How my Elivera World came to be

Writing excuses has been exploring the flora and fauna in world-building: Writing Excuses 7.2 and Writing Excuses 7.3

I spent a lot of time devising this backstory to my Elivera world – over ten years now to be honest. The podcasts link above have reminded me of the origins of my Elivera world and many of the strange denizens on the planet itself. I first started with a world that held predators that seemed to live in shadows and ate energy; the world also had giant trees that were nearly a mile high and had high mountain regions. I then extrapolated from there.

In my Elivera world, a lot of the creatures are very different from those that evolved on earth. For example, there is a creature that lives mostly in shadows and abhors daylight, for it eats the chemical energy – specifically the neurotransmitters within an animal brain. It does this by placing its mouth upon the creature’s head, it’s tongue burrowing through the eye sockets or through the ear canals and into the brain, where it sucks out the neurotransmitters – the chemicals that are sent from neuron to neuron. However, it dies if exposed to too much sunlight, for its body cannot handle certain wavelengths of light.

So there’s a few different species of this family of energy sucking creatures on this world. They evolved within the dark caves of the Egoni island and also within the dark areas of the giant Raliok trees. Raliok trees can grow to the height of a mile or so, and so because of their thick vegetation, the canopy of these giant rainforests are thick, allowing very little light to reach the forest’s floor. In such a dark and damp environment, these creatures evolved to use echolocation to sense the location of animals, as well as sensory organs that are sensitive to certain types of smells emitted by their prey.

These predators are in turn eaten by fairly large spider-like carnivores, who create webs to trap the shadow creatures. These carnivore spiders live extremely long lives and only have one or two children every decade. A lot of the creatures on Elivera are nocturnal and are able to swiftly and easily climb through the branches of these Raliok trees.

From those two alone, we have creatures very different from our own Earth.

Elivera, itself, is a world that has a lighter gravity than earth. It’s smaller in size and less dense. It’s atmosphere is fairly rich in nitrogen and oxygen. Most of the carbon dioxide and methane from creatures and planetary tectonics is used up by the giant mile high forests that cover a lot of the temperate and equatorial regions of the planet. A lot of its mountains are very high with deep valleys. Around 60% of the world is land and the other 30% is water. It has three moons, one close to its own size, and the other two fairly small. In all honesty, it’s hard to tell if the planet orbits its largest moon or its largest moon orbits the planet. The other two moons orbit at a fairly large distance, and are captured asteroids. One of the three moons will exit the Elivera orbit entirely in a little less than a million years since it’s orbit is slowly taking it further and further from Elivera itself. Due to the close proximity of the largest moon, the plate tectonics were very active in their youth, allowing for large mountain chains and interesting geologic features as well as great tidal influences on the oceans. However, over time, the tidal forces abated somewhat due to a lengthening of the distance between the largest moon and Elivera; this, in turn, quieted some of the tectonic activity, although it is still a bit more active than Earth’s.

The main sentient species is actually descended from birds and panther like creatures, and so have the ability to fly but also walk on four legs. Due to the ecology of the planet, the DNA of these creatures are pliant, and because they often would go into the canopy of the Raliok trees, up and down mountains, into caves, across deserts, and even into the oceans – their DNA evolved in a manner that allowed them minor shape-shifted abilities. The shape-shifting was subtle as their body adjusted to the new environment, and so they were able to fly into new regions and populate them. They called themselves the Dragios.

Over time they built a highly advanced technological civilization, which allowed them to visit other worlds. This is how they found Earth. They spent centuries watching humans evolve on earth, mostly out of curiosity. Their governments enacted strict rules to avoid tampering with humanity’s evolution. So they merely watched; however, a few rogue scientists sometimes would take a few of the poor or abandoned specimens of human society for study. They were sometimes seen by humans, and so became enshrined in legends as dragons or werewolves or other mythical creatures (depending on what form they resembled in the encounter). In their advanced society they experimented on themselves, giving themselves a wider range of shape-shifting alterations. Due to this, they were able to fashion their bodies into a more bipedal form, allowing for somewhat close encounters with humans, which in turn helped shape humanity’s ideas of gods and/or goddesses.

However, in the far future, beyond our present time, humanity engages in a fierce civil war, where nuclear weapons are used and the land itself is destroyed. With the climate becoming quickly inhospitable and global warming at its peak, the Dragios opened up their watcher portals and began to rescue as much of the human populations as they were able. However, in order for humans to survive on Elivera, the Dragios people were forced to alter humanity’s genome due to the very different ecology it held.

This is how humans come to Elivera and how thanks to the Dragios altering parts of their DNA, they are able to survive on Elivera and evolve slowly into a new form of humanity.

This is the world in which the majority of my novels and stories take place.

What about you, my readers? How did you come up with your worlds and what are they like?