Hegs

Hegs are herbivorous quadrupedal gigafauna indigenous to The Nomad Plains. Their legs, heads, necks, and tails are covered in thick feathers which grow in patterns of green, brown, and yellow. These patterns, while not entirely unique, tend to make individual specimens recognizable from a distance, and often provide clues to their genetic families.

Basic Information

Anatomy

Hegs stand around 30 meters tall at the shoulder. Their shell can reach 30 meters from front (where the neck emerges) to the beginning of their tails, but is closer to 20 meters in most specimens. At its widest point, their backs stretch 20 meters as well. The shell is narrower at the neck and tail, having tapered to 10 meters or so.
They are digitigrade walkers, meaning they walk on their toes, but they have extremely thick and muscled legs, and there is significant support tissue which makes their feet appear to be more solid.
Their long tails curve just as they approach the ground, swinging back and forth with 2-3 meters clearance beneath them when they walk. The tail ends in a massive bone lump.
Hegs have a shell-like back covered in a layer of tiny feathers. These backs are broad and the arch is minuscule, so that hegs are often mistaken for having flat backs. The outside edge of this shell is rimmed with a row of horizontal spikes between 1-2 meters long, made of keratin-encased bones. Below are two more rows of progressively smaller spikes which angle downward.
They have flat-topped, arrow-like heads. A heg's beak is full of hundreds of flat teeth, plus a short front row of incisors, top and bottom. Some specimens also have keratin spike-like growths on the sides of their heads and their chins.

Ecology and Habitats

Hegs live exclusively in the savannah known as The Nomad Plains, and as adults they have no predators.
During the first year of life, griffins and great cats are known to hunt hegs. Only the most persistent of griffins regularly dine on heg flesh, however, as the back shell is difficult to get past. With its tail and body spikes, even a young heg can be a formidable opponent. A typical hunt involves knocking the heg over, ideally completely onto its back. The great cats of the savannah often hunt in small packs, enabling them to overwhelm a small heg. But griffins are solo hunters, and often cannot incapacitate even a fallen heg, which usually has time to get up and fight back when the griffin is ready for a second strike.
The greatest danger to a mature heg are quetzels. While the serpents do not hunt hegs, they frequently gather in hidden nests of dozens, if not hundreds, of individuals. Hegs cannot see their feet, and are prone to accidentally discovering such nests by stepping on them. The contents of a typical quetzel nest has more than enough venom to kill a fully-grown heg within minutes.

Biological Cycle

About every five years, females lay between 1-3 eggs in the Spring into a nest hole prepared by a courting male. The eggs are approximately a half meter long and weigh an average of 6 kilograms. The male will then fertilize and bury the eggs under a small mound.
After six months of incubation, featherless infants break through the shell and dig out of the nest mound. In the wild, the nomadic heg mother will not always have returned to the same spot, leaving the hatchlings to fend for themselves. Many abandoned hatchlings fall prey to griffins or other savannah predators. Finding food is not a problem, as the grasses and grains native to the region grow freely, but protection and shelter are not simple to find.
Fortunately, hatchling hegs will often imprint on any adult heg nearby, and it is not uncommon for a wild heg, male or female, to raise the young.
Domesticated hegs almost always have an adult, often their biological parent, near when they hatch. Hegs are indispensable to the Talka way of life, so when one lays eggs, the Talka remember where the nest is and return to the site to wait for the hatching.
Their first feathers appear during their first week, and a complete molt follows about every two months for the first 3 years, until finally their adult feathers grow in. At this stage, molting becomes an annual occurrence.
Baby hegs grow rapidly, eating enormous quantities of grass and grains. They reach a height of 4 meters within a year, and 20 meters within three years. The remainder of their growth takes another 10-15 years. But at the age of 3, a heg is fully capable of independence.
Sexual maturity is reached after 20-30 years. There is no known outward sign of this stage other than participating in the mating behaviors.
The total lifespan of a heg is between 100-150 years.

Behaviour

Wild hegs travel in small groups of 2-5 individuals often called families, though with the exception of an adult raising young, as often as not there are no mated pairs or parent-child relationships in families. The makeup of a family will shift over the years. An individual will decide to leave or join a family, seemingly on a whim. Observers have not discovered a reason for these changes.
There does not appear to be a dominant individual in most families. When one member decides to go somewhere, the others usually follow, apparently enjoying each other's company. Which member strikes out in a new direction changes from day to day. The motivation for their movement is usually finding more food.
Hegs eat constantly, sometimes even in sleep. The native plant life of the savannah grows rapidly, but even so, a family of hegs can eat most everything worth eating in a given area in a day. Hegs prefer to clip plants off to eat them, but if their incisors have been worn down, or a plant is tough, they will rip the entire plant out of the ground and consume it all, including any clumps of soil that came with it. They do not digest the soil, and it passes quickly through their digestive system, occasionally bringing seeds with them, thus helping the plants spread.

Additional Information

Domestication

For all their size, hegs do not deal well with changes in climate, and thus there are no domesticated hegs except those belonging to the Talka people.
The Talka build their homes upon the backs of hegs, using long poles that arch over the beast to form a framework, and then covering the framework with hides or other textiles. Rope ladders are used to ascend and descend from the huts thus made.
Domesticated hegs travel in a predictable cycle, but are still guided by appointed heg-masters. Partially this is to prevent the animal from stumbling into a quetzel nest, but they also keep them traveling in the circuit the Talka have always used in that region.
Domesticated hegs are trained not to eat the Talka's crops, but the heg-masters are still vigilant to keep their charges from forgetting and destroying the season's work.
Wild hegs are nearly impossible to domesticate, and heg-masters need to begin working with hegs from the moment they hatch to keep them as part of the Talka's herd. But, while early intervention is absolutely necessary, it is not necessary to keep them constantly supervised. The first meeting in their infancy, plus regular visits, and being present with the adult hegs raising the young is enough to keep hegs friendly.

Hegs are among the largest animals on Azmoth, rivaling even the largest sea monsters and dragons in size. While sea monsters are beasts of the sea and dragons are beasts of the air, hegs dominate the land. This set of observations has led some to claim that there must be a giant creature of arboreal nature, paralleling the four groupings of human and angel elemental associations. The overwhelming number of scholars call this line of thinking a load of dragon offal.