Tropes regarding sophonts and notable near-sophonts found on Serina.

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Outsiders

The Observer

A mysterious entity that first seeded life on Serina.

All-Powerful Bystander: The Observer has what appears to be godlike abilities, but save for certain exceptional circumstances will allow things to play out on Serina without interference, even if it means the extinction of sophont species as well.
Ambiguously Human: The species it seeds Serina with are all from Earth and are all from the Anthropocene, suggesting it is either a descendant or creation of humanity in some way, but no specific details of its backstory are given.
Character Development: It starts out as an unfeeling entity that simply observes the life on the world as it goes on, which is reflected in how the entries are regularly spaced out by millions of years and focused on species and environments as a whole. By the Mid-Ultimocene, however, it has been around long enough to develop more of a personality as well as develop attachments, which is shown by more of the entries from this period being closer together and focusing on individuals. It has also changed enough to actively interfere with the project to prolong its life as well as save the sea stewards after experiencing guilt for Brighteye's death due to its meddling.
Dream Weaver: It placed the dream in Brighteye's head to go find other sophonts like himself.
Everyone Has Standards: It does not approve of the warmonger matriarch's genocidal actions, so while it does make its presence clear in her final moments, it does not offer any words of comfort and instead passively watches as she's eaten alive by a sea shoggoth.
A God I Am Not: When Seeker asks if they're the daydreamer creator deity, the Observer's answer is "No.", and they make it clear that they have no desire to even be known in the first place.
Godzilla Threshold: The watcher's job on Serina is simply to observe, even if the moon becomes an iceball, because that's simply the natural way of things. However, the gravediggers managing to discover coal, and the subsequent continent-wide coal fire caused by Whitecrown and his clan of bluetails, forces them to directly interfere to stop the project's destruction, revealing themselves to and removing the sea stewards to save them from their otherwise inevitable extinction, and creating a clone Serina for them to live on as a new project.
Painting the Medium: It speaks directly to Ember, Brighteye, and Seeker in a floaty, cursive font.
Prime Directive: It's implied in "The Visitor" storyline that the Observer was responsible for the issues the probes sent by Fellstar's makers have in order to prevent them from interfering with Serina.
Sufficiently Advanced Alien: Rather than being a literal deity, it's a being with such advanced technology that it seems like a supernatural entity to the less technologically advanced sophonts.
Telepathy: Implied, Seeker describes the watcher's voice as coming from inside his head, but distinctly not his own.
Time Abyss: The Observer is at least more than 275 million years old once the Late Ultimocene rolls around.
The Watcher: It's a timeless, unseen observer that seeded life on Serina, watches its development, and begins increasingly making its presence known to various sophonts during the Ocean Age.

Fellstar

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/img_8637.png

A robot probe sent by an alien civilization to survey Serina following the end of the Ocean Age, who ends up being discovered by Eve.

Artificial Intelligence: Has a built-in Autonomous adaptive behavioral learning (AABL) pattern that allows it to communicate with Eve in the reaper's gesture based language.
Artificial Limbs: Eve uses animal bones and sinews to replace some of their missing legs when they start breaking off, though eventually they all fall off and leave the probe completely immobile.
Connected All Along: It's heavily implied that they were created by the technologically advanced descendants of the sea stewards, or the "alliance of three" as they call them.
Friend to All Living Things: Eve notes that basically every animal Fellstar meets doesn't fear or predate them, which is implied to be the result of ecological naïveté, as Fellstar is not native to Serina.
Meaningful Name: Eve named them "Fellstar" because they literally fell from the heavens.
The Needless: As far as Eve can tell, they don't need to eat or sleep.
Robot Buddy: They're a robot and effectively Eve's only friend.
Starfish Robots: Fellstar looks nothing like anything on Serina, being hexapodal with two extendable arms to manipulate the environment.
We Are as Mayflies: Eve notes that star creatures don't seem to live long, and post-activation Fellstar lasts around a decade and a half before shutting down, though its travel to Serina seems to have taken more than a century going by its logs.

Pangaeacene

Fork-Tailed Babbling Jays

A trio of babbling jays holding simple flint tools.

Loquax philosophus ("talkative thinker")

The first sapients to arise on Serina, the fork-tailed babbling jays were small songbirds that evolved in a region of deserts and scrublands in Serinaustra. They developed a complex culture, but died out when shifting climates caused their desert home to become a humid forest, introducing diseases and competitors than soon drove the thinking birds to extinction.

Ape Shall Never Kill Ape: Unlike their chatteraven descendants the fork-tailed babbling jays have a taboo against killing others of their species, and it's normally considered worthy of exile, but it can happen when lower ranked members mutiny en masse and try taking a new position by force.
Cessation of Existence: Fork-tailed babbling jays are not a particularly spiritual or religious people and don't believe in an afterlife, only believing in what they can see. As far as they're concerned, once the body dies the self dies with it.
Death by Irony: The fork-tailed babbling jays have a quasi-religious reverence for rainfall, believing that plants and animals are created by it, and that the gas giant Serina orbits is a "sky sea" that blesses them with it. Ultimately, it's rain that leads to their extinction, as it eventually causes the fork-tails' desert habitat to turn into a humid forest ridden with diseases they have no resistance to.
Due to the Dead: While they don't believe in an afterlife, babbling jays will bury their dead instead of just leaving them to the elements and scavengers when possible.
Formerly Sapient Species: When the fork-tailed babbling jays went extinct, the last surviving member of their species took a mate with a closely related but non-sapient bird and had hybrid offspring that lacked his intelligence (save for a grandchild who was killed by a predatory bird when they got distracted due to their high intellect before they got the chance to breed). By the time of the middle Ultimocene, these hybrids still live on in their descendants the chatterers, who aren't sapient themselves but are still highly intelligent and able to mimic spoken language. By the time of the Late Ocean Age, one bluetail chatteraven known as Brighteye is fully sapient, but the rest are merely about as intelligent as a chimp. The pickbirds and other chatteraven descendants of the Hothouse Age are much less aggressive than the bluetails, but haven't achieved sapience either. It's not until the rise of the whisperwings during Serina's final chapter that the flame of sapience truly rises again.
Loners Are Freaks: Fork-tailed babbling jays are intensely social, with the only solitary ones being exiles from their original clans for crimes such as attacking the breeding pair and/or their young maliciously as opposed to reprimanding them. Amongst the populations that live deeper in the desert, incubating eggs not belonging to the breeding pair is also an offense worth exile as it serves as a drain on resources.
Ridiculously Cute Critter: They consider baby birds with feeding gapes resembling those of their own chicks to be very cute. They'll even capture the chicks of other bird species to keep as pets for this reason.
Starfish Language: Their language is highly complex birdsong spoken too quickly to be understood by the human ear.
We Are as Mayflies: Fork-tailed babbling jays mature around two or three and live 10 to 15 years on average, with particularly elderly individuals making it to 25, similar to the canaries they evolved from.
Wouldn't Hurt a Child: Babbling jays have a taboo against killing the chicks and fledglings of any altricial bird, intelligent or not. In fact, harming children for malicious rather than disciplinary reasons is seen as cause for exile. This however doesn't extend to the adult non-sapient birds they prey upon (somewhat like humans who recoil at the killing of veal calves but have no problem eating meat from adult cows).

Mid-Ultimocene

Gravediggers

In General

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/img_8635.png

Southern gravedigger

^{Tundra gravedigger}

Decipulaformus inimucus inimucus and Decipulaformus inimucus borealis ("hostile trap-maker" and "northern hostile trap-maker")

A species of solitary bumblebadgers who developed the ability to create traps for catching prey. They eventually developed true sapience as part of an arms race with their main prey, the antlears. Two distinct subspecies exist: southern gravediggers, the primary kind, live in the forests and temperate prairies of southern Serinarcta. Tundra gravediggers, larger and grey-feathered, live further north, and are nomadic instead of defending permanent territories.

Beneath Notice: Gravediggers will hang around their prey for quite some time, learning how they think and therefore how best to trap them as they don't associate the gravedigger with their traps. They got good enough at it over the millennia that the ancestral gravedigger drove at least one non-sapient antlear species to extinction.
Bizarre Alien Psychology: They're ancestrally solitary. Since they aren't social, they don't need to interact with others of their own kind for emotional fulfillment, don't experience boredom when it comes to performing long menial tasks like digging trenches, and develop strict, almost ritualistic daily routines. They use art scratched on the trees located on their territorial boundaries as a form of long-distance communication and may even experience sorrow if another gravedigger they shared art with for years dies but will become violently aggressive if they were to ever meet in person.
Crafted from Animals: Gravediggers normally use animal sinews to create their snares.
Had to Be Sharp: The tundra gravedigger are larger, more aggressive, and more willing to personally kill their prey when compared to the southern gravediggers thanks to the extremely harsh and barren lands they live in. It's also mentioned that they aren't less intelligent than their southern relatives, but they rarely create tree art, and their thinking is generally geared more towards animalistic survival. However, they are also expert trappers and problem-solvers due to the more unpredictable nature of the animals migrating through the tundra.
Hoist by His Own Petard: The gravediggers became highly successful predators of antlears due to their complex trapmaking skills, but in doing this, they would usually end up killing the more naïve antlears while the more observant and intelligent members of the species would live to pass on their skills at avoiding and sabotaging the traps. This would end up starting an evolutionary Lensman Arms Race of increasingly more elaborate traps and more savvy antlears that would ultimately result in both species becoming sapient and elevate the antlears from prey to mortal enemies.
Hulk Speak: The gravediggers' language is said to be very simple, as could be expected of a solitary species, and is entirely lacking in pronouns. They prefer to communicate through art scratched into tree trunks.
Interspecies Friendship: The tundra gravedigger has developed a mutually beneficial relationship with the jackal carnackle, the carnackles will distract large prey animals that they wouldn't be able to take down themselves and drive them towards the gravedigger's traps while the gravedigger digs out molodonts that the carnackles wouldn't be able to reach but are able to catch them once above ground while the gravedigger is too slow and they all share in the meals. They are also said to enjoy each other's company and while even play and do tricks for one another.
Nature Versus Nurture: While the gravediggers are inherently introverted as a rule, their tendencies for killing off all but the strongest newborns, and particularly amongst males, self-serving tendencies and opportunistic cannibalism are more the result of culture. Due to Bridge, Lucky, and her descendants spreading the better parts of woodcrafter culture amongst southern gravedigger-kind, over the centuries these issues were eliminated.
Offing the Offspring: Mother gravediggers have a custom of killing all but the strongest of their offspring.
Proportional Aging: While it's not mentioned how long gravediggers live relative to humans or woodcrafters (although it's later noted that woodcrafters rarely live past fifty), they do grow more quickly than humans, with a four-month-old gravedigger being roughly equivalent to a human seven or eight year old, and become functionally adults at about twelve months, though they don't gain their adult plumage until later.
Sapient Eat Sapient: They become highly intelligent and learn to construct elaborate traps to catch their prey, the herbivorous antlears. Pressured by the gravediggers' increasingly elaborate traps, one species of antlears becomes more and more intelligent as well in an arms race to avoid their clever predators, culminating in both gravediggers and antlears, now the woodcrafters becoming truly sapient, and waging war on each other. The conflict finally stops when the two species make peace as a result of two of the latter getting adopted by the former.
Starfish Language: Gravedigger languages consist of gravelly, croaking, and hissing sounds that are very difficult for woodcrafters and later daydreamers to understand. In the case of the latter, it takes their equivalent of teenagers who still have the plasticity to learn in order to communicate with them.
Sympathetic P.O.V.: We are first introduced to the gravediggers by hearing about how they hunted the sapient antlears before eventually being driven out, and there's even a picture of one standing over a trap with a dead, skewered antlear inside it which might cause our sympathies to lie with the antlears. Later on however, we get to learn more about how they operate and that they even have an artistic side that has allowed them to develop a kind of culture despite being solitary by nature, complete with a picture of a mother gravedigger showing her young chick how to draw. Later still we also see that the antlear's descendants, the woodcrafters have developed a bit of a cruel streak that they express by indiscriminately killing any predator that they can find, including the gravediggers that don't even hunt them anymore.
Trap Master: The gravediggers hunt by making various kinds of traps for their prey, and they are very good at it thanks to their tendency to closely observe the behavior of the creatures they hunt so they can learn to take advantage of it. It's also something that they are taught at a young age since Bridge already knew how to make snares and pit-traps for small animals at only four months of age, which is his species equivalent to a human eight-year-old.
Unseen Pen Pal: The gravediggers communicate with one another using images that they draw into the trees and rocks that border their territories. This allows them to form relationships with each other without ever physically meeting. In fact, doing so is necessary as they are naturally solitary despite their sapience and if they were to ever meet outside of mating season then their territorial instincts would kick in and they'd get into a violent fight.
A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: Early gravediggers often traveled alongside their intended prey for long periods of time, letting them become used to them; because they didn't act aggressively towards them, the animals they stalked simply never associated the slow, small, plodding creatures with danger and barely even acknowledged their presence. This allowed the gravediggers to memorize their habitual routes, and thus to dig their traps in locations where they knew they would pass over soon.
Wouldn't Hurt a Child: Adult gravediggers become instinctively hostile towards any other adults of their species who trespass in their territories outside of breeding season, but will tolerate the orange-coated adolescents who pass through as long as they don't stick around for too long.

Bridge

A gravedigger child adopted by the antlears after the killing of his mother, Bridge was the first member of a sapient species raised by another, and proved to be the first step towards the formation of a hybrid civilization.

Heritage Disconnect: When he left the village and tried living "amongst" his fellow gravediggers, his lack of territoriality thanks to being raised amongst the woodcrafters and inability to speak the gravedigger tongue led to problems, and he returned beaten and bruised to his village and stayed for the rest of his days. Years later, when Lucky, another gravedigger chick, appears in Bridge's village, he can't understand a word of the gravedigger tongue and she only knows just enough woodcrafter to introduce herself. It's not until she achieves fluency in the woodcrafter language that they can hold a conversation.
Interspecies Adoption: He's adopted by the regretful woodcrafters after they killed his mother. At first many of them feared him, but he eventually becomes a beloved member of the village and was named Bridge for being a link between their two people. He was taught the woodcrafter language and made more social while he kept the number of smeerps down and introduced the concept of drawing to his community. He briefly left when he reached adulthood due to his instincts but eventually came back and he drew in more curious young gravediggers which led to the two species to become more integrated with even the art Bridge taught the woodcrafters becoming the foundation for their first written language. It also shows a rarely considered consequence of such an event. Due to being raised by antlears at such a young age Bridge imprints on them, but not other gravediggers, and doesn't have any interest in breeding with them as a result. He never has offspring of his own. However, he does become the adoptive father of Lucky, and thanks to her being raised by another gravedigger, she does have children to whom Bridge becomes their Honorary Uncle.
Meaningful Name: Bridge, the first socialized gravedigger, was given that name by his adoptive antlear family to serve as a bridge between both species.

Woodcrafters

In General

Otodactylus sylvamunitor ("ear-handed forest engineer")

A species of herding antlears who became sapient as part of an arms race with their predators, the gravediggers; as the gravediggers became smarter to trap their prey, the antlears became smarter to avoid their traps. Over time, the woodcrafters became the dominant species of the southern Serinarctan forest refugium and began to tend to it extensively to maximize food production, and to counteract environmental damage from their wholesale extermination of local predators. They eventually began a genocidal campaign against the gravediggers, but were forced to halt it when they realized that their targets were as intelligent as themselves.

Became Their Own Antithesis: The woodcrafters started out as prey animals who eventually became powerful enough to drive away the gravediggers and had grown to view predators as monsters. Once they did drove them out, however, they started to become bolder and began venturing out of their territories in order to kill predators that were no threat to them for sport and took sick amusement in their suffering, becoming even more monstrous than their perception of the gravediggers, who only kill for survival and had long since avoided hunting the woodcrafters.
Bizarre Alien Limbs: Like all antlears, they have mobile, jointed antler-like limbs on their ears.
Born Unlucky: As a species, the woodcrafters like most other antlears drew the shortest straw by being a species specialized for browsing that developed sapience only a few thousand years before the ice age got so bad that their trees died out faster than they could evolve to feed on other food sources, on top of their traditionalist nature preventing them from leaving with the gravediggers before enough woodcrafters had died to render the species functionally extinct.
Crippling Overspecialization: They became so specialized for feeding from a specific type of broadleaf tree that was already on the decline when they evolved that, when it becomes too cold for those trees to survive, they begin to die out from malnutrition, while the carnivorous gravediggers can subsist on any source of meat, on top of being more flexible in mindset in general. It's eventually discovered that seaweed can actually sustain the woodcrafters, though its softness means their jaws grow longer, but by then it was already too late as the surviving woodcrafters were all well past child-bearing age (only males keep their fertility past their thirties, and woodcrafters as a whole rarely live past fifty years), on top of their population being too small to prevent a genetic bottleneck even if they weren't too old to have children.
The Dreaded: In an ironic twist, the woodcrafters became this to their former predators the gravediggers. Their tendency to retaliate if one of them was killed or injured caused the gravediggers to view them as a jinx and their systematic hunting at their hands made them a danger to be steered clear of. The gravediggers that lived in the refugia would not create any tree art for fear of drawing their attention and when the woodcrafters began hunting the ones outside their territory, they start depicting them as deadly monsters in their artwork.
Face Death with Dignity: Woodcrafters typically don't become worried about things that can't be resolved. As such, when it becomes clear that their species is going to die out, they simply decide to use their remaining time to help the gravediggers and impart their final lessons on them.
He Who Fights Monsters: The woodcrafters become far crueler than their predators, which only kill to survive, when they start going out of their way to exterminate them and bring back their heads and hides as trophies.
Herbivores Are Friendly: The woodcrafters have this view and certainly see themselves as such due to starting out as a prey species and thus generally try to avoid harming other prey animals. However, they end up becoming Hypocrites when they both drive off browsing herbivores that might damage their trees and especially when they start going out to cruelly slaughter carnivores outside their territory that weren't a threat to them.
Honor Before Reason: The woodcrafters won't harm other prey creatures, but even when the smerps and molodonts living in their territory reach plague numbers and start devastating their food supply due to a lack of predators, they still refuse to kill them.
Loophole Abuse: The woodcrafters have a major taboo regarding killing other herbivores, even if they happen to be pests to the trees they need to eat. Once enough socialized gravediggers are around, however, they have them take care of their pest problem to keep their own hands clean.
Non-Human Non-Binary: Some juvenile woodcrafters choose not to fully mature in the absence of familiar males for aesthetic purposes, with some choosing to identify as female or nonbinary, with a similar phenomenon happening with the woodcrafter equivalent of transmen and transmasc humans taking on more masculine traits in the absence of cis male woodcrafters.
Starfish Language: The woodcrafter language sounds similar to elk calls.
What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Or rather, What Measure Is a Non-Woodcrafter? The woodcrafters view other, non-sapient species of antlear with great disdain, finding it very uncomfortable to see creatures so alike to themselves yet devoid of rational thought. They also view their former predators, the gravediggers, with disdain and culled them from their forest refugia millennia ago, only to change their views once they find out their old enemy's sapience and gravediggers end up being raised amongst them, though some woodcrafters attempted to keep the gravedigger's sapience secret at first out of a fear of losing the glory gained from predator hunting. [invoked]
Xenophobic Herbivore: Casting off oppression is a large facet of their philosophy, including the oppression of their original place on the food chain, leading them to systemically kill or drive off their predators, first out of survival but later out of a sense of cruel arrogance. They also drive away any browsing herbivores that might damage the trees they rely on for food and shelter, with the main exception being the mammoth trunko, which they view with spiritual reverence. This ends up being deconstructed as their elimination of all predators, even those who didn't hunt woodcrafters, leads to a mass population boom for the pests of the woodcrafters' trees, and starvation for the woodcrafters as a result.

Ember

Ember and Bird, on the last night of her life.

The last woodcrafter to live, Ember was born in the wake of the woodcrafter-gravedigger culture's collapse during the height of the ice age and the dwindling of her people as the forests they depended on vanished.

Last of His Kind: She is the last woodcrafter to ever live, having belonged to the last generation born as woodcrafter society collapsed under the strain of the worsening ice age and eventually outliving all the other endlings.
Meaningful Name: Ember, the last woodcrafter, passes on phrases of her language to the descendants of the babbling jays, which persist as the flame of sapience reignites in them.
My Life Flashed Before My Eyes: As she dies, she receives a dream from something reassuring her and pulling back the curtain to show the world from its perspective, millions of lifetimes and species far beyond her comprehension, all starting from a little fish and a little bird.

Others

Bird

A white-margined chatterer, a descendant species of the sapient fork-tailed babbling jays, and Ember's adopted companion.

A Dog Named "Dog": He's a bird whose name is just the woodcrafter name for "bird" translated into English.
Small Role, Big Impact: Ember taught him the phrase "I love you, Bird", and he passes it down to his descendants across both time and species, as his chatteraven descendant Brighteye uses the very same phrase while comforting Whitecrown during the Late Ocean Age more than five million years later.

Early and Mid-Ocean Age

Gravediggers

Social Gravediggers

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/img_8655.png

A Social Gravedigger catches a sharkbird, a fish-like aquatic metamorph bird, with a plant fiber line and a fishbone hook, demonstrating the continued evolution of the trap-building behaviors that defined their earlier ancestors.

Decipulaformus inimucus inimucus

Descendants of the civilized gravediggers who had lived among the woodcrafters, who moved out to the shoreline when glaciers closed over their old homes; nowadays, they live entirely on their boats and shoreline villages. Social gravediggers are smaller than their ancestors, retain their orange juvenile colors into adulthood, and lack most of their old territorial instincts.

Beware the Nice Ones: The social gravediggers are known for their empathy and connection to the living things in their ecosystem, but, when the second battle against the warmongers occurs, they arm their daydreamer allies with armor and poisoned spears that quickly turns the tide in their favor. Unlike the daydreamers who are horrified by the gruesome deaths suffered by the paralyzed warmongers, the gravediggers prove themselves to be quite ruthless and pragmatic when the chips are down, feeling very little sympathy for their hated enemies, and even celebrating the news of their victory.
Born Under the Sail: The social gravediggers become a seafaring people that use things like plant fibers to make canoes and nets as well as animal parts to make their tools. It's also stated that they typically don't destroy the island ecosystems they come across like ancient humans due to them not settling on the islands and actually living on the ocean itself. After making peace with the daydreamers, they strike out with them from the Icebox Seaway to explore the open ocean, and find so much success there that they last for a million years and evolve into a genetically distinct species.
Color Motif: In daydreamer dream sight, they're depicted in dark blue, contrasting the daydreamer light blue.
Combat Pragmatist: The social gravediggers are smaller, weaker, and less adapted to an aquatic environment than the warmongers, so they armor the fishers and pastoralists with shells and bone and give them poisoned weapons to fight in their stead.
Crafted from Animals: They make boats and sails from animal skins and bone, the former due to a lack of wood, along with bone oars.
Defiant to the End: In "Outcasts", as the warmongers take apart a gravedigger boat and even kill one of their tame pretenguins, one of the gravediggers angrily brandishes a spear at a warmonger preparing to take it in its jaws.
The Discovery of Fire: Shortly before Ember's death, the social gravediggers become the first of Serina's sophonts to discover how to make and use fire, and it becomes a major factor in their future success.
Everyone Has Standards: The social gravediggers are noted to be highly empathetic to other species, but even they come to see the warmongers as evil before officially fighting them due to the fact that they are willingly eating other people (daydreamers) despite the current abundance of alternative food in the shallows they are currently invading.
God Guise: The fisher daydreamers come to believe that the gravediggers are one of the missing fragments of their creator deity, while the gravediggers themselves were completely oblivious to the daydreamers' sapience until some of them began speaking to them.
Handy Mouth: The social gravediggers are able to use their mouth in crafting and using tools as a way of compensating for their stiff arms. Later on, they are able to teach the daydreamers how to craft tools of their own using their mouths and group coordination.
Humanoid Aliens: The gravediggers are effectively this to the daydreamers as they basically look like a tiny daydreamer with hands and feet instead of flippers.
Mundane Made Awesome: The fisher daydreamers come to believe that the gravediggers are the hands of their creator thanks to their ability to make and use tools like nets, fishing lines and boats, something the daydreamers themselves are incapable of. The warmongers even go so far as to attribute the deaths of their soldiers by gravedigger weapons as an act of divine retribution.
Older Than They Look: By the standards of still extant gravedigger kind elsewhere. As a result of millennia of natural selection borne out of their union with the woodcrafters, social gravediggers are smaller than the rest of the greater southern gravedigger population and still keep their juvenile colors well into adulthood.
Poisoned Weapons: In their second battle against the warmongers, the gravediggers give their daydreamer allies spears tipped with paralytic poison derived from the fireslime lumpus, a terrestrial tribbet, which means the sea-dwelling warmongers have no resistance to it. This also leads to a Cruel and Unusual Death for these warmongers, as their large size and ability to hold their breath for extended periods means that they sink to the bottom and slowly drown while remaining fully cognizant the entire time, something that traumatizes the daydreamers doing the stabbing.
Sapient Eat Sapient: While luddies are technically semi-sapient, the gravediggers initially hunted them, not realizing their intelligence, before making first contact with the fisher daydreamers.
Weak, but Skilled: The social gravediggers are small and poor swimmers compared to the warmongers, but their skill at making weapons and knowledge of poisons allows the fishers and pastoralists to turn the war completely against them.

Daydreamers

In General

Pelagiuvenator excoginator ("thinking sea-hunter")

Large marine dolfinches, daydreamers are an ancient species by the time they encounter the social gravediggers. They live throughout the Icebox Seaway, and have split into two main ecotypes — the ancestral kind, specialized for hunting large vertebrate prey, and another adapted for eating smaller fishes — which in turn consist of numerous cultural groups. The small-prey ecotype consist almost exclusively of the shallow-water fishers, while the large-prey ecotype is split between the shallow-water pastoralists who farm herds of smaller porplets and the deep-water whalers who pursue wild pods of prey.

Enemy Mine: The fisher and pastoralist daydreamers have been in a cold war for centuries, but with the gravediggers serving as the bridge, they unite in order to face off against the warmongers who wish to kill them all.
Everyone Has Standards: The shallow-water daydreamers may view the warmongers as evil monsters for their actions, but they're still horrified when they see the poisoned warmongers drown in their second battle.
Gray-and-Grey Morality: This the crux of the conflict between the fishers and the pastoralists. The fishers refuse to eat other intelligent creatures, and are very welcoming and outgoing to others, but they can also be overbearing, judgmental, and will sometimes sabotage pastoralist farms despite the nops not even being able to fend for themselves. The pastoralists on the other hand, eat the mentally degraded descendants of their close relatives, are highly xenophobic, and are generally distrustful of change, but they also prefer to keep to themselves and feed only on their livestock while leaving the wild dolfinches alone. Some fishers have started to become more introspective on this conflict and question if they are truly superior to their rivals.
Intelligence Equals Isolation: The first daydreamers arose from seastrikers who by a genetic fluke were every so often born with the capacity for sapience and the ability to see past their immediate survival, but for most of their existence the so-called "seers", while not shunned by the non-sapient seastriker population, lived mostly lonely lives due to their intelligence making them unable to fully relate to their brethren or vice versa. Since sapience was a recessive trait for most of their history, seastrikers only rarely birthed new seers, with only one appearing every few centuries for hundreds of millennia on average.
Land, Sea, Sky: The centerpiece of daydreamer religion is their creator deity splitting themselves into aquatic, terrestrial, and airborne essences. The daydreamers believe they are the aquatic, the gravediggers represent the land, and are still waiting for the sky.
Long-Lived: Daydreamers have a maximum lifespan between 130 and 140 years.
Matriarchy: Daydreamers live in female-led clans.
Pair the Smart Ones: The daydreamers were born when two seers, one from a herding community and another from a nomadic hunting community, chose to mate despite both communities despising one another. Their loneliness borne from their higher intelligence makes them break the social taboos that had kept their communities separate for around 140,000 years. As a result, their children were mostly seers, and those who weren't often had children who were. After 200,000 years of the seers mostly breeding amongst one another, the seers fully diverged from the other seastrikers and became the daydreamers.
Pieces of God: The fisher daydreamers believe that the world was shaped by a single creator deity who then splintered itself into three essences — a flying creature, a terrestrial one and an aquatic one, each of which then split apart into myriad smaller copies of itself — to better experience all the realms of the world. They believe themselves to be the far-scattered fragments of the marine essence, and that one day they will find and reunite with the fragments of the other two and, having learned all that the world has to offer, reform into the creator. In comparison, the warmongers believe that only they descend from the pieces of a dead god and view themselves as above all other life, including other daydreamers.
Proportional Aging: Daydreamers age more slowly than humans, reaching sexual maturity in their late 20s, entering menopause in their 70s, and live for around 130 to 140 years, making them the longest lived of Serina's sophonts.
Skeletons in the Coat Closet: The gravediggers outfit their daydreamer allies with armor made from animal bones and shells in the second fight with the warmongers.
Speaks Fluent Animal: Daydreamers can communicate with most of their non-sapient dolfinch cousins, who the small-prey ecotype perceives as akin to their own children in terms of intelligence.
Wouldn't Hurt a Child: The shallow-water daydreamers have a naturally strong instinct to protect and nurture their offspring and, as such, when warmonger children wander innocently into their territories to look for food, they do not harm them despite the initial animosity they had for their parents. The adult warmongers use this to their advantage by having their kids beg for food to feed their families.

Shallow-Water Ecotypes

Fishers

The main type of small-prey daydreamers, the fishers believe it to be morally wrong to eat intelligent beings and stick to a strict diet of small fishes. In time, this led them to develop small toothlike serrations in their beaks instead of the larger fangs of other daydreamers. They live primarily in the web of open channels that cross between the algal forests of the shallow seas.

Animal Wrongs Group: Pastoralist daydreamers view their fisher cousins as terrorists for sabotaging the nop farms they use to survive, which the fishers view them as immoral due to almost all porplets being nearly as intelligent as they are. However, the original founding fishers didn't have much of a problem with the eating of nops since they recognized that they lacked the intelligence of their wild counterparts; what they took issue with was the hunting of wild dolfinches which were intelligent. Modern fishers would end up scapegoating the nops due to the information becoming distorted over time as modern pastoralists feed almost exclusively on their livestock, and conflated the pastoralists with the whalers who do hunt intelligent dolfinches but lost contact with them several thousand years ago. However, after the war with the warmongers, the fishers come to the conclusion that the pastoralists actually have the most ethical way of feeding out of all the daydreamers as they are only eating creatures that lack the ability to physically or mentally suffer thanks to generations of domestication while leaving the intelligent wild ones untouched. They even insist that they teach the warmongers how to farm the nops.
Ape Shall Never Kill Ape: The small-prey subtype of the daydreamers diverged from the large-prey subtype about 300,000 years before their article's present because they considered eating other dolfinches, their ancestral prey from the time of the seastrikers, to be immoral. Over hundreds of millennia this change in ideology was even reflected in their biology, as their beaks became smaller and their bodies more agile in order to catch fish. However, despite changes in outward appearance, they're still genetically close enough to their cousins to not count as a different subspecies, let alone their own species.
Fantastic Racism: Some fishers discriminate against pastoralists who choose to join their communities.
Interspecies Friendship: Fisher daydreamers form friendships with the luddy porplets and other intelligent dolfinches, although they do tend to take a paternalistic role in these relationships.
Predators Are Mean: A version of this is a central part of the fisher daydreamers' belief system. In their view, hunting intelligent beings for food is morally unacceptable, and one should only subsist on simple-minded creatures such as fish. Consequently, they view the large-prey ecotype cultures, such as pastoralists and whalers who feed on other large marine birds, as being monsters and murderers.
Predator Turned Protector: The fisher daydreamers have long since stopped hunting other dolfinches and have come to believe that it is their moral duty to protect the smaller species that can't protect themselves, strongly paralleling the herbivorous woodcrafters. The luddy porplets have even learned to tell the difference between the fishers and the pastoral daydreamers and will stick by them for protection. Upon becoming the fully sapient greenskeeper, or grazer in the shared tongue of the multispecies civilization, they continue to view both the nova daydreamer (Known as "hunters") and thalassic gravedigger ("Walkers") as protectors of not only themselves but the whole ecosystem.

Pastoralists

The main shallow-water culture of the large-prey ecotype, the pastoralists adapted to look after herds of their prey instead of hunting for their food, in time domesticating their favored foods sources. They lead highly reclusive lives by preference, and live in family groups within the thick algal forests of the shallow waters.

Everyone Has Standards: The pastoralist daydreamers farm the non-sapient descendants of their close relatives, the nops, for food but they draw the line at eating them alive and will Mercy Kill them first, even though the nops aren't able to feel pain anymore due to millions of years of domestication.
Fantastic Racism: Often, pastoralist insularity can give way to plain xenophobia.

Deep-Water Ecotypes

Pelagans

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/pelagan_daydreamer.png

The main culture of deep-water whaler daydreamers, the pelagans diverged from their pastoralist cousins so long ago that they no longer recall the existence of other daydreamers at all. They live nomadically in the belt of deep ocean girdling Serina's equator, endlessly following schools of fish and pods of non-sapient dolfinches.

Dying Race: The encroachment of the ice has lowered sea levels and thus lowered the population of the large prey they evolved to hunt, so their population is slowly dwindling.
History Repeats: The last pelagans are met by the combined gravedigger-daydreamer civilization when they're all long past childbearing age, dooming their group to extinction, but do all they can to impart pelagan lore onto them before dying comfortably much like the woodcrafters millennia before. This is not lost on the gravediggers.
Last of His Kind: They're gradually done in when the shrinking oceans kill off all the animals that could sustain them. The last members of their species were too old to reproduce and believed themselves to be the very last of the daydreamers until the mixed gravedigger-daydreamer civilization from the shallows find them, allowing their people to symbolically live on the stories and histories they tell them.
Offing the Offspring: In whaler daydreamer society, if a baby is born and there's no space in the pod for it, it will be killed within three days after birth. Warmongers also do it to weed out "undesirable" traits such as the yellow markings other daydreamers have, as was the case for a daughter of the warmonger matriarch who was killed by the matriarch's own mother.
Population Control: Due to lack of food, whalers strictly control their population by strongly encouraging homosexual relationships, having sex only for procreation, and culling their children out of necessity if one is born before an older member dies. This can have the downside of entire clans dying out because the adults all turned infertile before being able to have children.
Would Hurt a Child: The pelagans decide to protect themselves from extinction by killing off the young of the sea rex, their only rival in the open ocean, before they can grow big enough to threaten them. As a result, between the loss of their prey to the changing environment and their babies to the jaws of the daydreamers, they eventually go extinct.

Warmongers

In General

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/warmonger_daydreamer.png

A splinter group of pelagans who practice a doctrine of aggressive racial supremacy. The warmongers selectively bred themselves for certain desirable traits, resulting in a very distinctive appearance — a typical warmonger is massively built, with a heavy fanged beak and a stark black-and-white coloration lacking the greys and yellows of other daydreamers. After losing a war with the orthodox pelagans, they're driven into the shallow waters and attempt to wrest them from the local daydreamer cultures.

Arc Villain: They're the main antagonists of the Daydreamer Saga of the Ocean Age.
Cannibal Clan: The warmonger daydreamers are a distinct cultural group that hunt and eat other daydreamers even though they are all still the same species despite their physical differences. They started first with other whalers not part of their group as their normal prey dwindled due to climate change, and after the pelagans banded together to kick them out of their open sea territory roughly 20 years before the fishers made contact with the gravediggers, they started preying upon the fishers and pastoralists instead.
Carnivore Confusion: They will happily prey on closely related species or even their own kind, and despite being sapient they have no moral qualms whatsoever about doing so.
Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: To the pre-truce woodcrafters. The woodcrafters were land herbivores who believed themselves to be Well Intentioned Extremists and that Predators Are Mean and must be eradicated until a chance encounter with gravedigger art and a helpless chick being adopted makes them pull a Heel–Race Turn. Warmongers are aquatic carnivores who are essentially A Nazi by Any Other Name who eat prey regardless of if they're sapient or not and it only takes the death of their matriarch for them to back off.
Defeat Means Friendship: Following their defeat by the coastian daydreamer-social gravedigger alliance, the warmongers eventually make peace with both, helped in part by the latter's children.
The Empire: The warmonger daydreamers have a supremacist culture and believe it is their right to conquer the ocean and destroy the other daydreamers. Unlike the fishers and pastoralists who have fairly loose clan structures, the warmongers have a large, united society with central leadership determined by monarchy which gives them an edge over both.
Evil Is Bigger: Warmongers are on average about 20% larger than their fisher and pastoral cousins, and 10% more than pelagans, and they believe in whaler supremacy over other dolfinches.
Fantastic Racism: Warmongers view all other beings as lesser, including the other daydreamers, making no distinction between either the fishers, or the pastoralists who happen to be their closest cousins. As far as they're concerned, their cousins are both little more than meat.
Fantastic Slurs: Warmongers refer to daydreamers born with the species' typical yellow markings as "bile-bathers", as to them they look like they're covered in vomit.
Grayscale of Evil: The warmongers are black and white in color and attempt genocide on the gravediggers and their fellow daydreamers.
Godhood Seeker: The warmongers seek to reclaim their place as gods of the ocean, as told by their ethnocentric version of the daydreamer religion.
Inbred and Evil: The warmongers, an extremist subset of the whaler daydreamers, purposely inbred themselves over thousands of years to give themselves darker coatings and eliminate their yellow pigmentation, and wish to genocide all other daydreamers.
Invading Refugees: The warmongers were driven to the shallows after a failed attempt to conquer and destroy the pelagans resulted in the latter driving them out of both the open oceans and their original southern territories. They see the shallows as a chance to both heal their wounded pride and build up their numbers by devouring the smaller, less organized daydreamers living there.
A Nazi by Any Other Name: The militaristic warmongers wish to genocide all other daydreamers due to considering them all inferior to themselves and turn their genocidal attention upon the gravediggers as well because their sapience serves as a threat to their beliefs.
Old Soldier: Apart from younger males, warmonger forces are primarily comprised of female daydreamers that are past childbearing age.
Outside-Context Problem: The warmongers trying to kill the gravediggers come across the issue that, while they're larger and better adapted to an aquatic environment, allowing them to easily dispatch the gravediggers upon capsizing their boats, the social gravediggers are not obligate aquatics, and can return to land and send warnings down the coast to other villages faster than a warmonger can swim. As a result, the warmongers soon find that there are no more gravediggers at sea for them to kill. They also weren't very aware of the gravedigger's ability to use tools, so when they give their daydreamer allies armor and weapons, the warmongers have no way of countering this and are soundly defeated. Said weapons are tipped with the poison of the fireslime lumpus, a toxic terrestrial species whose poison nothing in the sea has adapted to, so the warmongers die in droves.
Renegade Splinter Faction: The warmongers started out as a clan of the highly communistic pelagans who wanted to abandon this way of life in favor of a every family for itself system. They were exiled to the southern oceans after they started raiding other pelagan clans and became the large, brutish cannibals they are now.
Sapient Eat Sapient: As they become physically and behaviorally distinct from the shallow-water daydreamer cultures, they no longer view them as fellow people — to them, they're just meat on the fin. When the warmonger leadership finds out about the gravediggers and their sapience being a threat to their beliefs, because it would prove the fisher and pastoralist creation tale correct, they decide to attempt genociding them too to prevent their soldiers from finding out and turning against them.
Sympathetic P.O.V.: The warmongers are first introduced as fascist genociders, and from the view of the gravediggers and other daydreamers are perceived as Always Chaotic Evil, but are later shown to not be inherently evil, but are instead merely the product of their environment and shielded from most outside influences.
Would Hurt a Child: The warmongers are introduced by one killing a baby fisher daydreamer, and both they and their pelagan cousins will cull their own children if there isn't any space for them after they're born.

The Warmonger Matriarch

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/warmonger_matriarch.png

The leader of the warmongers, the matriarch seeks to win a rich homeland for her people at the expense of those already living in the shallow waters she has her eye on.

Arc Villain: She's the primary villain of the Early Ocean Age storyline.
Death by Irony: The warmonger matriarch was the ruler of some of the most deadly apex predators to swim Serina's oceans, but is eaten by a sea shoggoth, which is made of the tiniest carnivores in the sea.
Dying Dream: She receives a vision of her people prosperous and at peace as she is eaten alive by a sea shoggoth. No matter how hard she swims towards them, they only get further away until she can only feel the indifferent presence of something beside her, and then nothing at all.
Eaten Alive: After the blinded, weakened warmonger matriarch gets caught in thick vegetation her struggles catch the attention of a sea shoggoth, which swarms over her and takes her apart while she's powerless to resist.
Evil Old Folks: The warmongers are led by an elderly matriarch, and it's her idea to try genociding the gravediggers in order to preserve warmonger beliefs.
Face Death with Dignity: She attempts this after she's rendered blind as she tries to swim back out to the open ocean where she likely would have been put to death by the pelagans, which she saw as a more dignified way to go out. However, she ends up getting turned around and goes back into the shallows, where she gets tangled up in seaweed and devoured by a sea shoggoth.
Good Scars, Evil Scars: Has a scar across her left eye that blinded her, and she's a villain.
Hoist by His Own Petard: When the warmongers learn of the gravediggers, their matriarch realizes what their existence could mean for their cultural beliefs, and impulsively orders their extermination before they have the chance to understand their targets. This leads to both the gravediggers avoiding the warmongers' attacks thanks to their ability to move on land, and the general population learning about the gravediggers when the soldiers carrying out her orders tell about what they have seen. In addition, it causes the gravediggers to pull out the stops in their next fight, leading many of the soldiers to a horrible demise, including her most fanatical supporters, and leads their grieving families to chase the matriarch out of the pod.
How the Mighty Have Fallen: Once one of the most dangerous groups in the ocean, following their disastrous war against the shallow-water daydreamer-gravedigger alliance but prior to uniting with them, they're reduced to stealing nops from the pastoralists and having their children beg them for meat.
I've Come Too Far: The warmonger matriarch continues her genocidal actions despite her own internal doubts because it would mean the end of everything she's worked for.
Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Warmonger integration with the other daydreamers post-war was made easier by the matriarch's actions leading to the most fanatical of her followers dying in battle, preventing an organized push at reigniting hostilities with the shallow-water daydreamers and gravediggers.
One Bad Mother: Daydreamer society is matriarchal, and the warmongers are no different, so their leader is an elderly, genocidal matriarch.
Outliving One's Offspring: As she travels blinded, she remembers a daughter she had who was born with regular daydreamer colors, and was left to be devoured by predators at the orders of the then ruling matriarch, her own mother.
Sibling Murder: Killed her own sister during a duel to become the new matriarch.
Sympathetic P.O.V.: She's given this when she is blinded and exiled. Despite the misery she caused, despite the deaths borne by her own doing, we get a brief look into her mind, and see all her regrets, all her past mistakes she cannot undo, and, ultimately, how in the end, her goal was only to ensure that her people survive — despite her questionable means of doing so.
Would Hurt a Child: She herself remembers killing hundreds of baby daydreamers by her own jaws, presumably for being deemed "inferior".

Late Ocean Age

The Sea Stewards

In General

A hybrid civilization that arose in the wake of contact between the social gravediggers and the daydreamer cultures. The Sea Stewards consist of three allied species:

The thalassic gravediggers or walkers — Decipulaformus thalassicus, "ocean-dwelling trap-maker" — are descended from the social gravediggers. Slightly smaller than their ancestors, they also possess a nasal gland that filters out salt, allowing them to drink seawater. A few cultural groups exist separately from their main Sea Steward civilization, including nomads around the southern ice cap and coastal settlers who live permanently on the shores of Serinarcta and its nearby islands.
The novan daydreamers or hunters — Pelagiuvenator excoginator novissumus, "last thinking sea-hunter" — arose from the mingling of the older daydreamer cultures and ecotypes, and sport a blend of traits from them all. Otherwise, they don't differ much from their ancestors.
Greenskeepers or grazers — Pascoquaticus horticustodius, "garden-caretaking water-grazer" — are a smaller porplet species descended from the near-sapient luddies of the early Ocean Age. Unlike the obligately carnivorous gravediggers and daydreamers, they're wholly herbivorous.

Beneath Notice: According to Blaze's telling of the first encounters between the coastian thalassic gravediggers and woolly wumpos, the latter didn't pay the former much mind since they were seemingly too small to pose a threat to them, until they started using fire and their intelligence to hunt them.
Born Under the Sail: Even more so than their social gravedigger ancestors, the thalassic gravediggers are deeply attached to the sea, with the meadow population living on floating villages on the surface of the ocean. As part of taking on a more aquatic lifestyle, they've evolved glands that allow them to drink saltwater, webbed feet, and have pronounced brows in order to protect their eyes from the sun where there's no shade.
Crafted from Animals: The thalassic gravediggers use fish teeth and bones to create fishhooks and their tendons for fishing lines.
The Dreaded: The woolly wumpos fear the thalassic gravediggers for being smart enough to hunt them, referring to them as "demons" for driving them to the far north where it was much tougher for them to survive. For their part, the coastian thalassic gravediggers seem to fear the wumpos back as, ever since Retally drove them off, they never made any permanent settlements along the shoreline, only come to shore to mine peat and coal, and both species try to give each other a wide berth whenever possible prior to Brighteye managing to make peace between the two peoples.
Fantasy Counterpart Culture: The sea steward society combines elements of Inuit and other Arctic peoples (reliance on the sea, use of bones and pelts to make boats) and Aboriginal Australian cultures (maintaining a sustained, garden-like environment). Surreal/symbolic art draws heavy inspiration from Pacific Northwest cultures.
Formerly Sapient Species: In the vision the watcher gives Seeker of what will happen if the sea stewards choose to die with their world, he sees that the generalist thalassic gravediggers have managed to survive, being less attached to the ocean than the others, but at the cost of their sapience, and they feast upon the corpses of their former brethren, the daydreamers and greenskeepers.
History Repeats: During the peak of the glaciation, the gravediggers develop into a keystone species that actively maintain the health and balance of the oceans and islands they call home, much like how the woodcrafters would care for the well-being of the forests they once lived in.
Hoist by His Own Petard: The thalassic gravediggers used fire to scare the woolly wumpos into either their traps on land or off seaside cliffs where they could be then butchered en masse. Retally, a widemind of the Tidelands Herd, managed to drive them from the shoreline for generations by figuring out how to make fire himself from observing them, but due to his lack of control over it also managed to be an example of the trope himself, as he ended up killing most of his own herd by accident as well.
Homeworld Evacuation: To save the sea stewards from the extinction caused by the coal fires, the observer moves them off of Serina and to a planet that's been terraformed to resemble their old home but not before altering their memories so that they believe they always lived there.
In the Future, Humans Will Be One Race: A nonhuman example. After the exile of the warmonger matriarch, the surviving warmongers began to interact more with the fishers and the pastoralists who also came to communicate more often with each other thanks to the gravediggers. Over time, the relationships between the different daydreamer cultures shrank until none remained. Eventually, these groups merged to form the novan daydreamers, who have traits of all three cultures, which is most noticeable with their coloring and beak shape. One disadvantage is that they're not quite as efficient at killing large prey due to lacking the cutting beaks of their pastoralist and warmonger ancestors, so when it comes time to slaughter a floating bloat for food, it's a group affair.
Medieval Stasis: The sea steward civilization is so productive and stable that it does not progress beyond a stone-age level of technology for over a million years while also having a written language and innate understanding of ecosystem dynamics. A lack of mineral resources and a lack of ecological or cultural pressure to innovate contributes to this. However, this seems to have changed after they are transported to their new world as its heavily implied that they manage to create an advanced, interstellar civilization in about ten thousand years.
Nice Day, Deadly Night: The coastian thalassic gravediggers fear night because it's when the predatory savage gravediggers come out, who are smart enough to constantly probe their camp walls for weaknesses, alongside a whole host of other predators.
Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The sea stewards managed to turn the oceans into a peaceful and bountiful paradise but, in doing so, they made the entire marine ecosystem extremely fragile and utterly dependent on them. Once they disappear alongside the proliferation of greenhouse gases, the entire ocean biosphere collapses, leaving only a handful of surviving organisms.
Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: The majority of novan daydreamers consider the religion of their ancestors to be just some old fables, but Brighteye becoming known to them causes a religious revival as he's seen as the "wings" talked about in the prophecy.
Predators Are Mean: In the tales told by the sea stewards, the garbled cultural memories of groups such as the predator burdles were that of mindless, bloodlusted creatures that killed indiscriminately before the daydreamers wiped them out.
Predator-Prey Friendship: The initial People Farms relationship between daydreamers and luddies eventually evolved into this as the Greenskeepers became sapient.
Proportional Aging: Thalassic gravediggers and greenskeepers live roughly half as long as the novan daydreamers. In a group of friends consisting of a greenskeeper (Seeker), two thalassic gravedigger sisters (Patch and Pebble), and a novan daydreamer (Whirl), Whirl takes so long to mature compared to her friends that she ends up serving as a babysitter for one of Patch's grandchildren while still the equivalent of a human teenager. By comparison, gravediggers and greenskeepers age at roughly similar rates.
Sapient Eat Sapient: The thalassic gravediggers once hunted the woolly wumpos, unaware of their sapience due to being unable to hear the wumpo's infrasound based language and assuming they were just mere animals like the sealump trunkos, until the widemind Retally beat them back with the very fires they used against his people.
You Kill It, You Buy It: The daydreamers manage to eliminate their old foes, the predator burdles, but this means that they have to take over their role in balancing the ecosystem as they're the only large predators left.

Seeker

A greenskeeper who, unlike his sedentary people, has a taste for exploration.

Bold Explorer: Unusually for a greenskeeper, who normally stick with their family groups, Seeker has a great interest in the wider world and it compels him to leave and explore the wider world.
Celibate Hero: Seeker has no interest in mating with anyone regardless of gender, implying that he's asexual, compared to his gravedigger friend Pebble who is implied to be lesbian.
My Instincts Are Showing: When he meets Whirl, a novan daydreamer descended from the seastrikers who used to be his ancestors' primary predator, he briefly feels a primal fear when she opens her mouth to show him her teeth.
My Species Doth Protest Too Much: Unlike other greenskeepers who prefer to stick to the meadows with their family groups, Seeker has spent years traveling the seas in order to gain knowledge alongside some oddball walkers and hunters, which is how he learned about the coastians using coal or "earthfats" as fuel.
The Smart Guy: He's considered the smartest out of his group of friends, and it's Seeker's idea to use coal to melt the glacier threatening to disrupt the current that makes the sea steward civilization possible.
Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Seeker's decision to convince the sea stewards to start coal mining en masse in order to melt the glacier threatening their way of life starts a sequence of events that leads to the end of the Ocean Age.

Whirl

A novan daydreamer who happens to be the oldest of her friends chronologically, but the youngest mentally due to the differences between their species.

The Baby of the Bunch: Whirl is actually slightly older than her friends chronologically, but since daydreamers mature much more slowly than greenskeepers and thalassic gravediggers, by the time of the story proper she's roughly equivalent to a human in their late teens while her friends are all well into adulthood, with Patch even becoming a grandmother whose grandchildren Whirl babysits. (Seeker and Pebble by contrast are asexual and lesbian respectively and have no children.)
Cuteness Proximity: When Whirl meets Seeker for the first time she finds him cute and starts squishing him with her teeth.
Friend to All Children: Whirl finds that she's pretty good at relating to gravedigger and greenskeeper children due to aging more slowly than they do.
Mayfly–December Friendship: She's close friends with Seeker, Patch, and Pebble, and will live twice as long than they will under the best circumstances.
Only Known by Their Nickname: Whirl's full name is "Whirlpool", but she goes by "Whirl" for short.

Patch and Pebble

Two thalassic gravedigger sisters native to the meadows whose lives end up going on different paths.

Genki Girl: Pebble is very energetic.
Sibling Yin-Yang: Patch is a reserved textile maker who ends up becoming both a mother and grandmother as she sticks to the meadows, while Pebble is outgoing and ends up becoming a molodont hunter near the Serinaustran coast. She's also a lesbian who has no children.

Woolly Wumpos

In General

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/wooly_wumpo.png

Proboscirostrus lanatus ("woolly trunk-snout")

An isolated species of terrestrial sapients, the woolly wumpos are tentacle birds descended from the intelligent but non-sapient mammoth trunkos and desert wumps of the early ice age, and the largest terrestrial animal on Serina by the Late Ocean Age. Highly communal and devoted to their herds, they're however burdened with low mental flexibility and dwindling numbers in the face of a harsh world.

Armless Biped: As with all members of the tentacle bird family, they lack forelimbs of any kind.
Ascended to Carnivorism: Downplayed. The woolly wumpos, descended from the herbivorous mammoth trunko and desert wump, are opportunistically omnivorous, although they refrain from eating the corpses of predators or "biters" due to the belief that consuming the meat of a biter will make a wumpo become a biter, which is implied to be the garbled cultural memories of wumpos eating thorngrazer meat and being driven mad by prion diseases.
Bestiality Is Depraved: Woolly wumpos have a taboo against mating with their closely related but only near-sophont island wumpo cousins, although some have done so anyway^note, with the sapient hybrids being passed off as regular woolies by the herd leaders until their differences become obvious.
A Child Shall Lead Them: Wideminds are seen as more flexible in thought by the woolly wumpos, and so young ones are venerated by elders due to their ability to change how things are done in ways that only they can.
Color Motif: Wooly wumpos are represented in daydreamer vision sight by orange.
Creative Sterility: The woolly wumpos are, as a species, uninnovative and neophobic — while they're very emotionally well-developed and have a strong understanding of abstract concepts, they're not good at learning new things, inventing new solutions or tools or improving on old ones, or facing unfamiliar problems, and for the most part rely on well-established traditions. The exception to this are very rare, neurodivergent individuals called wideminds, who are more innovative, less fearful, and better at coming up with new things. Wideminds are highly respected in wumpo society, and historically have been responsible for creating most new tools, solutions or practices, which afterwards spread through the species and became established as part of tradition. The narration notes that if it weren't for the existence of wideminds, the species would probably not change much at all.
Dying Race: The woolly wumpos have been on a slow decline thanks to the shrinking of habitable land and competition with thorngrazers and now only number around a few hundred individuals compared to around 300,000 beforehand. Conflict with the thalassic gravediggers forcing them further north to more inhospitable territory has also caused their numbers to dwindle. As a result, aberrant traits such as heterochromia and albinism are very common. The Late Ocean Age ends with them dying in the Serinarctan coal seam fire.
Fantastic Racism: A good portion of the woolly wumpos are opposed to Brighteye and Whitecrown's presence amongst them at first due to being "harbingers", but are forced to acquiesce due to not being willing to seriously challenge their leader Blaze.
Soul Eating: In the religious beliefs of the woolly wumpos, those killed by predators have their souls completely devoured, barring them from their afterlife. As a result, it obligates them to kill their predators on sight so that as much of the family can survive death as possible.
Starfish Language: Woolly wumpos communicate primarily through infrasound that most other species can't hear.
Stars Are Souls: In the religious beliefs of the woolly wumpos, their loved ones watch over them as stars.
True-Breeding Hybrid: They arose through hybrid speciation of two closely related species that existed at the onset of the ice age, the desert wump and the mammoth trunko, as they were forced together by shrinking habitats. By joining in this manner, the two species' descendants ended up being better-suited for the new environment than either ancestor by itself, as they possessed both the wumps' physical adaptations for life in harsh, cold environments with scarce food and the trunkos' social habits and preference for living in multi-generational herds led by the most experienced members.
Uneven Hybrid: They descend from hybridization between the closely-related desert wump and mammoth trunko species, but as the trunkos were more common they also contributed more of their genome — about eighty percent of the final total. Further, natural selection favored the persistence of different traits from each parent species, so that the trunkos' genetic legacy mostly came in the form of their larger size, higher intelligence, and social behavior, while the wumps' mainly passed down physical traits for more efficient digestion and resource use, physical endurance, and a stronger sense of smell.

Retally

A woolly wumpo widemind of the Tidelands Herd, Retally attempted to master fire in order to drive back the gravediggers who came from the sea. He succeeded, but the resulting wildfires also killed many of his own people.

Driven to Suicide: Implied. After his lack of mastery over fire creates a blaze that kills nearly all of his clan, Retally is consumed with grief and regret. He heads to the inhospitable north and is never seen again.
My God, What Have I Done?: After Retally managed to get nearly his entire herd killed due to his lack of mastery over fire, he was so ashamed that he decided to go north and was never heard from again, effectively committing suicide.
Posthumous Character: Lived long before the birth of Blaze's great-great grandfather, so he's long dead.
Pyrrhic Victory: Retally managed to drive the thalassic gravediggers who hunted his kind away from the shoreline until the time of Blaze's great-great grandparents using the power of fire, but his lack of control over it led to the deaths of most of his herd. While Retally was among the survivors, he was so changed from the experience that he headed north and was never heard from again.

Blaze

Blaze and Brighteye

A woolly wumpo widemind of the Coastthorns Herd who forms a close friendship with the sapient chatterraven Brighteye.

Fire-Forged Friends: She makes friends with Brighteye after he saves her life from a dire bumblebear.
Interspecies Friendship: She forms a strong friendship with Brighteye, a bluetail chatteraven several hundred times smaller than her.
Last of His Kind: Blaze is the last of the widemind woolly wumpos when she's introduced, and when she dies no others are born because the species is among the first casualties of the coal seam fire soon afterwards, either burning to death or dying from smoke inhalation or toxic fumes.
Life Will Kill You: Blaze eventually dies from old age, surrounded by her family, save for Brighteye, who happened to be away at the time and only comes back once she's already been buried.
Mercy Kill: Blaze chooses to put the last scissortooth out of its misery quickly rather than just leave it to starve to death over hours due to developing empathy for "biters" through all her years hunting them, and despite the fact that it was her idea to systematically exterminate "biters" for the sake of the family in the first place.
Meaningful Name: While at first it's an Ironic Name since she's just as afraid of fire as every other woolly wumpo, thanks to Brighteye Blaze takes to the use of fire very well.

Bluetailed Chatterravens

In General

Feroxcogitator cymatilis ("water-colored savage thinker")

Near-sapient birds who live in complex flocks, the chatterravens are distant descendants of the babbling jays of the Ultimocene, and carry the legacy of the long-extinct babbling jays within them. One species, the bluetailed chatteraven, serves as the subject species of the Late Ocean Age.

Albinos Are Freaks: Chatterravens that hatch with albinism (Referred to as being "colorless" by other bluetails) are typically killed or left to starve by their parents. The reason is mainly because members with albinism typically don't last long due to their coloration making them easy to spot for predators, and their feathers lack of melanin also making them weaker. On the flipside, chatterravens with melanism are highly valued thanks to their dark coloring allowing them to absorb more heat and giving them much stronger feathers. Melanistic chatteravens are so highly valued that about 20% of their species is melanistic despite it being a recessive trait.
All of the Other Reindeer: Bluetails hate most forms of physical aberration, as they're almost uniformly similar looking, but have a special dislike for albinos since they attract predators due to standing out and tending to be more sickly. Even if they're not killed outright, they're not chosen as mates and remain at the bottom of the social hierarchy.
Battle Trophy: Bluetails are known to keep the tail feathers of slain rivals and hold them while foraging or fighting as a good luck charm.
Cannot Dream: It's implied by Brighteye's conversation with his sister Skychaser that most bluetails can't dream, or at least dream in a sense that can be communicated properly to others, as she's confused by Brighteye's description of the dreams he has and changes the subject to that of food.
Creative Sterility: The chatteravens are capable of innovation to a degree and learn fast, but they have little in the way of abstract thought, which hampers their creativity and their skills at making new tools or behaviors. Brighteye, being the only fully sapient chatteraven, is the exception as his strong grasp of abstract concepts and natural learning ability allows him to outperform wumpo wideminds when it comes to making new tools and discoveries.
Creepy Crows: Woolly wumpos refer to the raven-like bluetailed chatteravens as "harbingers" due to their tendency to signify the presence of the predators that they can summon with their songs. While most have a symbiotic relationship with mesopredators such as sawjaws, at least one flock has managed to form a partnership with a dire bumblebear.
Initiation Ceremony: It's customary for bluetails who join new flocks to get beaten up to test their toughness, and many bear scars from the experience.
Hair-Trigger Temper: They are naturally aggressive and have very poor impulse control, which means that they'll quickly attack anything that earns their ire.
Kissing Cousins: Implied, Brighteye and Whitecrown's family line is noted to have a larger amount of albinos than usual, as it's a recessive trait, which can be inferred to mean that their parents were in some way closely related. As a result Whitecrown is more tolerated by his flockmates than he would be otherwise, though if it weren't for Brighteye he would've died long before his weaning.
Lack of Empathy: Zigzagged. They are capable of feeling empathy, but only for those they consider part of their immediate family group. Anything or anyone else is either food or a threat, and treated brutally in either case, including former family members that have left their original flock to join groups of their own.
Partially Civilized Animal: They evolve high intelligence, complex social behaviors, and a rudimentary language, but never develop true sapience or personhood, save for Brighteye, an atavistic throwback to the sapient fork-tailed babbling jay in terms of intelligence.
Social Darwinist: In the world of bluetails, the strong have the right to dominate the weak. It's for this reason that albinos, who tend to be more sickly, are often killed before weaning.
Voice Changeling: Like a parrot they're quite good at replicating the voices of other animals, a trait passed down from their babbling jay ancestors, with Brighteye using it to mimic both the cry of a dire bumblebear and the voices of thalassic gravediggers to learn their language.
You No Take Candle: While bluetails have a native language, it's very primitive and only has simplistic grammar compared to the complexity of their fork-tailed babbling jay predecessors. Brighteye has to make up new words to describe his experiences because the language on its own proves inefficient.

Tyr-reet

A bluetailed chatteraven who took over Brighteye and Whitecrown's old flock and killed their parents.

Deadly Euphemism: Refers to killing Whitecrown as "problem-solve".
Dissonant Serenity: He shows no particular emotion while trying to bludgeon Whitecrown to death with his beak, referring to the action only as "problem-solve."
Dumb Muscle: Compared to Brighteye he's bigger and stronger, but he's also much dumber, leading to his defeat.
Eye Scream: Brighteye defeats him by stabbing a concealed thorn knife through his eye and into his brain.
Out with a Bang: Dies when Brighteye stabs him through the eye while he's in the midst of victory-mounting him.
Small Role, Big Impact: He's meant to serve as an example of a typical bluetail to contrast both the sapient Brighteye and albino Whitecrown, and his death also serves as the main catalyst for the two going on the run.
Would Hurt a Child: Tries to kill Whitecrown, still a child, simply because he's an albino and Tyr-reet is both bigger and stronger.
You Killed My Father: He killed Brighteye and Whitecrown's parents before becoming leader of their now combined flocks.

Brighteye

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/img_8632.png

The only chatterraven to achieve true sapience, Brighteye left his flock in search of other true people after his parent's deaths at the hands of a competitor bluetail flock. This decision would lead to far greater consequences than he could ever have imagined.

Beneath Notice: Brighteye is able to spy on thalassic gravedigger camps without anyone noticing something different about him because of the fact that outwardly he seems no different from any other bluetail despite his intelligence. As such, it comes as a huge shock to them when he starts speaking to them in a way that goes beyond simple mimicry.
Big Brother Instinct: Raised his younger brother Whitecrown to weaning despite being an albino, and the reason he fights Tyr-reet in the first place is because he tried to kill Whitecrown.
Celibate Hero: Brighteye never takes a mate because the intelligence gap between him and other bluetails is so large that he perceives any potential mate as simply a naïve child.
Clever Crows: Chatteravens are convergent to ravens, and he's the smartest member of his species, capable of both innovation and abstract thought.
Color Motif: In daydreamer dream sight, Brighteye is represented by purple.
Combat Pragmatist: When fighting Tyr-reet, an outsider bluetail whose group usurped his flock, he allows Tyr-reet to think he's won and allows him to mount him, before stabbing him through the eye and brain with an improvised thorn knife, and using the resultant shock to allow himself and Whitecrown to escape before Tyr-reet's flockmates can muster a (violent) response.
Commonality Connection: Apart from her intelligence, Brighteye feels kinship with Blaze because her heterochromia marks her as unique in the same way as Brighteye's intelligence and Whitecrown's albinism.
Crafted from Animals: Is capable of making knives out of bone.
Cunning Linguist: Devises written communication via images with Blaze, and manages to understand the sea steward tongue simply through observing them long enough.
Dying Alone: Brighteye dies of smoke inhalation on the beach with only the watcher as company.
Dying Dream: He has a vision of the watcher in his last moments, where it reveals to him its part in bringing he and Blaze together in the first place, which eventually leads to the death of the family thanks to the massive coal fire sparked by Whitecrown and his clan's carelessness with fire. Brighteye's last words in response to their apology and statement that this was not the end of the world, but merely another chapter in its history, are a Dying Curse combined with a Precision F-Strike towards them for their interference before expiring.
Everyone Has Standards: While Brighteye detests the thorngrazers just as much as everyone else who happens to be aware of them, even he thinks the razorbacks getting burned to death is too horrible a fate to suffer.
I Surrender, Suckers: Brighteye gets the better of Tyr-reet, a rival bluetail trying to kill Whitecrown, by pretending to submit before taking the opportunity to stab them through the eye with a knife while he's being victory mounted, and fleeing with his brother while Tyr-reet's brothers are busy watching in horror as he does his death throes.
Inbred and Evil: Inverted, the fact that he's sapient, has higher morality, and lacks the otherwise innate aggression of bluetails is implied to be because his parents were closely related.
Intelligence Equals Isolation: Brighteye is a pariah amongst his fellow bluetails, due to his sapience making him stand out from the rigid social orders of his conspecifics. He refuses to take a mate because the intelligence gap meant in his eyes that he'd be mating with a child, sticks around his birth flock at seven years old when most bluetails leave by five at the latest, and the narration describes him as the only adult in a species that never grows up.
Interspecies Friendship: He forms a strong friendship with Blaze, a woolly wumpo several hundred times his size.
Ironic Death: Brighteye, like all avian life on Serina, is a highly derived canary, and like many a canary before him, he dies from poisonous gases birthed from the flames of a coal mine fire while trying to warn the wumpos as a literal canary in the coal mine.
Meaningful Name: Brighteye, the only bluetail capable of higher understanding, gave himself his purposely symbolic name.
Meaningful Rename: Originally hatched as Tsor-tsor-tseet, Brighteye gave himself and his flockmates symbolic names instead of random sounds that hold no meaning, even if he is the only one capable of understanding them.
My Species Doth Protest Too Much: Brighteye dislikes other bluetails for their violent ways, and towards the end of his life considers himself more part of the woolly wumpo family than his actual species, referring to other bluetails as "harbingers" as the wumpos do.
No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Brighteye choosing to save his brother rather than shun him like what normally happens to albinos starts a sequence of events that ends in the end of the Late Ocean Age, and the deaths of both brothers.
Profane Last Words: As Brighteye lays dying, his last words to the observer are "Fuck you." in response to its apology for using him as a pawn, since it was responsible for both his death and the deaths of the wumpos.
Translator Buddy: Since the gravediggers can't hear the low-frequency infrasound the woolly wumpos use to communicate, and only one third of the sea stewards are capable of writing, Brighteye serves as a translator between the two due to his ability to copy the gravedigger tongue. It is however, deconstructed, as being the only person capable of communicating with both parties^note, combined with being seen as the coming of what was originally seen as a disproved prophecy, proves so taxing that Brighteye just leaves for a while.
Unwitting Pawn: It's revealed to Brighteye in his last moments that he has served as a pawn of the watcher to keep the experiment going longer than it otherwise would've, and his dream that convinced them to try finding other people in the first place was placed in his mind by them. Brighteye is understandably angry about this revelation because while he may have helped prolong Serina's existence, his actions damned him, his family, and a large portion of Serinarcta's terrestrial life to a fiery end.
Weak, but Skilled: Brighteye is noted to be not an especially strong bluetail, but his intelligence gives him an edge in combat, allowing him to defeat stronger but less intelligent opponents like Tyr-reet.
You Can't Go Home Again: Brighteye and Whitecrown leave their flock after killing Tyr-reet because the former knows that 1) his brothers are liable to try killing him in revenge and 2) their parent's deaths mean they've lost their original favorable position as children of the dominant flock members.

Whitecrown

Brighteye's albino brother, who left with him in search of greener pastures. Unlike Brighteye, Whitecrown is only an intelligent animal and ruled by his instincts, and ultimately returns to the wild.

Ambiguous Situation: It's left unclear why Whitecrown chooses to not attack Brighteye on sight when they meet again, and he dies shortly afterwards before Brighteye can even think of saying something.
From Nobody to Nightmare: Whitecrown was originally an albino who would've died long ago if not for his older brother, but through him he learned how to make fire and creates a mega flock of bluetails using it, and it leads to the end of the Ocean Age when one of the trunkos he and his flock are hunting sparks the coal-seam fire that leads to their end.
Hoist by His Own Petard: Whitecrown and his clan die when one of the trunkos they're hunting is set alight and runs into one of the gravedigger's old coal mines, setting off an explosion that kills them instantly.
It Can Think: It comes as a major surprise to Brighteye that his nonsapient brother was indeed paying enough attention to his and Blaze's fire experiments to be able to make fire on his own.
Pet the Dog: It's unclear why, but despite the fact that bluetails that are no longer part of each other's group will attack each other on sight despite their history, Whitecrown clearly recognizes Brighteye when they meet again years later, but doesn't attack him.
Red Eyes, Take Warning: Since he's an albino he has red eyes, and when he and Brighteye meet again after their fight he's taken control of a massive flock that burns all in its path indiscriminately.
Sibling Rivalry: When his wild instincts kick in, Whitecrown tries to fight his brother Brighteye for dominance, but loses and leaves soon afterwards.
Unwitting Instigator of Doom: After inadvertently being taught how to make fire, he ends up using it to become a dominant leader amongst the bluetails despite being an otherwise hated albino, but their indiscriminate burning heralds the end of the Late Ocean Age, and their entire world with it.
Used to Be a Sweet Kid: While friendly and playful as a youngster, as he reaches maturity his wild instincts become stronger and he becomes as aggressive as a typical bluetail. First he challenges Brighteye for dominance, and when that fails, he leaves and starts his own clan that hunts prey by burning them alive using the fire skills he was taught watching Brighteye and Blaze.
Too Clever by Half: While Whitecrown is smart enough to use fire to his advantage, he and his fellow nonsapient bluetails aren't wise enough to know how to put it out, which causes the coal seam fire and their deaths.
You Can't Go Home Again: Whitecrown is forced to leave his flock with Brighteye after the latter kills Tyr-reet to save his life.

Other Gravediggers

Savage Gravediggers

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/img_8636_0.png

Decipulaformus atrox ("savage trap-maker")

When the ice came from the north, the ancestral gravediggers who had not joined the woodcrafters or left for the sea were pushed south towards the coast. The larger, more aggressive tundra gravediggers displaced and partly assimilated their southern cousins, and in time degenerated into savage, bestial predators who lost the spark of true sapience. In the tongue of the sea stewards, they are known as "wildwalkers".

Dumb Muscle: Savage gravediggers are the largest and strongest of the three gravedigger species of the Late Ocean Age, but are only about as smart as a chimp compared to their sapient relatives due to losing the higher intelligence exhibited by their tundra gravedigger ancestors. Of course, this is only relative to actual sophonts, as compared to other non-sapient predators they're more of a Genius Bruiser.
The Dreaded: Just as a concept alone, savage gravediggers are so terrifying that combined with their normally terrestrial habitat, many thalassic gravediggers considered them only a myth, up until the encroachment of the glaciers starts to send them ever closer to the shoreline. This, combined with the coastian mining operations forcing the thalassic gravediggers to spend more time on land, reveals that the "wildwalkers" are indeed very real and very dangerous.
Formerly Sapient Species: Savage gravediggers are descendants of the tundra gravediggers forced towards the southern coast during the Ultimocene glaciation. The extremely harsh environments where they evolved and now live produced a strong selection against higher intelligence, as the lack of useful building materials following the extinction of forest environments provided little benefit for tool use and the scarcity of food made big, energy-hungry brains a liability. As a result, they're only about as bright as a chimp and have lost all forms of tool use and culture.
It Can Think: While nonsapient, the savage gravediggers are still smart enough to probe for weaknesses in the fortresses of their thalassic gravedigger kin.
Lack of Empathy: As a result of the loss of their higher intellect and of all social habits, the savage gravediggers have almost no capacity for empathy. Females will raise their own offspring for up to two years, but in all other cases their response to meeting another living thing is violence — even mating is a vicious and violent affair, and they're quite happy to cannibalize each other if the opportunity presents itself.
Nocturnal Mooks: They're mainly active at night.
Real After All: Most thalassic gravediggers considered the "wildwalkers" to be little more than a myth, since their normally terrestrial habitat would limit encounters with their seagoing cousins, up until the encroachment of the glaciers sends them ever closer to the shoreline and confirms their existence to the sea steward population at large.
Uneven Hybrid: They descend primarily from tundra gravediggers with a small southern contribution.

Icefishers

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/img_8636.png

Decipulaformus mareglacius ("sea-ice trap-maker")

The icefishers descend from a small population of southern gravediggers and southern-tundra hybrids who fled to the marine ice sheets along the Icebox Seaway to avoid their invading cousins. Forced to shed their aggressive habits to endure in their harsh new home, they adapted their old trap-making skills to instead catch fish on the northern edge of the Icebox Seaway.

Crafted from Animals: They use fish teeth and bones to create fishhooks and their tendons for fishing lines.
Crippling Overspecialization: They go extinct when the thawing of the ice they need to survive combined with their asociality puts them in the crosshairs of their savage gravedigger relatives, who outcompete them into extinction.
Foil: Compared to their smaller yet highly social thalassic gravedigger relatives that are part of a three-species panthalassic civilization that have bent the seas to their will, icefishers are mostly much larger loners who are still subject to the whims of their environment.
Gentle Giant: They're the second largest of the three gravedigger species of the Late Ocean Age, but are much kinder than their ancestors.
Polyamory: Icefisher males keep to themselves but take on two or three females as mates.
Took a Level in Kindness: Compared to their southern gravedigger ancestors. Due to aggressive territoriality not being a useful survival trait in their arctic environment, while they remain relatively asocial they also prefer avoiding conflict. They also no longer regularly commit infanticide.
Uneven Hybrid: They descend chiefly from southern gravediggers and a few southern-tundra hybrids, who are responsible for their larger size and color.

Reapers

In General

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/serina_reaper.png

Gigamitus discor vigilis ("watching, learning gentle-giant")

Sapient aukvultures who arose only after the many other peoples of the Ocean Age went to meet their various ends, the reapers were never common and dwindled away to oblivion soon after their arrival.

Brother–Sister Incest: The first reapers were born when two aukvulture siblings mated with one another.
Dying Race: Due to inbreeding amongst themselves from their very inception 10,000 years post-coal seam fire, the reapers have poor reproductive success, with nineteen out of twenty pupal sacs failing to mature, and even fewer managing to reach their first year, at which point they get a name. As a result, from an initial population of less than 2,000 scattered across the world they continue to dwindle until only a single female, Eve, is left 500 years later. At least until she discovers that there are several other reapers living in Serinaustra.
Gentle Giant: Reapers are very large but abhor violence, only killing to put the already dying out of their misery.
Giant Flyer: Their wingspans can span more than 23 feet long.
Liminal Being: They exist right in the transitory period between the Ocean Age ending and the Hothouse Age proper beginning.
Long-Lived: Downplayed. They have an average lifespan of around 80-90 years which is slightly higher than the average lifespan of humans.
Mercy Kill: The reapers are culturally opposed to killing for survival; the main exception to this is killing the already dying to ease their suffering.
The Remnant: The reapers are described as the last people of the Ocean Age, having descended from the aukvultures that co-evolved with the sea stewards.
Starfish Language: The reapers are only capable of making simple sounds like guttural honking so they mostly communicate using gestures and elaborate dances.
Translation Convention: As reapers lack a throat structure that would allow them to use a spoken language, limiting their vocal language to mostly hoarse honking sounds, it's safe to assume Eve's story is being interpreted from her dancing and other movements.
Wandering Culture: The reapers spend their time wandering around the world and only stop at their caves to mate and raise their young.

Eve

The last sapient reaper, and the last true person of the Ocean Age.

Ironic Name: Eve in the Bible is the first woman, whereas Eve the reaper is the last of the reapers.
Last of Her Kind: Eve is the last of the reapers, after her kind went extinct due to inbreeding. Until she finds the small colony on Serinaustra and even has chicks of her own.
The World Is Just Awesome: Meeting Fellstar helps to rekindle Eve's interest in the world around her, and she expresses the desire to see all the world has to offer.

Late Ultimocene

Scroungers

Sylvansparks

A male and female sylvanspark.

Vesperigniculus sylvus ("evening-spark of the forest")

A sophont descendant of the bloodbreasted squaboon that moved further south into the longdark swamp following the drying up of their old salt lake habitat, the sylvansparks live in large clans within the now boreal swamp and are the first of Serina's sophonts to achieve metallurgy.

The Blacksmith: The sylvansparks are notable for being the first of Serina's sophonts to achieve metallurgy and enter the Copper Age, smelting copper for use as tools and jewelry amongst themselves and as trade items with slaughtersprinters and whisperwings.^note
Hates Being Alone: Sylvansparks are a highly communal species, and most tasks are done in a group. As such, they are highly averse to solitude, even for short periods of time. This is in contrast to the slaughtersprinters who have no issues being alone for days at a time.
Matriarchy: Sylvanspark clans are led by a matriarch and ranks are passed from mother to child, with males not being involved in childrearing.
No Blood Ties: Downplayed. Sylvansparks form very strong attachments to their mothers, but they are generally unsure of who their fathers are, and males do not take part in child-rearing.
Our Dwarves Are Different: They're short and stocky in comparison to the tall and gracile slaughtersprinters and specialize in metallurgy, making them essentially Serina's answer to dwarves.
Secondary Sexual Characteristics: Male sylvansparks have reddish-brown feathers and a red throat pouch in comparison to the drabber females.

Slaughtersprinters

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/img_8656.png

Trucidator inpendinsector ("long-pursuing killer")

Sophont descendants of the squabgoblin native to Serinaustra's open moors, plains, and scrublands. Being obligate carnivores, they live in small social groups and partake in a nomadic lifestyle, hunting prey by acting as endurance runners and tiring them out before finishing them off with weapons.

Crafted from Animals: Due to evolving nearer to the equator, slaughtersprinter feathers lack the insulation needed for colder climates, and so they create winter clothing from the hides of their prey.
The Discovery of Fire: The slaughtersprinters are capable of making and using fire, and may have been the first to discover its use amongst their era's sophonts, but use it solely for cooking as opposed to the sylvansparks having enough fire knowledge to develop metallurgy.
No Blood Ties: Slaughtersprinter young are raised communally, and a given hatchling is more likely to be closely bonded to their caretaker than their blood parent.
Sapient Eat Sapient: The slaughtersprinters descend from the squabgoblin who was a natural predator of squaboons such as the sylvanspark, and they used to partake in hunting them even after they became people until the sylvanspark's advancements made them too dangerous to hunt. While by the present their relationship is less tenuous and the two groups partake in trade, encouraging less violent interactions between the two, there's still some tension between the former rivals.
Super-Persistent Predator: The slaughtersprinter's main method of hunting is chasing down prey until it gets tired and then finishing it off with weapons.
Wandering Culture: Slaughtersprinters live a nomadic lifestyle hunting prey, as they would otherewise exhaust the populations of edible animals in a single given area.

Others

Whisperwings

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/whisperwing.png

Spectator artifex ("artistic observer")

Descendants of the bright-eyed bogglebirds of the hothouse age, the whisperwings have a range that spans across both Serinarta and Serinaustra, and serve as clients to both the scroungers of Serinaustra and the sophont thorngrazers of Serinarcta. They have a reputation for being distant, sly, and untrustworthy amongst the scroungers, while they and the thorngrazers have more of an equal partnership.

Bizarre Alien Psychology: Due to evolving from more solitary ancestors, while whisperwings are social, a remnant of their territorial instincts is that while they do live in groups, every whisperwing has their own separate nest instead of living communally in one, and they will only allow another adult whisperwing in under very special circumstances.
Color Motif: Whisperings are instinctively drawn to blue and violet, as it matches their feathers, and so their clothing and jewelry almost universally takes on those colors.
Commonality Connection: They and the sophont thorngrazers connect over both having voice mimicry abilities, allowing them to speak the other's tongue.
Crafted from Animals: They make clothing out of silk produced by a domesticated species of metamorph bird.
The Fashionista: As a general rule whisperwings love adorning themselves and regularly wear clothing and jewelry such as scarves, anklets, and nose rings analogous to human earrings for fashion's sake instead of solely practicality like the slaughtersprinters do. This is helped by them being master fabric weavers, and the scroungers will trade with them in return for clothing.
Hates Being Touched: Whisperwings are very averse to touch outside of sexual contexts, even with their mates, a trait they share with their canary ancestors.
Polyamory: Whisperwings are naturally polygamous, and it's not unusual for a given whisperwing to have no idea who their father is, as males rarely directly partake in the rearing of their own children, though they will help out their female relatives with their niblings or younger siblings.
Practical Currency: Whisperwings value clothing dyes so much that it serves as one of their main methods of payment for facilitating transactions with sophont scroungers.
Translator Buddy: Like Brighteye with the woolly wumpos and sea stewards millions of years prior, whisperings use their vocal mimic abilities to serve as a translator between sylvansparks and slaughtersprinters, as the two have issues speaking the other's language. However, they are known to alter their translations in order to gain a result more favorable towards themselves if possible.

Characters / Serina

Outsiders

Pangaeacene

Mid-Ultimocene

Gravediggers

Woodcrafters

Others

Early and Mid-Ocean Age

Gravediggers