The End is Just Another Story's Beginning

The woodcrafters and the gravediggers, once primordial enemies, lived together in relative peace for eight thousand years. Hundreds of generations of both species came and went since their fateful first contact between intelligent souls as equals. Each of these very different peoples’ influence upon the other forever changed them.

In the millenia after Bridge and Lucky, the forest refugia got colder and to survive, both species had to be innovative. Trees no longer could grow quickly enough to form the houses for the woodcrafters; instead, both species began to live primarily in partially underground dens called mound-houses, dug at first into natural hillsides and then constructed upon level ground, primarily by the gravediggers whose natural anatomy was well-suited to the task. These earthen homes stayed warmer and could be built relatively quickly, and their insulatory properties soon inspired another innovation: windbreaks around their gardens. Gravediggers moved dirt in immense quantities to form sloping, semicircular walls of earth and stone facing away from prevailing northern winds and into the sunlight. They massed dark clay and sturdy stones to absorb and retain solar heat during the day, releasing it at night, and planted their trees at the base of the mound, training them to grow along the walls like espaliers, where they were sheltered from the most severe elements. Within a couple of thousand years, these artificial microclimates were the only pockets in which broad-leafed trees could survive and they covered many miles of land along the forest refugia, which became a completely domesticated landscape, a maze of these walled gardens and mound-houses. In return for their services maintaining the great mounds around the gardens, the gravediggers still had abundant small prey, lured to the gardens for shelter from their natural predators and the night’s chill.

Yet over the eons, the gravediggers of this insular community changed too. Though the wider gravedigger kind was still widespread over the remaining habitable world, the woodcrafters influence upon those which integrated into their world gradually  changed them to such a degree that eventually they could no longer relate to outside examples of their kinds; they were cultured, with richer languages, and changes had occurred on a genetic level as well. Thousands of years, hundreds upon hundreds of generations and subtle natural selection, had left them more social, and more expressive -  closer to their partner species, and more capable of communication with other intelligent minds. These gravediggers had also begun to self-domesticate, retaining juvenile attributes into adulthood, including a lack of the solitary settling life-stage, an increased tolerance of crowding, and sometimes even the orange adolescent plumage. They also showed more prominent, blurring white patches: piebalding, a genetic marker in many animal species for tameness. A new population, the social gravedigger, had diverged from its ancestor subspecies and was largely reproductively isolated by 4,000 years post-cooperation. Like the antlear, this population was small, only a few thousand adults living at any one time, and for most of the period where these two people lived in harmony they were significantly outnumbered by the woodcrafters as a result of being at a higher trophic level, requiring animal prey and so limited in the rate at which their population could grow versus their vegetarian neighbors. This only changed roughly two thousand years ago, when the social gravedigger learned to take control of their food supply and maintain it independent of the natural balance by domesticating a local variant of smeerp, a small pest-like circuagodont that they raised in earthen pens along the walls of their mound-houses. Once freed from the rising and falling prey populations of the wild ecosystem, the social gravediggers’ numbers rose toward a more balanced equilibrium to the woodcrafters.

The age of the woodcrafter and the gravedigger was beautiful, if at times challenging and imperfect. The triumphs and tragedies, the joy and the sadness of ten thousand years worth of lifetimes could fill its own story.  But upon Serina, where chapters are more often measured in tens of millions of years, their time together is just a dog-eared page, a bookmark in the book of life. It was a story with many good small moments, but no perfect happy ending. Faced with overwhelming, catastrophic climate change, the antlear people eventually went extinct. Yet may we take solace in that their end was not a violent one, not a sudden collapse, but more like the quiet flickering of candlelight as the wick burns down to its last. And just as one places a bookmark in a story to remember an important point where they left off, this bookend would carry an influence further into Serina’s story, even long after they were gone.

~~~

The factors to blame were multiple. They were never an abundant race. Environmental and dietary specialists which evolved at a time when their very requirements for survival, broad-leaved forests, were nearing extinction, the woodcrafters were restricted to a shrinking parcel of habitable land from the very start of their civilization. Help from the gravedigger to terraform the land prolonged their survival by thousands of years, but not even the best-designed microclimates could keep the forest alive when the days were simply too cold to support their growth. In the last century of their time, the antlear people’s populations shrunk dramatically to dangerously low levels not from increased adult mortality, but a lack of recruitment. As their nourishing, domesticated gardens died out, the adult woodcrafters could eke by on considerably less nutritious plants, yet their young could not grow on this well, and few young were soon born at all; the mother’s bodies, stressed by poor nutrition, ceased to ovulate, or aborted their young early in development to sustain their own survival.

With a maximal lifetime of around fifty years, with only males remaining fertile past their thirties while females past this age traditionally took on a role helping raise their grandchildren, the last few decades of the antlear people’s dynasty were quiet and childless. There was little denial of their circumstance; the woodcrafters were not blind to their fate, and they made peace as best they could. Most resigned to the end of the world, choosing to wait it out until their time came. A few of the youngest still fought it, struggling vainly to keep their species going with repeated still-born young, or to watch their live-born young weaken and die at just days of age from malnutrition, before eventually resigning themselves too to their fate to watch their people fade out. It was no longer kind to bring new life into a world unforgivingly cruel.

As if to dig a knife into raw wounds, the social gravediggers, adapted better to these changes, were faring well, now the predominant species in the community. They bore many young, healthy and strong on a meat diet that the woodcrafters had tried many times to  adopt too, only to be plagued by severe food poisoning. Creatures adapted for stable, mild conditions, woodcrafters were adaptable enough to change their worlds to suit themselves, but not to adapt their sensitive and specialized stomachs, designed for only the most tender leaves and shoots, to such a drastic dietary change. So the last woodcrafters could only watch the gravediggers attain everything they could not. It did no good to focus upon what they couldn’t have, however, and it was not the woodcrafter way to worry about that which cannot be resolved. They could not resent those who had helped them through the end times; it wasn’t their fault they could digest flesh and the woodcrafters could not. So they returned the favor as best they could, helping to raise one last generation of social gravediggers to know them. To remember them. To remember this place, this life, this chapter in the great big story larger than anyone. The beautiful, mixed up time where predator and prey forged a bond against all odds and learned to help one another at the end of the world.

With their role to play for the antlear people diminishing, and their own culture now strong, having learned to cooperate and live in enduring social groups of their own, many social gravediggers began to leave the woodcrafter lands to colonize the outlying regions. Those who stayed behind likely felt a sort of protective affection to the last of the woodcrafters, their metaphorical grandparents who they felt gifted their own kind the gift of sociality, aiding them in their twilight, and feeling pity for their predicament like children helpless as they watch their parents age and pass away. They were witnessing the last of a race, and the final moments of an era. As the woodcrafters aged and became endlings, most felt tied to their ancestral grounds; it was the only home their kind had ever known. Yet as conditions continued to deteriorate, even the most attached social gravediggers had to move on, and the very last of the woodcrafters  faced a harsh choice; stay and freeze to death, or follow the last of the gravediggers south toward the sea coast.  Some, perhaps most, chose to face their end in a familiar place, too weak and tired to abandon everything they knew for the unknown. Only a handful of individuals, still fit enough despite years of barely getting by on poor food, chose to go with the last gravedigger party. They trekked many days and nights into the unknown, through the harsh bramble-lands, facing bitterly cold nights and unfamiliar threats. But the gravediggers had been exploring, settling these regions now for years, and they guided them along. They had heard of a place where plants still grew and the days still warmed. A strange, alien, but beautiful place, by a huge water so big it met the sky. It sounded like a fever dream, and perhaps it was. Just a comforting delusion to a dying mind. But what did they have to lose to seek it? So they followed the gravediggers deep into a mysterious land.

One day, when their physical and mental strength were at their very limit,  they reached the shore of the great ocean. Here grew only stunted, wind-bent shrubs and grasses, little of any nourishment to them. But there were other gravediggers, many of them, a settlement of mound-houses on the grass-lined cliffs above where the blue sea crashed violently against the rocks. The unfamiliar gravediggers welcomed them into their mounds, and there provided food of a strange sort. Soggy, strap-like sheets of green material with a salty taste. Sea-weeds they called it. Like nothing they ever had before… yet nutritious and digestible.

It was a tragedy of fate that the last woodcrafters were to find the seashore at a time when every one among them was well beyond their child-bearing years. For several seasons more, thirty or so individuals settled along the sea coast and learned from the gravediggers how to gather the life-giving green food from the mudflats during the low tides, when the great salt-water receded toward the night-sun and revealed its bounty to the creatures of the land. Their bodies returned to health upon this diet, exposed ribs disappearing beneath muscle and shiny plumage for the first time in many of their lives. But they were old, and while thankful for this blessing, they knew their days were still numbered. More years went by, and as their legs grew tired and their cutting teeth long and twisted from a soft diet that provided them no wear, they left their mound houses less and less, relying on the gravedigger’s kindness as they continued to harvest the sea-weeds for them. They watched the gravediggers learn magical tricks they never knew were possible, to harness lightning itself in their hands and shape tools unlike anything they had made. They watched them carve tree trunks that washed from the water from far off lands they’d never get to see into vessels, taming the sun’s heat and light to eat away the heart of the wood into a semi-hollow form, then chipping stones to dig away the blackened charcoal. When no wood washed ashore to work with, they improvised and wove the grasses and the twigs from the shore into bouyant, floating structures upon which they sat and carried their materials. They rode  out to sea for days at a time where they cast woven traps of vine and thatch into the sea  and snared with it bountiful food; fish and other curious creatures from deep in the salt-water, equally alien foods as the sea-weeds but suiting their own palettes.

The last woodcrafters were happy here, though mournful of what was lost. In another time, another world, they would have done it differently, and found the great salt-water in time to save their people. The young would have loved it here, and though the soft food didn’t trim their teeth, they could have found ways to adapt. To shape tools and capture nature’s elements, like the gravediggers were doing.

We could have done it too. We were just too afraid to change.

The forest refugia did the woodcrafters well for a long time, but clinging to it when it failed to sustain them any longer was foolish. The gravediggers were always better at these things, responding to a problem and making the best of circumstances.  In this lifetime, now all they could do was support their partners, their ancient brothers, in the dawn of a new civilization, fantastic and hard to comprehend to them, but good.

Very good.

The endling rested on her knees on the great hill overlooking the coast-village and the great salt-water as the day-sun dipped toward the horizon, the larger, blue night-sun still hidden under the surface. Her kind wondered since time immortal where did the celestial bodies go when they dipped out of sight. She felt blessed to know they hid beneath this limitless water. Did the whole of the land float on the sea, so that they swam below them each cycle only to return later to the opposite sky? Her mind swam with so many questions about the world now, even as her body failed her. The gravediggers had shown her there was still so much more to learn about this world… they had lived their whole lives in such a small drop of it… and now she had no more time. Her kind are… were… notorious for their strong minds to the end of life, much stronger than their relatively frail bodies meant for fast lives on the run, and which tended to burn out just as quickly. She hoped the gravediggers would learn the answer one day, as the children romped and played in the blowing grass around her.

She felt the aching in her old, tired bones. She had lived eight cycles longer than most, which she took to be a testament to supernatural powers of this strange place and the strange food that sustained her here like manna from the heavens, even if it did wreck her teeth. But she knew that soon it was to be her time. This would be her last sunset on the hill in the place she had come to love. She had once sat here with her sister and her partner, both long since taken by the grass now. For these last cycles she lived alone, yet never really lonely, among the gravediggers… those strange, earless four-legs that gnashed the most rancid-smelling things in their jaws and spoke in gargled tones, yet could solve nearly any problem and always knew how to make the best of a bad situation. They weren’t much for nuance, and sometimes they bickered among themselves and made a terrible racket, yet they were her family, and she cared for them and them for her. So when she called out, quietly as her voice too had grown hoarse with age, the children came round to see her. Bright, curious eyes stared up at her own weary ones. They were the future now… the future of the social gravediggers yes, but also of the woodcrafters. As day gave way to night and the adult gravediggers lit up the dark with captive light, the elder told them of her life, of the old village and the gardens and the trees. She only knew the tail-end of the old-ways, but had heard the stories from her own elders in her youth about when the forest was warm and trees grew tall all around, not just creeping, stunted, against earthen walls. She told them an oral history passed down for countless generations, of the history of their people and the gifts they shared with one another. The woodcrafter gave the gravedigger community; the gravedigger gave them art and writing and engineering, and a humbling realization that they were not the only people in the world that mattered. She told them she was proud of their people - her people now as well - and that she knew they would do great things. As the light began to fade in her eyes, and the strength to sit upright dwindled, she told them to remember. Not her - she was nobody special, just an old woman.  But to remember the woodcrafters, and that time when they sat down with their enemy - the other - and  listened and learned, and forged a connection. She spoke softly to the children, who sensed something was wrong in her now in her frail voice, but listened intently while huddled close, grooming her fur.

You still  hold a piece of that in your own bright minds. Never forget, as you set off at the sunrise of your own big and beautiful lives.

When she lost the strength to articulate the words, and could only lie there in the grass among her loved ones, she mused to herself as a comfortable darkness edged into the corners of her vision. This wasn’t the end of the world. The world is so, so much bigger than us. This is a new beginning.

She wondered if there were others out there… people with thinking minds and ambitions and pain and love and joy. There couldn’t just be two, in a world so big and so beautiful as this. What lies beyond that horizon?

She couldn’t speak anymore, and she could no longer see the kids, but she could feel them lying against her cold, gaunt form. She couldn’t feel her tired old legs anymore, the weight of herself laying like a dead weight upon the ground. Instead she felt a drifting sensation, as if stuck to tether stretching up further and further about to break. It was dark and warm now. Her thoughts grew harder to form.

She hoped they would find more “others” out there. It would be so lonely to be the only people. She saw something in the distance, past the darkness, and as the tether broke away, she saw it come into focus… something she hadn’t seen in so long, that lifted her spirits immeasurably. She fell into a gallop on legs suddenly strong again, and found herself running freely through a lush, green forest with many other woodcrafters, laughing and smiling with their eyes.

She felt someone else with her too.  Someone else within her thoughts.  Strange  - but it didn’t frighten her. Though she never felt it there before, it was like she realized the presence had been there through her whole life, watching everything unfold, mostly without much interest but missing nothing. Its perceptions were drastically different to hers… able to observe the rise and fall of individuals… races… lineages… the world itself in just seconds if it chose. For a brief, fleeting moment, she could see what it saw. A story she couldn’t understand flashed within her mind’s eye. Images of a small bird… a little fish… things she could not recognize… so many lifetimes of so many things. She saw behind and ahead all at once, and she saw others already gone and others unborn… And then it spoke.

You did well.

And then nothing. Not blackness, not darkness, not silence. The absolute lack of anything at all, something no mind can truly understand because it only occurs when consciousness itself ceases to exist. As quickly as the presence had made itself known, and before she could understand any of what she was seeing, it was all over.

The page turned on another chapter, as the last woodcrafter died.