This post is for Loch of the Nothic’s Eye blog. I have previously written of the arctic, with the post; Doomed Polar Expeditions to Dread Hyperborea. This post shares some linkage with it and they can be used in conjunction with each other - while generating your polar expedition ask; ‘Which arctic hominid does the Imperial Zoological Society expect us to study and capture?’
This post is very much inspired by Man after Man, a speculative look into mankind’s future evolution, as well as All Tomorrows (check them both out). The illustrations bookending this blog post are taken from Man after Man. There is something of a horror tone to this post and (hopefully?) the same kind of biological, deep-time nihilism that can be felt in my inspiring texts.
Look and see! There, across the bitter expanse of the biting ice, those desperate, god-severed beasts. Descended from the proto-human thralls that, in long-ancient times, fled the eldritch and beetling-fortresses of Dread Hyperborea. These creatures are but uncanny reflections of humanity, bent by weird eons - in and by this accursed arctic landscape.
1. Homo Hyperboreus Servilis
Said by liberal-minded zoologists to be our closest relative in the Dread North. They're stocky and hirsute, with short yet powerful limbs to help retain warmth and their smooth and pale, mask-like faces are framed with
and ringed with bristling white fur that flows down to cover the rest of their bodies. These hominids have formed various tribes and cultures - Cadaver-Dwellers who shelter in the beached bodies of great sea-things, the Topaz-Eyed who pierce their cheeks and brows with jewels or the Autophagic Tribes of whom we’d rather not speak. Their myths tell obscurely of their primordial thralldom in the cities of Hyperborea and may prove useful in our expedition. Likewise their guttural language is likely derived from a primordial Hyperborean slave creole and may be useful in the study of the Dread Hyperborean language itself.
4. Siateen1
Numbering only a few hundred, these coast-dwelling beings are humanoid and well-proportioned, their skin in grey and smooth save for their wisened, whiskered faces. They wear no clothing save for thongs of dried seagrass. While their grey-mottled blubbery hide shields them from much of the cold, they nonetheless huddle for warmth around smoky fires and live in unadorned wickiups made from dried leathery seaweed on the stony beaches of Hyperborea. They are well adapted to the sea and can swim at speed in the frigid waters of the arctic in search of sustenance. Their language is unpronounceable to us, just as ours is to them, and while we struggle to understand their barks and gruff purrs, they can quickly grasp the meaning of our words. They are sea-cave worshippers, revering those deep and inaccessible places as sacred.
5. Simiformis Carnifex2
The apex predator of the frozen north. Twelve feet tall at the shoulder, its loping legs propel it with speed, digitigrade across the snow and its hunched spine and long-bristled back supports its over developed simian head and toothsome jaw. Their balance is kept by a swollen, fleshy protuberance or pseudo-tail (not too dissimilar to that of a baboon3) and two long gibbon-like arms remain tucked close to their white-furred bodies. These arms have considerable reach and are deployed with speed to snatch up smaller prey, drawing them into a Simiformis’ hungry and powerful jaws. The Simiformis Carnifex are solitary and keenly cunning predators; they hunt elk ravenously, make havoc in Throngling colonies and even prey on crawling whales and polar bears.
2. The Manotherium
Great, lumbering shaggy beasts, their hunched body’s enormous weight rendering them incapable of human bipedalism. The Manotherium’s wizened, drooping face and sad baggy eyes suggest a human intelligence. The index finger and thumb on a manotherium’s forehands have developed into powerful yet dexterous pseudo-pincers that it uses to uproot the tundra shrubs and grasses on which it subsists and can easily pulp a man or elk. The Manotherium is becoming less extant as their favoured shrubs and mosses have been overgrazed and while revered by the hominids of Hyperborea, the humans of the southern tundra see them as prize hunts.
3. Thronglings
A gawking, yammering horde of brown tufty beings. These squat hominids, bound in frost-rimed, matted brown down, huddle against the cold in enormous, foetid colonies. Their colonies range from a few hundred beings to several thousand. They use their cruelly hooked thumbs for prying open shells and molluscs and can be seen gathering and eating washed up seaweed and mouthing the blubber of beached sea creatures like cud. Socially, they practice a form of survival-first feudalism wherein the warrior-nobility bully their way to the warm middle of the colony. However, these warriors are expected to rush to the colony's perimeter at times of danger. Should warriors become lazy and indolent, they will be exiled or trampled to death. They exhibit tribalism and should two colonies converge on the same territory, the resulting clash is bloody and brutal. Victories are often pyrrhic with the arctic ice stained with blood and littered with frost-rimed tufts of the dead and dying. They have no discernable language.
6. Arctic-Shrew Men
Hopping, sable-furred rodent-like things with pink simian faces. Small and chittering, they live in snow warrens not unlike our rabbits. They exhibit social organisation and planning skills, so much so that despite being less than a foot tall they predate on Crawling Whales; it takes an entire troupe to bring one down. The Crawling Whale typically does not make attempts on prey as small as the Shrew Men and they take this to their advantage, positioning their entire troupe strategically around the whale with their bone-harpoons. Once slain, the troupe must act with haste, devouring and harvesting the crawling whale’s carcass, the white fur of their mouths ringed with crimson, before scavengers arrive. The sight is something to behold.
7. Mørketid Worm
Unlikely the result of natural evolution, the Morketid Worm is a horrific and undulating, neotenic slitherer that hunts exclusively during the long winter months of 24-hour darkness. Its larval stage, buried in the earth, during the summer of the midnight sun is strangely human, a smooth and statuesque humanoid. But when the sun sets for winter, there emerges a 15-foot long, mottled black worm, set against the black leathery folds of its ‘face’, two human eyes sit above a round and gnashing maw - vestigial arms and legs that attempt to propel the Mørtid worms slithering mass through the deep snow with a useless, driven aggression. The Morketid Worm’s unusual hunting method is to jet tepid gouts of water onto its prey - a death sentence in the icy cold of the arctic night. The hypothermic prey is then pursued with a relentless, pseudo-human intelligence through the dark and snow, the worm sniffing the air with a long human-looking tongue, bifurcated many times.
8. Snow-Heads or the Demon Ice-Kappa of Ur-Tzk Flow.
Solitary creatures with hairless, rubbery, white skin and black-ringed eyes, the Snow-Heads are most known for their bowl-like craniums, ever-packed with snow. These inexplicable creatures gibber endlessly on the icy expanse, performing their gangly pendulous, directionless dancing. They don’t appear to eat or sleep but when viewed from above it can be seen that they have walked strange sigils into the snow and can likewise be seen clawing eldritch monograms into exposed rock. If looked upon they react with aggression. While their dense rubbery flesh resists most damage, they are mortally wounded by boiling water, and should their cranium be emptied of snow they will die. An explorer that survived a close encounter with a Snow-Head swore that it began to speak in his language, with his own accent, of things that only he knew.
