On the strength of a child's report that she'd found a wyvern nest, Tyoka left the safety of camp. He donned his battered weatherproof cloak and headed into the depths of the rainforest he'd devoted his life — and a substantial amount of magic — to nourishing. Following his niece's directions, he hurried over blue frog's pond bridge, past the great scarred rock and up the little hill overlooking the clear waters of a mangrove stand. Nestled in the exposed roots of the tallest tree, he found what Jdanve described, and his stomach clenched. Not one of the rare wyvern eggs he hoped to protect, but a snapper cocoon instead. It had maybe looked like an egg once, when the outer layer was still opaque, but that must have been days ago. By now, the cocoon was so translucent the old mage could make out the red spots on the deadly creature's bile-yellow hide. The beak was hidden, tucked into its chest and curled beneath its powerful tail, but Tyoka recognized it anyway. It had none of the wings or rainbow majesty that made Nakayrande's native wyverns so beautiful. It was a misshapen lump, with claws like daggers and geysers of toxic chemicals bubbling under its skin, ready to poison anything that came into contact. He imagined Jdanve reaching out with curious hands to touch it while it hatched and flinched. Anger blossomed in his chest, masking his fear like a callous after a cut. The damn things had no business in Verraine, much less in the rainforests of Nakayrande. Some Realmwalker two thousand years ago brought the horrible creatures through one of the holes between worlds. It had probably been an accident — the really powerful mages never seemed to consider the consequences of their actions. For all Tyoka knew, some old bastard absentmindedly left behind eggs he'd brought for dinner — but regardless, they'd spread. Fully grown snappers were functionally immune to magic, could regenerate limbs and organs, and ran faster than most horses. Of course the monstrous beasts managed to spread. Normally, Tyoka didn't have to worry about them. Snappers rarely ate enough to trigger metamorphosis. When they did, though, it was enough to devastate entire regions. The last fully adult snapper he'd heard of stopped the advance of a foreign army cold. Hundreds of mages over hundreds of years tried to kill it; in the end, they'd just barely managed to starve it into torpor. Even then, they destroyed leagues and leagues of fertile forest to manage the feat. If he didn't stop this snapper now, Nakayrande would suffer the same fate. Not about to see his homeland decimated by a monster from beyond the sea, at least not without a fight, Tyoka sucked magic from the reservoir of his aura. With a quick prayer to the gods of his ancestors, he focused it into a spear. With a single deep breath to settle his stomach, Tyoka took careful aim. If he didn't get the spellwork just right, the beast would explode out of its cocoon, wounded and furious, and choose Tyoka — and all the power in his aura — as its first meal. If Tyoka _did_ manage the shot, he'd still have to deal with a pile of poisonous meat the size of a double-hulled canoe and thrice as heavy. He would rather have a wyvern to study. The universe rarely handed people their preference. Tyoka released the aural power he'd gathered, the single vicious jab more than sufficient to pierce the brittle cocoon. It did not so much as dent the snapper's hide. The beast was too close to finishing its metamorphosis. It unfurled herself with a furious cry, revealing the squat, wide triangle of its abdomen. Female, and therefore three times the size of the only other snapper he'd ever battled. She lunged out of her cocoon, the popping sounds emerging from her rounded maw a clear signal of her fury. Tyoka flung himself backward to dodge the lunge, but didn't dare try to escape. His niece deserved to run free in the lands of her ancestors, and she wouldn't be able to if he allowed this monster to gain a foothold here. He had to kill it. It was thinking the same thing about him. The snapper blinked its wet, bulbous eyes at Tyoka, then charged. Tyoka squeezed his eyes shut and dove into the nearby river. Snappers were unaffected by magic, but Tyoka wasn't. He poured his power into the muck at the bottom of the swamp as he swam, eel-quick, through the murky water. A few heartbeats later, he scrabbled into in an airtight, air-filled container at the bottom of the river, counting on the beast's predatory instincts. This soon after hatching, it would be close to starving, and Tyoka was the biggest prey around. The snapper obliged, sloughing off the goopy enzymes that fueled its transformation as it splashed into the river after him. The crystal blue water of the forest floor instantly turned cloudy. Tyoka was forced to navigate by touch as he hoisted himself along the ceiling of the tube as fast as he could manage. The hammer-boom sounds of the snapper's tail slamming into the sides echoed through the murky water. Disoriented, ears ringing, lungs burning, Tyoka barely managed to squeeze through the narrow opening he'd left at the end of the trap. Tyoka darted for the surface. Impossible to concentrate on magic when he couldn't breathe. He breached, gasping for air, then slammed his magic into the closest cypress tree. He shoved it down into the mouth of the trap with the same spell he'd once used to drive piles into harbor bottoms. The magic fizzled away, absorbed by the snapper's damnable hide, but it served its purpose. The beast's desperate attempt to escape its prison echoed through the swamp, and Tyoka hoped the tree would hold long enough for him to craft something more permanent. He siphoned more magic from his aura, adding layers to the trap, compressing mud and half-decayed plant matter into an impenetrable cage. He didn't stop until he'd exhausted his magic, and his legs from treading water for so long. The next day, he brought Jdanve over the blue-fog pond bridge, past the great scarred rock and up to the little hill with the rip-root cave. From the safety of shore, he taught her the difference between a cocoon and an eggshell, and how to weave snapper traps. How to thicken them, and check them, and ensure the beasts could never escape. One day, when she finished growing, the beast would die, and she could harvest its hide for a cloak just like his. Then, Nakayrande would be hers to protect. --- ## AFTERWORD This story and its forthcoming spinoffs were directly inspired by a bunch of articles I stumbled across (thanks to a discovery engine called [Refind](https://refind.com/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=barter&utm_campaign=Mn6vY1aQFu5DtmSrH9P7sg), actually). My favorites were about how [indigenous people are best placed to protect the environment](https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-returning-lands-to-native-tribes-is-helping-protect-nature) and therefore [stave off climate change disasters through conservation efforts](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/25/indigenous-peoples-by-far-the-best-guardians-of-forests-un-report). Although climate change is not a threat facing the inhabitants of Verraine (the setting for all my "high fantasy" stories) at this particular time in history, conservation is still important. The mass destruction of biomes has all sorts of implications for destroying people's way of life. The indigenous people of the eastern marshlands aren't fools; the marshes protect them from neighboring states, which would love to drain the wetlands and fill them with taxpaying citizens. The locals would prefer to preserve their own culture, and have a sense that their way of life is healthier for the land in the long run — which matters to them a great deal. As part of my day job as a Social Studies teacher, I teach a unit on the Amazon Rainforest and its importance, but also the hard ethical questions involved in preserving it. Economic challenges are always at the forefront of those discussions, but in many ways that's because money is at the heart of modern power, especially at the nation-state level. My question was: what would conservation look like in a world where _magic_ is power? What threats could conservation efforts reasonably face, that might actually be interesting to write about in a fantasy world? I settled on invasive species. When I first wrote those stories, I hadn't put much thought into Surzi's biology or role in the ecosystem. The imagery just kind of came to me. Since then, I've been trying to fit that piece into the wider puzzle for months. Everything in the universe of Verraine has to fit together somehow. I asked myself: how could an immortal creature immune to magic could possibly have come to exist? Almost by fluke, a subscriber actually gave me the last piece of the puzzle I needed: axolotls. They came up in reference to an entirely different storyline I was working on, involving a swamp city located on an artificial island. A young man winds up fighting marsh monsters while performing his labor tax for the local government, and I wanted the marsh monsters to be interesting. Axolotls are native to Mexico, and the Aztecs did their farming on artificial islands called chinampas. Axolotls, which I mentioned in the [Bones](https://eleanorkonik.com/bones/) %% ( [[2021-11-22 Bones]] ) %% edition, are native to that region of the world — and have a lot of cool quirks, especially in terms of [regeneration](https://eleanorkonik.com/regeneration/) (which I wrote about in the December) and neoteny. But the more I read, the more I realized what a perfect opportunity I had to connect several other, half-formed ideas I had floating around. For those, I was mostly riffing off some scary childhood experiences with big snapping turtles. I'd also read about how [saltwater crocodiles are so aggressive they sometimes charge boats](https://godownsize.com/do-animals-attack-boats). The big ones will even attack humans. I was also brainstorming sea monsters for some stories I wanted to take place at sea. It turns out that orcas are one of the few animals that actually attack a ship deliberately, which you may remember from [last month's edition about fishing](https://eleanorkonik.com/fishing/). Most of the other "sea monster" myths come from malformed creatures. Animals with birth defects often star in folkloric stories, for example those I mentioned in the [Cat Tales](https://eleanorkonik.com/cat-tales/) %% ( [[2021-05-17 Cat Tales]] ) %% edition of this newsletter. So I sort of put all that together and came up with the idea for a snapper. I look forward to sharing more stories about them with you — hopefully it's fun to see how I turn all those research notes I sent on Mondays into stories!