People and Monsters

265 Million + 2000 Years

Every generation the elders of the woodcrafters recall how the nights didn’t used to get quite so cold, but the young don’t know any different. The trees have been slowly selectively bred for ever stronger cold tolerance. Their leaves are now thick and waxy to endure nightly freezing temperatures and to bear nightly snowfalls, while still able to quickly start photosynthesis during the mild days once the cold fog burns off the land… at least when it does. Their heights have reduced as they become adapted both to constant clipping and to colder, windier weather, and most are more like hedges now, rarely much taller than the antlers’ head height. But the cold has some benefits; the nightly chill makes the leaves sweet with sugars and highly nutritious.

The woodcrafters are not the only creatures that think so. For centuries now the antlear people have turned the tables on their predators and have by now succeeded in extirpating the circuagodogs and the grapplers, as well as the cutthroats from their territories almost wholly. Their young now prosper in safety, and their numbers are climbing. But without carnivores to balance the ecosystem, other wildlife of all kinds find the woodcrafters’ lands ideal to set up home as well, where their feeding damages the trees and gardens. Large browsers - the trunkos and other antlers - are excluded to a reasonable extent with botanical fencing in the form of cultivated briars and other thorny brush that exclude them from gardens of the most edible trees within. Yet smaller grazers - smeerps and other molodonts - slip right through the cracks, even using them to shelter their young litters, and prove much harder to deter. It’s a situation without a clear solution that suits the antlears’ ethics, as very few woodcrafters are comfortable going out of their way to actually harm other “prey” creatures like themselves, taking pride as they do in creating a refuge free of the predator animals they so dislike. It becomes a frequent routine to try to chase the pesky varmints away when they cause damage, though the nuisance animals return as soon as they feel they are not being watched to enjoy the bountiful gardens and raise their own young away from the gnashing-jawed hunters of the woods beyond.

But with their lands all but free of predation, some of the woodcrafters began looking for trouble. For a prey species to take control of their world and kill the hunters that haunted their ancestors can make them feel strong and successful. What happens, however, when they do such a good job that there are no longer any hunters to hunt down on antlear land? Even herbivores, it turns out, can become addicted to the thrill of the kill. Parties of woodcrafter warriors make trips far outside the borders of the forest refugia, into the neighboring environments that do not suit their kind, purely to seek out their prey. They return with trophies - heads and teeth and hides of dangerous beasts - and receive fame and glory for their bravery. Those who bring down the fiercest killers and outwit the most cunning predators demonstrate their authority over nature. Predators are a bane to nature they begin to say; they will do a service to all the oppressed prey species, which live their lives fearing death by tooth and claw, by ridding the world of the lot of them.

~~~

Ancient gravediggers may have driven the antlear people toward sapience, but they stopped pursuing the antlear people as food about the same time the antlears proved themself formidable at turning the tables and defending themselves, hundreds of thousands of years ago. Though incidental predation certainly occurred since, it was too much effort to target them specifically once they learned to defend themselves. The prey had gotten too clever and too potentially dangerous in numbers - these blasted herbivores helped each other if one fell injured and retaliated; it was a bizarre, unnerving concept, and the gravediggers began to view the antlear people as some sort of jinx, bringers of bad luck to be avoided. For many, many generations the two species had a very uneasy truce. They lived in the same region, but avoided one another out of mutual distrust. Gravediggers modified their traps to target smaller prey species because even accidentally maiming a woodcrafter could lead to dangerous conflict, and gravediggers of the forest refugia even learned to avoid marking boundary trees with art, because it attracted unwanted attention to themselves. But in the refugia this no longer mattered; the antlers were now confident enough in themselves as hunters to target the gravediggers. It was not difficult because unlike themselves, gravediggers did not help each other. It took only a few generations to exterminate them too from the refugia. It mattered not that they had not pursued the woodcrafters, even their young, in anyone’s living memory. They were predators, and so not to be tolerated any longer if the antlear people were to truly make a safer world.

The gravedigger meanwhile was a hunter, but didn’t do most of the dirty work itself; it waited for prey to succumb to traps and kept its own hands clean. Though they might fight their worst if cornered, they would do everything they could first to avoid getting to that point. Gravediggers were pragmatic, opportunistic carnivores that depended on their prey animals for survival, and acknowledged that in order to survive other animals must die. Killing was therefore a necessity to live but not something to take lightly. Gravediggers didn’t revel in killing.

But the antlear people did. They did not know the life of a hunter, having to fight for every meal. They were a young and naive race, reveling in newfound power, and still viewed their world through a narrow lens.

As parties of woodcrafter warriors ventured far beyond the borders of the forest refugia, they encountered gravediggers that were still unfamiliar to them. But the antlears were long wise to gravedigger tricks, and sabotaged their pitfall traps. These gravediggers, not used to them, were easily destroyed. They descended inside and cried out as if wounded, only to surround and slay the gravediggers when they returned under the impression they now would be able to feed. Cornering and spearing the birds to death as a spectacle, laughing and mocking their suffering, they felt powerful.

But the gravediggers in the outlying regions were different from those they had coexisted with in the refugia. Unconcerned with avoiding conflicts with the antlear people, primarily because they did not yet know just how dangerous they were, these populations heavily utilized the language of barrier trees, their trunks richly carved in symbols and art to communicate and convey ideas across territorial lines. The woodcrafters didn’t notice them at first. When they did, and began to examine the intricate markings, they at first assumed they had found themselves on antlear land again, in some unfamiliar village, because only people could create art. To convey information in such an abstract manner as a picture was a skill only the woodcrafters, the highest living order of life, could understand - right? Yet there were no other woodcrafters here, no sign of settlement, no gardens.

But there were people.

The woodcrafters had set out to create a world without monsters. It was only then that they realized that they had become them.