Road to Hope

[Jakob]

I'm just imagining people and Kyanah coexisting on Earth and eventually becoming part of the same society.

I'm actually drafting a post on this.

Eventually one day, Ikun's inhabitants see some sort of rocket land, with strange organisms in suits exiting alongside some Kyanah- who have come home for the first time in centuries.

I suppose they could be wearing suits to make a good impression but I reckon something a bit more comfortable and breathable would be a practical choice, something like this. You'd also need an N95 mask to filter out the airweeds and spores since humans don't have tracheal sieves, shitloads of water, and probably some strength training to handle the gravity, but, like, the atmosphere itself is fine, Kyanah breathe oxygen too. Might want to bring your own food though, the only things a human could safely consume are water and some hard liquors.

Some humans are probably taken back to visit the Kyanah homeworld eventually, after the dust settles down--maybe a few hundred per century--but mostly those would be emissaries and diplomats who come, stay for a few years, and then leave, I can't really see any city-states allowing mass human immigration, or many humans wanting to go. I'm sure that by that point, everyone is well aware of what humans are and where they come from, so it likely wouldn't be too surprising.

[Jakob]

As was (maybe) previously stated, Kyanah don't have distinct languages with specific labels, yet this does not mean that they all share a common language. The vernacular tends to differ slightly from city-state to city-state; in the next city-state over, there might only be a few small spelling and pronunciation changes or some differences in handling obscure grammatical edge cases, but as one goes further and further away, the differences quickly accumulate. In most regions of the world, it's possible to understand the language up to a few hundred kilometers away from one's home city-state without dedicated study, but there's no hard-and-fast boundary where one language "ends" and another "begins". For this reason, linguistic aptitude is not a function of how many languages a particular Kyanah knows, but how large of an area they can make themselves understood in. Many of the specific vocabulary and grammatical structures used in Ikun are understood by educated Kyanah in other parts of the world, and tend to be used in settings where packs from many different regions of the world, with few or no linguistic features in common, must communicate, such as science or diplomacy. Due to Ikun's soft power and large-scale internet footprint, this is especially common in Net Zone 1; most but not all online content from this region is at least somewhat understandable to Kyanah from Ikun.

Notably, Kyanah have a syrinx rather than a larynx, meaning that their spoken languages are not pronounceable by humans and they also generally cannot pronounce human languages. Their typical vocalizations tend to sound like a mixture of rapid-fire grunts, hisses and chirps or screeches, which can vary considerably in pitch and cadence--not too dissimilar from how small theropods are believed to have sounded. Various low-pitched bellows and roars appear to be used in the same manner as shouting, being used to be heard across long distances, draw attention, or express anger. Naturally, this has presented considerable difficulties in translating proper nouns. With nothing else to go on, they have been forced to simply do a one-to-one replacement of the characters in their proper nouns with those in the Latin alphabet that most closely resemble them; humans have altered the conversion charts slightly in order to produce more consistently coherent and pronounceable results. Thus, for instance, the label "Kyanah" is simply a human construct and sounds absolutely nothing like what they call their species in their (as in, the soldiers from Ikun city-state) own spoken language. Actual communication between species was initially done through ad hoc gesticulation and amalgamations of human and Kyanah sign languages, which was gradually formalized in the first few years of the invasion, as well as occasionally communicating through writing or drawing when practical. By the end of the war, reliable inter-species machine translation and text-to-speech software would be developed, and in the subsequent years, this would advance to BCI devices that could generate speech in real-time, although not particularly reliable. Interestingly, even Kyanah who have a high base vocabulary of human words seem to struggle significantly with things like modifiers and word ordering, as their own languages tend to handle them in a radically different fashion.

For instance, over 95% of Kyanah writing systems organize words into binary trees rather than linear sentences, with children being semantically related to parents (e.g. subject and object, modifier and modified etc.). Linear scripts, while not unheard of, tend to be rare and associated with more primitive cultures, regardless of whether they're left to right, right to left, or top to bottom. It generally is not particularly important which words are the parent, left child, and right child; the writer chooses in order to optimize the aesthetics of their sentence-trees or place emphasis on a particular word. The nature of the semantic relationship between parents and children in the sentence-trees is denoted not by words comprised of characters, but by special markings called decorators, which in spoken language are expressed using subtle variations in tone, cadence, and volume, while in written language, they take the form of different types of lines between parent and child words. In most languages, decorators are also used for such things as prepositions, conjunctions, and tenses instead of using actual words for such things, resulting in all words referring to specific things or concepts, instead of having glue words that tie together other words or word groups like many human languages do. For instance, "You are eating", "You ate", "You will eat", "Are you eating?", and "Eat" (as an imperative command) all use the exact same words, with the difference lying in the decorators (or the tone/cadence/volume variations if spoken). It gets wilder, in Ikun, "Are the nyrud or the tyukrud in the field?" and "The nyrud and the tyukrud are out of the field." also use the exact same words. It's thus possible, in some cases, to meaningfully answer a question, especially a yes-no question, by simply repeating it back! (Albeit with variations in how the words are said, and with the caveat that simply "False" would be a much more succinct and natural response in this context.) For obvious reasons, decorators are dreaded by any humans attempting to learn Kyanah writing, and explain why Kyanah have an odd tendency to drop glue words and struggle with tenses when using human writing systems. In general, having a syrinx instead of a less complicated larynx allows them to make their vocalizations more compact by expressing a broader range of sounds, making the use of decorators instead of full words to save time a practical option.

Pronouns are another key difference; Kyanah have a whole set between singular and plural pronouns that they use to refer to packs, leaving human translators to awkwardly bounce between them when trying to translate these pronouns. Pack pronouns are a cultural universal for Kyanah; every single known language has them. It is customary to use pack pronouns when speaking to or about a member of another pack, even when only referring to that specific individual; using singular pronouns is usually a faux pas as it implies a higher-than-accurate degree of familiarity and intimacy, similar to a human walking up to a stranger and calling their spouse babe; or in the case of first-person singular, implies that the speaker is in some way deviating from their pack, if they have one. "I like nyrud steaks", when said to someone outside the speaker's pack, would for example strongly imply that the speaker's packmates in fact dislike nyrud steaks, and the speaker is the only one who likes them; saying it to another packmate however would have the connotation that humans would expect. The natural human tendency is to refer to packs using the plural pronouns, as they do in fact consist of multiple distinct individuals, but Kyanah would interpret this as referring to some vague, unspecified group, rather than their own pack. Additionally, as packs are atomic units in Kyanah society, occupying a single role and a single occupation, and being treated as one entity by their legal system, using plurals can create awkward statements in human languages and some meaning can be lost in translation.

Because the Kyanah use sentence-trees rather than linear sentences, languages aren't categorized into subject-verb-object, object-verb-subject, etc. but rather but the method in which the trees are traversed. Around 50% of the homeworld's population uses in-order traversal (left-child parent right-child), while 30%, including Ikun city-state, use pre-order traversal (parent left-child right-child) and the remaining 20% use post-order traversal (left-child right-child parent). To preserve the binary tree structure and prevent sentence-trees from exploding in size when dealing with many subjects/objects/etc. at once, lists of words with the same role in the sentence are placed into containers so as to occupy a single node. Kyanah sentence-trees can go on indefinitely as long as they are focusing on a singular subject; if the primary subject changes, a new sentence-tree must be started. Traditional Kyanah writing involves ornate sentence-trees shaped into aesthetically pleasing or meaningful shapes and sentence-trees are arranged on the page in a visually significant way; this sort of writing is roughly analogous to human calligraphy. Such niceties are typically ignored when typing on computers, in the name of efficiency and ease of programming. Instead, sentence-trees are automatically configured into rigid, standardized shapes and arranged on the page in such a way as to minimize wasted space, while still allowing for the creation of multiple threads. Naturally, traditional-minded Kyanah have been complaining about this since the invention of the computer, saying that it strips away subtle meaning and emotion from the text. However, the desire for efficiency has generally overruled such concerns in mainstream society.

Sentence-trees can be placed anywhere on the page, rather than following a particular order, though there is usually a clearly defined starting and ending point to a sequence; when the next tree in the sequence is not obvious from the position and orientation of the previous one, there is usually some arrow or other marker to point the path. Written works usually contain multiple sequences, each of which will take its own individual path around the page, and each of which is (at least primarily) written by a particular pack member. For this reason, written works are generally meant to be read by a pack collectively, with each member following one thread and later switching threads or explaining relevant aspects to each other if needed. Written works can be read by a single individual, but this requires the reader to frequently context switch between disparate threads that may only be loosely related to each other at times. Single threaded works do exist, but they are considered a separate form of art from mainstream, multi-threaded Kyanah literature. Multi-threaded literature is a direct descendent of story-threads, an ancient Kyanah art form and pastime that likely predates recorded history by a long shot, where members of a pack will take turns speaking sentences to collaboratively build a story. Good ones are sometimes written down and published, allowing other packs to enjoy them (sometimes even hundreds or thousands of years later), with each member of a pack choosing a thread and taking turns reading aloud their part of the story-thread and reenacting it. Interestingly, it is not just literature that is written this way; even textbooks, manuals, and research papers are all written in the same multi-threaded manner, and are likewise designed to be read by an entire pack.

There are plenty of distinct quirks between the different linguistic practices (using the term "language" may be a misnomer as linguistic practices tend to be continuous instead of being divided into discrete languages) in different parts of the world. Other than sentence-tree traversal, some of the most important differences center around the structure of words themselves. In most northern hemisphere scripts, characters represent sounds and have no intrinsic meaning on their own, while words are created by chaining these characters together based on the chronological order that they are pronounced. In southern hemisphere scripts, characters usually represent a few hundred basic objects and concepts and words are created by combining them, either in a linear chain or a graph-like structure, and the graphs tend to have their own unique algorithms for traversing them when reading or speaking, making such linguistic practices among the hardest to learn. For instance, in Kanenhah, "nuke" can be written (or spoken) by combining the characters for "made" (as in, made by Kyanah, not natural), "sun", and "egg" into a graph where the first two connect to the third, while in Koranah, the same word created by linearly chaining characters for "place" and "destroy" plus decorators to make the literal meaning "place destroyer" (which are written and pronounced somewhat differently from Kanenhah's characters for "place" and "destroy"). As an aside--the explanation for why there are so many broad and sweeping changes in language style and culture in general between the northern and southern hemispheres (a divide similar in many ways to the Western and Eastern worlds on Earth) is that impact ranges tend to cluster around the equator, which historically made travel between hemispheres much more difficult than travel within hemispheres. (I totally thought that through ahead of time, and didn't just make it up to retroactively justify the north-south divide.)

[Jakob]

Biome map of the Kyanah homeworld!


Descriptions of the biomes. Note that ocean biomes are not present, over 90% of the planet would be desert by Terran precipitation standards, but plant life has adapted to this in various ways, so greenery is more prevalent than one would expect from a "desert planet"; even "wet" biomes are technically semi-arid or close to it. However, trees as humanity knows them don't exist here due to the 1.4G gravity and low availability of water. Instead there are structured plants (including both endoskeleton and exoskeleton plants) which fulfill a similar ecological niche, but these have many biological differences from Terran trees. Their structure is inverted, with branches growing downwards from the top and forming many points of contact with the ground, they have smaller numbers of very large leaves held together by lattice-like woody structures, they reproduce with spores instead of seeds, and they tend not to get taller than 10 meters for the largest species. Exoskeleton plants have a woody exterior that protects a softer interior storing water and nutrients, while endoskeleton plants have the load-bearing woody structure on the inside, and transfer resources on the outside, additionally embedding primitive neural networks into their exterior skins to enable them to communicate via chemical signals and react to stimuli.


Dunelands. One of the low rainfall, low oasis density biomes. This one occurs where such conditions are present in a high erosion area, leading to basins filled with endless seas of sand dunes. While the high gravity limits their height to tens of meters max, as opposed to Terran dunes that can reach 300, what they lack in height, they make up for in breadth, sometimes stretching for hundreds or even thousands of kilometers with minimal interruption. What little vegetation occurs here tends to be hardy exoskeleton plants, with special adaptations like bulbous water storage structures, huge taproots, and sail-like appendages to capture fog. Dunelands usually occur between 10 and 30 degrees from the equator and are some of the hottest regions on the planet, with daily summertime temperatures topping 70 C.

Rocky Barrens. Occurs when low rainfall, low oasis density areas also have low erosion, resulting in outcroppings of bare rock rather than dunes. Vegetation is even more scarce here as it is hard for plants to take root in the bare rock without enormous networks of lattice-like roots or abandoning the idea of roots entirely and moving freely in the wind like living carpets or tumbleweeds. These areas tend to occur in rain shadows within already arid latitudes, making them even more arid than Dunelands. In some areas, especially in the Deadlands (~10N 120W to 40N 160W), there is no known vegetation or even native macroscopic life, and vast salt flats are present.

Polar Barrens. Basically the colder analogue of the Rocky Barrens. Currently it only occurs around the planet's south pole. This is one of the few areas on the planet where there is consistent snow accumulation in winter, along with the north pole and the tops of the highest mountains, though it always melts away in the spring. This snowmelt provides a critical source of water for what little vegetation exists here, mainly small bush-like exoskeleton plants and even smaller invertebrate plants (those without woody stems). The terrain is a mix of bare rock along with fields of gravel where snowmelt or root activity has broken down the terrain. However, plants are too sparse to create proper soil, like Dunelands and Rocky Barrens.

Semi-Arid Desert. This occurs in areas with low rainfall, but also a high oasis density, allowing comparatively more vegetation to flourish, creating an atmosphere not too dissimilar from the Terran equivalent. However, the vegetation cover is still inconsistent, with plenty of areas of bare soil and sand. Exoskeleton plants dominate here too, though larger shrub-sized ones do occasionally occur along with the bush-sized ones. Flowering invertebrate plants are present here in fair numbers as their limited propagation range due to having heavy seeds isn't as big of an issue with oases relatively close together, leading to desert blooms.

Seasonal Plains. So-named because there is full ground coverage by vegetation during the wet seasons, but during the dry seasons, it more closely resembles a semi-arid desert, albeit sparser and with occasional endoskeleton plants thrown into the mix. During the wet seasons--typically spring and autumn in temperate latitudes, but can be variable at more equatorial ones--the rains will lead to an enormous boom in vegetation, as flowering invertebrate plants flower, everything else releases its spores, and long-dormant plants germinate. During the dry season, most of this vegetation naturally dies, leading to huge, colorful fungal blooms in early summer and early winter as desert fungi emerge to break down the dead vegetation and replenish the soil.

Perennial Plains. Technically the reverse of seasonal plains, with low oasis density and high rainfall, but their appearance is quite similar. The difference is that Perennial Plains are lush enough to maintain a full vegetation cover year-round, meaning that fungal blooms are much more limited, like in the Semi-Arid Desert. Flowering plants are also rare, as their heavy seeds have a harder time crossing between oases than spores, so this biome is less colorful and more consistently green. Endoskeleton and exoskeleton plants occur in roughly equal numbers in this biome. It is usually associated with low elevations and tropical or temperate latitudes, when high rainfall, low oasis density areas occur far from the equator, other biomes result.

Boreal Savanna. One of the biomes that occurs when low oasis density and high rainfall areas are in a polar region. It is usually characterized by relatively low-lying, sheltered areas between 50 and 70 degrees from the equator, with a full ground cover year round, but sparse bushes and shrubs. This biome tends to have a slight bias towards endoskeleton plants, but is relatively mixed. As there is no direct analogue to Terran grass, the ground cover is made up of crawlers, invertebrate spore-bearing plants that crawl along the ground like Terran ivy or kudzu--but less dense--attaching to the ground with multiple stems and forming elaborate mosaic-like patterns on the ground as individual plants compete for space. The environment tends to be relatively cool by the standards of the Kyanah homeworld.

Boreal Scrublands. The other boreal biome, which occurs in higher-elevation areas like the Great Polar Plateau. The relatively cool and moist climate, even slightly cooler and wetter than the Boreal Savanna--rarely exceeding 40C in the summer, and dropping below 20C in the winter, is ideal for large bushes, which tend to grow very densely along the ground, while frequent larger shrubs pop above the undergrowth. Like the Boreal Savanna, the structured plant makeup is fairly balanced, but leans more towards though exoskeleton plants that withstand the high winds, while endoskeleton plants are more likely to be low-lying bushes. Invertebrate plants tend to not be as common here, as they can only rise a few centimeters off the ground without woody supports, and thus can't compete for sunlight. This is the ancestral environment that the Kyanah evolved in, carving out a niche as pack hunters of the medium to large browsing herbivores that roam the biome, before spreading across the planet, and it was in this area that their first civilizations arose.

Riparian Web. One of the biomes that occurs in areas of high rainfall and high oasis density; this biome occurs in hillier areas. Water overflowing from the oases erodes channels, connecting the oases in a web-like pattern. This is the closest analog to rivers on the Kyanah homeworld, but since there are no oceans, they don't form tree-like patterns that lead to an ocean, and instead form web-like patterns that lead nowhere. Nevertheless, these areas are characterized by very dense vegetation along the shores of the channels, basically extending oasis-type vegetation into areas between oases. Endoskeleton plants, being "social plants" tend to dominate in such environments, and exoskeleton plants are rare. When they do occur, it's usually bushes that rarely pop up in the meadow-like areas (with permanent vegetation cover of invertebrate plants) that emerge in the areas between channels; this duality is the source of the term riparian web. Such biomes are among the best for agriculture.

Flood Meadow. Forms in Riparian Web type conditions that are too flat for true Riparian Webs. The water from overflowing oases thus tends to just sit around until it evaporates. Many unstructured plants with amphibious characteristics can be found here, creating a relatively lush environment. Among structured plants, water and energy demanding endoskeleton plants tend to be dominant here, with exoskeleton plants being extremely rare, unable to efficiently compete in such a dense and dynamic environment. These biomes are usually but not always found in tropical latitudes, making them extremely hot as well, even by the standards of the Kyanah homeworld (65C and higher is not uncommon). While some of the wettest biomes on the planet, they would still be barely above semi-arid by Terran standards.

Shattered Biome. This is where impact ranges form from asteroid fragments impacting in a linear manner, creating the planet's analog of mountain ranges since plate tectonics are not present on this world. These "mountains" aren't clean and pretty things. They're ugly scars slashed across the landscape with shattered, chaotic terrain, a mix of jagged, irregular peaks, debris flows, ejecta blankets, and countless overlapping craters connected to the peaks by sheer cliffs reaching hundreds or even thousands of meters. Despite being "mountain ranges", the average elevation doesn't differ too much from the surroundings; instead it's a complete mess of deep craters mixed with central peaks and ejecta. Some of the highest peaks can tower kilometers over the surrounding terrain, while craters drop kilometers below it. The low rainfall reduces erosion and preserves them for long periods of time, geologically speaking. The chaotic terrain creates extreme and unpredictable winds and rapid temperature differentials, but also countless oases hidden away inside craters, which are home to rare ecosystems, while sturdy exoskeleton plants and fungi cling to life at the edges of the craters, subsisting on the water coming out of the shattered oases below.

[Jakob]

N A R R A T I V E S T U F F

[firestar464]

Road to pope

[Jakob]

Around 34 million Earth years ago, at the end of the very creatively named 18th Era, the boreal and polar regions including the Great Polar Plateau, where Kyanah would eventually evolve, and its surroundings, were a very different place. The climate was at the time cooler and drier than the modern Homeworld, and the plateau was filled with more open boreal savannas and polar barrens rather than the dense scrublands of modern times. These boreal savannas were quite different from the modern ones, as endoskeleton plants had yet to expand in the northern hemisphere beyond the tropics, and single-leaf crawlers (which would go extinct at the end of the era) dominated over the modern multi-leaf crawlers to form the ground cover, the equivalent of Terran grass. The most common Walkers (i.e. tetrapods) on the plateau in the late 18th Era were small to medium-sized grazers, many of which had heavy armor or glands to secrete poisonous substances, as a defense against the top predators of the day. There were also the Kakenkortiors, the ancestors of modern Kyanah and dozens of other species, as well as other carnivore groups that specialized in oasis environments, pursuing the amphibious neuz or small burrowing herbivores. The Kakenkortiors were solitary quadrupedal carnivores roughly the size of small to medium-sized dogs, which were opportunistic carnivores taking on all manner of small prey when they had the chance, but primarily subsisted on scavenging carrion or stealing eggs, and had scaly skin covered in a dense coating of feathers to keep them warm and provide camouflage; notably they had yet to evolve the pack behaviors seen in some of their descendants. However, they themselves often fell victim to the true predators of the time--not true Walkers, but rather an offshoot of the wingbeasts (themselves marsupial creatures with foldable wings that could fly like gliders or walk on all fours on land)--the terrorbeasts. These terrorbeasts gave up their flight in exchange for reaching enormous sizes--over a ton and 3.6 meters tall for the largest species--adopting a permanently quadrupedal and rather uncanny stance, with their forelimbs (formerly wings) being much longer than their rear limbs, while the wings themselves lost the ability to unfold, instead becoming vestigial forelimb frills used for attracting mates. Some terrorbeasts used their height to feed from the tops of exoskeleton plants, but many were carnivorous, developing long necks and elongated, hardened spear-like snouts to peck at grazers from above; it's believed that they sometimes reared up on their hind legs to gain additional height and force. This was in direct contrast with every extant tetrapodal predator of large game, which would prioritize either attacking from below or else taking out their prey's legs to bring them crashing down; as a result most herbivores had the heaviest protection on their bellies and legs, with their backs being comparatively weak. But then again, most creatures on the Kyanah homeworld, both extinct and extent, tend to be wide and low to the ground due to living under 1.4G, not tall and spindly, so the terrorbeasts were a giant middle finger to the biosphere and planet in general. Though their 50 million Earth year reign was cut short by the meteor shower that formed the Homeworld's newest impact range, created the Shatter, and caused the most recent mass extinction, leading to the beginning of the 19th Era.

With the terrorbeasts gone (though not their relatives, the normal, flying wingbeasts), the early 19th Era saw the creatures of the Great Polar Plateau adapt to the changing landscape. A group of species which had evolved thorn-covered backs--essentially made from modified feathers--to protect themselves from the terrorbeasts, also went extinct, and many of the remaining grazers lost their heavy armor due to the sudden dearth of megacarnivores to necessitate it. The Kakenkortiors survived the mass extinction and continued to occupy their old niches, but by around 29-28 million years ago, one branch, known as the Tyorketforms, would shift to a more actively predatory niche, using enlarged dew claws to slash the tendons of prey to drop them to the ground; this branch would eventually lead to the domestic Tyorkets, common Kyanah pets in the modern era. Meanwhile, climatic shifts at the start of the mid 19th Era would lead to the Great Polar Plateau becoming warmer and wetter; the boreal savannas would give way to denser boreal scrublands. Through both speciation and migration, the smaller, armored grazers would be displaced by large unarmored browsers eating leaves and twigs and growing to much bigger sizes in the comparatively plant-dense nutrient-rich environment.

It was only natural that something would evolve to hunt these new browsers. Oddly enough, it would be the Kakenkortiors. The main line would go extinct around 9 million years ago, but long before that, they would produce one more notable sideline, the Ratoryinut, starting around 25 million years ago. Many of the early Ratoryinut would be much larger than both early Kakenkortiors and modern Kyanah, reaching average masses of 150-300 kilograms, depending on the species. Compared to early Kakenkortiors, they had a higher and proportionally slightly narrower, though still relatively broad, profile, with bulkier forelimbs and more dexterous forelimbs--an intermediate stage in developing opposable thumbs--with non-retractable claws, as well as losing their feather coating entirely. By 20-18 million years ago, the Ratoryinut would further split into the Ratorkortyot-forms and the ancestors of the Kyanahforms. The Ratorkortyot-forms (roughly "strong herald beast") would continue to grow in size, with the largest species reaching up to 500 kilograms by 10 million years ago, somewhat resembling large, reptilian bear-like forms with bare, greenish-brown scaly skin. They would also evolve a Parasaurolophus-like crest, which they would use to make loud and elaborate trumpeting noises to attract mates or scare rivals away from a kill, and, as the climate cooled in the mid-late 19th Era and they gravitated towards the poles, many evolved blubber deposits to replace the insulating role of their ancestors' feathers. Ratorkortyot-forms, including the eponymous Ratorkortyot, the most famous species, are still extant and where their ranges overlapped with prehistoric Kyanah, appear to have occasionally killed and eaten packless or young individuals, though the reverse was more common. Most Ratorkortyot-forms are now threatened by habitat destruction and pollution.

As for the Kyanahforms themselves, they took the opposite approach to hunting the soft browsing herbivores that were spreading throughout the boreal scrublands. They began steadily losing raw mass, but underwent a quantum leap in intelligence, with six-core brains rather than the four-core brains of most Walkers; the only other animals with six-core brains, before or since, were a few one-off species of social wingbeasts. Not coincidentally, the modern pack dynamics of modern Kyanah also emerged with early Kyanahforms by around 15 million years ago, with 4-6 adults bonding together for life, having children with each other, and cooperatively raising them to adulthood. It's believed that this pack dynamic evolved from simpler serial pair-bonding in Ratoryinuts and the earliest proto-Kyanahforms as a result of six-core brains enabling more complex social behavior, allowing such relationships to be stable. It also enabled reliable tool using and eventually tool manufacturing (modifying found objects to further enhance their utility), as the Kyanahforms were capable of bipedal movement--though early Kyanah forms still spent most of their time on four legs--and had developed opposable thumbs.

While one minor side-line, the arboreal Kyanahforms, continued to shrink further, taking up omnivorous behavior and living in the taller, shrub-like exoskeleton plant species, the main line continued to gradually optimize for attacking in packs and killing medium-large game on the ground. During the mid-late 19th Era cooling, they would take on migratory behavior, moving to the edge of the Great Polar Plateau in the winter to take advantage of the milder winds from the south, and back north in the summer to hunt the big-ticket game animals further into the plateau. The main line would eventually evolve into tkorks, the closest living relatives of Kyanah, who have been discussed elsewhere. The side-line that would become the true Kyanah diverged from tkorks around 5-6 million years ago, shortly after the evolution of the Tyotonikors (perhaps "strong leaf beast"). These were basically the final, logical conclusion of the trend of large generalist browsers, relying on raw mass rather than armor or numbers to deter predators; it was one of these species that would eventually become the domestic nyruds that are so important to the Kyanah. The largest species, the Tyotonikor, could reach heights of 1.8 meters, with a length of 7.6 meters and males averaging around 4-5 tons--one of the largest known animals in the history of the Kyanah homeworld, and the largest period since the 16th or 17th Era; it was hunted to extinction by prehistoric Kyanah around 8000 years ago. While other related species were not as large, even the smallest averaged 1.5 tons, 3 times bigger than the biggest carnivores in the Great Polar Plateau. With a long, whip-like tail, a wide and stocky frame, and a sturdy beak-like mouth capable of handling even the toughest leaves and twigs, the species under the Tyotonikor classification were quite formidable. Indeed, healthy adults had no natural predators...until the true Kyanah came along.

If it seems like Kyanah were optimized specifically to hunt and kill the giant Tyotonikors that no one else dared eat...well, they were. They shifted from a merely bipedal-capable form to obligate bipeds, enabling them to see over interfering shrubbery to better devise a plan of attack, and also be able to hold tools and weapons at all times. To maintain balance in a bipedal posture, their tails became longer and bulkier, enabling them to flail them around to keep balance, and also use them as a weapon. While their jaw size--and thus snout size--and bite force increased relative to predecessors to better penetrate the thick skin of Tyotonikors, their claws became somewhat shorter and stubbier, optimized more for gripping than piercing, making it easier to hold the sticks and rocks they were increasingly using as force multipliers. An increase in fast-twitch muscles in their legs enabled them to more easily catch fleeing Tyotonikors--which, despite their bulk, could be surprisingly fast, rather like Terran elephants, able to reach speeds above 30 kilometers per hour. The strong legs and gripping claws also made it more feasible to get onto the creatures and deliver devastating top attacks. Their skulls also broadened significantly to enable increased cranial capacity, which enabled them to form even more complex pack hunting strategies and even cooperate with other packs to take down especially large and dangerous prey; this would be a game changer, as tkorks and earlier Kyanahforms would almost always ignore or fight other packs instead of working together. Compared to the tkorks, true Kyanah are basically high-performance, high-maintenance creatures, relying on intelligently applying explosive bursts of strength and speed to quickly take down big-ticket prey, rather than stamina, low resource usage, and gradually accumulating smaller prey items. While having primarily evolved to fill the empty niche of preying on Tyotonikors, the various Kyanah species were more than capable of hunting any medium to large animal, both on and off the Great Polar Plateau, using their sophisticated tactics, high physical strength, and eventually primitive spears, axes, traps, and controlled use of fire. Meanwhile, most tkork species in modern times are endangered or extinct, except for those that have adapted to living in Kyanah cities and feeding off various urban critters and meat that has been thrown out or left unattended by the Kyanah themselves. Those tkork species have done very well for themselves, to the point of being a pest.

Proto-Kyanah would speciate several times, gradually expanding around the edges of the Great Northern Plateau by around 1 million years ago, with some species expanding to the poles and also to the more temperate latitudes by 750k years ago, though modern, main-line Kyanah did not spread off the Great Polar Plateau until around 100k years ago. Remains of the most far-flung Kyanah species, the Dunewalkers, have been discovered from the Shatter to the Western Sector, though they went extinct 84k years ago after the asteroid impact that created the Ikun Crater, which also reduced the main-line Kyanah population to a few thousand, though they, obviously, bounced back and then some. None of these other species remain; the last to go were the Kyanah Brutes, so-named because of their large stature (roughly on par with humans) and proportionally smaller brains compared to main-line Kyanah, dying out around 5500 years ago; it is possible that there were organized efforts by Kyanah proto-civilizations to eradicate the last of them, but also just as possible that the main-line Kyanah merely hunted their prey into extinction. Notably, main-line Kyanah have the largest cranial capacity of any of these species, with Dunewalkers being a close second; there is no evidence that any Kyanah species other than *the* Kyanah ever devised fully fledged language on their own, which made cooperation between multiple packs more frequent and reliable, and made teaching their young more efficient. The presence of bones from multiple species being found together indicates that main-line Kyanah occasionally included members of a couple of the more advanced Kyanah species, like Dunewalkers and Kyanah Brutes, into their own packs, and vice versa. While these species lack the genes associated with independently inventing complex languages, it's believed to be possible that they could be taught it to a limited degree, as they had similar vocalization structures, and even tkorks can be taught to understand simple words and phrases. The exact nature of this relationship, whether these other species were viewed as working animals, slaves, or fellow packmates, is unknown. While they likely interbred, it is also unknown if this led to fertile offspring--but probably not.

[Jakob]

Road to pope

You made me stay up until 5 to do a worldbuilding thing again....

In general, Kyanah are a massively polytheistic society, though their religious practices can't be divided into discrete religions with labels. Different gods have different geographical ranges where they are popular and while religious packs generally pick one or a few deities to worship based on their interests and disposition, they generally don't deny the existence of any gods they aren't actively worshiping--a list that may change over the years, depending on what the members of a pack agree works best for them. There is no definitive list of all recognized deities, especially as legendary historical figures and characters from popular media are often venerated in much the same way, blurring the lines considerably. There are gods that have had a consistent following for thousands of years, and short-lived meme gods that emerge from some popular trend, internet joke, or other bit of popular culture, are unironically worshiped by millions for a few years, and are then forgotten just as quickly--or, rarely, become mainstream.

For instance in Ikun, the three most popular deities are the god Iok, seen as a shrewd negotiator and diplomat, often mediating between other gods; the god Akirut, seen as a tinkerer, a creator of things, and an aggressive optimizer; and the goddess Tyorun, seen as a brave and relentless fighter who struggles against the odds to keep what she likes in the universe (this will make sense later). They all have dozens of temples in Ikun, and there are at least 80 gods who have 1 or more temples. The obscure Western Sector water goddess Kya briefly shot into the top three in Ikun around Y940 as a result of being a character in the popular TV show The New Gods of Ikun, gaining millions of worshipers in a few years, but losing most of them in a few more--it's no coincidence that in Road to Hope there are like three girls named Kya who hatched around that time! Much like Earth deities, there is no hard evidence that these gods exist, but it's also very tricky, if not impossible, to prove that they don't (and brings to bear questions about what it means for something to "exist" in the first place).

However, Kyanah don't necessarily see their gods as giant immortal Kyanah sitting in the sky working miracles. Popular media may depict them that way sometimes because it makes for better storytelling and characterization, but actual theological texts do not anthropomorphize them in such a manner. Essentially, the gods are seen as the natural result of an iteratively self-optimizing universe, intelligent processes that seek to refine and perfect the universe. Kyanahs' conception of the actual nature of these gods, whether they form packs with each other, are packs themselves, or are simply atomic beings, also varies greatly depending on culture, region, and each pack's own beliefs. But in general, as scientific discoveries have made it more and more clear that the universe is bigger than just them and their world and that Kyanah aren't special, belief systems favoring less anthropomorphized and relatable gods have become dominant, especially in the southern hemisphere.

The formation and existence of gods in Kyanah religious thought is intimately linked to the worship and belief in said gods. Theogenesis occurs when Kyanah start to believe in some god, the act of associating some set of divine processes and forces with a name, creating the god with that name. It's not so much that they believe this literally creates a god from nothing, so much as they are grouping together pre-existing divine processes under a name to better understand, categorize, and reason with it. The prevalence of belief in some god, and the power of said god, are correlated, or even one and the same, in many societies, as the power of a god is directly related to the extent that they influence the universe, which obviously includes the Kyanah themselves. Similarly, forgotten gods, no longer worshiped, are essentially dead gods, whose names have lost their meaning and thus their power. In a way, the Kyanahs' conception of gods can be seen almost as divine memes so powerful that they are sentient and influence the universe, with "memes" obviously referring to the broader sociological meaning, not funny pictures on the internet. Indeed, the lines between gods, socio-cultural memes, and sufficiently influential fictional characters often blur together in Kyanah culture, though notably, treating any living Kyanah as divine is usually but not always considered blasphemous, and packs who claim to be divine or have a divine member will offend most cultures and almost certainly be regarded as a fraud. Many religious scholars have devoted their lives to trying to make "divine atlases" that map not only the geographical, but also the ontological ranges of the countless gods, trying to pin down exactly what each name refers to.

The purpose of the gods--to iteratively refine and optimize the universe--ties in with the Kyanah concept of afterlife: not a place or alternate dimension that you go to after death, but the idea that you can be part of the next iteration of the universe. Entities that make the universe a better place--which for living Kyanah and their packs, naturally includes living morally (whatever that means to the culture in question) and fulfilling their role in life well--will be kept around by the gods in the next iteration, while entities that make it worse will be removed. In this way, Kyanah religious beliefs promote moral behavior (again, whatever that means to the specific culture in question) via the positive reinforcement of being with their packs again in a more optimized universe if they are good, and the negative reinforcement of never again being with their packs if they are not.

Thus the concept of anything resembling Hell is largely unknown in most cultures, and the closest thing to Heaven is the so-called Final Iteration, an idea that is widespread in some cultures, that the gods will eventually finish their cosmic optimization problem and create the perfect universe; believers in the Final Iteration are also split in whether it will be devoid of suffering and imperfections, or whether it is impossible to reduce such things beyond a certain amount, and the gods will eventually hit that limit. However, other societies reject the idea of a Final Iteration and believe that while the gods may gradually improve the universe and get asymptotically closer to the best possible one, they will never actually reach it. Some cultures believe there was a First Iteration and gods were there from the beginning, and there may or may not be a Final Iteration; others believe that there was no First Iteration and at some point gods arose by chance from random noise and began to optimize the universe in a guided manner, and may or may not reach a Final Iteration; others still believe that the gods have spent an infinite number of iterations trying to optimize the universe, and will never finish. Some believe that even the gods don't know if they will ever finish their task. There are also differing views on whether the gods are, collectively, perfect optimizers that will always improve the universe by some nonzero amount in each iteration, or imperfect optimizers that, while in the long run converging towards an ideal universe, may make some flawed decisions on the way, leading to some iterations being worse than their immediate predecessors. Some theologians and cultures reject the idea of Iterations entirely, instead adhering to a linear cosmology where the universe tends to get more complex and orderly over time, and the existence of gods--beings of extremely high, if not unlimited, complexity and orderliness--is an emergent phenomenon resulting from this, the resulting gods will more efficiently guide the increasing optimization of the universe. However, this view has been declining over time, especially in the past century or two, when Kyanah science has revealed the ultimate fate and heat death of the universe--or at least the current Iteration. Nevertheless, there are still millions of adherents who have found ways to justify this with their belief in a universe that increases in complexity and order.

These views have naturally made Creation myths a relative rarity on the Kyanah homeworld. It seems that primitive societies often believed that their world was eternal and infinite, with no beginning and no end in either space or time. Looking at the world it's easy to see why: it's significantly larger than Earth (and thus has more distant horizons), with vast biomes, no oceans or forests to break things up, few mountains (unless you're near an impact range), and seemingly endless seas of scrubland, desert, or plains stretching into eternity, hence primitive Kyanah often assumed that there was simply no beginning and no end to the world, and it's not too big of a leap from there to the idea that the world never began and will never end--in this cosmology, apparently the sun wasn't a unique object; suns rose out of the ground in the morning in different parts of the world, then burned out, fell, and sank into the ground at night. However, as Kyanah increasingly understood the universe and their place in it, more and more of the patterns underlying reality became clear--that they were not on an infinite flat plain with suns rising out of the ground every day, but on a spinning ball moving around one large sun, and there were many, many spinning balls out there spinning around their own suns--and a cyclical cosmology began to prevail over a linear one--though that is even less conducive to Creation myths.

As for what day-to-day faith looks like for religious packs, it naturally varies greatly from region to region, but generally consists of two goals: attracting the attention and admiration of their chosen gods to ensure that said gods will want to keep them in the next iteration of the universe, and maximizing the influence of their favorite gods to ensure that they'll have the power to do so, by advertising and proselytizing for the god in question, donating to temples, or even becoming a pack of religious scholars. Those who are casually religious only do the first task; those who are devoutly religious do both. Like so many other aspects of Kyanah culture, the north-south divide, likely caused by the large number of impact ranges on or near the equator, plays a huge role in religious practices.

For northern hemisphere cultures, religion is usually a personal and private matter, handled primarily at the pack level or even, to an extent, the individual level: it is not unheard of for individuals to worship one or more gods on their own in addition to those that the rest of their pack worships, especially when said individual is from a different region or culture than the rest of the pack. Attitudes towards this from the rest of their pack can vary from acceptance to indifference to hostility. Gods with a large local following in some city-state often have one or more temples devoted to them, where offerings can be made to the relevant god; they will often sell thematic items that can be sacrificed as sacrificed as gifts to the temple's god, with the idea being that giving up time and worldly resources demonstrates faith and loyalty that will make said god want to keep them in the next iteration. Additionally messages and questions to a particular god can also be directed to religious experts (who may or may not live at the temple, depending on the local culture and which god the temple is devoted to) termed toryatkiot (literally "student", as in a pack who studies a particular god, learning about and in a sense "from" them, to understand that god and their behavior; though "monk" would be a more human-centric translation). These temple visits are occasionally done by packs to more effectively keep their names in the minds of the gods, or when turning to faith to solve some crisis, but for more everyday worship, where the services of professionals aren't needed or there isn't a temple nearby for a particular god, many packs will have private shrines in their own homes; as an analogy, using these shrines is kind of like cooking at home versus going to a restaurant. Major gods in the northern hemisphere are often quite commercialized, with plenty of merch and popular media centered on them.

In the southern hemisphere, religion tends to be somewhat more centralized and communal, with regular, periodic mass-worship sessions for various gods, where religious leaders explain key aspects of a particular god, and instructions on righteous behavior and gaining their favor, to the gathering. The gods themselves aren't so often commercialized in the south, where it's more common to see them in a more abstract and impersonal light (almost more like processes than beings), and Kyanah in southern cultures tend to be less likely to be atheist and more likely to be devoutly religious. However, being deeply and fundamentally religious does not generally equate to a "thou shalt not have fun" attitude; on the contrary, these mass worship sessions are frequently filled with drunken revelry, lots of food, and loud music...there has to be something to draw in congregations, after all. On the other hand, authoritarian governments in the southern hemisphere frequently use these mass worship sessions as an efficient way to spread propaganda to the masses, with some even making attendance mandatory for this reason.

The Kyanahs' general distrust of social structures and institutions larger than their own packs extends to their religious views as well; just as there aren't discrete religions with labels, there aren't high level religious leaders with global influence like a Pope, nor definitive holy books that huge sections of the population acknowledge as the truth. The Temple Alphas in the north will often only oversee a handful to a few dozen packs of toryatkiot, and even in the south, mass-worship sessions have no more than a few thousand packs at the absolute maximum, and usually far less, on the order of dozens to maybe a hundred. That is not to say that there aren't theological texts with broad appeal, that have sold millions or even billions of copies over decades or centuries, and been translated hundreds of times, but most Kyanah won't be like "this is the one true holy book, no other religious book could possibly have anything useful to say" and instead pick and choose whatever teachings they want from whatever texts they want. Not doing so is in fact seen as uneducated and spiritually lazy behavior that is unlikely to lead to being retained in the next iteration.

Also common to both hemispheres is the general desire to be remembered and liked by at least one god, a desire which manifests in their culture in several ways. "Forgotten" or "broken up" is probably the closest translation to the human term "damned"; "may you be forgotten" is a very strong insult in many cultures. Similarly, rather than being buried or burned, dead bodies are usually taken out into the wilderness and left in the open to desiccate, with their packmates being brought to rest with them when they die. When one member of a pack dies, the others will often build a cairn at the pack's final resting place; stacking stones is a common Kyanah art form in both religious and secular contexts, and different types and shapes of stones often have specific meanings. Rich and powerful packs, especially in ancient times, would often commission large and elaborate monuments at their final resting place to really draw the attention of the gods. Also of note is that religion and science have rarely been in serious conflict on the Kyanah homeworld; as the gods are believed to act in a predictable and logical manner, science can simply be reframed as understanding and predicting the actions of the gods. Indeed, many packs who have made great scientific discoveries were also devoutly religious, and in general, religious adherence has not declined by much even in the wake of advanced science and technology. Depending on the time period, global prevalence of atheism tends to range between 10 and 30 percent for at least the past few centuries, often spiking during tumultuous times when many Kyanah have doubts about a self-optimizing universe. The exact prevalence of atheist views can be much higher or lower depending on geographic region as well.

Of course, Kyanah religious beliefs are often twisted and manipulated by those seeking worldly gain, much like human religious systems. There are corrupt toryatkiot who convince others that they can buy their way into the next iteration, in order to make a tidy profit. Mass-worship leaders who spread government propaganda disguised as religious teachings. Cultists who make up gods solely for a self-serving agenda. Politicians who start religious wars, believing that the best way to spread the influence of their favorite gods is at gunpoint. However, state institutions do seem to have largely secularized in recent centuries, a trend that has accelerated with the decline of Utopianism, with the gods being used less and less frequently as a direct justification for political and military action.