[center][h2][colour=steelblue]Mamang.[/colour][/h2]
[h3]I[/h3][/center]

The glassy jaws of the ice ground against one another, great frozen plates crushing themselves away into a soup of brittle ostraca that bobbed on the surface of the heaving water. The sound of it groaned deep and far through the belly of the silent ocean. Earth tore, the winds howled cold, and the surface of Galbar cracked like a cake.

A first birth is not easy.

Like the blood of afterbirth, rich life stained the fresh land, sprouting in the greys and greens and wrinkled amber hues of lichen. Grass, first, then sedge and reed, and shrub, and tree, and- yes! Great, grand woods, tall as mountains, ripping through the soil to dance with the goddess. The cry of a bird, the howl of a wolf, and soon, over it all, the great call, the sound of triumph, loudest of them all- a trumpet boomed across the Shepherd's plains, the song of a bull mammoth, virile, singing his new strength.

A first birth is not easy- and yet there is such joy in it!

The earth and sea revelled, and even the wind in all its coldness could not quiet the spirit of the north. A great walrus barked and rolled into the beating waves, its tusks bigger than any elephant's. Its great lumpen bulk flew freely through this well-salted water, its path as smooth as a circling hawk. Soon it would eat its fill, cracking clams the size of watermelons, and return to rest and bask on the stones of the sunny shore, so freshly hewn that the waves had not yet even had the time to wear them down into round pebbles. Soon, yes, it would rest on the shore.

A great eye watched it from the deep, and departed.

Born of a deva's laughter, something grand had been forged in the ocean, and left there unwitnessed to enjoy the breath of life. It would not return to shore. It had never known the shore, no more than any fish. It barely even knew the silt of the shelf that encircled the new continent, that muddy, craggy seabed writhing with dire wolf-eels and halibut the size of two men. It was untethered, left to drift away on the currents like no other being in the cold god's care, unmoored from the Shepherd's fields. It was alone, and it was free. 

The first whale breached, and blasted a spray of hot fog towards the shining sun.

It sang a song into the open sea, a long, beating string of deep whoops and pulses. It was soon answered by another. In the distance, a third, a different tongue, this one slowly whistling.

The eyes of the southern realms might never see such beasts as roam the Giant Lands. The elk and mammoth would not venture to the lands where it was hot, and the direwolf would not follow. The walrus would always return, in the summer, to nurse its young on the shores of its home. 

But the whale would be everywhere. There was no ocean too great for it to cross. In seas warm and cold, dark and bright, the whale would go and bring the great dance of the giants with it, borne by the waves of this well-salted sea. Until the day it breached and sank for the last time, it would always be supreme.

In time it would bear a calf, and the name of that calf would be-

[hider=...]
The whale is born. Between Sala's extra salt making the oceans more dense and Zenia's decision to make gigafauna, the fin whales that come from the Giantlands are gargantuan, possibly 200 feet long. Unlike the rest of the gigafauna, some of them can cross oceans, ensuring that Galbar will have titanic whales wherever the local fish and krill can support them.


0 Vigour gained.
0 Vigour spent.
[s]3,626 whale points awarded for being a whale.[/s]

[b]574 whale points awarded under the new fraudproof system ARE YOU HAPPY NOW CYCLONE[/b]

Total whale points: 574
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