whalesbone's Clan | Flight Rising

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whalesbone's Clan

what is a bird? a delightful little pile of secrets

Ancient Lair

hidden in the

Foxfire Bramble

Clan Info

Secondary succession happens when a climax community
or intermediate community is impacted by a disturbance. This restarts the cycle of succession, but not back
to the beginning—soil and nutrients are still present.

The brambles here are young and creep close to the ground; the trees are even younger, a hundred years away from fully obscuring the sky.

At a glance, there is nothing here.

Upon closer inspection, in fact, there is
nothing here at all.

There are no dragons, to be certain, though there are trace fossils that suggest a not-so-distant inhabitance: the clean-cut ends of felled trees scattered among the saplings; linear troughs in the soil demarcating neat squares of irrigated land; shallow valleys where some underground structure has collapsed on itself. These traces alone could be taken simply as an abandoned lair, but it is not the absence of dragons that makes this area peculiar.

It is not dead: there is soil supporting short grasses and woody shoots, but even the most poorly-defended sweetgrass grows free of predators, supporting little beyond dewdrops and unseen microbiota. There is none of the near-deafening insect song like that which permeates the old-growth bramble, only occasional chirps and the congregation of some hardier species along shallow pools of water. With no canopy, the open sky reveals birds overhead, but they do not stop to forage, for the paltry offering of moss and mosquitoes does little to entice them.

Were there blackened boughs roofing charred-open pine cones, the implication of a forest fire would be understood. Fresh ravines cracking the earth, a layer of water filling the burrows running below, even signs of battle are straightforward. Yet there are no such examples of environmental storytelling. There are no bones. Perhaps the dragons that were once here are as gone as the overarching thickets, the owls within them and the rodents scurrying below them, all consumed by the same unknown force of nature. Perhaps this landscape is dracogenic, drained of all its resources before its residents moved on to repeat the same cycle elsewhere.

It doesn’t matter. The thorns will regrow and the wildlife will return when the moonlight fades, same as it always has been, same as it always will be. Whether dragons will return as well is their own prerogative.

hikaru [光]• 21 • he/him • english/日本語 • fr +3

"i just don't care much for most breeds" -guy who's been on the dragon pixel game for close to a decade

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