The Last Architecture: The Great House
To understand this structure, the Last Architecture, this Great House, is to grasp at something that defies that very name, a non-Euclidean, multi-dimensional process of patchwork ductility in which only a handful of regions remain spatially and temporally consistent while everything between them churns in constant flux, metabolising itself eternally. The interaction of these extremes gives rise to juxtaposed phases of concinnity between patterns of ecological perversions and biomechanical surrealism to create an assonant orchestration of causal grotesquery, a decadent, nightmare beauty that meshes into an ornate, self-sustaining, ever-evolving, living whole.
Because of its abstract nature, defining any one place within its bounds is less about where things are and more about how the confines of the Great House are currently behaving at a given moment, characterised by its prevailing modes of autolysis. Any given region is defined by whichever of these metabolic phases is ascendant at any one time, the spectrum of environmental dominants that emerges characterised by the balance between three core, interweaving processes with the results of their interactions becoming the very environment.
In this way, any such region is not wholly one, but rather experiencing a primary dominant in its foundational assembly, with the others present as secondary or tertiary superstructural phases that shift, bleed and transform throughout in transient, overlapping cycles of fractal potential amid the phantom geometries of the overall construction. A "Caerdroia-dominant" region might have a "Numina-secondary" pocket, a haunted, reality-warping chamber within an otherwise stable fungal maze, while a "Nightlands-dominant" waste of chambers might have a "Caerdroia-secondary" vein, a single, warm, wet lymphatic corridor pumping through the frozen dark, lined with desperate life.
Places where excitations of atmospheric plasma fields emerging from the Lambence are strong, the constituent matter of the Great House is excited and echoes of the Old Ones’ melismatic will subsist. These, Their thoughts, move like a thunderstorm refrain across the Architecture’s pattern, a pressure-system of half-remembered imperatives that warp reality like heat-haze.
In this way, the condition of Their presence is felt despite Their remoteness, through diurnal patterns of this “Telluric Current” that their Will excites throughout the lithocule dust, arcing in energetic webs across its walls. The Current carries this dust, the sublimating material of the Great House’s construction, as it rushes throughout the corridors, putting mood to its motions in a sostenuto fever-dream of logic, recursive mythologies of consumptive mind.
A slow contagion that moves through its bounds like the ache of a long-broken bone, the Old Ones, these “Tellurians”, are less intelligence than indifferent instinct, their pilgrim motions telegraphed in the processionals of the Ythrani, aftermath of higher powers, more a manifested process than species, a walking necrosis. Wretched threnody of rot and scripture who wander the Great House on Their behalf, the Ythrani move with purpose throughout, untouched by hazards that unmake all else as a fever is to a sweat, cleansing what life they find in their passage and vanishing people they encounter, a twilight principle made flesh with a care that has no room for the living.
Enigmatic and inaccessible, the finger held to the Architecture's dying pulse, these shepherds of dead minds, stitch the wounds of a taxidermied creation in rituals that only they comprehend, a sight terrifying and beautiful to those few who claim to have glimpsed them. The amoral beneficence of the Ythrani is nonetheless depended upon by the lesser inhabitants of the Great House for survival, an alien event so beyond comprehension that its leftovers seem like magic or trash.
As so much that is discarded, these are of a utility, though it be merely accidental byproduct of their true function, poisonous waste products of an unknowable process and the most valuable things in the world. Left, inscrutable, in their wake, such a metaphysical fallout is manifested as powerful, unstable artefacts, anathema, crystalline symptom made manifest of a physics that here, in the monumental edifice that is the Last Architecture, is but a passing echo.
The Numina are an intensely focused demesne of pure energy and consciousness, a place where abstract coagulations of mind coexist in their most primal, abstracted forms, freed of the constraints of flesh to roam withal, a signal broadcast throughout the Last Architecture. Reaching out, these thoughts move the very fundaments of the Great House, the central force of their churning self-consumption, wracking its body like a fever-sweat delirium that will not, cannot break, precipitating consciousness as an electromagnetic phenomenon, for which biology is the antenna.
The size of the Numina is not necessarily defined by physical space but rather by the density of information, energy concentration and the mindspace of the abstract entities within, or those lesser beings who enter, a vast ocean of cerebrative rot which washes up against the sleeping mind of the unwary. It manifests as the noosphere, phantasmia tremens, a vast ocean of waking dream, hungry afterbirths of realms where dead laws twitch like nerves, insensate, their abortive motion giving rise to sentient subspaces and the creation of interconnected realms for their physical manifestations.
Here, waking reality becomes distorted by gravitational fields that bend in unpredictable ways, creating temporal pockets where lifeforms evolve in patterns that defy conventional biology and physics, where time and space are altered and infinite in nature, their limits existing only in the conceptual or energetic boundaries of the Great House’s overall structure. Within the Numina, dreams are alive, wandering in regions of hypnagogia, the place between sleeping and waking, where the mind’s fever becomes the flesh of the Last Architecture, birthing sentient cavities of meaning that obey their own grotesque logic, where hallucinations have weight, texture and agency, the only certainty the trembling unreality of it all.
Places where the metabolic waste of the Great House is vented and cools, energy is low, matter is inert, things freeze in place and memory becomes geology, a twilit frontier, barren desolation clinging to jagged eyries broken only by elaborate spires, infinite stairways of nested arches receding into a vanishing point of gilded, descant rot. The Nightlands are a constant outflow of fractured, shifting ecologies built into altars carved with bioluminescent frescoes of blooming fungi or growing around massive crucibles swarming with vines like filigree patterns, where the living and dead contend for both energy and space in a hinterland caught in agonies of the slow-motion dissolution of deep time.
The Nightlands represent the furthest reaches of the metaphysical edifice that is the Great House, where the abstract energies that flow from the Numina, expending themselves through the fluctuations that typify the Caerdroia, start to dissipate into more stable forms. Filling these reaches are the leftovers of forgotten civilisations, decaying structures, dormant artefacts and alien ecosystems that obey familiar rules, their purpose long rotted into obscurity, time fixed into place by experience.
Their outermost reaches are fragmented regions marked by the remains of lost knowledge and remnants of abandoned systems, older, more primitive epochs deposited there in an inexorable, glacial evolution from the Numina. Only worsening the further one ventures, such are the ossified degradations of these that much has been rendered toxic or irradiated by the death throes of decaying mechanisms, what lives made crazed by mutation and disease.
These cover vast, open expanses of congealed matter, the dross of antiquated iterations wherein the experiential has coagulated into the common senses of the physical and, further, ossified into the legacy of memory. Here, abstractions curdle into fragmented pathways and collapsed regions of slag and ruin where only the hardiest living creatures can persist and the leftovers of ages are said to wait in untouched vaults filled with the wonders of legacy.
Where the insensible desolation of the Nightlands meets the grasping delirium from the Numina extends a variegated gradation of substance and torrid figuration in cantabilic cohesion altogether more habitable than either extreme, its halls pulsing with moisture, corridors breathing with the thick, hot air of life. These are the Caerdroia, wherein biological and mechanical processes have achieved a temporary, cancerous stability, carrying out the slow, sacrificial coaxing of ecology, weeping like a fresh wound to spill across its width and breath, and in which can be found the greatest populations of the residents within the Great House.
The Caerdroia represent the intermediate spaces where both physical realities and metaphysical energies merge, housing bastions of civilisation where biological sapients and artificial sentient beings hold sway with relative impunity. These environs are constantly shifting, affected by both the underlying Base of the Nightlands and the superstructure of the Numina that control and maintain them, harried by the Ythrani who see only an encroachment to be wiped away, a stubborn mould.
Taking asylum within a vast, membrane of living, organic tissues from which are synthesised the endless materials needed to maintain the ungodly whole, the societies of its peoples are given not even the dignity of afterthought as they subsist amidst its brutish processes. Having evolved within this framework, various factions and the societies of this invasive ecosystem which they serve have grown from dependence to manipulate the Caerdroia themselves, alchemists of flesh, feeding the unyielding, unheeding decay with their defiance and creativity.
Immeasurably vast, the real scale of the Caerdroia is reckoned in terms of experiential time and interaction with the metaphysical forces shaping them rather than any arbitrary measure of physical length, the only stability in momentary pockets pulled from its mass. Its convolutions are fractal, folding inward and outward, expanding or contracting depending on the direction in which they are explored, with cities and settlements existing in hyper-dense clusters or vast multidimensional spaces that may take eons to traverse without guidance.
Time in the Last Architecture is not uniform, being primarily governed by the convulsions of the Telluric Current, the water cycles it excites by the moods of the Lambence and the ritual pilgrimages of the Ythrani, cycles which travellers must read like a physician reads a fever chart. Within its bounds, there is no universal "now," only a localised consensus of process and decay, synchronised to the agonised rhythms of these cycles and, as such, to keep time is to find fleeting regularities in the convulsions and to learn from such measures the rhythm by which its environs pulse.
To this end, all complex chronometry is built upon the two most fundamental and widespread macro-cycles of the Great House, knowledge which is preserved and disseminated by the Choristers, a sect within the Ciborium dedicated to this diagnostic art. Their duties, to maintain the basal measure of time across the civic sphere by which all others are set, encompass a variety of instruments tailored to the variegated means used to measure and mark temporal demarcations, of which there are the following:
The primary environmental unit, kept by pneumatic cores, vast, organ-like devices that measure the moisture and pressure differential between "rising" and "falling" winds, the key civic marker of which being the moment of reversal, called the Turn of the Tide. Together, one full cycle of this Tide is roughly equivalent to 120 subjective hours, lasting approximately 60 subjective hours with each Rising and Falling, making it the most reliable long-term rhythm across the Great House, felt even in relatively unstable environs.
The Rising is a cycle of warm, wet wind that pulls inexorably, inexplicably "inward" toward the metaphysical wounds of the Numina, drawing matter and latent energy from the outer reaches toward the core for "digestion" and metaphysical processing. During this time, humidity condenses on ceilings and gathers in upward-dripping rivulets, the air growing thick, sweet with decay and ozone, a time of growth, swelling and fecund putrescence wherein biological processes accelerate as flora and fauna become more active.
Following this is the cycle of Falling, as the wind reverses, becoming a cold, dry draft pulling "outward" toward the frozen Nightlands, venting the thermodynamic and ontological waste of the Great House's processes, depositing them into the outer dark. As it does, the air parches, bioluminesce dims, exposed organic matter desiccates and contracts, a time of expulsion, cooling and consolidation in which the digested waste products of the Great House's metabolism, its cold logic, spent energy and entropic residue, are pushed to the extremities.
A convulsion of the atmosphere akin to a nervous spasm, superimposed on the slower Tide, is the erratic firing of the Great House's decaying nervous system, the Telluric Current. The Current is measured by telluric reeds, complex arrays of conductive crystals that hum and glow in proportion to the activity of atmospheric plasma, predicting what are called the Sigh and Surge.
The Sigh is a period of roughly 24 subjective hours where the Current weakens and the Lambence dims to a bruised, crepuscular gloom, though it never quite goes out, rare calm that is often treated as a time of introspection, planning and maintenance. Always, the Sigh is preceded by a sub-audible pressure that builds in the skull, transit routes become unstable, making navigation perilous, the whole of its duration like a great, grey weight draped implacably over all it touches, leaving the inhabitants of the Great House in a deep malaise.
Counter to this is the Surge, a violent period of about 12 subjective hours, wherein the Current erupts, fracturing the Lambence with synaptic lightning that crackles through the air, causing metals to grow warm and unshielded anathema to discharge violently. During the Surge, the environs of the Great House are briefly more malleable as the phase separation within its processes grow thin, making it the prime time for prospecting high-risk regions, for rituals that require bending local laws and for heightened terror, as Aborganisms become frenetically active.
The interval between Surges is irregular, but tends to fall within 3-5 Wake-cycles, approximately 18-30 subjective hours for the majority of sapient races. Crucially, the Sigh always precedes the Surge, providing an essential warning period and allowing for reliable, if not exacting, timetables which are easily supplemented by sensitive instrumentation.
A period of ~6 hours of activity broken by ~30 minutes of torpor or meditative stillness, the common polyphasic rhythm to which biological life has adapted and, as such, the dominant unit of biological experience. Four Wakes and their intervening Rest are a Cycle totalling ~26 subjective hours, aligning neatly with the average period between Surges and allowing for activity peaks during both the Rising and Falling.
The diagnostic reports published by Choristors on the imminent condition of the Great House, the “clock time” by which civilisation sets its own rhythms within them, and thus the basis for agreed temporal structure and coordinated action across the most prominent social spheres. The instrument of this synthesis is the Oneiros Engine, the Ciborium’s great crystallographic computer, which integrates data from pneumatic cores, telluric reeds and a thousand other sensors across the Great House, detecting dissonances in the noospheric static and calculating probabilistic forecasts for its Cycles.
The Daily Pulse is the most up-to-date records of these forecasts, posted in scriptoriums and guild halls, terse as medical charts, by which the learned may mark their schedules and align the output of their operations or otherwise prepare for an imminent interruption to their routines. For those without such access, great bells emit precise, arithmetical tolls, the Civic Chimes, at the Turn of the Tide and the onset of major Surges, less a marking of time and more a public service announcement of what to expect and when to secure one’s threshold against the coming upheaval.
Parallel to these are Social and Professional Time, as different cultures and trades slice the foundational units to suit their needs, such as a farming commune dividing the Rising into "Rooting," "Swelling" and "Bloom" or mercantile leagues scheduling caravans to depart with the Falling winds at their backs. This creates a Babel of minor calendars and sub-cycles, all ultimately translatable back to the Choristers' foundational Prognostications, lending strength to the ongoing act of keeping the fragile scaffold upon which all cooperation, and thus all civilisation, standing in the corpse of eternity.
The environs of the Last Architecture defy conventional spatial logic, a place of essential wrongness that has no sane design, only symptoms of its own decay, a phantom limb of structural framework that cannot be mapped as a cartographer might, only negotiated through an understanding of its intricacies. Within this Great House, its functional processes are those of a recurrent dying, that dying what feeds its persistence in a pathology of metabolic cycles rather than spatial coordination, of digestion, necrosis and recursion that resist being fixed into place, forced to do so at great expense.
Here, landmarks are not points to which one travels, instead, they are the bleeding-over of the Numina, like a fever dream generating tumours, being more akin to spectres haunting its death rattle, a discomfitting horror that is both map and terrain and thus cannot be relied upon, only treated like a terminal diagnosis. Travel, then, is more akin to the tracking of symptoms, landmarks the subject of delirium made manifest, structure a lie told to oneself to delay dissolution, because the Last Architecture isn’t decaying, it is decay, reducing any attempt to plot its borders as sensible as medicating a corpse.
As one ventures into its convolutions a few things quickly become apparent, the foremost being the Lambence, not a sky because it is not above, but always visible, a perceptual constant, like the tinnitus hum of a dying universe. Its presence is not a thing of luminance, but instead an infection of vision casting a false glow that makes the darkness beneath it deeper, a twilight murk throughout the Last Architecture that clings to perception like mucus.
Emerging from the Lambence, the Telluric Current is less a river and more the pulse of a dying nervous system, not a flow but a convulsion, carrying half-digested memories, energy and rot, its path a seizure in time and space, a spasm that rewrites local reality. These are the vital signs of the Great House, not landmarks in the conventional sense, yet their logic is reliable enough to remain useful in how they allow its convulsions to be negotiated by its inhabitants, their shifting often laid along such scales of time that they can stand in as roads, until they don’t.
Without place, with no up or down, no centre, navigation then becomes a matter of following the rot, the directed decay that typifies the environs like veins of necrosis in a corpse as, for all its disorienting alienness, the Last Architecture is not random and can be understood, if only partially. Paths form where the Telluric Current has eroded reality, carving trails of dead meaning that expose the lie of permanence, leaving only the processes that limited sense insist are singular objects, a process that once understood, makes it possible to ride the current, carried like leaves in a septic tide.
Between points, habitual circuits calcify, the space between them a contested dominion of dying physics marked less by fixed objects and spatial definition than by localised surrender to entropy, those stable pockets where populations endure something of a collectively materialised thought-form, synesthesia of intent and the illusion of routine. Frequent travel along certain routes causes them to temporarily stabilise, like scar tissue on well-worn paths or even to ossify, like trade routes between Districts, their direction guided by the intentions of people, necessities for the things they carry and the justification of their travel, the whole of this phenomena resulting in pockets of habitation and routes between.
However, it must always be remembered that no route is safe, only familiar, infected by persistence, and even “stable” routes may rupture, spilling over with the underlying logic of the Great House in twisting refutation of imposition or the hungry vomitus of aborganisms. Every step is both a rebellion and a surrender, every place a parasitic rhythm in a co-authored suicide pact with the underlying reality, habitation and habitation, mass hallucinations sustained by need and repetition, to inhabit to repeat, repetition the only thing propping up the corpse.
The Last Architecture cannot be mapped as where things are, only as how things behave and connect and, through this fundamental premise, “maps” are less schematic and more illustrated axioms for surviving reality by teaching the philosophy of navigating its abstractions. Thus, to map the bounds of the Great House is a twofold framework, between representing their interactions at large through diagrams meant to illustrate the different principles involved, and representations which abstract geography into a clear, functional diagram.
In contrast to wayfinding maps used as an aid to navigation, “didactic maps” are superficially primitive and inaccurate, not meant to be used as navigational charts and with no pretence of showing the relative areas of land and water. Rather, they are schematic and illustrative of different principles, communicating place rather than space, providing historical meaning and continuity of identity across generations.
Using space and detail, didactic maps illustrate further concepts, such as the cardinal directions, political borders, military actions, distant lands, stories, history, mythology, flora, fauna and exotic races. The simplest are diagrams meant to preserve and illustrate classical learning easily, viewed as a kind of teaching aid that is easily reproduced while, in their fullest form, they become minor encyclopaedias of knowledge.
Such maps can be further categorised through their emphasis on instruction, philosophy and instruction, such as conceptual maps which highlight ideas more than geography, canonical maps representative of official, sanctioned worldviews and paradigms maps, or models through which the world is understood. By nature and essence, didactic maps as a whole are a direct translation of concept into grand, formal terms, central to which is a claim of ontological superiority for which its depiction is of things as they should or are meant to be rather than how it merely is, a foundational template against which reality is measured.
These are the pragmatic tools used to abstract geography into a clear, functional diagram depicting nodes of relative stability and vectors of flow with cyclical annotations, like a tide chart. A warfaring map is a tool first, a geographical representation second, with the goal to answer how one may get from A to B, and of what the broad strokes of most recent understanding is the general environment along the way.
Warfaring maps are composed of three key elements, the first of which are Nodes representing points of interest, such as social hubs, settlements, faction HQs, bizarre landmarks and similar moments of persistence. A node is labeled not by a city name, but by a defining, repeatable condition and an icon representative of its type, such as a stable pocket (circle), a cultivated enclave (square), a dangerous site (inverted triangle).
The second key element are Lines, representative of pathways connecting two or more nodes, each of which is marked as a consistent colour representing its elevation and names descriptive of the nature of the route itself. Lines are not Roads, they are Currents and Convulsions, the primary lines being Telluric Currents, marked as pulsing, sinuous lines, their thickness indicative of intensity and risk to travellers and a visual texture representing its environment.
Secondary lines are Habitual Circuits between nodes, paths scarred by frequent travel, marked with dotted lines indicating their temporary, illusory nature and penchant for unpredictably erratic change. Both Primary and Secondary lines are not simply paths, but visual representations of the environment, their colour a mark of the dangerousness of environmental challenges found along them.
Lastly, Branches are representative of lines which branch off from more important routes or otherwise connect two or more primary lines or to one or more nodes that do not lie upon the main line. Typically, branches are in service to industrial rather than common travel and likewise denote potential encounters, environmental hazards and navigation challenges specific to that line's elevation.
Because the true geography of the Great House is not a fixed arrangement of landmasses, but a phasal relationship between processes within its bounds, a Didactic Map that depicts its environs as a tripartite body at the centre of the Lambence, with the Telluric Current as its circulatory system, isn't wrong in a spatial sense. Rather, it is ontologically precise in the way it maps the functional and hierarchical relationships of the overall superstructure, showing what the Great House is, a digestive, dreaming, excreting body, which is the only kind of "location" that has any permanent meaning, a Truth of concept, philosophy and metaphysics.
By contrast, a Wayfaring Map that tries to depict a bird's eye view of a region is the abstraction, a desperate, temporary, local lie told for practical convenience that shows what the Great House is doing in a specific place and time. It is a schedule of symptoms, a timetable for a localised metabolic process that is useful, fragile and profoundly untrue in any permanent sense, a lie of local, temporal practicality by which the laity live and die.
Both are correct, the former teaching the nature of the Architecture while the latter tracks where the next spasm of its body will be. One speaks the Truth of Being, the other speaks the truth of becoming, this duality the perfect expression of its ongoing process.
Encircling all is endless dark, the churning night, abiding blackness from which all things animate once crawled gasping, and to which all that emerged shall one day return, swallowed once more into the writhing depths of black water. As unto a tide lapping a boundless shore, black water rises and falls, bringing with it the motion of its currents and the things carried upon its waves, thrown upon far shores, those dancing, hooting, screaming hideousnesses called life.
The Last Architecture is threaded by this suppurating tide, governed by its slow, laboured pulse, a wet, peristaltic churn dragging decay from the Numina’s dreaming wounds through the Caerdroia’s stagnant veins to pool into cooling sludge in the bleak outer reaches of the Nightlands. From this motion is birthed an undertow of thaumic currents, slow siphon drinking the humid air through the gradations of chambers, corridors and halls to create strong winds and heavy humidity where they meet the static of the Lambence, spilling over into the scaffolding of the Great House like a seizure in space.
Bereft of seasons, different regions are defined by near-constant climates of varying extremes according to their berth within this structure, roiling, tempestuous places where wind and current violently meet with the result of near-constant rainfall. Where they are least active, heavy mists obscure even the largest chambers, with some being of such vast size that they house their own weather systems and, subsequently, the most biodiversity, though they are subject to regular flooding from wetter regions.
In the absence of naturalistic development is, instead, a genetic confluence which clings like mould in the hot, humid environs, fed by the telluric surge and scattered far by the constant breath of wind and flow of water. Tenacious enough to thrive where all else is barren, a surprising diversity of form can be found between the great extremes, having dragged itself in agonising slowness to spread in profusion throughout, endlessly adapted to the tribulations of place.
Through the passage of unnumbered aeons, the life and death of this precipitant have deposited sediments in regions where convection is largely relaxed, resulting in a relatively shallow blanket of soil stirred by the prevarications of the water cycle. Where these sediments have built up enough, the sheer pressure of layer upon layer has produced deposits of rock that have been exposed and shaped over time by the motion of wind and water, though their growth is stunted in the shadow of the wider superstructure.
That material which finds its way back upon the tide of black water is subjected to increasing heat and pressure before being gathered once more into the cyclical mechanisms therein and ejected back to darker, cooler climes. So expelled, this chemical-rich slurry is subjected to the telluric current, the resultant prebiotic ooze complexifying to add its own lurching, motive force and biological material to the endless, inexorable process of maturation and putrefaction.
In its own way, an invasive facsimile of ecology has sprung up abundantly, both flora and fauna, to populate these alien spaces, adapting over time so that none but the bleakest reaches and fecund depths are without their presence. The motion of life has gone on to reshape these contents, contributing countless bodies to the recursive cycles, adding richness and unpredictability where none was, first by chance, then unthinking imperative and, finally, intelligent direction.
A curious transitive quality exists between many flora and fauna, as juveniles alternate between instars, both vegetative and animal, developing from a larval floral phase before emerging upon the ripening of fruiting bodies into adult fauna or, in the reverse, moulting into sessile, vegetative maturity. Others eschew such metamorphic cycles to, instead, rely on interactions between sexes exhibiting animal and vegetative qualities between them, forming a symbiosis in which the animal sex consumes and is pollinated by the vegetative sex or else fertilised and fed through sporulation via droppings.
Having evolved under conditions of unstable gravity, animals exhibit the development of stronger hearts and lungs, with leaner, denser musculature, higher muscular irrigation and thicker, hollow bones actuated via internal hydraulics. Most complex animals are small but very strong, commonly crawling, aquatic and semi-aquatic arthropoids, with both exoskeletons and many-limbed configurations being by far the most successful adaptations universally.
Relying on denser oxygen, larger animals tend to have extremely slow, efficient metabolisms; many ambush predators exist and ruminants are common, but those that do not are very active, flying animals are rare and even smaller. Ruminants were the first sapient species, an abundance of ready prey incentivising the dietary diversity offered by active hunting and, eventually, farming and the preparation of calorie-dense fare which subsequently aided brain development.
The most common fauna mainly consists of a complex, but not very diverse community of largely colonial cyanobacteria, algae, fungi and microorganisms alongside a handful of simpler vermiform creatures similar to worms, sponges and jellyfish. Fewer in number, large fauna are predominantly those which have been cultivated for food and materials, otherwise ranging in diversity from the docility of bovine analogues to the savage predation of dangerous carnivores, insects, avians and so on.
Within environs where light skews toward ultraviolet and infra-red, what little there is being obscured by thick atmosphere, perception of yellow, green and blue tones are greatly reduced. Eyes are often large, faceted or multitudinous, seeing mainly infrared light while both plants and animals rely on pigments that operate primarily in the ultraviolet portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Bioluminescence is common in creatures that do rely on sight and also often in plants that they feed upon, with many taking up the mechanism through ingestion of certain carrier species. Indeed, this is the primary source of visible light extant in the environment, a distinction around which many iterations of life cluster or else use as signifiers of prey.
Senses that don't rely on light are common, ie chemoreception, electroreception, thermoception, magnetoreception or echolocation, among others of more or less specialisation depending on the region inhabited. This is especially true in the deep places, those cisternae wherein fresh water gathers, as what little light does exist does not reach more than 50 metres (164 feet) beneath any significant liquid body.
A distinction is made between typical animals and flesh-begotten amalgams of cultured meat and unnatural grafts, cursed lineages, creatures which behave like organisms but have none of the attributes associated with life that is grown rather than designed. Such feral transgenic monsters show radical signs of having been engineered and do not typically find a niche in the natural ecosystem, forcing many settlements to rely on hunting or maintained barriers to repel or corral less dangerous types.
Despite their volatile nature, breeding populations do persist for many of these and all transgenics are far more hardy and long-lived than their natural counterparts. Such resilience has allowed many singular types to range beyond the usual territories preferred by mundane creatures where they grow enormous in their solitude, meeting only to breed.
Originally defined by metabolic rhythms in early microorganisms, the rise of plant life further refined this through intervals of temporal improvisation by which early plants rested between periods of UV flares and carbon dioxide intake. The complexification of animal life ultimately came to be defined by movements between the active, wet areas where the telluric current is in flux and quieter, drier regions where they were able to escape predation, rest and rear young.
Sapient species refined this to its current reckoning as they began to cluster within regions on the edges of this dichotomy that experience a temperate mix of the two extremes. Accordingly, many animals and plants are synchronised to changing weather patterns, being dry-active or wet-active while others rely on the activities of predators and prey.
The uniform twilight within the Architecture has likewise resulted in the evolution of varying types of overlapping, nonlinear cycles of rhythmically co-ordinated biological processes across species, largely untethered from a reliance on ambient light levels. Rest is a precarious ritual and particularly so are the cycles of sleeping and waking adapted along the line of required sleep rather than time or light-locked sleep, which have grown to encompass variations of polyphasic and unihemispheric cycles, states of reduced activity called “torpor”.
In social and herd animals, these have been marked by refinements in the form of staggered cycles, where certain subsets of the population remain awake to watch over the sleepers, and an accelerated achievement of REM phases. Exertion is another factor, exhibited most sharply in predators and other solitary animals, which display an instinct to seek out hidden or darker areas in order to find security from the pressures of local competition.
Within encultured species, the above has found expression in widespread habits of mindfulness and meditation across peoples and social organisation to match and encourage certain expressions of restfulness. In the modern day, this has come to be expressed in the standard around which most of society has been ordered, consisting of six-hour periods of wakefulness interspersed with half-hour periods of rest.
Due to the constraints of fluctuating gravity, plants are more often low to the ground and many crawl and cling across surfaces, independent of any substrate, but those that do not tend to be hardy outliers or rely on buttressing growth patterns that see individuals grow together into networked structures or otherwise form dense congregations. As the environs are cast in perpetual twilight, this lack of illumination renders photosynthesis a less effective means for most plant life to survive, rendering the majority black or deep purple, while bioluminescence is common and forms a basis for a rare type of symbiotic photosynthesis within certain species.
As previously stated, most plants are purple, with more and broader structures dedicated to light absorption if they photosynthesise at all, leaves otherwise developing into long, thin fronds meant to catch moisture from the air. Some ignore the entire visible spectrum or only use some red light via chlorophyll in addition to infrared light, leading to white or bright blue-green-metallic vegetation, respectively, but these, by far, are an exception.
This kind of reflectiveness allows for greater survivability, concordant with regular flares within the telluric current and subsequent UV spikes common to areas of climatic conflux, as radiotrophy is prevalent. Other plants, upon detecting UV spikes and react accordingly, react by rolling up, burrowing, using the sudden influx of light for reproduction or springing up rapidly after flares as others do after fires.
Plants that would otherwise wither within the constant gloom subsist upon a process of thermosynthesis, converting heat energy rather than light into chemical energy and nearly all obtain nutrients and water from the very air. Many larger plants draw energy from electrical storms prevalent throughout the telluric current, passing it through metallic deposits within their root systems to other plants in their community, discharging excess through their branches.
Certain groups of flora have shown a predilection for extracting minerals and metals from what passes for soil and rock, which is stored within iridescent sap in concentrations purer than can otherwise be found in solid deposits. Acting as botanical larders, these weeping metallurgical forests are cultivated as hoarded accumulators and their sap harvested even as the fruiting bodies of more edible fare and other staple crops.
The most successful flora, by far, are those which subsist in parasitical union with other life, clinging to fauna or aggressively choking out and subsisting upon other flora, exerting such influence over dense, intractable regions around cisternae which feed them. In their presence, other plant life is largely protected by their parasitical influence, allowing them to thrive within the lush, predatory interiors of these areas, vast wetlands at the edges of which served as the cradles of civilisation in the shadow of the most successful cancers.
