parade around the open step vocalizing their fitness to females. 

For nocturnal animals, the summer nights are filled with the horn-like below of the Parade Squids some might see the flashing shades of pink and the glow of two large auburn eyes in the dark as the only indicator of the creator of the song. 

Well, their parading has made them less ornery to each other, Parade Squids are still massive animals that have a habit of unrooting food with their tusks well feeding. 

This feeding method keeps other plant life out of the steps except for one place. 

The constant feeding of Parade Squid and other grazers has encouraged the Lichen Trees and their Slither Suckers to grow around older trees providing a refuge for other higher-growing plants to avoid getting mown down. 

And on these summer nights, one might see the swaying tendrils of the largest Lichen ever known. 

Standing ominously over the step, the Lichen that will pierce the heavens, Coelumtactus  lichenabratus, (heaving-touching slime tree) is the tallest of all Lichen trees at a towering 70 feet tall they dwarf everything around them. 

These trees are so big that if it weren’t for their Slither Sucker companions the Lichen Trees wouldn't be able to transport enough water and nutrients to keep themselves alive. 

Having a second set of roots makes the Lichen Tree much more effective at the collection of resources. Dew Vines are specialized for the collection of water with a layer of porous spongy cells forming an outer cuticle to absorb water from the ground and sky. 

This lets the “tree’s” own pseudo-roots focus on the transport of energy as the fungus’s Mycelium can’t photosynthesis and theirs only so much the Cyanobacteria and Algea can do before it would be too large to support without the Dew Vine. 

Most of the time the Dew Vines is tucked within the tree's “bark-harden upper hyphae) but like the Parade Squid, they come alive at midnight. 

In the dead of the summer night like some bad analog horror, thin yellow tendrils emerge from the Lichen Trees pods slowly the pod shrivels until all that is left is the yellow tendrils snaking through the sky. 

These are in fact, the Dew Vines, and on them are thousands of spore pods. The vines lay motionless all night until the sun appears again in the sky. 

By midday, the pods rupture in the heat releasing their spores onto the ground. All the trees in the cluster do this on mass and even when grown in the cluster away from grazing mouths only 1 in a hundred thousand will grow to produce a mature tree. 

These clusters are extremely thick. An alien pit of shadow that large animals can’t enter the trees becoming coated with moss and are home to many insects that will never leave the relative safety of the forest for some even larger animals like the Heptiles will never leave these forests unable to survive on the grasslands isolated in their own islands of shadow and slime.