The Horizon System: Praya, the Exotics Author
Praya (Cool Megajupiter, Brown Dwarf)
System - Horizon-Palmaria
Mass - 5,684 Earths (17.88 Jupiters)
Radius - 67,776 kilometers (10.64 Earths)
Global Average Temperature - -93.54°C
Day Length - 3h 8m 26.5s
Year Length - 1.650 years
Number of Satellites - 15
ESI - 0.292
Etymology - From Praya dubia, the Giant Siphonophore, for its enormous size and carnivorous nature.
Overview
Though cloaked in golden brown clouds of ammonium and sulphur haze, Praya is very much the same as nearby Physalia on the inside. Both are low-mass brown dwarfs that no longer perform any nuclear fusion. Both rotate quickly, generating huge storms and powerful magnetospheric radiation belts. Both are endowed with elegant rings of fine-grain rock dust. And most importantly, both are endowed with a frankly excessive number of habitable satellites.
History
Unlike Physalia, whose history is markedly violent, Praya evolved smoothly into its current state. It never experienced any major collisions or gravitational disruptions, migrating through its host star Palmaria’s primordial protoplanetary disk to its present orbit in the habitable zone. Its internal heat budget is about as expected and its orbit is fairly circular, suggesting it never collided with anything large. In fact, Praya’s orbit has remained so stable that a pair of large super-Earths have formed in the gravitational basins of its L4 and L5 Lagrange points.
Unlike the planet itself, Praya’s satellites are marred by cosmic violence. Several have been stopped of their crusts in giant collisions, while others have had their insides scrambled every which way by puncturing blows. Rocky, carbonaceous, and watery worlds are mixed up all out of order, tossed about by gravitational instabilities that emerged after Praya’s own protoplanetary disk was blown away by supernova winds. Even the lifeforms that call the Prayan Worlds home seem to have inherited the wild and violent natures of their homes, for all of their numerous ecosystems are stuffed to the teeth with horrors beyond mortal comprehension.
Most of the Prayan Worlds were settled by a small contingent of Horizonian animals blasted into space 300 million years ago. Unlike their counterparts over at Physalia, however, all of the Prayan Worlds save Melophysa were still the domain of anaerobic bacteria at the time, so the new immigrants remained small and insignificant until photosynthesis finally transformed the Prayan Worlds into oxygen-rich environments some 200 million years ago. With only a fourth of the biological history Earth has experienced, all are still very primitive, but even in this short time a whole host of unique evolutionary innovations have made their indelible marks on the history of Prayan life.
Civilization
It is unclear how Old Horizon treated Praya. Only a rare few artifacts attest to their presence here, while there is no mention whatsoever of the planet in their descendants’ surviving folklore nor the archeological materials recovered from their fossilized cities. From the perspective of history, Palmaria may well have been a star with no planets.
However, this does not mean that the planets of Praya are entirely devoid of civilization. At the same time that Horizonian civilization was taking its first tentative steps beyond the home world a million years ago, the flesh-eating jungles of Erenna gave rise to a wholly different kind of intelligence. Resembling ants or even siphonophores more than humans, the Erennan Organism (Myrmodoris miramens) was a true hive-minded species. As a globe-spanning supercolony of innumerable drones taking a menagerie of forms from birds to barnacles, it exploited the jungle ecosystems through millions of years of careful management. The trillions of beings that inhabited the planet’s surface essentially acted as neurons in a mind of godlike intelligence, yet incredible slowness; at its peak, the Erennan Organism would have had as little as one thought every hundred years, its neural networks distributed across planetary scales. Sadly, the Erennan Organism’s glory has vanished just as their individualist counterparts’ has; collapsing in a sudden ecological disaster concurrent with the fall of Old Horizon, only a few hives still remain.
The present Horizonians, though technically foreigners, may be treated symbolically as a bridge between the civilization of Old Horizon and the alien intelligence of the Erennan Organism, seeing as how their society is a fluid network of labile mind-networks desynchronized from their biological bodies straddling the borders between individualist species and hive minds. As for their actual use of the brown dwarf and its satellites, numerous settlements have been made to take advantage of the unique properties of local fauna; sapient uplifts from Gymnopraia and Crystallophyes are some of the best seafarers and survivalists of the new Horizon, respectively.
Myriad Celestia: Hell on Earth (The Prayan Worlds)
Though the Prayan Worlds are smaller on average than their Physalian counterparts, the organization of their system is much the same. An inner region exposed to extreme tidal forces contains a few lifeless, volcanic planets whose gaseous exudates inflate Praya’s radiation bands. Beyond them is a region of highly volatile but still habitable greenhouse worlds, beyond which further still lie a widely-spaced series of conventionally habitable worlds. Though this would suggest Praya’s planets haven’t moved much in their history of existence, the actual characteristics of the Prayan Worlds themselves suggests very much the opposite. The current arrangement may only be a fortuitous coincidence that by happenstance allows for maximal habitability.
A. The Pyrrhian Series
From left to right: Desmophyes, Hippopodius, Cordagalma
Due to the co-orbital relationship between Hippopodius and Craseoa, they cannot approach within 60° of each other and so do not align.
The four worlds of the Pyrrhian Series form a subdued counterpart to Physalia’s Rhodaliid Series. All four of these small planetoids are closer to Praya than Io is to Jupiter, putting them in an extremely radioactive and gravitationally hostile environment. All are persistently volcanic and in some cases cracked open, with only their high densities preventing them from disintegration under the tidal forces of their immense host. Cloaked in toxic atmospheres of volcanic sulphur hazes, all are far too hostile for any life to inhabit.
I. Cordagalma
The first of the Prayan Worlds is a heat-blasted cannonball scoured by flame and tide. Cordagalma by far the most iron-rich object in the Horizon System, with some 95% of its mass in an iron-nickel core. Its blackened basalt crust is all that remains of a once much more extensive envelope of rock, the rest stripped off in an ancient collision with a long-gone planetoid. The mantle of Cordagalma is not lava but rather liquid metal, which pours out through volcanic vents to form shimmering, silvery mountain ranges.
IIA. Hippopodius
Deep within the gravity well of great Praya is a world of neon flame. With an atmosphere several times thicker than Earth’s and a mass less than Mars’s, Hippopodius’s weak gravity is barely able to hold onto its abundant gases. As radiation from Praya bombards its upper atmosphere, huge flows of gas are stripped off to form an enormous plasma torus that engulfs the small world in massive auroral discharges. Massive atmospheric waves caused by constant volcanic explosions strip the quartz sands of Hippopodius’s deserts to form a worldwide static lightning storm that fuses its quake-wracked surface to twisting, opaline glass.
IIB. Craseoa
Craseoa is the smallest of the Pyrrhian Series; a tiny barren desert world slightly smaller than the Moon. Its weak gravity can only hold onto an atmosphere just a few thousandths the thickness of Earth’s despite extreme volcanism, resulting in a mostly barren surface dominated by levitating dust. In the low gravity, volcanic spires of obsidian glass can grow like unearthly stalagmites, forming vast, alien shoals of black, sharp-edged blades.
III. Desmophyes
This small world’s beating viscera have been laid bare for all to see. Though when compared to its neighbors Desmophyes only experiences a moderate level of tidal heating, this Mercury-sized planet’s south pole is covered in a lake of lava a thousand kilometers wide and as deep as Desmophyes’s mantle is thick. But this magmatic ocean is not a holdover from the Horizon System’s infancy when lava covered the surface of every terrestrial world. Rather, it was produced in a collision between Desmophyes and a large asteroid that once shared its orbit. The energy of the impact was enough to fully melt Desmophyes’s surface for some time. As the planet cooled down, the lava seas retreated to the poles where tidal forces provided enough heating to keep them liquid. Desmophyes’s lava ocean frequently bursts with eruptions, like jets of blood spurting from a deep wound.
B. The Xenolith Series
From left to right: Melophysa, Marrus, Chuniphyes, Forskalia
Unlike their counterparts over at Physalia, the greenhouse worlds of Praya are exceptionally diverse in shape and form. All are dependent on tidal heating to remain active and all possess hot cores wracked with intense volcanism, but otherwise they share almost nothing in common. Instead of a gradual progression towards the habitable worlds of the Emergent Series, this is a ragtag association of exiles implanted in a former no-man’s-land between tidal ruin and barren eternity. With a range of sceneries from the cracked, Europa-esque ice world Melophysa to the tarry, crimson-red carbon world of Marrus, these are undoubtedly the most unearthly of the living worlds of Horizon. But even in places as strange as these, life will always find a way.
IV. Forskalia
Forskalia is an acidic, oppressively hot and humid world far worse than even Diphyes and Athorybia. Though not nearly as radioactive as the inner worlds of Physalia’s Agalmatid Series, Forskalia is still bombarded by enough ionizing radiation to sterilize the cold upper layers of its atmosphere above its cloud decks. With a tidal flux eighteen times that of Io’s, the surface of Forskalia is more or less constantly lit aflame by volcanic explosions. The lowland lakes and seas are trapped in a never-ending cycle of evaporation and condensation as they are engulfed by lava again and again, resulting in an eternal torrential rainstorm that aggressively scrubs CO2 out of the lower atmosphere as fast as it can be produced.
The radioactive hell of the upper atmosphere and the volcanic hell of the surface sandwich a band of habitable sky between them. Struck by blustering windstorms and lashed by volcanic eruptions, even this strip of habitable sky is a dangerous place. Even still, the incredible energy of the environment can provide an opportunity for innovative lifeforms. Vast umbrella-jellies school in the shadows of storm clouds, repelling rain with their glossy bells and extending fields of ash-collecting tentacles through which dart schools of glossy-winged moonfish and raindrop-riding malachite flies. Save for a few flying plants that brave the freezing upper hell, all the lifeforms of Forskalia must survive on the faint trickle of sunlight that breaks through the thick cloud cover. Like midwater corals, many are endowed with brilliant fluorescence to best make use of the available light, creating a neon wonderland in endless shadows.
V. Marrus
Marrus is the only habitable carbon world in the Horizon System and one of only a rare few carbon worlds with complex biospheres. Though carbon worlds with their conductive diamond mantles usually cool quickly and become geologically dead, the tides of Praya have essentially put Marrus on life support. With a complex surface of elemental carbon, carbide minerals, and rare silicate rocks. Unlike the powdery graphite surfaces of more typical carbon worlds, this mineralogy is not favorable to the formation of dusty hazes in the atmosphere and so Marrus is quite well-lit. The high surface pressure allows hydrogen cyanide and hydrogen sulphide to condense as liquids and mix with the planet’s petroleum seas, increasing its capacity to dissolve minerals and adding the requisite chemical complexity that let strange life form in these exotic oceans one and a half billion years ago.
Life on Marrus is unlike that of any other Horizonian world. Their cells are cloaked in membranes of acrylic resin instead of fat, their genes are written in proteins and not DNA, and their bodies are effused with pentane and hexane, not water. Though Marrus is entirely without oxygen, the anaerobic metabolism its lifeforms use is much more efficient in waterless conditions and thus they can reach levels of complexity comparable to aerobic lifeforms on other worlds. In the high heat of a greenhouse planet, vast jungles of plastic trees line the basins of black petrol rivers, teeming with strange lifeforms from leaping, vampiric monkey spiders to fluttering, venomous centiwings. It is easy to forget that even the lowliest bacteria is infinitely more like us than these creatures are, separated as they are by an unnavigable gulf of biochemical distance.
VI. Chuniphyes
Though it is by far not the most hostile member of the Xenolith Series, Chuniphyes is still an acidic, hyperbaric, poisonous hell unfit for all but the most determined polyextremophiles. It is by far the driest of all the moist greenhouse worlds in the Horizon System, with some 30% of its water content in the atmospheric cloud layers and the rest as hypersaline seas. In these conditions, volcanic sulphur aerosols remain in the atmosphere for decades, forming the oppressive yellow-green smog that immediately distinguishes Chuniphyes from the greenhouse worlds of Physalia.
Though the atmospheric fauna of Chuniphyes is respectable, the low humidity and clear atmosphere devoid of global cloud layers is not favorable to the survival of permanently floating vegetation. Instead, vast forests of slick bladder-weeds and scrambling hydrophytes anchor themselves on the crests of high mountains, where upwellings of moist air bring clement temperatures and consistent rain. Like coral islands in a vast barren sea, each one of these cloud forests is a haven for biological productivity and a home for thousands of species found nowhere else, from ballooning jellysquids to multi-headed stellosomatans. The lands between the mountain peaks are a blasted moonscape of searing heat, bleached by the sun and crisscrossed with massive fissures flush with strange opaline flora. The diatom-like shells of the lowland steppes grow for centuries then burst into planet-wide firestorms, whose fumes usher in a millennial downpour of torrential rain.
VII. Melophysa
Unlike all its siblings in the Prayan World, Melophysa is a world drowned in deep seas. Like a slightly larger and warmer version of Ganymede, a whopping 40% of this aquarian planet’s mass is contained in a deep saltwater ocean. The surface of Melophysa is swathed in a thick layer of ice and snow, but unlike on its airless solar-system counterpart this shell’s seal is incomplete. Several jagged holes are punched through the ice, either by asteroid impacts or volcanic activity. In particular, a vast wound lies at Melophysa’s north pole, where tidal forces drive huge fuming geysers in the oceans below. Below the ocean is a thick layer of exotic high-pressure ice over a rocky core. Unlike on most ocean worlds, where the ice forms an oppressive barrier to the geothermal energies below, huge hotspots in Melophysa’s core send vast tentacles of magma through the ice above, forming immense ‘forests’ of hydrothermal spires in the endless black of the abyssal sea.
No light reaches the kilometer-high smokestacks of the hydrothermal forests of Melophysa, for even their greatest peaks are still tens of kilometers beneath sea level. With so much water, the planet’s surface is extremely sparse in mineral nutrients and so the vast gulfs of open sea between hydrothermal systems are essentially sterile. But around the vents, it is a different story. Vast, reedy forests of pearly macrobacteria encrust recently-active vents, while vast roving lithotroph slime moulds bore into the lightless rock with industrial-grade acids. Vast abyssal arthropods pick through these bone-white forests and fields like alien cattle while innumerable hordes of squirming worms mine the bacterial undergrowth, while above somnambulist seadevils and vast, bioluminescent hive-whales wander endlessly from vent to vent in a sea far greater and far darker than any known to man.
C. The Emergent Series
From left to right: Gymnopraia, Chelophyes, Rhizophysa, Erenna, Enneagonum, Bathyphysa
Crystallophyes is inclined too strongly to enter alignment with the remainder of the Emergent Series.
Beyond the strange reaches of the Xenolith Series are a set of seven life-bearing worlds. The members of the Emergent Series are all conventional earth-like terrae rich in marine and terrestrial flora and fauna. While far less physically unusual than their inward siblings, the Emergents more than make up for their inadequate environmental deviancy with strange lifeforms and even stranger cosmic histories. From the drowned Atlantean continents of Chelophyes to the deadly, hive-minded jungles of Erenna to the fungo-arthropodal mountains of Enneagonum, life has had to pull out all the stops to survive and thrive in the strange and hostile environments of the Emergent Series.
VIIIA. Chelophyes
Though roughly the size of Mars, Chelophyes was an Earth-like world. With low terrain, a warm climate, and extensive ocean basins, the climate of Chelophyes remained exceptionally consistent, providing a harmonious environment for complex life to thrive and diversify for the first 150 million years of its existence. But this was not to last. Some 30 million years ago, the planet captured a gigantic comet which was torn apart into a short-lived ring system. As water-rich ring material fell onto its surface, the continents of Chelophyes were inundated by the rising oceans, disappearing fully beneath the waves within just 10 million years. Though eventually geological cycling will drain the excess water away, today even the tallest peaks of Chelophyes’s former landmasses are buried beneath half a kilometer of ocean.
Chelophyes’s gradual apocalypse has driven great change in its biosphere. Terrestrial plants and animals had to either fully retool their biology and carve out a niche among already-marine competitors or go extinct. Expectably, such a transition was too much for many - some 85% of terrestrial animals and 95% of terrestrial plants went extinct during those 10 million years of gradual drowning, having drowned in rising seas, starved with dying ecosystems or simply been crowded out of existence. But still, some have triumphed. Over 50 lineages from all eight terrestrial animal phyla successfully returned to the sea, from reef-dwelling squid monkeys to rasping tortoise-leeches to phrynocetid frogwhales. Where once were mossy plains and coal-forest jungles are now great reefs and fields of their seagrass-like descendants, home to a familiar yet alien array of strange lifeforms.
VIIIB. Erenna
Erenna, like so many of the Prayan Worlds, lies on the edge of habitability. At just 8% the mass of Earth it is most comparable to Physalia’s Apolemia or Dendrogramma - a small, low-gravity world with a thick and oxygen-rich atmosphere continually replenished by volcanic activity. Unlike Apolemia, however, Erenna has so much oxygen that a normal human would be poisoned within minutes. The atmosphere also contains small fractions of ozone and nitrogen oxides and very small proportions of highly toxic elemental chlorine, hydrogen chloride, and various chlorine oxides, which rapidly attack exposed rocks, unprotected flesh, and any other non-resistant material. The hostile chemical environment and wet, tropical climate of Erenna turns most of its continental surface into ‘Swiss cheese’ terrain riddled with huge caves and crevasses thousands of meters deep.
All Erennan lifeforms are subject to a tragic quirk of biology. In order to survive in the planet’s chemically hostile atmosphere, they have evolved a metabolism much more efficient than those of other lifeforms. Though this makes them much more robust and fast-growing, it also reduces their lifespans and puts them in a state of constant starvation. Erennan plants rely on an extremely efficient photosynthetic apparatus and carnivorous adaptations in order to provide the energy and nutrients needed to grow as much as ten meters in a single day, while animals like buzzsaw-jaw uranosuchians and combine-harvester cereotheres achieve unprecedented levels of strength and speed to satiate their endless hunger. Visitors to the planet, should they not be suffocated by toxic spores or struck by horrific diseases, will find a green hell where barbed tentacles burst from ravenous undergrowth and desperate venomous hunters hurl themselves from hundred-meter treetops for a single taste of sweet flesh. It is unsurprising, then, that no one who wanders off into the Erennan rainforest alone has ever come back alive.
IX. Rhizophysa
Clement, sunny Rhizophysa seems uncharacteristically nice for the Horizon System. The climate is tropical, but not excessively hot. The oceans are wide, but do not drown all land. The days are long, but not excessively so. The planet is small, but not so much as to be unrecognizable from the Earth-like form. In the Horizon System where every planet seems to offer a new and wonderful way to push the boundaries of what biology can achieve, it may even be appropriate to call Rhizophysa’s clemency disappointing. But with the mundanity of their home world, the inhabitants of Rhizophysa have only gotten all the stranger.
Rhizophysa’s fauna consists entirely of diploblasts - simple organisms with only two cell layers who are similar in anatomical complexity to flatworms and jellyfish. Unlike flatworms and jellyfish, however, the inhabitants of Rhizophysa are not content to remain simple and aquatic. They have gained increased complexity not by evolving more organ systems but rather by aggregating into siphonophore-like colonies with dozens or hundreds of zooids each specialized for a single task. Vast schools of hyalichthyan glass sharks and myxoteuthid jellysquid swarm over Rhizophysa’s patchwork-carpet worm reefs, while on land lumbering living-highway viapedes and vitreous, humanoid striders pick through opaline fields and gelatinous rainforests.
X. Bathyphysa
With a mass only slightly greater than Mars’s, Bathyphysa is a world on life support. It is too small to sustain geologic activity on its own for more than about a billion years, remaining habitable to the present thanks to the geothermal heat generated by Praya’s tidal forces. Even with this assistance, Bathyphysa’s tectonic cycle is sluggish and its atmosphere contains little carbon dioxide, so global temperatures average around 5°C. Though not totally unlike Earth, the extensive ice caps plunge to -100°C in winter and much of the planet is covered by seasonal tundra or alpine forests. Only a thin band of tropical climates offers consistently clement conditions on this highly seasonal world.
Though the cold conditions of Bathyphysa may resemble those of Pleistocene Earth, these are only superficial similarities. The sluggish tectonics of Bathyphysa cannot drive intense continental drift, so its continents have remained largely in place for hundreds of millions of years. For the 200 million years or so that complex life has existed on this world, it has been largely the same - one landmass in the far north, another in the far south, with only islands and errant microcontinents between them. In the north, arthropod-like animals from sabertooth spiders to elephantine carcinotheres dominate alpine forests of green plants. In the south, crimson tundras of red algae are home to echinodermatous cave urchins and titanic grazing astrosaurs. With skies devoid of flying animals, only a seagoing dispersal across thousands of kilometers of freezing water could break the splendid isolation of Bathyphysa’s inhabitants.
XI. Enneagonum
With 26% the mass of Earth, Enneagonum is over twice as massive as its inward neighbor Bathyphysa despite being far smaller than our own world. It is just barely large enough for its geothermal heat supply to last through the Horizon System’s 5 billion-year lifetime without any external assistance, and indeed it does not receive substantial tidal heating from its host. Unlike its outward siblings, drowned Gymnopraia and arid Crystallophyes, Enneagonum’s surface conditions are quite Earth-like, though its thick, soupy carbon dioxide atmosphere would instantly kill any Earth lifeform attempting to establish itself.
Enneagonum’s fauna belong to the Paramycetes, a lineage of eukaryotic pseudo-fungi originally native to Horizon. Though this gives Enneagonan ‘animals’ a vague resemblance to the fungo-arthropod creatures of frozen, anoxic Cryogenia, they are much more active creatures. Layers of sclerous hyphae grow together to form armored skins and strong, light bones, while spore-launching vesicles assemble into powerful hydraulic muscles. Grazing, ostracod-like glimmermites and swift-footed iridocerans pick through rolling plains of jelly-moulds and cling to the crags of immense fungal mountains haunted by shell-cracking mantidognathids and mycetosaurs. Though the fetid, mould-speckled lands of Enneagonum might resemble rotten fruit more than vegetated continents, they are nonetheless full of wonderful life.
XII. Gymnopraia
Gymnopraia is the largest of the Prayan Worlds, at about 30% the mass of Earth. Immense amounts of ice swept up during its formation have settled as water in Gymnopraia’s deep mantle, driving massive amounts of volcanic activity as hot steam struggles to escape from its prison. Around 10% of Gymnopraia’s water content emerges to the surface, covering some 99% of its surface in a deep, cold ocean. Unlike the superficially similar Chelophyes, Gymnopraia is a slow-rotating world whose days are nearly a month long. As such, tropical climates nonexistent and ocean surfaces can swing from noontime highs of 30°C to midnight lows of below 0°C. But as the fauna of Tonicella shows, Horizonian lifeforms can survive far greater climactic fluctuations than this.
Life in Gymnopraia’s oceans is difficult. The world is continuously wracked by bitterly cold storms while the nightly freeze can encase even equatorial coastlines in solid blocks of ice. Most coastlines are covered either by fast-growing sponge reefs which grow back from gemmules when killed by cold snaps or heavily calcified stromatolite hardgrounds. Coral-like animals are limited to the deeper reefs where temperatures are fairly constant, where they form vast labyrinthine tunnels and ghost-white forests teeming with bizarre swimmers from gelatinous, iridescent auriculozoa to armored, radially-symmetric asterichthyans. The thirty-day cycle of hot and cold drives a migration cycle where a noontime warm-water fauna trades places with a nocturnal, psychrophilic ecosystem of abyssal horrors. The cetaceous fulicosaurs and thalassopterans instead chase the sun, using their great strength and efficient swimming style to follow the midmorning plankton blooms as they creep across the globe.
XIII. Crystallophyes
Arid, cratered, and air-deficient Crystallophyes bears an uncanny resemblance to our own Mars. Though similar in size to Gymnopraia, Crystallophyes formed with very little water and a small iron core which provides only meager amounts of geothermal heat. With little volcanic activity to replenish its atmosphere in the face of solar-wind erosion and little water to modulate its climate, Crystallophyes resembles a colder and somewhat milder version of Tonicella. Though the planet was once covered by oceans, much of its water has been lost to space or locked up in massive polar glaciers. What once were cold ocean beds are now vast, bone-dry deserts encrusted with calcium deposits and toxic perchlorates. The shallow seas that remain in its southern quadrants are now more like vast salt lakes, chock-full of minerals and teeming with halophile algae.
While Crystallophyes’s situation might seem similar, if inverse, to Chelophyes’s, it lost its oceans nearly a billion years ago. As such, all the animals and plants that inhabit the planet today are not remnants of a native fauna but rather foreign xerophiles who carved their own niches into an alien world. Black, radiation-resistant tundras and scrublands cover the wetter and colder highlands, while resinous scale trees can even form small forests around persistent underground reservoirs. These regions resemble the milder parts of the Gobi or Atacama deserts of Earth and host a fair diversity of large animals, from grazing nothotheres to fleet-footed cynosuchians. The lowland salt deserts, however, are almost barren of life. Plants are replaced with siliceous, halophilic bacterial colonies whose shattered remains accumulate into grandiose opaline dunes, shimmering with glassy iridescence under the searing sun. Animal life is generally restricted to small, burrowing herbivores and insectivores, like the agate-scaled echinosaurs and crinosaurs. Stranger forms, like dust-eating electrophytes, flamingo-like waders, and geothermal fungi may be found further out in the deep sands, walled off from the wider world by blasted fields of toxic salt.
