The Sunstalker Part 1: Light, Limbs & Lifecycles (Patreon)

We're going to start off our deep dive into the Sunstalker with an extensive look at its physiology, the real world inspirations behind that and its lifecycle. The Sunstalker is one of three monsters we know a huge amount about and one of two that we know just about all of its lifecycles in extensive detail alongside the Gorm. In fact, we know probably more about the Sunstalker than we do the Gorm, and we know almost everything there is to know about that angry elephant anglerfish baby.

I'm going to start with a journey into the constituent elements that make up the Sunstalker; it is constructed of two of my favourite childhood animals blended with one of my other favourite things – Stars. It is a combination of an octopus/squid (I'm mostly going to write about Octopi here as I know more about them), a star and a shark – young Fen was very much into the space and oceans as a child and I have never lost the spark that those things ignite. As such, the Sunstalker is easily the monster that I have the most understanding of despite its nature as a chimera.

We'll start with the creature that dominates the Sunstalker's shape and behaviour, the Octopus and Squid. This fascinating creature is often referred to as being a form of alien intelligence, and this is an adept description due to how its very existence calls into question the current theories about how living organisms develop intelligence, but we'll get to that – right now we're going to start with the biology of these creatures. (Note: I write all of this as an interested hobbyist, not an expert in marine life and while I do have some astrophysics qualifications; I am also far from an expert in the stellar domain.)

Octopi, Octopuses or Octopodes are a part of the cephalopod portion of the taxonomical tree, as a cephalopod they are most closely related to snails and slugs and even share more common ancestors with insects and worms than with mammals. Their ancestors were small, had hard shells and appeared over 500 million years ago; they would crawl along the bottom of the ocean much like mollusc who are a slow and simple animal. The divergence for the octopus happened around 140 million years ago, with the creatures losing their hard shells and almost all of their bone-like parts apart from their beak. This change allowed them to become nimble, agile and resulted in divergence that gave us squids, octopi, nautilus and my personal favourites the cuttlefish (plus more besides, many of which are now extinct).  This shedding of the shell has had a huge amount of benefits for the octopus, they have become able to squeeze into tiny spaces and gained a lot of speed and agility. But they have also become soft and more vulnerable to predators.

It is this change which is believed to be a core part of why Octopodes and Squids have become so intelligent. But their intelligence is far from the kind which we traditionally understand. Mammalian intelligence is considered to be a 'social intelligence' that is it has been gained through the social nature of mammals and our need to be near each other. However, Octopi are highly solitary creatures, rarely seeking out other members of their own species and yet they still display intelligent behaviours like problem solving and play. Play in particular is a very striking and unusual thing for a non-mammal or bird to demonstrate; outside of mammals and the most intelligent of birds (corvids, parrots, parakeets etc) play is only seen in the cephalopod family. This has resulted in a large amount of questions being asked about what causes living things to evolve intelligence and demonstrates that there can be more forms of intelligence than just the ones which we understand as mammals.

When, it comes to the physiology of these creatures there are also a huge amount of differences between them and us. Octopi have a massive amount of neurones in their bodies (around half a billion – which is in the cat/dog/parrot range) and a de-localised form of intelligence. An octopus can control its eight limbs directly through its central nervous system and brain or the limbs can act autonomously – something we're not capable of.

Their sight is also decentralised, it does not use just their eyes, because they see in a low colour or black and white nature, their skin is also capable of a form of sight – which allows them to mimic and display colours even though their main eyes cannot see them. In fact, if you look at this diagram of Octopus Skin you'll notice some things you may have seen reflections of before if you've achieved the birthing of a Warrior of the Sun.

The octopus skin has Iridophores which can create reflective and iridescent effects. Which is why the Sunstalkers have such a large emphasis on colour and light in their design. The very nature of the skin of the octopode inspired the light based nature of the Sunstalker.

However, we can't just attribute everything that the Sunstalker is based on to just octopodes, there is also a lot of shark and star left to wander our way through; but before we do move on, it is worth acknowledging that the specific physicality of the Sunstalker owes a lot to the Dumbo Octopus and their large flaps that look like elephant ears.

The shark properties of the Sunstalker are somewhat lighter, the main thrust of the design comes in the top of the torso, which has a large shark-like head with human teeth in its maw. But through the weapons we also know that the Sunstalker skin on the external layers is less like an octopus's skin and more tough, because the Denticle Axe directly references the very nature of shark's skin. You may well be able to guess from the construction of the word, but a denticle is any small tooth-like structure 'Dent' as in Dent-ist or Dent-ures. The most commonly used place for this word is in specific reference to the placoid scales on sharks and rays. This gives their skin a tough, abrasive feeling and is what gives the Denticle Axe so much savage, dangerous cutting power. Still, the Shark portion of the Sunstalker is a relatively small component when compared to the other two parts, so rather than dwell on it let us get to the stellar section.

The final portion of the Sunstalker's main chimeric components is the sun portion of its name, Sunstalkers are capable of generating light and heat in a way that makes them look like stellar bodies. This portion of the creature's physiology is a bit more of a mystery because we do not have organisms capable of this sustained level of phosphorescence, luminescence or fluorescence, we do have of course creatures like fireflies, deep sea organisms and bacteria that are all capable of this, but even the brightest of creatures can't mimic the strength and intensity that the Sunstalker produces. This of course pushes their light production off into the realms of fantasy, but we're in a grubby fantasy setting already, so that's absolutely fine.

When we move into this speculative realm; there are suggestions that Sunstalkers in fact employ fusion for their light. Fusion is a form of a nuclear reaction where atomic nuclei are combined and it is the most abundant source of energy in the natural world – because of how darn big the Sun is. In case you're not sure how large the sun is, it's 99.8% of all the mass in our solar system. It's massive (and yet it's very small for a star). The sun converts around six hundred million tons of hydrogen into helium every single section (output is around 596 million tons of helium and four million tons of energy). I think we can safely say that Sunstalkers are not producing that level of fusion, but a smaller scale form of fusion is possible in this made up world.

The main suggestion that the Sunstalkers are using a form of fusion for their power is the inclusion of 'sunspots' as a resource. Sunspots are an area of a star which has reduced surface temperature due to magnetic flux inhibiting the normal convection process for a temporary period. In Sunstalkers these sunspots appear to hang around for a long time – so they could also be the same as the thing which we call 'liver spots' (those have nothing to do with your liver) and they are instead a side effect of how the Sunstalkers are often overexposed to cosmic/sunrays because of their nature. Those sunspots also give us a lot of information about the lifespans of the Sunstalkers. Just like the stars they are partially inspired by, they live a long, long time (unless Survivors turn up and shorten their existence).

There is also one more very fun physical element of the Sunstalker worth discussing in detail. That is their buoyancy. One of the (intentional or not) fictional inspirations/ancestors of the Sunstalker are the Vampire Warriors from Brian Lumney's Necroscope series. We can be confident that these fictional creations, which are squid like creatures that fly through the air through a combination of jet propulsion and air bladders – are an inspiration because Lumney's writing is something which inspires Junji Ito – and Ito's work is heavily baked into the Kingdom Death world. With Gyo being one of the most obvious aquatic tales that mangaka has created (but let us not forget Octopus Girl by Toru Yamazaki).

We get very little information about how the Sunstalker achieves this feat, but the Sky Lure's construction gives us some clues – the Sky Lure has a lot of boyancy and it is constructed from sunshark blubber and scrap. This means that it is likely the Sunstalker's blubber which is filled with helium (and can have more helium produced from hydrogen fusion) in order to allows the Sunstalkers to become 'lighter than air' after that it is likely that they will propel themselves around through jet propulsion in a similar way to cephalopods do in water. However, it also seems quite likely that it's only the oldest and grandest of the Sunstalkers that are capable of doing this, we see 1000, 2000 and 3000 lantern year old Sunstalkers in the quarry forms, but none of them ever demonstrate flight, it is only the slumbering Sun entity – a grand, ancient Sunstalker, that does that. So we just can't be sure, but one would think that if the younger Sunstalkers could fly, we'd see more evidence of it.

Offensively we know that the Sunstalkers employ a wide range of tools, large tentacle arms, squirting shadow ink, biting, flashing light which is capable of igniting feathers, but not burning leather – so we're looking at under 200C (392F for those of you who are savages), and given that survivors do not suffer more than 1st degree burns from this light, we can consider that the temperature is a fair bit less than 118C (244F) – so the Sunstalkers likely output less heat than a boiling kettle when they flash. So this means that most of the threat that comes from the Sunstalker is due to the creature itself rather than the light it projects.

We can also be sure that the Sunstalkers are relatively lightweight creatures themselves because they are capable of buoyancy in air and they are the fastest moving monster in the game right now, sometimes even capable of moving at speeds that the survivors consider to be 'light speed'. This is supported by their weaponry and armor being non-heavy (except for the Skleaver, but even that can lose the heavy tag).

Sunstalker Life Cycles

Just like the Gorm we get to see just about every single life cycle of the Sunstalker's existence. They start off as a large amount of small eggs submerged in a pool created by the parent's saliva. It's not clear if Sunstalkers produce young through Parthenogenesis (asexual) or not, we have only seen the female Sunstalkers in the game, but that could simply be a limitation of the system's design the way that White Lions have similar issues that ended up with a meme answer as to why female white lions end up with testicles (personally I would have just had archived that hit location and resource at the start of the fight vs. a female white lion). But regardless, we know the eggs are laid with the front limb, a tentacle that ends in a phallic ovipositor.

The mother will stay above the eggs for the duration of their hatching and infancy, if survivors are foolish enough to discover a site like this then the Sun (the name given in the campaign to this ancient mother) will not harm them and instead behaves like a cuckoo, providing the survivors with knowledge and protection. In turn the survivors end up worshipping their aerial benefactor and a somewhat symbiotic relationship starts.

This state continues until the eggs produce a large amount of shadow ink which boils into the air as a black fog. The infant sunstalkers hatch out and grow by using the saliva pool as sustenance and the food in the thick, protective mist produced by the Sun – it is this mist plus the presence of such a dangerous Sunstalker that keeps away other predatory monsters from the settlement. This mist will be withdrawn by the parent when the infants are close to their first actual solid feeding – where their Mother will crash down and devour the people who were duped into assisting in raising its children during their earliest stage.

We can surmise that in the case of Suns who do not attract young settlers that they will still be able to raise and protect their young just fine, despite the weak stats of the Ancient Sunstalker (which will be addressed in Campaigns of Death), these creatures are large powerful threats on par with Watchers and The Tyrant. What we do not know however is what happens near the end of a Sun's natural life cycle, unlike the Gorm who head to their burial grounds to die because their stomach acids are not capable of digesting the food they need anymore, we don't know where Suns go. Perhaps they burn out and fall to the ground, perhaps they feel the call of the stars and the void above even more and travel up there, becoming part of the night sky alongside the constellations that The Tyrant's people came from, or perhaps they explode in a ball of fire and brilliant rainbow light. I'm sure however it is, it is both disgusting and beautiful at the same time.

When we return to this topic next time, we'll start digging through the carrot of the Sunstalker by exploring their gear and discussing just why it is so, so powerful and desirable.