On Loria Broadly:
The Fauna
Loria’s animals are built for fog, root, water, and night. They move with the land’s patience and answer to its moods. Many wear light—not as spectacle but as grammar: a throat-pulse that says I’m here, a rim of glow that says keep distance, a scatter of sparks that says turn together now. At a glance they are familiar—tortoises, fish, lizards, long-legged marsh birds—but the place has edited each for the work at hand.
The Shape of Life
In the Valemire, weight belongs to water. Herd-sized Thrymm browse through hanging moss like ships through drapery, their bell-lows ahead of rain. Knee-deep channels hide Drenvok in silt; their strikes come as a hush, a fold, and then stillness again. Above, green roads climb tree to tree. Harken-cats pass without a sound; Cymrel gliders drift leaf to leaf, the rim of their underwings tracing a thin cyan line in long nights.
Below all this, in caverns of root and stone, sight yields to touch and echo. Ostrel map pools with whisker-clicks; ringed coils called Kask feel a traveler’s footfall through the wall long before torchlight arrives. Farther out along the coast, Carrowbacks (river tortoises) push barges against the slow pull of tide, grazing algae from pilings between loads. Beyond the harbor, old stories stir—hook-limbed Trossolith that keep to trenches and rise only in rumor and wreckage.
Not everything survives everywhere. In the ash belt, almost nothing does. A heat-fed Barraglox toad vents steam through capillary slits and tastes rock the way an eel tastes current. Where cinder-voles churn the ash, soil appears; when they vanish, whole patches of life go with them.
Light as Language
Bioluminescence in Loria is practical. It binds schools and flocks, sorts mates from rivals, and marks edges in the dark. Rivers carry lantern shoals that turn bridges into star-fields. Canopy creatures keep their glow low—enough to find one another without inviting the hunter. In the Underroot, signals are brief and narrow: a single pulse under a jaw, a thread of light along a fin—messages, not beacons. Street lamps in Tolmir borrow the idea rather than the creatures: cultured bio-lights in glass jars, fed and trimmed like plants.
Companions and Work
People do not stand apart from the animals; they hire them. Mire-stags are the reed-runners’ choice: two-toed swimmers that ford where boats ground out—skittish at first, loyal for life. Carrowback teams haul canal barges and flood sleds; they are slow, tireless, and almost impossible to panic. Whistle-kites learn a camp’s short language and return to glove or mast in any fog.
In the canopy, Brindlefolk favor quiet partners. Vine stoats carry line across gulfs that would kill a person; leaf owls mark strangers without breaking the hush of a sleeping village. A well-kept partnership is spoken of the way others speak of good tools or good neighbors—by how long it lasts and how little it asks.
Predators and Courtesies
Danger is part of the etiquette of travel. Forest paths belong to the Shavrath, shadow-scaled and patient; you will see the amber eye-shine only after the insects go quiet. Mire crossings belong to the Vorrbek, six-limbed and mud-cool; locals toss reed-flats ahead to draw the strike. Rivers host the Lantern Pike—a steady white lure even in wind; city law forbids using similar light to trap animals inside Tolmir. In the highlands, Cliff Marr packs test ledges with pebble-fall; rope bridges there are dressed with wind-chimes of horn that sing when anything larger than a hawk comes on.
To travel wisely is to observe such courtesies: announce yourself where you must, abstain where you should, and give the right of way to what cannot be bargained with.
Taking and Leaving
Most tables see marsh boar, reed-hens, hill goats, and river eels. From rarer beasts come things buyers will fight for—lumen glands (cool light without flame), glassbone (flexible serrated tools), storm bladders (pressure kept safe for craft and cure). There are lines no one respectable crosses: no nets during glow-spawn when the rivers turn to stars; no Stonewings taken in Shroud; no talk of colossi as quarry. Houses Eldrath and Thalen enforce these compacts inland and on the water. The black market still whispers of trench hooks said to be cut from a Trossolith’s limb; even poachers keep a small prayer for that story.
The land keeps its own accounts. Villages that harvest clean find game near their doors in lean months. Those that cut corners learn their luck evaporates in ways no ledger predicts.
Seasons and Routes
The moons are not clocks so much as hands on a scale. When Talvaris climbs bright, eel runs thicken and carrowbacks drum their shells at dusk. Orriven lingering pale by day stirs the deep ocean; lantern shoals thread closer to shore. On Cynvara’s rose nights reed-hens clutch. During Shroud the uplands grow quiet and the low water lights itself with a moving star-field. Migrations are learned by ear and nose before they are learned by date; a village knows when to hang its nets by how the night sounds.
See: The Skies of Loria
Harbor saying: “If the gulls leave and the ropes creak, do not ask why—go.”
The Colossi
A dozen are spoken of; nine are named still. Haumyr, Kethra, Umbros, Iriqual, Thoren—the tortoises. Vyrn, Salendre, Nethil, Orros—the snails. In ledgers they sometimes wear longer styles—Iriqual-on-Thale, Umbros Talmurath—but most mouths keep it short.
They do not shine. They hum—felt more than heard, a pressure in bone and soil that makes cattle lift their heads long before the shell moves. Mossy hollows on their backs hold ponds and wind-sown shrubs; a walking hill in all but name. Some stay for decades. One, Haumyr the Restless, stirs most years, cracking river seams and making a ford where none stood the day before.
Their routes are sanctuaries by decree and habit. Shells outlived by their keepers become temples; a few towns bend their streets to the curve of an ancient margin. Harm one, and judgment arrives long before a magistrate does.
Mind, Memory, and Use
The clever here is not always a person. Chantfish sing low before a flood; caravans cross where glass egrets land and regret it rarely. Brindlefolk tell of Harken-cat pairs that keep a truce for years with families who feed them; boatmen etch charters into Carrowback shells because the animals will outlive the men who wrote the lines. Instruments that require sensitivity—fine balances, patient's breath-bells—are strung with Ostrel whiskers because nothing living measures a ripple better.
Across all of it is a simple understanding: life here is held together by agreements—some written, most not. The animals watch as surely as the people do. Keep faith with the place and it will carry you farther than your strength alone.