The Migration

This story is set on Apoptis, within the same geological era as Mage Errant.

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The sun was mid-flare when dawn broke, bathing the land in burning rays as it rose. 

As always with a dawn flare, a few more plants than usual failed to shift their pigments in time, and were badly charred. Most of the sparse plants in the highlands, however, were warned by chemical and electrical signals racing from plant to plant ahead of the dawn, and managed to turn white in time to survive.

None of it concerned the herd, though.

The matriarch, half awake, raised her mirror-plated head a bit, and looked up the slopes of the ravine they’d nested in for the night, watching the dawn singe the soil at its rim.

Then she snorted, glanced around to make sure the herdmembers were all curled up with their mirror-shelled backs facing the sky, and went back to sleep.

The flare passed over the herd harmlessly, with only minor discomfort when the glare hit their mirrored backs. Their shell-backs, polished and cleaned in the night by the scuttling, sucker-footed symbiotes that lived under their their shells, kept the worst of the flare off easily. Most of the herd didn’t even awaken, though their symbiotes all tucked themselves more carefully away.

Once the flare had passed, the matriarch stretched, grunted, and clambered to her feet. She glanced around, sniffing at her herd.

She couldn’t count, nor did she have any sort of grasp of numbers except in the most relative sense, but she would have noticed if any of her herd— her descendants all— had vanished. None of her daughters nor their yearlings had been taken by the auroras in the night, and few other predators in this region would dare attack her kind.

The matriarch bellowed, and her daughters, each twice the size of an elephant, yet still smaller than the matriarch, slowly clambered to their own feet. Not, of course, that there had ever been an elephant on Apoptis, nor could one survive any of the world’s flares— not without considerable magic of its own.

The matriarch shook herself, her mirrorshell clattering, and began clambering out of the ravine with her six immense clawed feet, leaving a steaming, burnt patch on the ground where she had slept. 

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The matriarch spent much of her morning corralling wandering herd-members— this early in the migration, even many of her adult daughters who should know better wanted to graze slowly on the vegetation, especially those unlucky burnt plants who’d been caught by surprise in the dawn flare. 

They’d remember the path and stick closer together once the migration went on longer.

The yearlings wouldn’t take the migration seriously until at least one of them was lost on the way, so the matriarch was continually breaking up their tussles and such. A few hours in, she had to drag the yearlings away from a pack of dog-sized predators, who scurried off whistling in terror away from where the yearlings had trapped the pack between several boulders.

The rocky highlands were sparser than the plains they’d started their migration from, with fewer plants, and next to no trees. And none of the trees up this high were false trees, disguised ambush predators— they needed even deeper soil for their bodies than trees did for their roots.

It didn’t mean there were no threats, of course— a careless step could take one of the herd off a cliff, and the auroras could strike anywhere the sky’s magnetic currents took them, but this stretch of the trip was as easy as it would get for the matriarch.
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The herd was slowed by a greater-than-usual number of flares, so it took most of a week to cross the highlands, following the routes the matriarch and her ancestors had worn into the soil and stone for generations, wide roads cut by their claws.

Where those roads descended from the highlands, though, something had changed.

Plate-fungus had covered their path.

The dark fungal growths, from above, looked like smooth, slightly reflective slabs of shale, growing so close together they created an overlapping platform a couple feet off the ground. It stretched as far as the matriarch could see ahead of them, covering the old herd-paths entirely.

She shifted uncomfortably at the sight. The herd could plow through the plate-fungus fields easily enough— the overlapping slabs weren’t even strong enough to hold up or hold back one of the yearlings— but it was what lay below the plates that worried the matriarch.

The plates were help up by thin, arching stalks, and in the foot or two of darkness below, entire ecosystems thrived. Hives of jelly-bodied, venomous arthropods devoured the parasites that consumed the soft fungal stalks, while thousand-legged snake-like creatures twined their bodies through the maze of fungal stalks and used their beaks to trim away dead fungal flesh from the bottom of the plates above.

Dozens, if not hundreds, of species survived in the shade of the plate fungus, and all of them would react with fury if the herd crashed through it.

The angry shade-dwellers were no true threat to the adult grazers of the herd, but they were a threat to the herd’s yearlings and symbiotes. And without the symbiotes to scrape fungal growths off the mirror-shells and to polish away scratches, as they clambered about at night with their suckered limbs, the grazers would struggle to survive the day and the flares of Apoptis’ sun.

The matriarch could put none of this in words— or anything into words, for that matter— but she knew they could not risk a passage through the plate fungus. If had been just an edge of the plate-fields, she would not have worried— there were too few shade-dwellers around the edges of the plate to worry the herd. The former herd paths, however, went straight through the depths of the plate field.

When the matriarch was young, the plate-fields had been far from here, trampled into bits by the many herds that passed these ways. Over the long decades of her life, though, the number of herds heading this way had dwindled, as misfortune befell them, favored routes were blocked off, or other matriarchs simply chose different routes.

There weren’t enough herds to keep the plate fungus on these plains away from their routes.

The matriarch considered returning to the highlands, seeking a new route, but the journey ahead of the herd was long yet, and time was short.

Instead, she turned her head along the edges of the highlands, looking for another path.

She found one to the north, but the thought of following it made the matriarch nervous— she had never gone that way, never been led there by her mother or grandmothers.

The matriarch saw no other routes, though, and clawed irritably at the ground, cracking apart great chunks of ceramic-like baked soil.

Finally she snorted, and called to her herd, and set forth along the rough, rocky gap between the stone of the highlands and the plate-fields.
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As the herd entered the gap, the matriarch paused to raise her body temperature while between several of her daughters. Her symbiotes fled the rising heat, clambering aboard the smaller grazers.

The matriarch took the lead, then, trampling the very edges of the plate-fields as they headed north. A few shade-dwellers boiled out of the ruined fungus, nipping at her, but she couldn’t even feel them through her mirror-shell and thick hide. A few times, when the angry vermin grew too dense, she was forced to raise her body temperature to drive them off or kill them, but it was thankfully seldom.

The matriarch’s children kept far away from the plates— especially after a few of the shade-dweller bit into the thinner skin of a yearling. The little fool only suffered superficial wounds, it would survive, but its whimpers and complaints kept the other yearlings away from the plates.

If the old herds had still been there with them, each matriarch would have done the same as they passed, trimming back the edges of the plate-fields. There were too few on these routes now, though, too few by far.

It took three days to reach the end of the plate-fields, even moving at a fast clip. There were few plants or distractions in this narrow borderland, and those plants they did find held little liquid to parch their thirst. The flares were less frequent than they’d been in the passage over the highlands, thankfully.
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The matriarch should have been relieved when they reached the edge of the plate-fields, but instead, she halted entirely, contemplating turning back entirely.

The plate-fields had stopped their northward growth because they’d run into a far more dangerous ecosystem— there was a river blocking their path. 

The matriarch clawed at the ground anxiously, tearing up shards of flare-baked soil with cracking noises.

The surface of the river was covered in steam, but it wasn’t boiling— there hadn’t been enough flares the past few days for that, even with their greater-than usual frequency.

The matriarch could see shapes moving in the water, one almost as big as she was, but they weren’t the true threat.

No, the water itself was the threat. The grazers were far too dense to float, and being submerged in water played havoc with their thermal self-regulation.

Merely staying away from the shore wasn’t nearly safe enough— the constant temperature shifts in the water, the water levels that varied ridiculously throughout the year, all contributed towards leaving the ground unstable and full of hidden sinkholes for quite a distance from the edge of the water.

The herd milled behind the matriarch, a few of them hissing nervously, until finally the matriarch made her decision, and set forward.

She wrecked as much of the plate-fungus as she could, and made sure none of her descendants did anything but trail behind her. If there were any sinkholes under the plate fungus, her weight was more than enough to collapse them. 

The matriarch set forward, one patient, cautious step at a time.
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The herd lost their first yearling on the second day edging across the river, and their second yearling at the end of the third.

The first was lost entirely as the matriarch had expected. The yearlings never took the migration and its risks seriously until one of them was killed or injured. They’d spent the first year of their lives in the gentle plains, with few predators that would even consider tackling a member of their herd— they simply didn’t understand the risks.

No matter how much the matriarch and the other adults hissed and bellowed at the yearlings, they kept wandering away from the plate fungus and its stinging pests and closer to the river.

It was only a matter of time before the ground gave way under one of them, and when it finally happened, the yearling had the misfortune to fall not into a soft-spot or a sinkhole, but into a boiling mudpit.

There was nothing the herd could do, but the matriarch made them wait until the yearling and its symbiotes stopped screaming and sank below the mud.

The yearlings were very careful to walk in line after that, stinging pests or not.

The sun began flaring more regularly soon after that, offering much-needed relief from the pests living in the plate-fungus. The entire reason they lived there, after all, was to protect themselves from the flares— they lacked the mirror-grazers numerous flare defenses.

The second yearling to die didn’t stray from the group, didn’t do anything wrong. Not even the matriarch saw the predator coming— one moment, they were walking along the edge of the plate fungus, the next, the sinuous, many-legged predator was already hauling the yearling into the scalding river.

The matriarch quickly calmed her herd and got them moving again— no sense in tempting the creature to strike again.

The plate fungus finally began to curve away from the edge of the river a few hours later, and that evening, the herd ate well for the first time in days. There’d been enough plant life in their narrow road beside the plate-fungus to sustain them, but not to keep them all comfortable.

The plains opening up on the other side of the plate fungus, though, were nearly as rich with plant-life as the nesting plains, and the herd gorged themselves until it was time to sleep.
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The plate-fungus fields and the unstable riverbanks soon gave way to great plains of feargrass, stretching countless miles in every direction.

If a traveler from the known multiverse were to see feargrass, they would likely be surprised at how mundane the feargrass was. Oh, it was black instead of green, still— Apoptis was no friend to chlorophyll, after all. Likewise, the weak photo-voltaic properties of Limnan plants were still present in the feargrass- to an even greater degree than most, though if you bit into one, you’d still only feel a faint tingle from the electricity.

Apart from those things, however, the feargrass was remarkably mundane in appearance. It was chest-high on a human, thin, waved normally in the wind.

That appearance of mundanity only lasted until you walked within a few feet of the feargrass, or when Apoptis’ sun flared, in which case it would retract below the ground in the blink of an eye.

There are plenty of plants that move in the multiverse— rare is the planet that doesn’t at least have a few dozen species of carnivorous plant, or at least plants that fold up their leaves when touched. There are even quite a few walking plants out there.

Far rarer, however, are plants whose motion is driven by a literal electric engine.

Each solitary blade of feargrass was rooted around a tiny spindle, itself attached to a tiny biological engine. When something alarmed the feargrass, it activated its biological engine, winding the blade of grass around the spindle as it retreated down the root-like sheath protruding up to the surface.

To make the feargrass’ life-cycle even stranger, the engine was, in fact, a symbiotic life-form.

As alien as the feargrass’ biological lineage was, it was, at least, far more recognizable than its symbiotic engines, which corresponded to no normal type of organism in the known multiverse. It could, perhaps, be placed halfway between fungus and animal, given that the living engines linked together and played a role similar to the mycelial webs below more familiar soils. It would be a poor taxonomic placement for such a strange creature, though.

And all that strangeness was only the beginning. It didn’t encompass the living batteries of the engines, themselves symbiotic microbial colonies, or the electromagnetic immune systems of the engines.

Like so many worlds of the known multiverse, Apoptis was the relic of a catastrophic collision. Not a kinetic collision, but an ecological one, as multiple biospheres cascaded against one another through the labyrinths and mana wells of the universe, as invasive species rolled over invasive species over invasive species.

Apoptis took that ecologic chaos far beyond most worlds, though, for Apoptis lay at the intersection of normally remote regions of the multiverse. The brutally hot regions inhabited by the Kyrene, the gentler regions of the known multiverse, and a third, stranger region, one where the laws of nature and the shape of natural history had collaborated to create semi-mechanical ecosystems, where lightning usually provided more light than stars and radioactive isotopes brought life, not cancer.

The feargrass was a symbiosis between organisms from mutually inhospitable worlds, a mad alliance that defied reason and probability.

Life has never much cared for reason nor probability.

To the mirror-backed grazers, none of that was particularly important. It just made the grasses more annoying to eat— the burrowers could dig them out of the hard-baked ground with their immense claws, still, but they seldom bothered, save in regions filled with feargrass like this one. Eating the biological engines offered little nutrition to the grazers, though they weren’t harmful.

To most multiversal travelers, the feargrass wouldn’t be particularly significant either, unless they took the years to study them in depth. They’d just be strange grasses that retreated when you approached them. Hardly a unique adaptation in the multiverse.

Few multiversal travelers beyond the Kyrene had ever seen the grasses, though, and fewer still from the known multiverse. Not even Galvachren had ever observed them, but then, he had countless thousands of worlds to wander, and even he had his limits.
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From above, the herd faintly resembled a comet of barren ground with a heart of mirrors, as the feargrass vanished ahead of them, then slowly rose up behind as they passed.

For all the annoyances of traveling through the feargrass, especially the aggravation of digging up the plants to eat, there was one benefit that, above all else, led grazer herds through them: The electromagnetic immune systems of the feargrass helped hide the herd from the predatory night auroras.

“Helped hide the herd”, unfortunately, was a distinctly different thing from “hid the herd”.

The auroras were always more active after periods of more frequent flares, and the sun’s flaring had increased rapidly day to day as the herd continued away from the plate-fungus.

The matriarch grew more nervous as the flares came closer together, even surrounded by the feargrass, and on the third night in the feargrass, her fears came true.

The predatory auroras descended on the herd.
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The matriarch and her herd took precautions to conceal themselves even beyond the feargrass, of course. They slept farther apart than usual, so their neural activity wouldn’t be as easily visible to the auroras. They closed off their biological heat-sinks deep inside them, to raise their body temperatures and help suppress their sleeping neural activities. 

None of it worked, in the end, and the matriarch woke to screaming.

There were three of the auroras, but it was hard to be sure— the auroras often overlapped, and the living electromagnetic fields could easily combine and split into entirely new auroras at any time.

All three struck yearlings first, as their less-developed heat-sinks and smaller body-size kept their body temperatures lower and their neural activity higher, and the herd awoke to the screaming and flailing of the victims and their symbiotes.

Many of the other yearlings and young adults scattered as the three attacked grazers convulsed and screamed, but the matriarch didn’t bother. Speed was a paltry defense against the auroras. 

Instead, the matriarch began to constrict some muscles in her heat-sink, while restricting others, in order to rapidly lower her body temperature.

And as her body temperature dropped, her neural activity began to spike.

A few of her symbiotes— the smarter, faster, and luckier ones— fled her body in time to evade what was coming.

The rest were struck by the largest aurora as it enveloped the matriarch, and they screamed with her.

The auroras were not predators in the sense that they relied on their victims for sustenance— no, they fed upon the interplay of the sun’s flares and Apoptis’ magnetic field.

No, it would be better to say that they bathed in the nervous systems of their victims. They reveled and danced through the unique neural patterns of higher lifeforms, the different webs and shapes of electric activity in brains and nervous systems, until they tore their victims apart.

The matriarch, though, was hardly defenseless, and her body temperature kept dropping.

Neural signals began cascading in ever more complex patterns through the metal and silica-rich nervous system of the matriarch as her body cooled, further and further, until a rime of frost began to crawl across her mirrored scales, and onto the ground around her.

The dance of the aurora within her nervous system stuttered, then began to twitch, as it began to be dragged along by the cascading nervous system, began to be overwhelmed by a seizure that would have killed any lesser being than the matriarch. Not by the electrical power of the seizure, of course— the auroras danced through flares and lightning joyfully— but by the sheer baffling complexity of the neural patterns.

From outside, the battle was nigh-incomprehensible— wild flares of color ripped through the air in jagged patterns, all reflected off the flailing, mirror-coated body of the matriarch.

On the inside, though, the aurora had finally had enough, and it withdrew from the matriarch’s nervous system entirely, calling its lesser brethren behind it.

The herd slowly gathered back around the aurora victims. Two of the yearlings had died, while the third had lived, if barely, thanks to the matriarch calling the largest aurora to herself.

The center of their focus was the matriarch, though.

The matriarch’s seizure lasted long past the aurora’s flight, but it finally ended, and the heat-sink organ began to work at full power once more.

The organ was a miracle of biology, one forged by a synthesis of biospheres even more complex than the feargrass. It was filled with dizzying fractal structures of exotic biometals, dense colonies of alien microbes, and even stretched into the aether itself. The veins, lymph networks, and muscles controlling fluid flow through the organ were so elaborate that it nearly served as a second heart for the grazers. 

The heat-sink organ was the only reason such massive creatures could survive on a world as hot as Apoptis, and the matriarch’s heat-sink organ had been pushed to its limit, engorged with heat to the very point of rupture.

The organ rapidly began pushing heat through the various bodily networks it was attached to, but most of it was pushed through a special set of biometallic fibers, all running down to the matriarch’s immense digging claws. Within moments, the claws began to glow, venting heat into the ground and air around them.

For all the complexity of the system, no dragon on a less alien world would be particularly impressed. Far less energy was contained in the heat-sink organ than were present in the chemical processes of a single blast of dragon-breath. Complexity is, after all, far from synonymous with power— much the opposite, at times.

Slowly, though, the matriarch’s convulsions slowed, then ceased, and after a drawn out, nervous waiting period, the huge grazer dragged herself to her feet once more and steadied herself.

Then she lifted herself entirely onto her hind legs and bellowed in victory at the sky.
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The herd reached their destination two days later, in the heat of the day, less than an hour after a pair of back-to-back flares. The twining, self-echoing musical calls of the male mirror-backed grazers greeted the herd as they trudged into the vast furrowed landscapes the males continually dug and maintained. The smaller males danced alongside the herd as they trudged next to one of those furrows, leading eventually to one of the colossal sessile elder males, who fed on the detritus carried to them on rainwater through the ditches maintained by their younger brethren. 

The herd would rest here, and the adult females would mate with the sessile males. The male yearlings would stay here when the herd departed for their grazing-lands, while the females would have several more trips back and forth before they reached adulthood.

The matriarch let herself wander in the middle of her herd, among her daughters, granddaughters, and great-granddaughters. Let herself rest for a few weeks before she led them on their return journey once more. Let herself gather new symbiotes from her family and other herds, and recover from her tribulations.

She’d need it. She’d be leading these migrations for decades yet to come, after all.