Fellfield
rating: +9+x
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The morning light did little to warm us, not with the wind coming whistling over the tundra. A faint bitterness hung in the air. It was a product of the razorflowers that carpeted the ground. Their long flower spikes shimmered shades of sapphire and violet, reflecting the sky and their own leaves. Tiny kuul were already crawling over them. As their armored bodies slipped into the flower cavities they twisted and turned to anoint themselves with the resins. We had to walk carefully through the fellfields, lest the flower spikes cut us. Had we come even two tendays earlier or later, we could have walked without fear of them.

And yet late spring was the best time to make the journey. During fall and winter it would be too bitterly cold and in the brief summer the kuul would be aggressive and carnivorous. So we left the Way just after the snows melted. The river's headwaters were only a trickle beside us, burbling over exposed granite. Last summer's skimmer bones lay on the banks and the air felt heavy with the weight of the dead, despite the cold. They'd only just started to crumble. Yet the tiny bones crunched easily under the feet of myself and my three companions. Skimmer bones are fragile, and with any step the dead joined with the soil. A boon for the plants in our wake.

Of them all, I'd been the only one to visit this world or walk along this river before. So I led the way, pointing out some of the stranger plant life to my companions. Here a lone spinetree, the tallest plant on the fellfield slopes with a single rosette at the top of a long stalk and armor protecting their windward side. There a raxon's rosette, so thorny and bitter no animal would bother with it. The ground sucked at our feet and we left a trail of muddy prints and broken leaves. Every step felt like the ground was trying to hold you in its embrace. As the leaves were crushed under our feet the distinctive mint-like scent of Oanes' plants filled the air.

When I'd last come, it was summer. The land had changed since, even as close to the river as we were. The skimmer bones were new, though I'd known to expect them. That many bodies were never going to disappear quickly up here. More surprising was that the carpet of tiny rocks that'd coated the ground in summer was no longer present. If they had been, we might've had an easier time of it walking. It wasn't very long before we found where they'd gone. The gullies were full of stones and at my suggestion, we climbed down to take a closer look. While most of the rocks up in the fellfields were covered with lichens and algae, the ones at the top of the gravel piles were bare. The freeze-thaw cycles must have pushed them off the ridges and into the gullies. During the summer, there's no freeze; the rains just wash the soil away and can't carry the rocks. Come fall, these would be as coated with yellow-green lichens as the ancient boulders.

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Oanes is a small world, discovered mere decades ago and only accessed through hidden paths in Carcosta. Walk amongst the highest barren peaks. You may find a trail where the sky turns to a more intense blue as you go down it. Keep going, and you will find yourself on the fellfields of Oanes, at the headwaters of a river.

Space is strange there. Aim for the sun, and you will never reach it. Only the Eruk River remains truly constant. It starts in the mountains as only a trickle and becomes as mighty as the Neep by the time it reaches the ocean. Never once does another river flow to meet it. Everywhere else, the generalities may remain the same but time and space flow like the Eruk's waters. A dozen years ago et-Boz sent prospectors to check for potential mining sites away from the Eruk. All returned, but only because they turned back when the mountains started moving.

Since then few have visited Oanes and it remains a lonesome world. Though there have undoubtedly been more lone Wanderers who never spoke of their journey, as far as I know our group was the nineth to visit. The Academy of Carcosta sends the odd expedition, Wanderers visit out of wanderlust, and the Hand comes to avoid entering the Northern Carcostan Republic and gather certain species of razorflowers.

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You can't tell razorflowers apart by their blossoms; most are identical. None of the flowers I've seen in Oanes use color to attract pollinators. Instead, they're reflective. Even the ones in the understory of a forest are. Not unlike the popular image of a magpie, their pollinators will swarm towards anything shiny. There's no nectar, either. When the kuul crawl inside the four-bladed flower spike of a razorflower, they rub all over the single pistil and the walls of the flower to coat themselves with very thin layers of parasite-repelling resins. Different species of razorflower repel different species of mite. While all provide some physical protection, their chemical defenses are fine-tuned by millions of years of co-evolution. Brush your whiskers over their resins and taste them; that's how you identify the different species.

The male gametes are carried in the resins, which are kept freely flowing by secretions from the pistil and the walls of the flower. The pistil also releases compounds that cause the sperm to migrate through the resin towards the pistil. Of course, have sex this way and you might just fertilize yourself. But despite having a pistil and resin on every flower, razorflowers have distinct male and female flowers. Their blooms simply don't produce the gametes associated with the opposite sex.

Without those resins, the kuul are plagued by hard-bodied mites that latch onto the gaps where their plates connect, particularly at the leg joints. I've seen photos of kuul who weren't able to coat themselves in resins. It looked like their joints were coated in thick dust. At their worst, it gets bad enough that the kuul's motion is inhibited. Nothing preys on kuul, but a slow kuul is a hungry kuul. They quickly thin. Sometimes, they even die.

Above the treeline, it is cold enough, even in spring and fall, that their little bodies will freeze-dry. Look into a rock crevice at the Eruk's headwaters and you may find kuul mummies.

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We didn't find any, though we did check some of the more promising crevices as we went by the boulders that periodically stick out of the ground. Even once we stuck our tails in to feel around, no mummies revealed themselves. There were plenty of live kuul, though. With the breeding season still far off and their eggs hatched, they weren't aggressive. When we frightened them, they gave a warbling cry and scurried deeper into the cracks, then puffed themselves up. Wedged in as they were, even if we were able to reach down there we could never tear them free.

Most of them scurried deeper, anyway. A few fled for other boulders or burrows. And one apparently didn't have anywhere to flee and nipped Arxl's suckers after being woken up. He pulled his tail out in a flash, shaking it vigorously. But a quick inspection showed no harm, and so we continued on. By then the Eruk had gone from a tiny rill to a fast-flowing stream. Tiny fish darted in the pools. They flashed orange and scattered whenever we crossed the Eruk to avoid the worst of the razorflowers. None of us could figure out what they ate despite occcasionally tossing in bits of plant matter to see what they thought of it.

Perhaps they eat kuul. You find kuul body plates in the stream sometimes, scrubbed clean of flesh as neatly as a rock picked over of algae by vewt. On our hike we saw a pair chasing each other right off the bank, falling into the water one after another. They were quick to leave, shaking themselves off and lapping off what water remained with long tongues. Had they been slower, would they be devoured alive? The mind wonders.

Whatever the truth, the kuul seemed unbothered by anything other than their lust for resins and territorial squabbles. They sang the low song for which they are named from perches atop the flower spikes. Kuuuuuuuul, kuuuuuuuul, kuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuul. "This is my family's territory, but mine most of all. Stay away." Their response to intruders was vicious. As soon as they spotted or scented a stranger, they dived down from their spike and rushed towards them, jaws snapping in fury. Any members of the family group within range quickly came as well. Their grating yelps as they fought echoed off the slopes.

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Most world's fish look similar—they're one of those creatures for which one body plan is so favored that it's converged upon from many points. The streamlined forms of the Eruk's are no exception, for all that they swim through jet propulsion and only use their fins to maneuver.

Whatever it is that the Eruk's fish live off of, it can't come from within the creek. Up in the alpine regions, there's no algae to speak of. And there's nothing for chemosynthetic life in the sediment or water column. Drowned kuul are likely, but they're not the only possibility. Oanes' mountains receive heavy rains during its brief fall. During this time the Eruk floods down its entire course, but most severely in the mountains. Perhaps the fish are detritovores, feasting on plant matter that's already partly decayed.

Some scientists have tried to find out. Catch an animal. Kill them, slit open their bellies, and look at what's inside. It's a messy way of studying what animals eat, but an effective one. But it's not worked for the Eruk's montane fish species. A few scraps of plant matter or flesh are sometimes found within their stomachs, but never enough to sustain the animal. It could be that the fish only eat during the floods. There are animals that only eat for part of the year. But those tend to not be active except when food is available, and the fish haven't been studied enough to know. For now, they remain a mystery.

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By the time we had started to see the forests below, the sun was starting to sink behind the mountains at our back. Shadows grew long and my fur bristled as the temperature steadily dropped. The air went from pleasantly bracing to difficult to breathe and our every breath out turned to mist. Other creatures were feeling the cold too. The kuul became scarcer and scarcer as they started hiding in their burrows for the night and the plants pulled their blades tighter to conserve heat. The mountains looked as if they were rimmed with flame, such was the color of the sunset.

Quickly, we decided to set out camp near the Eruk so as not to wake up somewhere different from where we'd camped. Our tent was a sturdy thing, all oiled silk, dyed violet to blend in with the plants. As soon as I'd removed it from its pack it started to slowly unfurl of its own accord like a blossom. By this point, Oanes' star was starting to dip behind the mountains. While downslope the sky was still a vivid blue, above the peaks it was turning a reddish orange.

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When the tent had been staked to the ground we put our packs within, yet remained outside sat to watch the night. The orange tones of the sunset dulled to gray then black as the sun finally dipped beneath the horizon. By then Arxl had unpacked the space heater and set dinner to roasting above it. The succulent smells of roasting flesh filled the air as we watched stars slowly blink into existence, filling the night sky with many-colored points of light. There was not a single cloud to obstruct our view. While only I had been to Oanes before, Raxo knew the constellations better than I and pointed out some of the more prominent ones. Pob's Razor, with its long arc of steel-gray stars. The Starpelt, brown stars outlining the relk and innummerable other colors decorating their body. And the Eruk Above, a course of blue and white stars that followed the path of the river below.

We told stories about them. All lies, of course--I suspect some of Raxo's were ones she'd heard before and was passing along, but I made mine up on the spot (and they were the worse for it). But even for an astronomer there's value to those modern myths. Our's kept entertaining ourselves long after the bones of our meal were cold and the night was pitch-black. By the time we retired for the night, we were in good spirits despite having hiked all day long.

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That the sun, sky, and stars of Oanes are constant is a strange thing. The rest of the world changes more and more the farther you get from the Eruk, even as you go up. No probes have ever scraped the sky because when they try, they get lost. Transmissions cut out. Sometimes they're found later, miles off course.

But since we've never reached the sky we can't know how they're affected by Oanes' strangeness. What we do know is that those stars aren't very far away, merely a few dozen kilometers. Parallax makes calculating the distances simple. The first expedition from the Academy saw that they seemed to move too much as they traveled down the Eruk for them to be any farther.

Any true star should be larger and Oanes stars do not shine like stars should. They have the spectral lines of burning salts and metals rather than gases. In times past people thought the sun was a flaming sphere of metal, and that might be true for Oanes' stars.

Compared to lower down on the slopes there's little activity during the night. The fellfields get cold at night, to the point where the Eruk freezes over in patches. In the height of summer it wouldn't, but even with the heater we couldn't stay outside in late spring. Even the fish, protected by the water, head for the deepest parts of their pools.

There is one exception, but it's limited to the summer: skimmers. For most of the year they live protected from the frigid temperatures by the densest rosettes of the fellfield's plants. There they take advantage of the plant's own insulation to grow and grow and grow without fear before spinning a cocoon of silk and secreting themselves within over the winter.

During spring, they transform from crawling things to imagos that will remain forever aloft on eight gossamer wings. As soon as the thaw lasts overnight, they hatch and chew their way out, crawling on now elongated legs for the last time of their life.

Adult skimmers are as voraciously carnivorous as the larvae are voraciously herbivorous. They need protein to produce their eggs, and lots of it. As hermaphrodites, all of them are hunting, too. Since the kuul are hiding, they hunt fish. It's a beautiful sight. They swoop down in great arcs, wings glittering in a rainbow of colors, and spear fish with their legs before the fish even realizes the danger. The fish is eaten on the wing and before long the skimmer hunts for another.

Their flight only lasts once night. Come morning, the skimmer lie dead and dying on the ground. Kuul will eat them alive and flense the flesh from their bones. But their task has been accomplished. A new generation of eggs has already been laid on the rosettes of the plants along the Eruk's banks. Soon they will hatch and the larvae will crawl within to start the cycle anew.

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I awoke first, come morning. Dawn's early light filtered strangely through the oiled silk. Uncurling and crawling out of my sleeping sack, I approached closer to the wall. After a closer look I realized that the night had grown so cold frost formed on the outside of our tent. And poking my muzzle through the tentflap, it wasn't just frost—there was a light dusting of snow covering the ground. In the sunrise it shone red. Above the peaks I could see some of the clouds that must have left the snow over the night. They were thin wispy things, as transitory as a dream. Even before my eyes, they were slowly dissipating.

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Pulling my head back within and sealing up the tent, I awoke my companions and we conferred about our plans for the day. We hadn't expected any snow and the air outside was still unpleasantly chilly. Cold weather gear is unpleasantly restricting to wear as a full body covering, especially when covering a lot of ground. We'd hoped to keep the length of time we had it on to a minimum. After some discussion, we decided to wait until it was warmer to leave. We'd still have plenty of time to reach the warmer cloud forests even if we waited until the snow was entirely melted, and from then on we wouldn't need the cold weather gear at all.

The delay wasn't a boring one. The kuul were quick to ignore our tent, paying it even less regard than they did us. We couldn't see them except when we peeked through the tent flap's seams, but we could hear and smell them and see their silhouettes. They climbed to the top of the tent, just like it was a massive boulder. Once at the very peak, they called kuuul, kuuul, kuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuul. Ordinarily it would have been a quiet, low-pitched call. But the inside of our tent acted like a resonator and what should've been quiet became very loud indeed.

After the first minute, I took to poking the roof of the tent whenever one climbed to the top. They didn't like that at all and would jump away whenever I did, inevitably losing their grip and sliding back down the slope of the tent with an angry chitter. But soon another member of the family would try to summit our tent. Kuul, it appears, aren't very smart.

By the time they'd all given up, it was late morning and the air had warmed up nicely. We broke camp--sending the kuul in the area scattering-- and started downslope again.

The forests beckoned.


Ejuk

On my most recent trip to Oanes for the Wanderers' Library, I took photos of the night sky above the treeline. Most weren't photographing anything in particular, but I took a few good photos of the more major constellations. When I was reviewing them, I noticed that some of the constellations seemed differently shaped and ran some calculations. It's not just an optical illusion--according to my results, there's been some pretty impressive stellar drift over just the past year. When I went back and compared them to the photos I took for the first expedition the Academy launched, it's even clearer and the rate appears to be constant.

Not unexpected, given Oanes, but there was less stellar drift the closer the stars were to the Eruk Above. My results aren't clear enough to be definitive, but I think the Eruk Above might have a similar stabilizing effect on the stars as the Eruk does the land. As below, so above. I'm confident that with more data, we can determine whether or not the effect I noticed is real or just a statistical anomaly.

Do we have the funds to establish an automated observatory along the banks of the Eruk? We wouldn't need anything large, just a broad-field camera and some solar panels. I know Atmospheric Sciences has been interested in observing weather in places like Oanes; we could attach some weather station sensors and make it an interdepartmental effort.

Klab
Department of Astronomy
Academy of Carcosta

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