The Wendauerian race are very humanoid in appearance, but are different in that they are far more advanced, yet still hold strong in the old ways of sun worship and cannibalism. They are sometimes of ill temper.

The Wendauerian race evolved on their homeworld of Erendauer, and expanded out into the neighbouring systems once they reached the level of technology required to produce controllable wormholes. Therefore, apart from the last few thousand years, the History of Wendauer is effectively the History of Erendauer. Later colonies such as Megiddo are covered in their own sections.

Erendauer, Geology and Geography

A relatively low percentage of the surface of Erendauer is covered in water (30-35%) and therefore erosion is considerably slower than that of earth. Convection currents within the planet’s mantle (mostly cadmium, iron and cobalt) also move more slowly. As a result, the flatter areas tend to be flatter, and mountainous ones very sharply mountainous. The lower percentage of oceanic versus continental plate means although tectonic activity is infrequent it is far more violent, resulting in once-a-century planet-quakes which may affect from 20-80% of the planet’s surface, often having devastating effect on the life. As a result, life on Erendauer tends to be extremely hardy.

As previously explained, planetary water is fairly low on Erendauer, and the planet has no real oceans, as such, but several large seas dotted across the temperate and polar areas. The areas of thin crust around the seas have the heaviest tectonic activity concentrated around them, making the most fertile areas of the planet, also the most dangerous. Equatorial areas are mostly desert, again due to low surface water, and as a result most life is concentrated in the upper temperate zones, mostly grassland and lightly pink tundra, covered in a range of sizes of exceedingly dangerous herbivores and carnivores. The distinctive blue and purple colouration of the vegetation and as a result of camouflage, the animal life, is due to the Erendauer system’s sun providing slightly different wavelengths of visible light and therefore the photosynthetic pigment of the plant life absorbing mostly in the red and green wavelengths and emitting in the shorter blue and ultraviolet ones. Most Erendauerian life is therefore able to see in ultraviolet to some extent for greater food visibility.

The Wendauerians, History, Ethnology and Biology

The Wendauerian race evolved from a small, agile and particularly vicious pink and blue two-legged beach-and-shallow-roaming hunter-scavenger, given to occasional cannibalism and angry competition with its rivals. Tool use probably developed a few hundred thousand years before the present and technological evolution progressed rapidly to the present day.

The early Wendauerians most likely lived in loosely-organised and shifting Hunter-Gatherer tribes controlled by a powerful and particularly angry matriarch. This pattern is preserved to this day among the people of the Northern Wastes. Although arable farming was never really developed except in a few isolated societies close enough to a stable water source, herding and animal keeping allowed the necessary surpluses of food for the development of cities and civilisation, mostly on the northern temperate plains, where complicated city-stockades formed to keep out roaming beasts.

Inevitably, war between different city stockades tended to erupt rather rapidly, and was for most of Wendauerian History, the main population control, since only parents with vulnerable offspring would, grudgingly, turn down the chance to fight. Warfare mostly involved spears, cut from hardy, full grown trees which were rare, and thus valuable symbols of status, often passed down in pairs in the female line for the use of a mating couple. Thus, Wendauerian heraldry, rather than being based around anything so evidently cowardly as a shield to hide behind, relates to the patterns upon a family’s spear (for instance the red and blue quartered of the Royal de Lanseau line, originally formed around the haft of the spear). Things continued in much this vein until the first of the city-stockade coalitions formed, making the nations thus formed and the wars thus involved progressively larger until one particularly nasty one wiped out half the population of the entire planet and a grudging peace was declared, the wars being transmuted into immensely vicious and annual games presided over by the Queen with representatives of tribes and cities all over the planet duelling for the honour of their homeland.

Windsong de Lanseau and her sister Skysong are both Wendauerians, and the current Queen and heir apparent to the throne.

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