Introduction to Fauna & Flora

Subject: Everything alive on Aropria — its peoples, its creatures and its plants
Covers: Twelve sapient species, the beasts and monsters, and the plants worth knowing

Aropria is crowded. Twelve peoples share the continent, along with a great deal that would rather eat them, and a surprising amount of plant life that is not entirely passive about the arrangement. This section is where all of it is recorded.

The peoples

Seven species are met often enough that most people on the continent have met all of them. Humans are the most numerous and are found everywhere. The Kin are ordinary animals woken into people, and are the next most numerous after them. Alium arrived from somewhere else and have no vocal cords, speaking mind to mind instead. A Cryptum is a consciousness living in a reanimated body that was not originally theirs. Ophidians come into their own selves at a Second Birth. Primordials are born of congruence and the earthen elements. And Synthoids are constructed rather than born, and live for centuries.

Five more are recorded separately, and each is rare for its own reason rather than for a shared one. The Kitteri and the arak range the plains and are known to most of the continent's borders as raiders. Folletts are four inches tall. Psylopods do not speak. And there is exactly one Līxar, which is the whole of what is known about them.

Beasts and monsters, and the difference is a stone

A monster carries a congruence core. A beast does not. That is the whole of the distinction, and it is not about size, temper, or how likely the thing is to kill you — a savulak is a beast and will see off a lone homesteader, while a hummingbird is a monster whose core is the size of a grain of rice.

Beasts are the continent's powerful and peculiar animals, and they are much the more abundant of the two: the Aquila Leo Aureus — the golden lion eagle, and one of the few large predators an ordinary traveller will actually see — and the savulak.

Monsters are fewer and each carries its core. The Brown Beast is the one most of the continent can name, and the Garshallan tribes built a reverence around it. Beyond it the range is wide: the strigoi, the mistwalker, the jhund, the null daemons, and the hummingbirds, which are not what the name suggests. The monsters most people actually meet are commoner: the prak around settlements, the zopper that most river folk have a story about, and the giddy flame, anything from the size of an apple to the size of a person.

Carrying a core does not make a thing a monster, which is worth knowing before the rule is applied backwards. A Synthoid's heart is a core, and a Synthoid is a person. A predatory plant that manages to eat something sentient begins to grow one. And the null daemon's blight core sits where a core would and is explicitly not one. Congruence Cores carries all three.

What grows

Medicinal plants are the practical half, and most of what an apothecary actually works with. The predatory plants are the other half, and the reason a traveller is told which valleys to walk around. The peesh is neither, and is worth reading about on its own terms.

Plants on Aropria are not reliably inert, and the reason is congruence in the natural world — the force is in everything alive, and where it pools more thickly, what grows there grows differently.