As the almighty Aegis finally collapses—after resisting the merciless blows sent by a cruel sky—the dust of pulverized stone falls across the canyon floor, enriching its heavily used soil with life-sustaining nutrients.
To the north of the canyon's upper end, away from the sharp vertical drop of the pale red coastal cliff, and within a quarter of a day's flight for a raven, a lot of this nutrient-rich dust and pebbles tumbled and rolled across Aegis while it was active, ending up in the world-ocean and allowing for the blossoming of life unseen. It is a tiny life, so infathomably tiny it is invisible and yet it forms a bedrock for the feasting of far larger creatures. This offshore region experiences a bloom of marine abundance—a plethora of fish to be caught—which spreads almost up to the coastal parts. The Time of Plenty lasts for eighty days or so into autumn.
Pasturelands adoring the flat, tall tops of the canyon's eastern and western cliffs are made of grass that is both richer and thicker than the one found scattered across most of the Wastes.
From the windy high coastal paths overlooking the ocean to the far mountainous southern end of the canyon's valley, purple grass, dotted and speckled with black clovers and dark-blue chicory, creates an unbroken, jagged, sinuous world-line, an expanse mirrored hugging the top of the not so distant opposite cliff. Like two wide, rich, purple, neverending, velvety rugs, they outline the canyon.
In the northwestern and northeastern reaches of the Wastes, the land is pockmarked with countless lakes. Scattered and often deep, the surface of the many lakes becomes pristine once more, after the rock and the dust are swallowed by its depths. The glistening mirrors plaster the cloud's white and gray face across the world.
Contrasting the white and the gray, thousands of underground lakes, to the west and to the east of the canyon, are wombs of darkness—forever forgotten, forever hidden.
Centuries ago the very first rock rain's death-showering of the entire East, length and width, brought not much more than obliteration to all of the cities, leaving ruins, rubble, and red-soaked dust.
The annual cascade of destruction marks the end of the long spring that lasted the entire first half of the year. It was time for spring's counterpart to shroud the world. However, autumn was deceptive. True, trees would lose most of their shriveled, dark red, black, and dark purple leaves, but, about a month after rock rain, there will be a blossoming of life.
Continent-wide dust storms.
After rock rain's seemingly complete obliteration of the landscape, fine dust rises all over the battered face of Eastern Equiya. Walls taller than any mountain yet softer than a down feather blanket entire regions.
In world-spanning arcs, the invisible rivers of air flow. Far north of Arcadia and to the south too, they flow high above Alldora's raging waves, going westward.
Some of the dust, kicked up by the storms, becomes part of these mighty air currents. It rides the highest winds, traveling roughly ten days, before falling from the sky like invisible ashes. Unfathomable amounts of dust are scattered across Western Equiya, across the forests, valleys, mountains, and fields, enriching the loam and sandy soil alike.
After about forty days into autumn, the dust storms subside and the fine grit settles. The light of the pale sun is free to hug the tortured soil of the East again.
The purple grass of the Wastes grows quickly, with bulbous outgrowth forming on the top. During the first few weeks after the dust storms, if the conditions are right, this round outgrowth slowly fills with a fume lighter than air. Eventually, it detaches itself from the blade of grass. It floats up and up, sailing the winds, carrying thousands of seeds in it.
Birds of the West flock.
Around this bountiful time creatures of the air, of both feathery and leathery variety, finish their long migration from the far Dontium. Riding the air currents for many days has made them famished. From dawn to dusk, avians—in some regions, their numbers contest even the dominance of that nebulous gray, ruling the world's spherical vault—gorge on the floating seed-filled pouches.
Leathery-winged craklers use their long and sharp beaks to pierce the floating pouches. With quick snapping movements of their beaks, they snatch the falling seed from the air.
The craklers are always closely followed by tiny-feathered, pale pink birds—craklers' acolytes no bigger than a hazelnut—whose beaks are not strong enough to burst the floating seed pods. The pinkish hazelnut's speed seems unmatched. Like small arrowheads, scores of them whizz around each crakler in an unpredictable rapid chaos of movement, only to all, as one, suddenly converge downward at the seeds being strewn across the soaring heights of the aether.
A devourer unsatiable, one of the animals consuming most of the seeds was a four-winged leathery creature with two big triangular and gracefully-shaped wings at the fore of its wind-cuttingly sleek body, paired with two smaller ones at the rear. Akin to a fish, the whistler opens its large mouth to swallow the seed pods whole. With widely spaced black eyes, no neck, and gaping mouth, one might be forgiven for thinking the gliding creature looked purely made to sustain that white, wide, flat, long, sleek belly of its.
The whistlers, in their myrmecoid numbers, continue to swallow the round pouches, filled with fume. During digestion, this fume escapes through two rows of holes lining each of their gray-striped backs. The whistling sound echoes throughout the world in tandem with the popping barrage.
After floating and being carried away by wind and reaching a certain height, the surviving bulbous pods burst open with a pop and the seeds rain down across all four corners of the Wastes. Due to the sheer horizon-breaking quantity of floating sacks, most will manage to heap down their seeds inside and avoid being digested.
This simple plant is a survivor. Back, weeks before the rock rain strikes, fully understanding the whisperings of the world, the purple grass would start to dry and wither, turning black and dark purple, retreating the precious nutrients into the seed underground. Now was the time to reap the rewards.
Not all that floats is a banquet.
There are regions of the sky best avoided. Regions with malicious shapes as if stolen from the Void. The plant's profile closely emulated the depiction of a wind rose, with plenty of mean fat boisterous spikes escalating at every side. The pouches of fume inside its protected body allowed it to float the air currents indefinitely while feeding on the light coming from a blotch of spilled orange-yellow, staining the clouds. Needless to say, the black plant was found to be less than appetizing to any animal cruising far above even the highest of mountains.
An unmatched network of hair-thin vines is always hidden. These fungi spread their delicate tendrils, connecting plants big and small across the vastness of the elderscape. Destined to be unsung heroes, for without them the natural world collapses, these organisms paradoxically use death and decay to fuel future life, through an eternal circle of recurrence.
The vines are often narrower than even hair in places. Delicately, they pierce and fuze with shallow roots of many tiny flowers—that often have ant-sized violet petals—as well as the abyss-deep roots of colossal trees, exchanging nutrients with and between all of them.
The strands are the secret subterranean veins and arteries of life on Equiya. Together they create an infinite mesh of impossibly delicate spider's-thread-thin roads, whose role is paramount in keeping the land alive and fertile.
Mighty or fragile, eight out of ten of all plant life knows the uncountable cuddles of these gentle gossamer threads.
If a spore, each smaller than a speck of dust, lands on a perfect spot, where there is moisture and food, it may be able to grow. Most specks will never find such a blessed place.
There is a plant that feeds on these dots of life which sail on even the gentlest of air currents. The plant is a violet hairy orb of long, dense, always-swaying, dancing strands, connected to the small round hidden core, located at the top of the stem part. The purple-black stem has the thickness of a forearm, it is flexible and strong—its toughness surpassing that of even the mightiest known wood. Spores that stick onto the thin, fine, and very delicate strands, become consumed. Despite having deep, powerful roots, the never-still plant gets some of its most vital ingredients from spores.
Near the base of the Dancer, a flower of amaranth found its purchase. The queen of flowers has a crown of twelve dark, reddish-purple petals. Each was the shape of a butterfly's wings and as delicate. Amaranth's scent is sweet and warm, with notes of caramel and honey making it irresistible to any flying helper near it.
The flower can live for many centuries but such a long life was only possible in the most forgotten, remote, and untouched places of the world, if there even were any such places left.
Trees, akin to fists of angry gods, reach for the Empyrean.
Trees of the East adapted to survive the rock rain. The taller the tree, the deeper the roots. With deep, deep roots indeed—fused and intertwined with each other and with fungi—many trees grow to become giants. Near the time of rock rain, their entire bark exudes a slowly-growing shell that hardens. This shell-shield is a stony coating that upon impact cracks, absorbing most of the damage. Days after the rock rain is done reforging the landscape, what's left of the stony bark crumbles and peels away slowly, like an old scab.
Long before the bark gets its shielding, a variety of insects have their larvae burrow into the steadfast trees of the East, seeking refuge deep inside. Larvae dissolve the tree's greenish-brown flesh with their saliva, gorging on it, growing long and plump. They will only come out after the dust settles.
Insects are the bloodstream of nature. Without them, giants fall, and the entire wilderness of Equiya collapses.
After about fifty or so days into the long autumn, when the dust fully settles over the plains of the East, and plants begin to bloom, these intricate tiny sculptures of life leave their hiding places from underground, in rivers, or tree trunks, and swarm the world from north to south, often with procreation taking the highest priority. They hatch, mate, feast, pollinate and molt—each breed at its own pace.
Violet to black ferns and heliotrope grasses blanketing the world as well as: thinly leaved or in bud break, black-brown, scabrous, knobbly branches of stonebark trees, whose shielding of rock-like quality is now gone, all become nurseries for a myriad of tiny life.
Their chitinous shapes are often diminutive in size but beyond count in variety and the sheer scope of gleaming iridescent colors.
In the deep south of the Wastes, not far from the coastal region, there is an agile insect of glossy-purple coloring, dotted with contrasting white spots. The small thing was shaped like a perfectly round plum, cut in half, with eight delicate legs at the bottom. Its head was little and rounded, with a large, orb-like, circular, golden eye on either side. The eyes together were almost two times bigger than Plumy's head, with blurry-black, egg-shaped pupils within.
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Plumy also had wings so special they could sing.
The female uses those wings to make a series of chirping sounds and the male has to mimic them exactly, flawlessly, with exact volume and duration. She chooses to mate with only the male that repeated her song exactly and to her satisfaction. It is unknown how these insects can discern any individual sound from the cacophony thousands of them make, scattered across the half-lush meadows, fernlands, and grasslands of the world's southern region.
The world is filled with creatures so small they are invisible to even the sharpest of eyes and yet their footprint upon the terrain can be greater than that of the biggest of lumbering beasts. In the southwestern fringes of the interior, deep inside the Wastes, layers and layers of their solidified minuscule remains build-up over many decades to form large hill-sized rocky mounds. The strange hills, painted with pale green patches of faint luminescence, are surprisingly resilient from the devastating consequences of rock rain—their haunting glow, returning in full splendor within a few scores of days after rock rain's passing.
At night a black-blue insect, with an unusually long neck, longer than its entire narrow body, and twelve almost as long legs, lands on the green-light-speckled rocky formation, irresistibly drawn to the glow. The minuscule whispers of life stick to the Black-blue's limbs and sometimes, like the night before, to his abdomen. Others of his kin, hidden in the night, crawl and fly to nearby rocky hills, disseminating the Tiniest-of-tiny and feasting on the deliciously-sweet liquid produced by the glow. But every sweetness has a price.
The lanky black-blue insect has wings, however, they spend a lot of energy and can be easily damaged, making him use those wings sparingly.
Now, he notices another glow. Different, stronger in luminescence. A little away from his hill.
Sparingness be damned, the Black-blue activates his wings, like translucent blooming petals they spread from his elongated back, to take him toward the pleasant glow.
Darkness.
The Black-blue's body is crushed by the throat muscles of his unseen killer.
The nectarous sugary reward was in reality a black, round animal with smooth, dewy skin, bulging gray eyes, and a large, flexible, circular mouth, which could be opened wider than the width of its body. In the cover of darkness, the plump animal usually places itself near these large rocky structures, opens its mouth with the alluringly gloving green tongue inside, and simply waits.
This is not truly the end. As the round mouth of doom snapped shut on him, in less than half a flicker, so too did three of the long-necked insect's legs detach, before they could get swallowed. Each of the three legs started violently thrashing, jumping almost, in three different directions.
When the gray day finally came, the violent convulsions stopped. All three slender legs, now far apart, started releasing a unique scent.
One of the limbs ended up in a patch of violet grass. It was not long before another long-necked, long-limbed, insect found it. This one looked similar to the Black-blue except that it was much bigger than him, with more powerful legs, and a thicker neck. Also, there was a vivid violet iridescent-like coloring of her chitinous armor.
The female moves to skillfully break the middle section of the leg with her mandibles without damaging the fragile content within. Using a special organ on her abdomen she picks up the tiny white spherical package.
The Black-blue will have progeny yet.
The deep heartland of the Wastes is often cruel to any life. As if in an act of defiance, a lush canopy creates a purple marble surrounded by seas of red sands and dotting rocks.
An oasis.
The mighty stonebark trees here have their thick branches grow very wide, forming a protective covering. Refuge to many.
Below one such covering and close to a pristine, cold, trickling spring, a buzzing noise grows louder and suddenly stops. Even those feasting on death have a part to play. A fly's brood swarms and wiggles inside the corpse of a midnight black wild boar, claimed by its many years. Nature's cleaners decompose the unfortunate ones. After hatching from the eggs laid by their mother, hundreds of maggots were feasting on the foul flesh. Such an activity rarely goes unnoticed and soon, like an uninvited guest, a golden-yellow, two-thumbs-long wasp, with dark red eyes, swoops down toward the feasting maggots. A fat black fly, standing on the long-dead boar's red eye, zaps directly at the approaching wasp's head and clings to it like a drowning man to a rope. As the wasp stabs the fly, desperately, again and again, it is already too late. The fly's body explodes, releasing an acid that melts the wasp's entire head.
The hordes of maggots, now safe, blissfully continue to munch away.
Before rock rain's catastrophic symphony arrives, there is a four-legged creature—the size of five horses and a head roughly similar in shape to one, barrel-shaped body, a thick yet stubby tail, and dense dark brown fur with a gray-white patch on the upper torso—that can feel the approaching doom. Using long, powerful forelegs and fat aubergine-colored claws, it slowly digs a cave in the side of the hill or mountain and goes inside to protect itself from rock rain. The robust creature's sense of smell was of such magnitude it was able to find hidden salt beds inside the protective cave. It would hold chunks of salt-rich rocks inside its heavy-jawed mouth for a considerable span, to get the much-needed sustenance.
After the pummeling vibrations are over, the hefty beast continues its long slumber, breathing slowly and barely moving for more than forty days, before unburrowing itself by removing the piled rubble of dust and broken stone, often sealing the entrance to its cave. Stems, twigs, and grasses of the world will not grind themselves, after all.
At the height of a small mountain, a crakler nests. The nest was richly decorated with foliage of deep purple, dusky red, and even a smidgen of black. The leathery creature with black-gray stripes has its pebble-sized hatchlings safely tucked away from most predators.
They will have to grow quickly, big and strong in less than a year, to follow their parents on the long journey back West.
The crakler shares its realm with many species of feathery birds.
Most birds prefer to nest at extreme heights of the tallest trees, their nests are safe there from most ground predators and seamlessly camouflaged with often pale purple and dark red-brown leaves, chosen with care.
In the distant past many creatures of the dark relied on the glint of stars, a sky of molten silver, to see in the night. Many of them went the way of countless others, never to be seen again. Naturally, there are always those who adapt.
During the day, an obsidian-black, fur-bathed animal with thick, curved claws, constantly digs the soil in search of anything its sense of touch, or another yet-to-be-understood sense, deems to be its potential prize. With no humans nearby to mine them, nature found a use for the long-dormant crystals, waking them from a slumber of eons. And so, if this dog-sized creature is fortunate in its labors, just as it happens to be the case now, a small crystal is uncovered from the soil.
Curved-claws instinctively places the small blue crystal at the hopefully most opportune location. For the rest of the day, the exposed crystal slowly charges in the pale sun.
At night the crystal, of often red or this time blue variety, shines like a beacon in a fog of blackness, attracting diminutive piceous flies. Their tiny swarm eventually attracts a small and round furry animal with eyes bigger than its brain. The large-eyed orbicular creature shoots its exceptionally long tongue at the nutritive flies with immaculate precision, despite the half-darkness. This was what the sable four-legged creature waited for, so patiently.
Curved-claws converts his claws inwards, exposing the soft padded layer of skin, and then he prowls, shadow-silent and well beyond the blue crystal's light.
Snap.
The sound was pathetically quiet, the tiniest of branches cracking, almost nothing. Yet the Curved-claws stopped. It was over.
The little furry, mouse-sized creature is not completely helpless and it instinctively bounces off into the night, using its potent and flexible hind legs, previously almost entirely hidden within its round shape. The blue glint reflected in its large reddish-brown eyes is whisker-swift swallowed by the night.
This hunt ended as most do and was unsuccessful, but it didn't matter since the hardest part was finding the source of alluring light. The rest was simply a matter of patience, and Curved-claws had copious amounts of it.
In the distance, a centipedal-looking creature with widely spaced yellowish eyes and long chitinous upright neck—as long as its many-legged body—watched and waited in silence. It was only slightly smaller than the Curved-claws and could potentially kill it. But there was no need to risk it, after the black hunter is successful and finishes feasting, then the Yellow-eyes will rush in and use its powerful mandibles to break the bones and eat the nutritious bone marrow within. It sensed the air currents with its long antennae and stayed well positioned, so not even the slightest scent of its presence may be noticed.
Deep within the heart of an unremembered southwestern forest, hundreds of verdigris-colored mushrooms stand. The biggest have tall stems and caps the size of a half-timbered house or a large knoll, while smaller ones have caps no bigger than a cat. The stem of each is unusually small in width, but only if compared to large caps. No insect nor any other creature bothered to try and consume this seemingly abundant bounty since the mushroom's flesh was highly poisonous, causing instant paralysis and death.
The mushrooms sprawled the area around many tree trunks, encompassing their entire bulks, in places. There were entire regions within this forest where mushrooms created cap-based woodlands of their own.
A raven, standing on top of one of these verdigris giants, was scraping its claws, quite vigorously, across the side of the mushroom cap. Then, it stood there, lost in the scope of the mushroom's edge, silently watching a pile of mud down below with great interest.
After about half a day of waiting, a white boar with pink-red eyes appeared, trampling over some violet ferns and moving toward the muddy clearing.
The boar walked on with dominance in each step, easily pushing through the tall, thick, tangled, and fern-intertwined dark red shrubs. As it made its way to a nearby muddy patch, a few of the ruby-red leaves fell, marking the boar's passing.
With glee, the creature rolled in the mud.
The raven was a pebble on the side of the mushroom, observing closely.
Suddenly, it sprang into action, swooping, seemingly foolishly, at the white fury bulk, now largely covered in mud.
The boar turned its head after hearing the raven's wings.
Continuing much further meant certain death for the black feathery shape, but it was not deterred. At a distance equal to about two of the boar's body lengths the raven spread its wings, halting its progress, and pointed every single of its black claws at the boar. All of the eight claws ejected from their purchases, rushing toward the boar with the speed of a fast autumn wind. Two claws managed to barely penetrate their target, one lodged above the boar's left eye and one in its left ear—through the mud, fur, and boar's thick skin. As the raven flew upward, the boar's body stiffened, its legs: wood-rigid. The beast was as if made out of iron, it simply fell on its side, with all four legs not moving even a hair's width as some of the mud splattered across the nearby grass and fern.
''Kraa! Kraa! Kraa!'' said the raven.
Out of oblivion, dozens of other ravens soon appeared, their dark shapes flying between the widely spaced tree trunks. Many of them were several times smaller than the now clawless one that was already feasting on the boar's right eye, the endings of his toes bleeding a little.
After circling the corpse and releasing many throaty croaks of approval, about ten adults, many with missing claws and others with small, stubby ones, swooped down to land at their feast. With great difficulty they managed to tear through the boar's skin as the smaller ones waited nearby, observing.
The younglings are not immune and the flesh will have to be partly digested by the adults and then regurgitated directly into their offspring's mouths.
A blood-plump crawler was helplessly petrified, attached around the boar's back. It was promptly gobbled up by one of the fully-grown ravens.
The spine of the world stretches roughly north to south. Mountain ranges of the Wastes are largely found in its western reaches, standing their eternal watch against Arcadia.
In defiance of late autumn, the woodlands of the Wastes are adorned with a rich, sable-violet carpet of feathery fronded ferns. Much of the land is a violet canvas with patches of dark red and black, all occasionally impastoed by wide rivers.
In the southeastern regions of the Wastes, more so than anywhere else, there are mighty wooden seas of sprawling forests whose cloud-scraping trees have their deep roots intertwined with other such stalwart obelisks. Rebelling even the heaviest of winds, root in root, together brethren stand. Nonetheless, as is the case with most things in life, there is an impediment. If one tree falls it could cause an unfortunate ripple effect making its neighbors follow suit. A distant screech permeates the entire forest, reverberating across the rows and rows of unending wide tree trunks.
The constant, unfeeling hardships are just part of existence, just another obstacle to be overcome.
What one might call a calamity, nature uses as but a mere tool for achieving transmutation; forever seeking that elusive perfect balance in all things.
The winds of late autumn are strong. Their whispers reach the most hidden of caves, their caresses tickle the tallest of tall branches. It is the time when the foaming waves of the world-encompassing ocean become mightier still, emboldened by these whispers. A somewhat colder time, when the falling, rustling, gliding, swishing black-purple and reddish-brown leaves outnumber all the birds of the world by far. Yet, half will remain clinging onto their branches, waiting for the kiss of the warmer spring air.
The heat of summer and the snows of winter are long-forgotten memories. The true heat is with the stone-encrusted sands of deserts in the deep interior expanses of the Wastes; while snow mostly dwells on mountain peaks.
Spring or autumn, the air of the world is vigor. Lava, bone-dissolving environment; from the deepest ocean floor or darkest of caves, to the highest of snows topping the mountain ranges—it never mattered—life must continue. Each organism is a survivor, always hunting for the next day, for that next pale dawn.