A Healing World | The Reaper

10,000 years have come and gone now since the fire, and Serina’s ecosystems are slowly healing, with surviving life adapting and adjusting to a new and far hotter world… for now.

The oceans, which died in fits and spasms over thousands of years of red-tides and anoxic spells that kept seaside scavengers unusually well-fed for many generations, are clear again - but they are comparatively empty. Acidification, lack of oxygen, toxins released by the decomposition of algae and a rapid and extreme rise in sea levels has resulted in the loss of the undersea grasslands completely and all of their associated animal life. Not since the end Thermocene has Serina’s ocean been so depleted, and it now resembles more than anything how it looked some 270 million years ago when Serina was young and life simple. The fish left now are primitive colonists from inland waters, most of them spreading seaward from brackish estuaries as the Meridian Islands sunk, and the biggest measuring under 12 inches. Small and mundane to us, these fish are in fact ancient and successful survivors and have changed very little since Serina began. Known as mollyminnows, they broadly resemble their livebearer ancestors the poecilids and live in similar ways, with some species live-bearing and others laying eggs. 

Such fish - though occuring in only around three dozen or so distinct species globally - now fulfill the niches of millions of species now extinct and have already begun adapting new mouth shapes and behaviors, speciating into forms that already do not readily interbreed even though they are only a few thousands of years diverged from an ancestor resembling a somewhat more streamlined guppy. Some are now herbivores with a downturned mouth with scraping teeth and pick algae from rocks in shallow coasts. Some hunt insect larvae at the surface - and insects, mostly the far-distant and fly-like descendant of ants known as saltflies - have been some of the only marine organisms to thrive as the ocean age ended due to the increased abundance of rotting organic matter for their larvae to eat and warmer temperatures speeding their growth. Other mollyminnows have already evolved somewhat elongated jaws and catch smaller relatives; unlike most predator fish of modern Earth, they do not indiscriminately hunt their own young as well, which are protected by their parents. The most numerous mollyminnows of all school in open pelagic waters and sport wide, forward-set mouths, where the only food source now is microscopic phytoplankton that they collect in their gill rakers.  Conditions now would suit larger filter-feeders, yet none have yet had time to take the role again since the extinction of the giant dolfinches in the late ocean age, and so only billions of tiny shoaling fish now fulfill this role. Yet the mollyminnows do not inherit a sea totally their own, for snarks - mostly benthic species more tolerant of water pollution than either ray-finned fishes or aquatic metamorph birds, have also survived. It will take time for them to recover their diversity, but they start off with a size advantage over the ray-finned fishes, and their future is promising. At the same time, their competing fishes - descended from freshwater species adapted to navigate complex and changing environments - are more behaviorally complex than most before them, and often show much more dedicated parental care.

There is no ice left on Serinarcta; just a small glacier lingers at the south pole. The deep carvings in the earth left by the slow movement of now-bygone glaciers has produced deep lakes across the world and a new freshwater polar ocean in the north, crystal clear and just beginning to be colonized by life. Most land animals have still had little time to evolve physically, but once cold-adapted scavengers such as the snowscrounger have begun to grow taller, thinner, and with much sparser plumage of a dirty grey, rather than white color. Now known only as scroungers, they are visibly distinct  from their ancestor and currently the dominant predator of Serinaustra where some have even learned to use tools to hunt big game - sealumps, while other populations form cultures based on seaside foraging or hunting other prey types such as seraphs such as pocketfowl that now graze the green continent in flocks that can darken the skies as they pass. Nimicorn thorngrazers have little competition now on land and their herds have exploded into the hundreds of millions. Yet rather than destroy the land, they help sustain other creatures - small trunkos such as snoots follow the herds, feeding on new growth after the larger herbivores mow down the coarse older grasses. Sawjaws still stalk the herds, and carnackles scavenge abundant carcasses they leave behind, but the nimicorns now have a new ally. Island wumpos have keener sight and a higher vantage, so with food no longer so scarce, tensions are less violent and they are tolerated within these herds for their value as sentries. When the tall birds spot danger on the horizon, they alert the herds to form protective formations around their young - and the wumpos take advantage to shelter behind the wall of tusks too.

There are few visible signs left of the sea stewards civilization left upon the world now, and to find what does remain would be difficult. Occasionally a gravedigger knife or a shard of pottery may be exposed through erosion as a river carves a new path, but most are now buried deep in oceanic sediments. They are forgotten, their long dominion of their world thoroughly complete. Yet their legacy here has left one final influence on Serina as it heads into its last exciting era in the form of an unassuming creature. A commensal species which evolved a gentle and socially intelligent nature to eke out a living upon their scraps and resources, the aukvulture had to adapt fast when their masters never came home again. For thousands of years the ocean produced enough death to sustain their lives, as they used their intimidating jaws to defend their meals from bolder competitors. As the seas became more stable, the aukvultures dispersed over the land and began to feed upon the dead thorngrazers, and to use their great size to take kills from land predators. Their serrated beaks, once built to catch fish, now became more robust to gnaw on bigger bones and their overall body size increased as well, making the already-biggest flying predator even bigger still - their wings now spread 23 feet or more. 

Yet the biggest change was internal; at some point very recently, just four or five hundred years ago, the strong selective pressures for adapting to situations that changed faster than instinct behaviors could follow produced another spark, and a population of aukvulture sophonts arose. Their sapience, a fluke of nature, did not directly benefit them, versus the others of their kind, but it didn’t pose a disadvantage either. Sapience, to the aukvulture, was neutral to their fitness. So it has persisted, at a low level, in a small segment of the global population of these nomadic scavenger birds.The sophont form of the species now distances itself culturally from the much more numerous non-sophont even though they have no physical differences, and the two do not interbreed or mingle. The sapient forms now call themselves reapers; those who perpetuate their life through the deaths of other animals that sustain them as carrion. Their culture is young and their population small and very low in genetic diversity, with less than 2,000 living adults. It is further widely separated, for they are wide-ranging and globally distributed. They live in family units of just a few individuals and young, which gather at common roosts but often spend weeks and sometimes months alone as they travel the skies. 

A solitary reaper, Gigamitus discor vigilis (watching, learning gentle-giant), overlooks the world from a coastal cave roost which has been used by these migratory nomads as a safe place to raise offspring for generations.

Reapers are a species that is sapient despite their lifestyle not requiring it. They use no tools at all, for their jaws do all they need, and their vocal language is more primitive than even many non-sophont birds which are more intrinsically social. Aukvultures have only limited ability to make hoarse honking sounds and so most of the reapers’ communication is nonverbal - gestural and symbolic, often taking the form of beautiful and elegant dances. They name their children not with a vocal word but with an individual series of gestures that the child learns to represent itself, and carry these unspoken names through life. Their culture has a history going back to the first of their kind, for it was not very long ago, and it too is told in dance but a different, coordinated sort that often whole groups engage in together to tell. The reapers are a contemplative, sensitive and emotionally perceptive race, empathetic to other lifeforms and culturally opposed to the taking of any life, because even as obligate carnivores they are natural scavengers and their ancestors did not hunt. They are not technology advanced, yet they have a highly developed code of ethics and strong moral principles which distinguish them from their wilder brethren. They do not fight amongst each other and kill only in mercy; they are spiritual in that they believe their lives continue in some form after death and so are respectful of the dead’s life essence - a similar concept to a human soul but extended to every living thing - but they lack an organized religion. They take the world as they see it and are not particularly creative; they do not draw or write, though they tell stories of fiction and create fables passed down to their young often to warn of exaggerated real-life dangers.

The reapers also know that their kind is not likely long for their world. As it is, they persist as a distinct population only because such intelligent individuals do still manage to find food and survive just fine, and because they choose to mate only with others like themselves, but this means inbreeding has been rampant for hundreds of years. All reapers may descend from just two siblings, about fifteen generations ago. Traits linked to inbreeding, such as white piebald feathers in their wings which are much weaker than normal dark ones, are now common. Fertility is also now very low and so their population stays nearly level, despite very long lifespans of individuals that reach adulthood, because very few surviving young are born. The reapers do not understand the reason for their lack of population growth. They are unable to comprehend why as many as nineteen of every twenty pupal sacs that they brood simply die before they are born, and even more young die before their first year. Their species is biologically adapted to bear large litters at a time and to do so as often as every year, and to lose a number of them early in life to disease or predation, since aukvulture chicks are born clumsy and vulnerable like ducklings, able to follow their parents and even to fly soon after birth, but genetically disposable, with only a few needing to grow up to perpetuate the species.

Yet few reaper embryos even manage to mature in-utero and pupate. Of those that do, most still die before they emerge. Reapers thus cannot afford the casual approach to parenthood of other aukvultures where the loss of a few chicks doesn’t matter. Children in reaper society are utterly sacred, and it is a celebratory occasion when a reaper child is born from its ‘egg’, for it is very rare, and often occurs only after a couple has tried for years to bear children. Yet mortality remains high for young chicks even if they make it this far, and so children remain nameless until they are around the age of one. Naming children so late has another reason besides delaying attachment in the very likely event the child does not survive; their chicks only develop their sense of self around this time, and begin life much like their non-sophont relatives with instinctive behaviors but no self-awareness. It is not usually a chronological birth-day on which a surviving youngster gets its name but the day it asks its first question, and so demonstrates the arrival of its personhood and the formation of its soul.

As they live their lives, which might extend to 80 or 90 years for those who survive the trials of early childhood, the reapers keep watch over the world around them. They are tireless travelers, and most will have flown around the world several times in their lives. They soar with little effort on high thermals, crossing seas and seeing different and strange land ecosystems that are just beginning to take shape on separated landmasses. They see the young born, and watch the old die so that they can live. Their place in the circle of life is well-understood and respected; as scavengers they can only survive because others failed to do so. Their ability to see the whole world keeps things in perspective - they think themselves unimportant in a bigger picture; just a small part of a far grander whole. Yet they are the only beings left now which can consciously take note of the changing world around them, and think of their own future and look into themselves. They, not the woodcrafters or the sea stewards before them, are the last people of the ocean age. Born from it, but finding their souls only after its end, their finite time upon Serina bridges the final moments of one epoch and the first of another.