Serina: Greater Skuggernaut (Patreon)

As the spring light descends upon the north after months of darkness, countless flocks and herds that sheltered further south for the winter begin the migration back to the summer feeding grounds of the Polar Basin. In summer, with months of nearly unbroken sunlight and warmth, the aquatic vegetation and plankton explodes in quantity, attracting countless animals to harvest its rich bounty while it lasts. The largest of these migrants is an armoured behemoth well-suited to wading through the vegetated quagmire of the inland sea. An antediluvian titan closely related to the towering skulossi of drier pastures, this giant skuorc evolved down different lines as its long-legged cousins, for it never forsook the amphibious lifestyle of their common ancestor.

Skuggernauts are a branch of skulossi descended from the skogre which, rather than becoming full terrestrial as they immigrated to the mainland, double-downed on their swimming abilities to take advantage of the massive tributaries and lakes which riddle the Serinarctan continent, with wide, webbed feet and thick, paddle-like tails, easily propelling them through the water with minimal effort, like a four-legged rubber ducky heavier than an elephant. Their bones are thickened to help them maintain neutral buoyancy, allowing them to sink underwater if they choose to in order to rip up water weeds and hidden roots deeper down. And the greater skuggernaut is the species has adapted to exploit the largest freshwater body of water in the world, and as one should expect, it is also the very largest species of skuggernaut period.

Capable of weighing over twelve tonnes, the massive greater skuggernauts are covered in imposing keratinous spikes and scutes, but nonetheless remain buoyant due to a system of air sacs that riddle their body cavity and even lacerate their skeletal structure. Although they are very heavily-built, they are not proportionately heavy, and they remain comfortably mobile both in and out of water. Because it lacks the height to keep its more vulnerable body parts out of reach from large predators, its very impressive coat of armour is its primary defence against the powerful jaws of both terrestrial and aquatic carnivores. Every part of its body is covered in thick dermal plating, in some places over two inches thick, making it incredibly tough to damage, never mind kill. And of course the skuggernaut doesn't just passively sit there while attacked, and it can slam its attackers with powerful swipes of its thick spiked tail and neck, or try and crush a potential beneath its massive bulk in a furious charge.

Unlike the skulossi, this is an obilgate quadruped unable to even rear up for brief periods. But feeding very low to the ground, or on vegetation underwater, it has little need to rear up. A very wide and broad beak allows the animals to indiscriminately graze large mouthfuls of plant matter in a single bite, ripping the greenery right out of the ground. A massively long and rotund body contains a huge and complex digestive tract built for extracting nutrients from vast quantities of ingested vegetation; because, like all skuorcs, the skuggernaut has no teeth, it cannot chew its food and relies on a churning fermentation chamber and colonies of specialized gut microbiota to extract energy from its diet. At any one time, there may be over one-thousand pounds of vegetation being digested inside the skuggernaut, and it produces nearly as much faecal waste every day. Herds of skuggernauts wading through the Polar Basin are are extremely destructive, but turning literal tons of surface plant matter into fertilizer that sinks to the lake bottom, they cycle immeasurable quantities of nutrients in the aquatic ecosystem.

As the days of midnight sun in the north come to an end, the skuggernauts, normally foraging blissfully, with no real predators in the region capable of hunting them, congregate in herds as they pack up and migrate for the humid savannahs and wetlands beyond the polar circle as the vegetation dies back for the winter, making survival for such large numbers of massive grazers virtually impossible. Fortunately, they are able to adapt fine to the terrestrial vegetation and smaller bodies of water further south for several months until the warmth and sunlight return to the Polar Basin. In the winter, the skuggernauts stay close together for protection, the packs of cutthroats and vultrorcs, with bone-crushing bites capable of piercing their hides, present a bigger threat than the darksharks and snagglejaws of the north.

Skuggernauts mate during the middle of winter when their much higher population densities make courtship more convenient; the more colourful males thunder across the landscape with colourful and inflatable nasal and gular sacs hoping to woo the females. Young are born around early summer as aquatic vegetation once again turns the Polar Basin green, and are independent from birth. Young stay near the coast, as they are much easier pickings for aquatic predators, and their proportionately longer legs make them much nimbler on land than the massive, squat adults. During the winter, they shelter further south in the upperglades or night forest, where the denser vegetation and lack of larger predators in the perpetual darkness provide them greater protection. At this size, camouflaging and numbers are essential for their survival, as their armour is not nearly developed enough to protect them from most hunters; the defensive claw present in all skulossi, but is largely vestigial in adults (since they can't rear up to use it), does provide a last resort weapon when attacked for juveniles.