The Taynifi of Iiser are a race of spiny-backed, fat-bellied mammals that emerged from savage animality on the fertile plains of Iiser, a far-orbiting satellite of a gas giant. Taynifi worlds are among the most proactive Sympolity members in interstellar exploration and economic and cultural exchange, driven by their quiet, passionate precursor veneration, the blocks of whose immense cyclopean ruins—difficult for early taynifi to explore—always loomed large on their continent's coasts, sinking into the bogs and the sea. Wanderers of the plain first and foremost, nearly every taynifi retains a rich oral and osseous musical tradition, informing a notably symphonic mode of intellection and abstraction.
In the eons since the Seeding, the taynifi laid roads, erected small towns of turf and stone, or dug out from the hillsides and reinforced them with bone. Gradually, a simple yet comprehensive medieval civilization coalesced using only the wind that constantly blew through their treeless world to generate mechanical power. It spread out over the rocky hills and grassy plains of the supercontinent that emerged from Iiser's ocean, but, at the coasts, it stopped. They began to burn peat to smelt iron into tools, and brickwork replaced the turf of their communal buildings and temples. Beyond that, the continental period's patchwork of social structures, customs, and kin relations would have more closely resembled the intricacies of aboriginal Australia, with innumerable, complex spiritual traditions and the ritualization of most warfare.
Contact with the worlds of the early Sympolity brought tree plantations and shipbuilding, and coastal clans quickly explored and settled their world's two heavily forested subcontinents and peripheral islands, where only animals and the much-mystified Ancients had walked before. Taynifi mariners seized the opportunity to harvest their oceans' bounty for the benefit of the Yikarans and other off-world carnivorous races in return for machinery and, later, curvature-drive schematics. Taynifi cannot ingest fish without significant bloating, having evolved from grazing herbivores, but found that Iiser's previously invisible bounty gave them power. The new maritime economy nearly wrought social chaos upon Iiser, but Sympolity intervention helped mediate the forces that resulted from the new surplus.
From the coasts, the new mariner clans forged ties with the inlanders, gathering iron in exchange for refined materials and new technology. From exchanges organically emerged a continental confederacy with improvisational systems of arbitration; the ancient world was meeting the new, transforming both. Inevitable economic schisms that resulted from these modes of relations were met with Sympolity pressure to rationalize, computerize, and network the entire tribal system of patronage and distribution under a world council of representatives chosen from the various taynifi clan-communes.
In modern times, taynifi—neither natural foresters nor mariners yet passionate about both as a learned foundation for prosperity—maintain autonomous colonies across a score of worlds and several fleets of freighters, seeker scouts, and other fast, lightly armored craft. On their native Iiser, the spread of non-native plantation forests across the supercontinent proved to be a significant ecological disruption for the pattern of grazers and surviving predators and were thus deliberately reduced in area by taynifi stewards; shifting the cultivation and felling of trees to the offshore and outlying lands, where indigenous forest ecologies still flourish. Taynifi builders now primarily source lumber from other planets, and their sprawling cities of brick and bio-composites rise from the rolling hills of Iiser. Their walls and narrow streets are specially fortified, not against invaders, but against the battering winds, with some equatorial storms sustaining wind speeds as high as 200 kph.
