The Dark Before The Dawn 

It has been one minute since we left the Mid-Ultimocene.

The ocean age has come to its end with the disappearance of the sea stewards. The seaway is left silent as a million boats float abandoned in the dark, with a distant gold glow bridging the northern horizon beneath a soft orange sky. Fires still burn in clay bowls here and there, lanterns in the night. They are the last controlled fires, now relics of a vanished culture. As they flicker and at last burn out, their fuel never again to be replenished, they represent the end of the era. Before new life can adapt to the beginning of a new epoch, however, the final vestiges of the prior one must come to an end.

It is now dawn, six hours into the Late-Ultimocene. Birds come around and wait around the floating villages as they always do, waiting for scraps of food. They chirp and squawk and bob on the water. By noon, sea ravens are already getting tired of waiting. Without anyone to stop them, they begin tearing open woven bags and knocking over earthen containers and taking whatever they find inside, fighting amongst each other for bits of meat. The larger vultures, more patient, chastise them when they see such a breach of conduct of which they do not approve. They chase and bite the vandals, tearing feathers from their tails in their defense of their masters’ possessions. The stewards would be upset to see the damage left when they came home. It is their duty to keep order.

But the days come and go, and still no one comes home. The aukvultures get hungry too. For three days they’ve now kept vigil, still hopeful their masters would return, but they’d never been gone this long. Pragmatism begins to take over idealism, and with empty stomachs, the stewards’ wild pets also begin to scavenge from what they left behind, using their greater size and strength to tear into sturdier food storage and feed themselves. The ravens, having already gorged for days, still gather around to take whatever they can from the sidelines. They are greedy and insatiable. Tempers flare, and one aukvulture has had enough. Driven by its hunger to unusual extremes of behavior, a serrated jaw built to crush bone closes tightly on a much smaller neck, and blood spurts onto clean white plumage. A glutton is left for dead in the water, and its fellows sensefully back off. The vulture seems at first alarmed at its own conduct, and pauses, looking at what it has done. Yet its hunger dominates its thought process, and it soon forgets. It must do what it can now to survive, for the world it knew before has gone.

As it fills its gullet with the contents of a canister of salt-dried fish, something else smells the blood in the water and comes in to investigate. No scraps have been delivered for a while, and the sea shoggoths, though their metabolism is slower than the birds’, are beginning to notice. While most will remain in the dump sites for longer, resting in a semi-dormant state to conserve their energy, one emerges from its hide to seek out something to eat. Like a slick of oil shimmering over the waves, it comes to find the dead raven and engulfs it in its folding tendrils. Minutes later, it drops a handful of clean bones under the water, and then retires back to its den.

Two weeks have passed now, and wildlife of all sorts has begun to haul out on the boats, some of which have already capsized in the wind without anyone to man them, while more have washed ashore. Sea-molodonts and wild pretenguins of species usually wary begin to gather in flocks to rest on those still floating, while the big scavenger birds, joined by other smaller species, have now depleted most of the food stores accessible to them. On land the air is steamy and wet, as the usual nightly snow has fallen instead as rain every night since the fire started to heat the air. The blazes have become small and isolated for now as a result. They have been temporarily quenched, but the heart of the inferno burns as strong as ever below ground, still smoldering and spreading just out of sight. A charred landscape reveals the blackened bones of thousands of animals that failed to escape, but one dominates the grim scene: the tooth-studded skeletons of razorbacks. Slow and unable to run, their instinct when afraid was only to cluster tightly together and lay down. The fires have obliterated them. Nimicorn thorngrazers with longer legs could still run away, and though some come away with severe burns, many have survived. After they pick through the remains of their fallen relatives, they are pushed to forage along the seashore to seek washed up seaweed, for there is now little else to graze, and there they begin to eat the wrecked ships, made of natural fibers and bone structures, for additional nourishment. With their more powerful jaws than the seabirds, the lucky few that get to them first crush the remaining larger vessels storing dried food that the birds could not open, and get a much-needed nutritional boost. A few surviving island wumpos pushed to the fringes of their world for the same reasons have the advantage of being able to swim; smelling food somewhere offshore, they pursue alluring scents to reach near-shore islands and there find the abandoned villages of the coastians. With a dexterity superior to sea-going scavengers, they rummage through the settlements, using their trunks to unscrew jars and open other containers of food. They will stay until all is cleaned out, and then they will have to use their intelligence to find a new way forward in a world where everything has changed.

In low-lying river valleys and swampy pools, the bodies of other large animals such as the last wooly wumpos that sought shelter from the fire only to succumb to smoke inhalation or by releases of toxic gasses have mostly been picked clean by surviving scavengers. Yet some sink beneath the murk before being found, settling into the peat, and will be preserved buried in the low-oxygen environment almost untouched. Sawjaws, carnackles, and savage gravediggers, all small enough to find pockets of shelter and nimble enough to outrun fires, are now some of the only predators left and inherit a land in which the massive dire bumblebears that dominated them will now soon be extinct, their population having been depleted below a sustainable level. When the dead and dying left for the taking after the fire have been all cleaned up, the predators follow the surviving prey to the sea coasts. With food scarce and predators literally waiting among them to strike at the weakest links and steal from one another, a stressful, too-close-for-comfort existence becomes the new norm for now.

After one month, herds of sealumps reach the settled meadow region formerly kept off-limits to them by the daydreamer-greenskeeper alliance. They feed heartily on richer vegetation than anything they have known in the wilder coastal waters, leaving vast tracts of once closely-maintained gardens stripped bare, the water turned dark and muddy as they tear out the sea grass by its roots. Fast-moving packs of small predatory dolfinches follow their prey into new territory, and turn their attention to the small and comparatively defenseless calves of the floating bloat. With prey unable to run away or fight back, these roving hunters' predatory instincts are over-stimulated and they engage in a spree of surplus killing, leaving many more dead than they can even eat, and it is this which now sustains the sea raven and the aukvulture as they leave behind the abandoned gravedigger structures. It is only the beginning of the end for the bloat.

The sea shoggoths, too, are now stirring in earnest. The clicking and shifting shadow masses awaken, and they begin to empty out from the garbage dumps that no longer provide anything for them. Their owed payments have ceased, and they do not know, or care, why. They only know that they must now sustain themselves however they can - the terms of the contract have been breached. They take to the boats first, scattering all of the animals which got there before them, and infiltrate the smallest crevices with their shifting tentacle chains to devour the last of the abandoned edible scraps. Unsated by what little they find, they take the bloats next, for they are now entirely helpless. For the first few weeks they are sustained by the surplus of the other predators, and feed themselves upon carrion.

But eventually there is no longer enough carrion to sustain their numbers, which have been artificially inflated by supplemental feeding of refuse beyond the levels which would occur in the natural environment. While the scavenging seabirds begin to disperse to locate smaller, wider-separated food sources, the shoggoths must change their behavior. Unlike their ancestors, these colonies have become tolerant of their own kind through millions of years of selective pressure, and so they do not immediately fight over lessening resources. Rather, as they are forced to hunt for themselves again, they will mob their quarry as one unstoppable force.

After three months, the sea shoggoths have fully reverted to their ancestral condition. They now must hunt for their food. Continuing to take whatever is easiest, their next choice becomes huge, defenseless live prey - the adult bloats, too big for anything else to take down. They descend upon them slowly, at first causing only minimal disturbance, for the bloats have learned over their evolution to fear little. But this was before. Soon, the shoggoths cover them, one by one, like dark and shifting cloaks. The lucky ones succumb to swarms of the insects clogging their airways, and their death is relatively quick. But without needing to disable their food to eat it, most don’t bother. The colonies begin to feed from the outside-in, and continue to cut deeper, layer by layer, over days and weeks. Their prey struggles, driven to seek escape by primal instinct but no longer able to achieve it, now failed by its deformed condition suited only to a sheltered environment that no longer exists. No matter what it does, it cannot shake the hoards, and eventually it resigns to its fate, which will befall all of their kind in the years to come. It demonstrates a broader truth of the world from here on out. No-one is around now to interfere with the natural order, as Serina enters a new and wilder final era where for now only the toughest living things will be rewarded.