Diaspora Wyrm
The icy ocean world of Nisis is the Diaspora’s heart, feeding Sarcesian crèche worlds and connecting them through the River Between. The Pact Worlds claim these waters, but in their depths lurk elusive monstrosities that truly rule them. Dubbed “diaspora wyrms” in legends from before The Gap, these predators resemble immense, fanged eels. Younger wyrms are sleek and sinuous, while older ones bear fringes of calcium-based scales. Instead of eyes, a wyrm has frills sensitive to electromagnetic fields. Organs in the wyrm’s head allow it to shape its field, producing waves that allow communication.
Popular fiction depicts these wyrms as beasts, because in addition to being hostile to intruders in their seas, the wyrms communicate through electrocommunication in a way often undetectable without proper sensors. Nevertheless, diaspora wyrms are sapient, and some grow sagacious over their centuries-long lives. They communicate among themselves, working to keep and pass on their legacy. So central is this fixation that the wyrms’ name for themselves translates roughly to “those in observation.”
Diaspora wyrms predate the Diaspora’s formation. According to their history, they evolved in a subterranean sea on one of the twin worlds that, when destroyed, created the asteroid belt. When that world cracked apart, the chunk containing their home survived intact for a time, its egg-like outer layers slowly breaking away or sinking down into the new planetoid’s core in a process the wyrms call “the Hatching.” This planetoid became Nisis. In its waters, the wyrms adjusted to their changed environment. They evolved the ability to alter the water around them to recreate the darkness that birthed them. The molecular change the wyrms create is lasting, and when the wyrm releases the changed water, it renders the surrounding liquid cloudy as the altered molecules disperse. These particles break down, but not quickly.
Today, the oldest and wisest wyrms, called sages, keep mostly to Nisis’s depths, obeying an ancestral mandate to protect the Broodnest. This mazelike coral reef is not only the wyrms’ home but also an elegant organic network bearing electrical fields that record the wyrms’ history—though like any other record, fractured by the Gap.
Wyrms that attack the settlements inside the planet’s ice shell are usually young ones that hunt for food and sport until maturity and duty draw them back into the depths. However, some sages have begun preparing the wyrms for the possibility that Nisis’s oceans are freezing permanently. Believing the only way to ensure their species’ survival is to colonize new worlds, these wyrms have been scouting the River Between, darkening its waters as they hunt for a way to escape their fate. Wyrms in Nisis’s depths have purposely darkened water there and released it in cycles, simultaneously darkening Nisis’s ocean. An average diaspora wyrm is 15 feet long and weighs 1,200 pounds. However, diaspora wyrms grow throughout their lives. The largest can be up to 30 feet long and weigh over 5 tons.
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