The Hawkinsae are two distinct, diverse phyla of vertebrate arthropods, one sharing many traits with arachnids and the other being terrestrial crustaceans. They are named for the Etrusean biologist Sofia Hawkins, who was the first to describe the "Hawkins Gap," noting a distinct area of body mass ratio in which there were no insects at all and thus concluding that the Hawkinsae were a distinct group. Since then it has been concluded they are actually two, but in general the term is used to describe both groups outside of biological sciences. The Hawkinsae are predominantly single-sex species using similar methods of reproduction to their mammal, reptile and amphibian counterparts, though there are some with males; some lay eggs, while others have live young. Many species nurse their young, usually using glands located underneath the sternite plates on their undersides.

Both branches have an odd trait of not being belligerent towards bipeds, which has gone from being a useless quirk to perhaps the greatest advantage the Hawkinsae have.

All Hawkinsae in the arachnid branch are related to a common extinct ancestor, the Devonian Sea Spider. This 12-foot tailless whip scorpion shared features common to all its descendants; two large, well-developed forelimbs, a primitive calcified endoskeleton in addition to its exoskeleton, true lungs, eight walking legs, eight eyes, two sets of antennae, and three distinct sets of mandibles. This creature lived in shallows and used a hunting strategy resembling that of a modern crocodile.

The ancestor of the crustacean branch appears to have been a creature similar to modern amphibious trilobites. These species generally still have eight eyes and three sets of mouthparts, but typically have fourteen walking legs and no well-developed forelimbs.

Bipedal examples are typically descended from cricket-like tree species with highly developed rear walking legs and the rest decreased in size; for example, moth-people are related to a genus of hopping moths, and have six bumps on their lower ribcage that are the remnants of their other legs and are used to anchor their wing muscles.

These species have merged primary eyes; bipedal bees have a single pair of eyes with a four-lobed pupil made from all of their ancestral eyes, while other species retain shiny compound eyebands on their cheeks and have a two-lobed pupil. Their similar facial form is achieved with a lower jaw made from two fused mandibles, while another pair typically manifest as front toothplates that can move independently of the rest of the jaw. The remaining pair are reduced to vestigial floating plates in the cheeks.

Chiran Spotted Silk Moth

Spotted Silk Moths are among the smaller Hawkinsae: a full-grown moth has a wingspan of around a foot, and over an average lifespan of around 30 years they will grow by another six inches or so. They are omnivores, but can survive happily on a diet consisting almost entirely of simple sugars; they do have some instincts related to hunting and will eat small insects. Their three sets of mouthparts are divided into two pairs of dextrous inner mandibles and a pair of horizontal sideplates that close over them and are used for nibbling.

Like all Hawkins Moths, their forelimbs are held vertically and resemble mantis claws, and they have three distinct types of eye; two complex forward-facing eyes, four shiny compound eyebands, and two almost invisible rear-facing eyes that allow them to perceive motion behind them. They lack eyelids, but have a small indent on the inner face of each foreclaw containing soft, moist fur-like hairs that they use to wash their primary eyes and to cover them when sleeping.

Their antennae are of two types, a straight horizontal set for general sensing and a very fine, feathery set for precise flight information that curve back over their heads. They are very protective of the latter and do not like them being touched. Unlike insect moths, they do not use celestial navigation and so are not confused by artificial lighting or flames.

They are social, friendly and endearingly stupid creatures, with the approximate intelligence of kittens. They share the common Hawkinsae capacity for associative reasoning, though their ability to do so is quite simplistic. They communicate with each other using claw gestures and simple vocalisations; soft chirps, purring sounds, or urgent squeaks if they are alarmed.

Like all Hawkins Moths, Silk Moths have no larval stage, bypassing this state in their egg before hatching as miniature adults. As hatchlings they are almost completely white except their foreclaws, which are hardened so they can open their egg, and over their first few molts they will slowly acquire their adult colour, an all-over blue with white speckles on their wings. Their thorax is covered in soft fluff, which is greyish when they hatch, turning blue to match the rest of their body over time.

They have the most simplistic skeleton of any Hawkins Moth species; their small size means they do not require leg bones for support, instead only having a skull, ribcage, hipbones and an extension of their spine that runs the length of their abdomen. The stiffeners in the front surface of their wings are cartilage rather than bone.

Silk Moths are diurnal and spin messy nests with trip lines that they rest their foreclaws on while sleeping; in the wild, they will nest high up on the trunks of trees and spin the triplines so a predator climbing the trunk will trigger them. Their silk glands incorporate the hip muscles of their rearmost pair of walking legs, which are permanently folded against their abdomen as a result; they are used both as steering vanes in flight and to manipulate silk while spinning.

Domesticated moths are traditionally taught to sleep on a silk cushion placed inside a porcelain bowl. The moth will spin her nest around the bowl and lead the trip lines only up to the edge of the cushion, allowing the nest to be dismantled easily while they sleep without alerting them. Silk Moths will become distressed if their nest is dismantled too frequently, but otherwise will simply wonder where it has gone until they forget what the problem was.

Spotted Silk Moths are important to the Chiran economy; as well as producing silk, they also pollinate the carnivorous Chiran Tea Plant*, a sundew-like bog plant which has a mutualistic relationship with them. Tea plants produce sweet red growths with a distinctive scent to draw moths to them since Silk Moths are not attracted to flowers; these are laced with extremely potent poisons that are harmless to Silk Moths. They will instinctively avoid the trap leaves, though the sticky secretions will not adhere to a Silk Moth's body anyway. This means wild Silk Moths are typically purple in late summer. Chiran farmers typically remove the "fruits" as soon as they start to develop and replace them with sugary substitutes, since it makes their moths safer to handle.

In some Chiran belief systems a Silk Moth was thought to be a soul that had entered the mortal world but was not yet ready to be born. The story of the moth-in-the-moon, Jia, results in this being the most common name for moths owned as pets; farmers, however, will never use the name, believing it to be unfair to their other moths to name one after the spirit.

Hawkeater Moth

The Hawkeater Moth is the supreme aerial predator of Etrusea and the largest of all Hawkins Moths, with a wingspan that can reach twenty-five feet and a body length of up to six. Like most predatory moths, the Hawkeater sacrifices one pair of walking legs; these are raised up to attach to their front pair of wings, which are articulated like bird wings and formed of large scale segments which resemble oversized feathers. The rear pair of wings are simpler. Also like other predatory moths, Hawkeaters have the ability to hover by beating their wing pairs in opposite time.

Their inner mouthparts are fused into a beak-like structure specialised for tearing, and their sideplates are heavily muscled and reinforced. Their body is covered in thick plating and an overall stony grey, with mottled patterns on the wings; the bony plating is often host to lichens that assist them in blending in with the rocky hills they would naturally make their nests in. In modern Etrusea, they prefer to nest in abandoned buildings.

Their sheer size means they cannot stand on surfaces in the same way as smaller moths, instead producing an extremely tough resin from their footpads, which they alternate with an enzyme that dissolves it.

They have the same configuration of antennae as their smaller cousins, though the horizontal set are stiff and covered in plating. They possess steering membranes on their abdomen and a fantail resembling an enlarged lobster tail. When their children are young, they will cling to their mother's abdomen and sense muscle movements, steering her with their own wings; a Hawkeater with four daughters is actually more agile than she would normally be.

Their offspring are born live, usually in pairs; the parent who carries them will raise them, while the other will return to her own territory and occasionally return to see them. They are not strictly solitary and form loose groups, but retain large areas of territory out of practical need as an apex predator. Many do not have children, and Etrusea's Hawkeater population is relatively stable as a result.

Hawkeaters are one of two non-bipedal species regarded as sentient; they almost completely lack the ability to process spoken or written language (only being able to understand the concept to the point of knowing that words mean things), but are remarkably intelligent. Etrusean testing with a Hawkeater with four young daughters determined that she understood the purpose of the tests as well as the tests themselves, and would occasionally have her children perform tests she did not believe were supposed to be for her because she found them too simplistic.

They have mutualistic relationships with several smaller Etrusean bird species that keep them clean, and sometimes try to extend this to biped species; it is a bad idea to leave an opening to one's house large enough for a Hawkeater to enter unless one wishes to find a giant moth waiting in the shower hoping to be washed. They will sometimes take stray animals as pets; they also tend to regard small Hawkins Moths with affection and find their behaviour charming.

In spite of their name, they typically prey on large non-predatory birds such as geese and swans. The name comes from an Etrusean children's tale that may be based on a true story, about a young Basram noble who causes trouble by flying his hawk wherever he pleases, until finally he flies it near a forest that is home to a moth that snatches it out of the air. The moral of the story is usually said to be "don't be arrogant," though in Aludra it is interpreted as a warning to understand why the rules exist before one breaks them.

Chiran Enasi

Enasi are large grazing pillbugs used as beasts of burden in Chira. An adult Enasi can be the size of a truck and weigh over three tons. They are almost always dull grey with paler grey at the edge of their body plates, though they may have paler mottling. Their first set of antennae is tiny, while the second set is a large pair of jointed feelers that they use to sense ahead of themselves, compensating for their relatively poor eyesight.

Unlike the smaller related species found on the island of Omar, an Enasi only has the ability to curl up as an infant; as she grows her body flattens out, leading to an adult more closely resembling a woodlouse.

Enasi are not particularly intelligent, to the point that they will often simply lie down and cover their eyes when startled. They are sufficiently large that they have no natural predators. They can be trained to pull ploughs and tow carts fairly easily, and are very important to Chira's rural economy, where they are still as common as motor vehicles.

They react badly to anything being attached to their antennae and will try to eat anything put in their mouths, which means handling them requires teaching them to understand hand or foot taps; they respond to a combination of sound, pressure, and movement in their peripheral vision.

While Enasi are also used for food, they are not farmed for meat; this would be impractical, since an Enasi takes fourteen years to reach her adult size. Usually they are killed with anaesthetic poisons when they are elderly, since such poisons are harmless to the Chiran metabolism; there is a lot of ceremony associated with doing so to give thanks to the creature for the work she did during her life. Their carapace plates are typically kept to be used as plough blades.

Kraken

Krakens are vast sea creatures that possess both gills and lungs, descended from ancestors that laid their eggs on land but never became fully terrestrial, and abandoned this strategy as it became untenable. They appear to be related more closely to crustacean Hawkinsae, but have all but lost their rearmost legs, while their front eight limbs have become gigantic oar-like flippers. They appear to have once had compound eyebands, but these have become so large that a Kraken has one hundred fully-functional eyes. Their body is shield-shaped with a long tail, and they possess a set of lungs in each main body segment; their breathing openings are in the upper surface of their body and normally sealed under the joints between body segments. They open up as the creature breaches the surface, and a Kraken blows out distinctive twin spouts of water from each segment as she breathes.

Krakens can stay underwater indefinitely using only their gills to breathe, but use their lungs when they are hunting; they are omnivores that can feed on plankton, decaying plant matter or virtually any other sea creature, and were known to attack wooden-hulled ships in the age of sail. Only one such attack is recorded on a modern ship, by a juvenile that almost sank the factory ship of an Aludran fishing fleet.

They are rarely sighted; it is generally suggested that all known sightings are of animals outside of their normal feeding grounds, and that they live almost exclusively in the Sea of Clouds.

The largest known Kraken was a 350-foot example photographed by the Chiran fleet before the Battle of Laurent Abyss; it has been suggested she was drawn to the surface by the silhouette of the enormous Chiran fleet carrier Alana. There is substantial evidence that Krakens can grow larger than this, however.

In particular, the relics called the Queen's Lance and Tauberg's Spear are thought to be flipper bones that washed ashore after being shed by a Kraken of incredible age. It is believed this creature is a literal "living fossil" and quite possibly the last of her kind, since her flippers possess archaic features not present on any known specimen of a modern Kraken. Their scale, if the creature's flippers are of similar size compared to her body, suggests a creature no less than seven hundred and fifty feet in length, which would mean an age of around twenty-eight thousand years. This creature may have been the one that inspired Alcacian legends.

Kraken in legend

Alcacians, the horse-ogres of the misty isles, believed Hri, the supreme being, forged the world on her anvil from the first metal at the dawn of time. Hri is an entity of such immeasurable power that both Gods and mortals are the same compared to her, and is not worshipped since no mortal's voice could possibly be noticed by her.

As Hri worked, the sparks that were kicked up from her forge drifted away and became the Goddesses and Gods of the Alcacian pantheon. When she completed her work, she set it down and them drew her mighty axe and drove it across the whole world, each nick in the blade creating a mountain range, dividing the land from the sky as far as the horizon in the East where the spirits of the dead dwell.

Kraken, the first living thing and the only one not created by the Gods, was born at the horizon where the land touched the sky, and created all the waters of the earth, for such was her will. Seeing this and fearing the power of the creature, the Gods planted the seed of the world tree, and presently the mother of all trees lifted the sky far above the earth and scattered her seeds across the world, creating all plants. Kraken covered much of her domain in a great mist she blew out from her body, allowing the Gods no dominion over her ocean.

Frustrated by their failure to bend her to their will, the gods attempted to outdo her vast ocean, filling the lands of the world with life. Finally they created others with wisdom and the power to create with their will, to be their servants; in those times, there was only one of each, and each stood fifty feet tall.

In time mortals, led by Freya, the mother of all Alcacians, sought to overthrow the Gods who enslaved them, and fought them in a great battle, Ashkhost, that lasted a century. Finally defeating the mortals at great cost to themselves, the Gods feared to enslave them again. Instead, they commanded that they no longer be one of each kind, so that mortals would never again have the strength to defeat Gods. This division also removed the ability of mortals to make things real with their will, and instead each was granted a voice** by the Gods.

Those who became the Brannae (little people) each became ten and fled to the domain of Brannock***, far across the ocean, that the Gods would not find them. Sly Freya only became four, that her children would have enough strength to do battle with the Gods again if they sought to make mortals their slaves as before, and remained in their sight on Alcacia. Only Kraken dared to defy them.

Kraken swam in her boundless ocean, and did not heed the Gods' call to become many; as such, she had no voice given to her. But Kraken blew water from her body as she broke the surface of her ocean, and in so doing formed a great arc of every colour of light to write her voice in the sky. Each time her water touches the land, Kraken's silent voice is seen across the world. Sometimes she remembers the cowardice of all living things on the land, and her waters rise up to punish them, but mostly she is content to bring the waters to the land twice a day, that mortals should never forget her.

*Chiran tea is misnamed due to Chiran intelligence assuming the drink made from brewed leaves on the continent must be the same as their "tay" due to its similar name; because it contains the sugary secretions from the trap leaves, it is sweet and contains a narcotic the plant uses to immobilise its prey. It has a mild relaxing and calming effect on biped species, and is a traditional evening drink in Chira, with many family ceremonies based around preparing it; it is also popular in Etrusea and Aludra, and on the island of Mirrai.
**The Alcacian concept of "voice" is an early conception of sentience; to eat any creature that is able to speak is a monstrous crime. Alcacians used to believe their non-sentient cousins the Bruna, huge bear-like tree-climbing creatures that still dwell in the forests of Alcacia, were Alcacians who had consumed the flesh of sentients and become beasts.
***Alacian knowledge of Brannae is odd since the "little people" were regarded as stories for children in Skuld's time; it is believed there may have been an ice bridge between Alcacia and the continent at some point and these legends represent dim memories of continental species.