The Nexum: A Nadder Myth

[Pedant]

CONTENTS
Basics : The Ark-Builders : A Nadder Myth

BASICS
It’s not quite certain what is the part of the galaxy, or even the galaxy, in which the Crayfish Nebula is found. But found it certainly is—hundreds of stars in a region some 200 light-years across. And most remarkably of all, it bears life. A lot of a lot of life.
There have been thirty-one recognized species dancing around the threshold of sapience over the past three hundred and fifty million years; there are almost certainly countless others who got part of the way before some terrible catastrophe drove them to extinction or dullness or both. There are over seven hundred planets and moons that can support life, twenty-four of which birthed it. From tidally locked Wadjet, to Lux Aeterna and Jazz Harmony with days that last hundreds of hours, to “normal” worlds like Ajjamah or Manavi or Nemus, to moons like Labyrinth or planets like Rí Te Gáh whose days are half or a quarter of the Nebula standard—life prevails.
And life is aided by the particular nature of the Crayfish Nebula. For reasons scientists and sorcerers are still trying to understand, reality reaches not across four accessible dimensions, but eight—four spatial, two temporal, one where time and space merge in unholy ways, and one that none but the Predecessors know of. Matter flowing through these extra dimensions takes on...additional qualities, the universe creating microcosms of itself in beings complex enough to receive it. Magic, in other words—souls that bind to the living by default, and grant flesh access to worlds beyond. And no world’s magic is exactly the same.
The surviving twenty-three sapient species are organized into a system of patronage called the Nexum (although of course this is but a translation of the name). Earliest to latest, patrons, clients, wards, and protected species all fit within a hierarchy that in theory guarantees protection and advancement for all. In practice...well, the system works, and if they notice at all then they feel content that their interests are being looked after. But there’s always another layer. Always.
A few species of interest within the Nexum:

• The Predecessors, old enough and advanced enough that they have passed beyond this physical reality, only materializing when they see fit and occasionally eating people’s souls.
• The Ark-Builders, ancient and enormous, tentacles weaving in and out of this plane of reality—the spawn of Cthulhu that actually went to see therapists and got the chance to rethink their lives.
• The Miser Crabs, old and wrinkled and widespread, for whom time is personal and everything in life comes with a price tag.
• The Morphai, shapeless collectives of photosynthetic cells originally evolved for the winds of a gas giant—a peaceful race, but one for whom a personality is a death sentence.
• The Kodama, part-plant part-animal gardeners who tend the trees that will bear their grandchildren.
• The Faithful, a carnivorous marsupial-type species living in close alliance with a herbivorous sapient, the Pastors.
• The Kingfisher Scorpions, also called the Nepalcyons, flying, stinging, rather violent and thankfully extinct race with eight sexes and reproduction involving eating the mother from the inside out.
• Humans, an up-and-coming species of placental ape that shares its home planet with three other sapient species and yet still doesn’t believe in aliens.

[Pedant]

THE ARK-BUILDERS

Planet: Wedjat
Wedjat is that rare thing in the Crayfish Nebula, a functioning “hot eyeball” world. Tidally locked to its sun, Aten, Wedjat is divided into three rough zones. The Night is cold and frozen, the golden moon Khonsu being the only thing to light the surface and keep the ice moving. The Day is the opposite—bathed in perpetual sunlight, it is a barren, nearly inhospitable desert, home to very few species living on water in the bedrock. And Eos, the ribbon around the terminator, gets the best of both worlds—warm winds and ample light from the Day, rivers and seas pouring in from the Night. And there’s always a slight tilt, and a touch of orbital eccentricity, so most of the terminator has something approaching a day-night cycle—and this carries over into the Day and Night proper.

An inhospitable world? Certainly. But at the end of the day (the long, long day, over sixty Earth days long in fact), life perseveres. And in the seas around the terminator arose complex life, stretching both ways into the Day and Night. Sulfurates, chemosynthetic organisms drawing from volcanic vents beneath the glaciers, help to support an ecosystem of largely blind creatures in the hospitable regions of the Night. On the Day side, even relatively close to the sub-stellar point, shell-trees take advantage of the high copper distribution on the planet (something like 150ppm compared to around 50ppm on Earth or 55ppm on Ajjamah) to create protective blue-green shields from which black leaves emerge and can be relinquished in the event of solar excitement. And around the terminator, both mix with black algae in the water and bridgeroot plants (individual stalks send creepers and roots towards each other to create a mutual defence network and gene pool) on land. Animal life, aside from the inherent ability to fix nitrogen, is almost universally hermaphroditic, reproducing using something more akin to bacterial conjugation than meiosis. Many animals take advantage of the terminator's winds to send their offspring deep into the Day, in great flocks of eggs which may glide on a stalk, float under a specialized bag of methane, or even be dropped with seriform parachutes direct from their parents' tentacles, as in the case of the ballooning spider. This ensures a decent distribution across the planet, and a couple of handy-dandy cellular components (like the frustule, a type of cell wall used for dealing with extremes in temperature and radiation) assist the strongest in surviving.

Species: Ark-Builder
(Daemon amicabile)
No sapient species is found on Wedjat; the closest equivalent is the polar moose, a six-legged antlered herbivore which set their young adrift in coconut-like eggs on the "western" seas. But it was the ancestral home of the Ark-Builders, who by now have gone a bit dimensionally unstable but still retain their distinctive cyclops-spider-squid-skull look. Despite looking like the unfortunate offspring of Cthulhu with someone's hand even in their earliest days, the Ark-Builders (their real name is unpronounceable) are generally quite a friendly species, their civilization developing as a result of the selecting of increasingly intelligent "guides" to lead new offspring out of the desert and onto the fertile plains beyond.

Derived from the same lineage as the balloon spider, Ark-Builders were omnivores and tool-users. To compete with other creatures around the safe lands of Eos, they needed something to mark them as unique. Ark-Builders didn’t have families in the traditional sense, the tens of thousands of flying fertilized eggs scattered to the winds across one’s lifetime considered a sure-fire way of preserving one’s genetic code. Instead, “guides” would leave the safety of Eos and venture into the Day, finding however many children they could and bringing them back. The sense of community this created, and the incredibly well-honed ability to survive in a burning Hell for “weeks” on end, helped shape their personality as a species—aid where possible, remember what you can, and know that you will likely never see your biological chosen so seek out others to keep safe instead, in the hope that someone else will do the same for you.

For the hermaphroditic Ark-Builders, the issue of cross-generation reproduction—children born of parents from different generations—was a curious one. In some societies, it was expected, “guides” keeping the children they found and raised as spouses. In others it was considered a terrible perversion of the Trek, and generations were specially marked in some way by consensus of the previous generation (or, in some societies, on their own accord once they came of age). In still others it mattered not at all; one looked for mates who didn’t bear resemblance to oneself, if possible, but otherwise all functioning adults were fair game. In any case, be they spouses or wards, these children were, in a very real way, bound to their parent; entire lineages were constructed based on the “guides” who took their place in the cycle, and some colonies or religious groups shared the burden of child-rearing regardless of who brought the children home.

These groups (the closest term is “lineage bundles”) became the bedrock of further civilization on Wedjat. Once a certain tribalistic spirit was established, it became much easier to cooperate in general groups, to seek to better one’s lineage bundle, to ensure equal treatment for equal access to mates—and to prove that oneself was the worthiest for travel across the Day, or sometimes the Night. Safe-houses were constructed in the Day, then (sometimes) expanded into cities, importing precious food and water from Eos. Some (unfortunately) became auction-houses of a sort, other guides able to purchase recently-collected children in exchange for supplies. In more hospitable Eos, empires were founded around the pocket-seas, and the Ark-Builders—then merely the People, or True Thinking Beings, or Guides—learned to sail on and against the winds. Further and further they reached, across the world of Wedjat, singing songs in their guttural, clicking languages to the Inexorable Sun, the Invincible Moon, the Irreplaceable Flood, and the Irresistible Journey. And then, around forty million years ago—perhaps prompted by some cosmic force known only to them—they turned to the stars.

Nexum Status: Patron
Wedjat, for the Ark-Builders, was largely evacuated after an invasion by the terrifying Herons, genocidal robotic children of the long-extinct Kingfisher Scorpions; their enormous hollow asteroid habitats, sometimes as large as entire planets, now patrol the Crayfish Nebula to seek out new life and new intelligent souls for the Predecessors to graze on. The Ark-Builders themselves are one of the oldest patron species in the Nexum, with half a dozen new species under their care, and use their ancestral urge in guiding them to galactic society. The modern Ark-Builders, in the process of transcending physicality itself, look back on their earlier history with fond amusement, and although it’s been forty million years they have a fondness for their old home. And who wouldn’t? Although it has changed much since their time upon it, Wedjat is still one of the most beautiful planets around, stark contrast between Night and Day almost sacred in its purity. Besides, better to get the tourism out of the way soon, before the Polar Moose learn how to make proper tools and the planet is off-limits for a couple million years...

[Ares Land]

I like that a lot.

I'm not entirely sure of what the native lifeforms are doing with their eggs? If I get it, they send them in the day side, and they'll hatch whenever the currents send them to the terminator again?

[Pedant]

I like that a lot.

I'm not entirely sure of what the native lifeforms are doing with their eggs? If I get it, they send them in the day side, and they'll hatch whenever the currents send them to the terminator again?

Many thanks!

Ah, perhaps I wasn’t very clear there, pardon. Basically, the eggs are let loose on the winds blowing to the day side (and possibly the night side too, I need to check the winds again), scattering them safely across the planet. It is then the job of the guides to trek out into the wilderness, collect as many of the young as were able to survive nearby (presumably not from the same egg-group), and escort them back to settlements on the terminator. Society continues as “normal” until the next mating time (usually when the winds are right). Not everyone has to mate every time, but usually mating and release of eggs to the winds are synchronous—mate first time, release eggs the next.

[Pedant]

A NADDER MYTH

The Nadder culture known as Tranquil Contemplation Amongst Peers (also Hesychia) gave us the most consistent rendition of the myth of the two suns. (Please note that all individuals should be assumed as both male and female, and the use of pronouns depends on context more than anything else.)
Apollo (Twelve Darts), after defeating Zeus (Alcatraz who Births Hurricanes), needed to keep the sky alight for the children of his ally Pythia (First Ancestor). So she, Apollo, set her two sons, Prometheus (Seeing in Dawn’s Light) and Epimetheus (Seeing in Dusk’s Light), to patrol the skies, white-gold Epimetheus from the east and red-black Prometheus from the west. But Prometheus saw the children of Pythia grow tired and weak, for the light of two suns at full power was enough to burn the land and all life on it, while when they passed beneath it the world froze and there was no warmth and the children of Pythia risked death. So Prometheus, wrapped as he was in black fire, flew closer and closer to the world, shedding the vestiges of his raiment. Lightning crackled, volcanoes rose, and fire roared—and the golden leaves on the trees turned black. The children of Pythia hid in the water, where they were safe. But when night came, the warmth of Prometheus’ raiment remained with them, and they came forth into the night with fire and warm air, and the icy breezes themselves were made duller. And so they were safe from the cold forevermore.
Apollo was displeased, not only because of the destruction but because now, despite the good that would come, Prometheus could no longer travel from the west. But Epimetheus said, “I will help my brother. He and I shall travel together. I shall carry him westward, and he shall travel eastward.” And Apollo agreed, proud of her younger son.
And that is why the suns pass from the east to the west, why they turn from the west to the east, why Prometheus is smaller and redder than Epimetheus, and why the leaves on the trees turn black when Prometheus looks upon them.

In Context
The world of Parnassus orbits around two suns, one G-class (bright and yellow) and the other M-class (dark and red). The locals, both plant and animal alike, have adapted to the changing flux of light that comes about every so often. Plants have primary photopigments in the yellow range, but also have secondary pigments that absorb a lot of infrared light, and appear black to the naked eye for most species (although the Miser Crabs and Selkies can distinguish them). The animals, on the other hand, often come with infrared sensors of their own; in the Nadders, this is represented by two sets of eyes, one for "normal" light toward the rear of the head and one for infrared light closer to the front.
The Nadders themselves, by the way, are a race of semi-aquatic strongly-electric serpentine omnivores, whose first steps towards civilization involved the communal building of dams in the coral mangrove swamps of their ancestral homeland. Their double "hands" (six opposable digits around the mouth and the tail) helped them considerably with this. As with most other species in their class, they are protandric hermaphrodites; they start off as male, but become capable of laying eggs as well as fertilizing them as they get older. Nadder society is social, comfortable, and full of pleasant stimulations (their languages are based on sending controlled charges from one Nadder to the other), and they have been proud Patrons of the interstellar Nexum for hundreds of thousands of years.