Fauna
The Last Leyrider is known only from petrified bones, fossil chord-imprints, and a handful of pre-collapse Valari murals. Reconstructions show a fourteen-meter quadruped of slate-blue hide veined in gold leyline-patterns that pulsed in time with Originis' magnetic chord. The skull was ridge-domed and bore paired down-curving tusks of pale ivory, each tusk fluted with chord-channels through which the beast was said to hum the planet's deep song. A spiked dorsal ridge marched from poll to tail, every spike a true ley-crystal grown from the hide. Its tread reportedly synchronized leylines for kilometers, brightening crops along the path. Eyes were placed laterally and were, by every fossil socket, enormous; whatever color they were has been guessed at endlessly. The thick legs ended in cloven pads cushioned for shock, suited to a slow, steady continental migration that the murals show ringed in golden light. Nothing alive today has matched the species' chord-presence.
Every Veyari subtype keeps some memory of the Last Leyrider. The Valari call its passing the Quiet Year; Cael fliers say the sky's chord shifted by a half-tone when the herds died and never came back. Modern chord-mages still tune their first staff to the imagined low-chord of a Leyrider's tusk, and pilgrims walk the petrified migration-paths each spring hoping a fossil bone will hum if a true heir of the species is ever born again.
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