The fishers' modern feud with the pastoralists has been fueled by their perceived exploitation of the nop for many generations, even though the fisher's ancestors would have been familiar with the nop and aware of how different it already was from the wild porplet even at that time. In fact during the time of the great rift between their cultures, the nop was not even of particular relevance. Rather, it was the indiscriminate hunting and killing of other still-intelligent dolfinches for food by the predecessors of the pastoralists, still rather normal for daydreamer culture at the time, which the ancestors of the fishing culture first took moral issue with. The nop today has mostly become a scapegoat to keep the feud going with the pastoralists, as history has become distorted over countless generations of oral repetition. Pastoralists today rely almost fully on their livestock, treating them well, and live in relative peace with even the wild porplets; they do not generally hunt wildlife at all. These two cultures are actually much more alike than they seem to one another, but their time apart has forged them into different shapes and allowed their languages to evolve away from one another in structure, making relatively small differences seem large and impassable, and allowing for harmful generalizations to develop. And pastoralists are not the only large-prey specialist daydreamer culture in the ocean. Because the others share a more similar physical appearance, all being of the same ecotype, fishers have historically lumped them all together as this sinful "other".

The fishers' assumptions toward the pastoralist thus are wrong, but not entirely without justification. There are still daydreamers in the ocean which do kill other near-sapients for food. Another subset that split off from the rest about as long ago as the fishers, they don't raise livestock any longer. They are hunters, which chase and kill wild game of all kinds, but especially other dolfinches. These, the whalers, are the largest daydreamers, formidably built to tackle megafaunal prey that fights for their lives in a way that neither fishes nor the nop do.

In times gone by, whalers and pastoralists often had an open line of trade and communication, and fishers reasonably lumped them as one seeing their interactions. This changed in the last few thousand years, as climate changes left the sea shallower in all but its most distant reaches far from the shore and the whalers moved away from the thickly vegetated shallows. For a long time now, the fishers and pastoralists have been the only other races that regularly meet in their range, but the fishers have continued to stereotype the pastoralists as indiscriminate killers for carrying the same beak structure as the whalers. Fishers and pastoralists have long opposed each other's cultures, but their war is a cold one, with much more taunting and sneering than physical bloodshed. Pastoralists as a whole merely seek to be left alone, rejecting fisher culture entirely, but as their way of life can be perceived as boring, there has begun a recent trend where occasionally young pastoralists break ranks with their own kind at adolescence and are integrated into fisher culture. Fishers, despite a holier-than-thou attitude, are generally accepting of different people and willing to make connections, so long as they adjust their diets accordingly (nonetheless, they will always carry their big-toothed facial structure, and this alone can incite prejudice in some.)

Recent pastoralist-fisher integration even on such a small scale has begun to build the smallest of bridges over the ancient gap between the two. Through such young, rebellious recruits to their culture, fishers are learning that pastoralists too believe fundamentally the same creation story. Some fishers are now recognizing the similarities may outweigh the differences, and even becoming introspective at whether their own lifestyles are really any more moral than their rivals. Yet pastoralist culture is still resistant to any outside influence, with elders often effectively disowning those which betray them to fraternize with the enemy. Any semblance of unity thus seems unlikely as long as this remains so, as a connection cannot be forged without effort from both sides.

But now the world as everyone, fisher and farmer alike, has known it is changing. Two new variables have appeared almost at once. The fishers claim to have found the prophesied 'hand' of the creator, one of the two lost counterparts... and even some pastoralist's curiosity has been roused at the idea. "The fishers' heads are full of hot water and they speak way too many words to say nothing at all", the pastoralists might say.. but the traitors have learned their tongues and insist this time, they speak the truth. Even though they are unsure, there might be too much at stake to not take a chance... as both factions in this ancient rivalry must contend with a new and deadly threat in the form of the warmonger: the sudden return of the lost whalers to the coastal shallows. And they have changed since they left in highly unpleasant ways.

Warmongers are an extremely isolationist subset of whaler which arose from intentional inbreeding over several thousand years to favor novel recessive pattern traits and a lack of yellow skin pigment. Their language is the most divergent of all the races from its starting point. Deep, slow and haunting, it is even less comprehensible to fishers than gravedigger speak, and it is used sparingly; all whalers stalk their prey as silently as possible so as to avoid being detected.

Their historic line of communication with the other cultures still shapes the base of the warmongers' religion, but unlike these other cultures, warmongers no longer believe there were any other parts of the ancient creator besides themselves. Believing their people to be the sole descendants of a dead god, they view themselves above all other life, including other, lesser daydreamers. Their place of superiority is further supported by their immense size, averaging 20% larger than either pastoralists or fishers, with a significantly larger head and jaw adapted for killing massive oceanic prey animals. Evolved to hunt in large packs to capture prey, warmongers are extremely coordinated. Naturally large social groups have given way to an organized, large-scale society on a level neither pastoralists or fishers alone can rival... and which presents a deadly threat to both of their ways of life as this expanding, extremist group plots to demonstrate their ultimate power over their world by exterminating both their weaker rivals... and eating them - the ultimate act of domination.

Warmongers, a united front with a central leadership, don't distinguish between fishers and pastoralists. Both of them, as far as they care, are red meat. If they are both to stand a chance, they need to act as one too. Without any outside influence, the pastoralist culture would be reluctant to ever do so. They know that they outnumber fishers on their own, and would try to defend themselves. But if the long-anticipated hand of the creator itself has returned and called them together... it would be sacrilegious to decline.. right?