Skogre

This guest entry was written and illustrated by Troll Man.

Two-hundred and seventy-five million years post-establishment, thorngrazers dominated the northern continent as the most numerous of the lands’ large grazers, with numerous species numbering in total populations of billions. However, they are limited by their purely terrestrial habits; tens of thousands of islands along the coast of Serinarcta have never before seen the destructive feeding of these omnivorous tribbetheres. This allows for there to be a greater diversity of plant forms, and in turn unique ecosystems that develop in the absence of the stomping mega-herds. In particular, great forests have sprung up in these regions, dense woodlands sometimes over a hundred feet high carpeting the lands beyond Serinarcta’s shores. But nature abhors a vacuum, and it was not long before herbivores arrived from the mainland to reap these new unspoiled pastures. Feeding with far fewer competition, these immigrants quickly ballooned to huge proportions to better take advantage of their unique environment. 

Crashing through the undergrowth on the vast archipelago of the Trilliontree Islands is a massive browser, far larger than any thorngrazer, larger even than the soggobblers across the sea. Thunderous bellows and the scattering of flocks of small birds herald its arrive as the ten-thousand pound animal emerges from the shadowy jungle onto the beach. The scaly quadruped looks like some antediluvian beast that should have roamed the Earth hundreds of millions of years ago. Over twelve feet tall and adorned with huge spines, it utterly dwarfs any other animal in this habitat, including all land predators, but life here is not without its problems. Most of the individuals islands which make up the Trilliontree archipelago are not large enough to support populations of animals of this size, and it must repeatedly move from island to island to avoid depleting their resources. With heavy steps it strides into the sea, pushing off on thick, weight-bearing forelimbs, paddling with its webbed feet, and steering with a stout, paddle-like tail. Its body, naturally filled with air sacs, is naturally buoyant despite its size, so it needs little effort to swim many miles if necessary. Even to a beast this size, these waters can be dangerous, so they have evolved formidable defenses against the huge predators which now stalk the warm coastal waters. 

This creature, known as the skogre, evolved from the ornimorph skoblins that inhabited the soglands and coastal ecosystems of Serinarcta five million years ago, and established themselves in the Trilliontree Islands long ago, the skogre has increased in size dramatically in several million years, ballooning from an animal of a few-hundred pounds to several-thousand. This process occurred independently from the mainland gantuan grazers, although they are closely related to them. Growing much larger allowed the skogre to exploit a new niche as a tree browser in an environment with little competition, with a long neck to reach high into the branches, and a voluminous gut to process large quantities of vegetation more efficiently. Rearing up on its back legs, the skogre can reach up to eight metres into the branches. As adults, their only major predators are the huge calacarnas which prowl the seaways between the islands, attacking the skuorcs in coordinated packs and with powerful mandibles as they wade across the sea, although subadults and adolescents are frequently hunted by larger carnackle or sawjaws which have managed to reach some of the islands over the millennia. This further encouraged the evolution of large size among the skogre’s ancestors, attempting to outsize its predators. But it is not merely size alone with which the skogre protects itself, but its formidable armour.

Adults are covered in huge keratinous spikes and plates, the largest of which are over forty centimetres in length, and thick scutes that protect its more vulnerable neck and underside like chainmail. The ancestral skoblins were covered in an oily coat of bristly filaments, and this armour developed from these filaments. Only the very young skogres retain a hairy coat, as they have some trouble regulating their body temperature during the first few months of life. Skogres at all ages have large claws on their forelimbs, usually used for pulling down particularly high-up branches or gripping the trunk of a tree while rearing up, but also very useful to swipe at any predators which threaten them. In particular, its third digit has evolved into a massive spike specifically as a devastating stabbing weapon. One good blow from this claw is enough to instantly kill an attacking sawjaw or carnackle, and cause devastating injury to the rubbery hides of even the largest calacarnas. Rival males will use these claws in combat with one another, but it is extremely rare for these fights to become serious; they function almost entirely as a show of strength for females, as the nomadic animals do not hold territories and (living near the equator) have no breeding season. Older individuals are often covered in the faded scars of many seasons of such ritual duels. 

Females breed once every two or three years, releasing litters of between fifteen and thirty. These newborns are roughly twenty to twenty-five pounds at birth and covered in cryptically-coloured down, which falls out as they age, but during the first year of their life is essential for survival in the forest undergrowth. Juvenile skogres are hog-like in their feeding habits, with a greater quantity of animal matter in their diet; adults are primarily herbivorous, because they eventually become too large and heavy to chase after prey, although they are known to scavenge along the coastlines for marine offal. It usually takes around eight to ten years to reach adulthood and mortality rates before then are heavy, as they are completely independent from birth and make up a large portion of larger prey animals on the archipelago and are the main prey species for most of the Trilliontree Islands’ predators. Healthy adults have no natural predators on land, and therefore forage mostly alone or in loose associations, communicating with one another from great distances with resonating bellows, amplified by their inflatable nasal chambers. These associations use these bellows to signify to one another when vegetation of the area has been depleted and they should begin their migration to greener pastures in a more protected herd.

Males are larger than females (and also more vibrantly coloured), sometimes surpassing five tonnes in weight, and usually travel alone, technically, but usually trail some distance behind a group of females. Young skogres tend to travel in large creches; like most ornimorphs, the adults put little effort into the care of their offspring and rely on numbers for their survival. Young often associate with adults, but the adults generally do not pay much attention to them; the smaller juveniles feed at a lower vegetation level and do not compete with the adults. Compared to the adults they are far more terrestrial and usually do not make journeys between islands for some years after they are born, when they are strong enough to reliably make the regular voyages across miles of predator-infested waters. Occasionally, skogres occur as vagrants on the Serinarcta mainland, but are rare due to the lack of suitable forest habitat to sustain them; some individuals manage to survive by browsing on outcroppings of spire trees and lower-growing vegetation. It is not unusual to see one or two skogres foraging along the outskirts of a herd of soggobblers, among which they are easily distinguished by their much larger size alone. 

A single adult skogre can eat over two-hundred pounds of vegetation per day, and a population of them can strip the forest canopy of a small island within a few weeks (or a larger one in several months). Once the food supply on the island is exhausted, the skuorcs move on to another island. These migrations are generally under fifteen kilometres, but they are capable of paddling for over a hundred kilometres nonstop if necessary. Exhaustion is rarely an issue for such large, powerfully-built animals, except for perhaps the young adult individuals making their first voyage, but much greater danger comes from what lurks beneath the waves...