You’d think, being a race of beings that can travel to other worlds in our solar system (and nearby solar systems), we’d know a bit more about the local fauna and flora on these plants. Well, we don’t. We’re the sort of species that packs its own lunches and does its best to keep itself self-contained. The last time the Rethans invaded, we ended up making another species go extinct.
Needless to say, we don’t do that any more.
So whenever Rethans start exploring other places, for scientific reasons, we do so as quietly as possible. That’s what I was told to do when I moved into Thanatian territories. I wasn’t actually doing science or anything, I was supposed to be dead and was on the run. But still, I was told to not leave anything behind. And to be incredibly careful.
They were right of course. Thanatian territories are terrifying. But Portalia wasn’t originally a Thanatian territory. It’s always been neutral grounds, and only became a ‘thing’ when Vrekans settled there about five thousand years ago. Until then, Thanatian-like life had been wandering around, minding its own business.
After the Great Deitic War, the planet got split up into lumps, and the Thanatians were given Vriskera, the most varied and least wanted bit.
The thing is though, all this Thanatian-like life, it all started to disappear. Us Rethans may be nice and tidy and isolationist, but no one else is. The Cassid Iolonia territories are just as polluted as their own lands. The Vrekan lands aren’t too bad but agriculture means they’ve lost a of of trees. The Vohran areas look no different from any other Vohran nest.
Vriskera though, outside of the city and a few towns, is fine.
Really though, one can almost understand why other races would do this. Portalian Thanatoforic Life is terrifying.
Normal Thanatoforic life is scary at the best of times. You see, Thanatians are just the most evolved of a large collection of beings, all coming from a single evolutionary link. If you take an animal, anything really, from a Thanatian jungle, 95% of the time it’s related to the Thanatians. But once the Thanatians became sentient, they’d fight and war (just like every sentient race) and they’d cause damage and nothing would ever get too out of hand. Populations would remain low and life would remain varied.
Portalian Thanatoforic Life though, it never had the same restraints. So it’s evolved in weird, crazy ways.
On the one hand, you’ve got Thanatoforic beings that live a lot like aggelads, alogans and our other normal animals that we all have. Kotopol chickens, skyloi and things like that. Your “cows and sheep” as Cassids say. I mean, they all still look freaky as heck, but they have their place in the food chain.
Then you have the predatory beings. The standard ones. For us Rethans, it’s rather hard to understand because we always were the top predators, but most other races evolved from a middling predator, something not at the top of the food chain but smart enough to move away from it. Things like ligers and panthera, there’s Thanatian equivalents of them too, but they’re generally more ‘sauric’. Like Banikans and Cassids, rather than four-legged beings.
Those are all normal. At least, they’re pretty normal.
But then there are the fucking massive monsters that lurk in the shadows. Monsters that live in the bottom of lakes and hollow out hills to sleep inside them. Gigantic beasts which will swallow prey whole then disappear for several months, only to reappear and destroy a village, before fading into obscurity again.
These are the things we don’t know about. We know they EXIST but we don’t know much else. Like, how do they even stay alive? Any predator that huge would need to feast all the time. And are they all carnivores? Or are there Thanatoforic lifeforms that are herbivores too?
So many questions. So few answers. Either way, they’re massive, horrendous, horrific beings. Lurking just beneath the surface.
And these fuckers are related to Thanatians.
Terrifying.