Name : Syranx
Specie type : Fauna, Feliform. Superficially similar to ocelot and clouded leopards.
Weight : The adults weigh anywhere between 15 to 22 Kgs and the males are typically on the heavier side of the range.
Length : The head to body length is typically between 25 to 40 inches, with the tail nearly the fool body length at 22 to 34 inches.
Height :The shoulder height varies between 18 to 20 inches.
Typical Lifespan : 30 to 40 arcs
Special characteristics : Extremely intelligent and sociable. Special to Moseke and Qylios who have gifted the whole species with certain characteristics in the past.
Frequency : Rare in the Ywyngyll. Non existent elsewhere. Expert at hiding, difficult to capture alive.
Level of Danger : For a Syranx on its own, the danger is moderately high, but increases to extremely dangerous if the syranx is in its home territory and has clan members close by. Even if alone, it is difficult to capture alive, and even if captured, will be able to escape most traps since they are treated as dumb animals by almost everyone.
The Syranx, superficially similar to many medium sized wild cats, are not your usual felines. Quite intelligent, they have a complex social structure, even a nascent culture, unknown to the wider world.
Biologically they would be able to adapt to live in most places, barring the very cold and the very hot. However they best prefer forested areas, and call the Ywyngyll forest their home. Perfectly suited for their forest existence, they are equally comfortable on the ground, the forest canopy, and paddling in water.
The Syranx, being a feliform species, is superficially similar to some of the medium sized wild cats (ocelot and clouded leopards being the most common confusion) common to Idalos. However there are many subtle differences as well.
The biggest one probably is that their front paws can essentially work as hands, having two opposable thumbs bracketing three fingers, much like the arrangement of digits in Ospreys. This allows the Syranx to be a particular good fisher. They will wait motionless in shallow water for fish to approach, and catch it with a sudden grasp downwards. The thumbs, along with the fully retractable claws, also help provide a more secure grip when travelling in the forest canopy. All paws are lightly webbed, allowing them to enjoy the shallows and the smaller water bodies. However they are still quadrupeds and as such the paw-hands can not truly compete with the true hands of the bipedal races or the mer.
They have slender, graceful bodies, with a long tail that helps them with balance. The coat is short to medium, plush and silky, with bold black markings. The background colour is most commonly a shade of yellowish brown or a shade of grey, with the bellies absent of the black markings. The black on black variant is less common and no other variations exist. The eyes are either shades of mossy green, or golden in colour.
The adults weigh anywhere between 15 to 22 Kgs and the males are typically on the heavier side of the range. The head to body length is typically between 25 to 40 inches, with the tail nearly the fool body length at 22 to 34 inches. The shoulder height varies between 18 to 20 inches.
Few people are aware of The Immortal Moseke’s role in the founding of Rharne, but no one knows that she stayed in the Ywyngyll Forest for a few trials afterwards. As the immortal of life, Moseke felt a particular affinity towards the Great Unabor Forest and decided to spend some time there getting to know all the life it sheltered. During this time, she noticed a species of wild cat that, unusually enough for felines, hunted cooperatively and showed a much more sociable nature. Watching as the family group hunted together, fed and cared for their young, and most unusually even their old, she felt a faint touch of the same fascination she’d felt when she’d first met her human tribe all those arcs ago. Watching the cubs play in a shallow stream, she felt a momentary sense of peace, and as a reward, she decided to make a gift to this species. This wasn’t like creating a new race, she merely breathed the tiniest bit of her power into the Syranx with the intent and hope that the power, in time, help them rise up above their merely animal existence. Within a few generations, the Syranx were changed into their current forms, with their paw-hands, a much higher intelligence, and the beginnings of telempathic abilities. Moseke’s power continued to make slow but subtle changes with each generation, helping them along on the path to a nascent civilization and full sapience.
Some two hundred arcs after Moseke’s gift to the Syranx, the Syranx came to the notice of the immortal Qylios. The Syranx were no longer simple animals by then, and were starting to think in conceptual terms. The story goes that Qylios arrived to mark a young human boy who had come to her notice only to find that the strong bonds of family and the courage he had displayed in their defence was something new. The boy had been lost in the forest when barely 6 arcs old, and after watching the boy struggle for a trial or so, a Syranx family group had adopted the orphan. He was nearly 12 now and he had risked pain and worse to rescue one of the cubs from a band of poachers who had somehow managed to trap the cub and carry it to a nearby village. Qylios was impressed not just by the boy, but also by his tale of how the Syranx had protected him, cared for him, and even loved him like another, somewhat strange cub. So along with marking the boy, she gifted the Syranx with bonding, a limited manifestation of her power that she hoped would help allow the species to achieve a closer understanding and rapport with the other races of Idalos.
The human boy and the syranx cub he rescued were the first bonded companions.
A bond is an intense, but limited, connection that very very rarely forms between a typically young syranx cub and a human child or adolescent. The bond allows communication via sense (visual/auditory/scent) images and emotional context but does not allow true thought/telepathy barring exceedingly rare emergency sendings. The syranx are much more adept typically at this than the average human since they are used to communicating among themselves telempathically, much like the Diri.
[columns=3]
Communication & Language
The Syranx can glean a lot of knowledge about each other and the physical world via scent. Their visual, auditory and olfactory senses are almost on par with their wilder cousins. In addition to their original repertoire of intraspecies communication via typical feline body language and vocalisations, they now communicate amongst themselves telempathically, much like diris do. The working range for this is usually up to a kilometre, though distress calls have been known to reach out much further. Being able to physically see or sense another makes the communication better.
Older Syranxes pass on their experiences, stories etc to the younger ones via memory songs, and indeed some individuals having unusually exceptional memories act as the clan’s repository for such received wisdom.
Reproduction & Life
The syranx are a slow maturing species, with cubs taking up to six years to reach adult status. The mature syranx mate for life, and typically only mated pairs are fertile. Cubs tend to be born in Ashan and typically born in litter sizes of two to three. The family group as a whole takes care of the cubs though the young remain exclusively with their mothers for the first four weeks. The cubs are completely weaned when roughly half an arc of age, and they are fairly independent by the time they are an arc old, preferring to explore beyond their home ranges. Relations between clans are typically amicable and the juveniles frequently visit and travel through many clan ranges in their exploratory phase before mating and joining a family group.
The typical lifespan is 30-40 arcs.
Social Structure
The family group, headed by a mated pair in the prime of life, is the basic unit of Syranx society. A clan is a group of usually related family groups, that frequently intermingle. Though all adults and juveniles are expected to be able to hunt for their own food, at the clan level an individual takes up other roles like that of hunter, soldier, nurturer, healer, singer (equivalent to the oral historian) etc.
The clans are hunter gatherer in nature, residing in an area for five to seven arcs at a time before moving to a new range. The presence of paw-hands has allowed the syranx to also master certain specific skills like using vines as ropes, basic knots, and some very rudimentary tool use. However they are still primarily feral in their mindset.[/columns]
[columns=2]
Diet
The Syranx are technically omnivores, though they both prefer and need the bulk of their diet to be animal in origin. Being intelligent, as well as cooperative hunters, they are often able to bring down much bigger game than their appearance would suggest. This along with fish, forms the bulk of their diet, but they also supplement this with eggs, some varieties of birds and reptiles. The vegetable portion of their diet consists of berries, fruits and a few other plants.
Homes
Though the syranx spend a lot of their active time in the trees, they prefer to nest in sheltered hollows or small caves. The ideal syranx home is a defensible cave network that can house a good part of the clan and the cubs. The area is always deep in their range and is guarded extremely well. The home is lined with soft vegetation and syranx are known to build a winter larder of sorts come Vhalar.[/columns]
Temperament & Personality
It might be simplest for someone who had to interact with the Syranx to forget all their assumptions about what an animal is capable of. They are very intelligent, comparable to human ten year olds at the very least. However their intelligence is of a very alien sort when seen from a humanoid perspective.
The Syranx population is small but stable. They aren’t unaware of humans, in fact a rare few curious individuals even go so far as to prowl through human settlements once in a while. The Tunawa in the Mistral Forest are known as well. But they tend to lump most other races into human since it’s very unlikely that they’ve come across one of the more exotic races.
There are some rumours about how sometimes Ywyngyll cats have been known to lead human children out of the forest. On the whole, however, they are cautious and suspicious of humans, preferring to hide away and go into guard mode if human hunters or travellers ever enter their territories. A bonded syranx will almost always prefer to pretend to be a simple, if slightly exotic, wild cat.
As their awareness of humans grows, there has been a growing collective sense that it’d be better to seek out more places they can build homes in. The occasional bonded syranx-human pairs have also helped them begin to understand the dangers and benefits of human contact better.
Credit : Pepper
