The woodcrafters had set out to create a world without monsters. It was only then that they realized that they had become them.
Unmarked spoilers below.- The description of the gradual extinction of the fork-tailed babbling jay is surprisingly tragic, focusing on the last few survivors taking on "simple-minded mates" of other species in a desperate search for company, and how the last of their descendants held a higher awareness in the world but soon succumbed to disease or predation. It becomes even more poignant as the narration speculates what they might have become, perhaps an advanced civilization doomed to destroy its surrounding ecosystem just as humans have. In which case, from a certain perspective, their extinction could be seen as a good thing.
- Time and time again, we are introduced to amazing and fascinating new species, only to hear about their tragic demise and ultimate extinction as the unforgiving and indiscriminate forces of natural selection take its toll. First come the vivas, a wide and diverse clade of dinosaur-like birds that become the dominant life forms early on, but are killed off by a mass extinction. Then we get introduced to the deer-like serezelles, who are quickly outcompeted by the grazing circuagodonts, and later still the merwals, last of the aquatic canitheres, who were just on their way to evolving into specialized marine tribbetheres but quickly die out once the swimming molodonts outcompete them.
- The sudden and violent death of a young male gmu at the fang-tentacles of a greater grappler. The large herbivore was too distracted by the mating call of a female to notice the predator; even the narration mourns that this calm, surprisingly intelligent animal will never find a lifelong mate or raise a family.
- It's not hard to feel especially bad for the chubbirds and the snuffalo, forced to deal with tiny predators that don't even try to kill them but take chunks out of them while they're still alive, leaving them with nasty scars. The snuffalo in fact is said to be frequently blinded in butcherraptor attacks, but simply manages to cope by relying on touch to forage.
- The Gravediggers are a solitary species aggressive to others outside the mating season and mark their territory with border trees. However, as they began to become sapient they started turning the marker trees into art, which other Gravediggers would visit and contribute to: in essence, becoming pen pals. Despite never meeting in person it appears the Gravediggers feel a sense of loneliness in contrary to their solitary natures: and indeed, they display a level of grief should their "pen pals" cease replying due to death or eviction from their territory.
- The gravediggers are clearly not evil: as sapient carnivores, they take no joy in killing and simply accept it as a fact of life necessary for survival. The woodcrafters, on the other hand, are vicious trophy hunters which revel in killing carnivores: creatures they see as monsters to be exterminated. This extends to the gravediggers which the woodcrafters slay with hateful abandon...and only upon discovering evidence of gravedigger art did the woodcrafters realize that they were the monsters all along.
- The ultimate fate of the woodcrafters. The forests they were most adapted to die out due to cooler temperatures, leading to mass starvation, and the ones who manage to join the gravediggers who've moved to the still warm shores with edible seaweed for both species are all long past childbearing age, dooming them to a slow extinction.
- As the warmonger matriarch swims around blinded, she thinks about the choices she made in life and people she's lost and wishes that she'd chosen differently. She dreams of her long dead mate, her sister that she killed in a battle to the death for her leadership position, a daughter who was killed by the previous matriarch, her mother, for being born with yellow markings, and the hundreds and thousands more children who died at the jaws of herself and her followers. While being literally taken to pieces by a sea shoggoth, the matriarch's last thoughts are her wishes to right the wrongs she helped inflict on her people, only to die alone and unmourned.
- The last sea rex, Serina's largest aquatic apex predator, spends every mating season calling out for a female that will never come for around 92 years before finally dying and ending up little more than a feast for the scavengers, alone and unmourned.
- The last scissorjaw, the very last of the circuagodogs, dies half-starved at the club of a trunko. Equally tearjerking from the trunko's perspective: having hunted scissorjaws all her life, she ends up feeling a hint of empathy at the dying scissorjaw and decides to mercifully put it out of its misery, knowing even for a moment that it too was just a suffering creature and not an evil monster.
- The narration reveals that Brighteye, the sapient bluetail, is but an evolutionary fluke, a latent genetic throwback from the fork-tailed babbling jay, and not a sign of the dawning of a new species. He is, according to the text, the first and the last of his kind.
- Retally, a widemind of the Tidelands Herd of woolly wumpos, tries driving away the thalassic gravediggers who have been hunting his people with fire and succeeds, but accidently kills most of his herd due to his lack of control over the flames, and ends up effectively committing suicide by heading up north out of shame over his actions.
- Brighteye's later years turn to tragedy. First, he loses Whitecrown when his brother's wild instincts assert themselves and he tries fighting Brighteye to become the dominant male, only to lose and leave soon after. Second, Blaze dies of old age while he's away, and by the time he comes back she's already been buried. Then, the pressures of being the only being capable of bridging the gap between the family and the sea stewards causes him to forsake everyone for some time. When Brighteye and Whitecrown finally meet again, the latter has become leader of his own flock thanks to all Brighteye and the wumpos have taught him despite the issue of his albinism, only for that same knowledge of fire to claim his life, and set most of Serinarcta ablaze when they accidently cause a fire within the ruins of the sea steward's coal mine. Brighteye tries to warn his family of the flames, but the fire is too fast and envelops his home and its inhabitants while he's helpless to watch. Ultimately Brighteye dies of smoke inhalation with only the mysterious watcher who seeded Serina as witness, who he curses with his dying breath for interfering enough to have caused all this. All the while, the sea stewards can only watch from the relative safety of the ocean as the curtain finally closes on the Late Ocean Age. Fittingly, this section is called "When All Falls Apart."
- While the woodcrafters live on in clay tablets and gravedigger tradition, only a few gravediggers learned Blaze and Brighteye's glyph-based language and even then, any record of their achievements were retroactively erased when the sea stewards were transported to the cloned world and their memories were wiped. Aside from the watcher, no sophont would remember that they ever existed. At least the babbling jay had the excuse of being the first to emerge.
- During the Great Thaw, the icefisher's home melts under their feet, and they lose out to the savage gravediggers, closing the tale of the Middle Ultimocene's sophont species.
- The reapers, aukvultures that have managed to gain sapience, only last around 500 years due to inbreeding depression making their population dwindle, and Eve, the very last of their kind, tells her tale to the world instead of a person because no one else is alive to witness it. It's even worse since the once peaceful non-sapient aukvultures lose their gentle natures and become aggressive and violent.
- 2021 saw the return of frequent updates, with the arc between the gravediggers and the woodcrafters taking place in a half dozen updates. With the end of that, however, focus has shifted to the beginning of the end for life on Serina; the ice age has begun, ecosystems all over the planet are collapsing, and entire clades are dying out on a scale not seen since the end-Thermocene. This death, however, is slow and drawn out; we're getting dozens of updates, some an exploration of sentient life in this brave new world, but most a snapshot into a harsh new ecosystem, with the last survivors of many of the clades we've seen survive and thrive now clinging to life. Seeing death play out on this scale, this slowly, is an agonizing sorrow few pieces of media dare to touch.
- "None Will Remember" is a flash-forward from the Hothouse Age to 300 million years post-establishment, centering on two unknown tribbetheres gnawing on the bones of the last cygnosaur, who died centuries before. The formerly vibrant spire forests and the grasslands surrounding them have long since died, turning into a desolate wasteland with only the skeletons of the old spires left. Even they, the narration notes, will eventually break back down into the soil they were made out of. All the while, the first snow seen on Serina in 30 million years starts to fall. It's overall a solemn reminder that Serina's habitable stage is on borrowed time, and that time will one day run out.
