Awesome / Serina

Unmarked spoilers below.

---

• The description of the ornimorph life cycle, starting from humble beginnings as a tadpole-like larva and culminating with its final form being a long-lived, airborne bird that spends its whole life on the wing and never again lands.
• The tyrant serins. Birds are descendants of dinosaurs after all, and in this strange new world the humble canary has once again become a mighty beast rivalling its distant bygone ancestor, the T. rex.
• The boomsingers naturally count, being giant avian sauropods, towering 30 feet high and producing musical, melodious calls that can be heard for long distances. Archangels have a similar appeal, the huge beautiful white birds descending onto the savanna in great flocks with trumpeting calls.
• The description of the tribbetheres' rise to dominance, emerging from the unassuming mudskipper-like Mudwickets into one of the most successful, diverse and longest-lasting lineages in Serina's history.
• The Subjugator, a T. rex-sized bipedal apex carnivore, is easily the most badass member of the entire tribbethere lineage.
• The sapient antlears waging war on their also-sapient predators, the gravediggers, and actually winning, driving their enemies out of their forest. Later on, when things get dire in the last ice age, the antlears and gravediggers call a truce and manage to coexist peacefully, working together to keep the forests alive in the ice age.
• In a way, the idea that the humble bumblebird would be the last bird standing after the ice age has driven all other life on the planet to extinction.
• The carnivorous trunko known as the grisly carnackle is partly Nightmare Fuel and partly awesome, easily one of the most badass and almost demonic-looking of all Serina's birds.
• The bumblebear is a giant perdatory bumblebadger related to the gravedigger that, being the size of a full-grown grizzly, becomes the apex predator of the steppes in the Middle Ultimocene. Extra awesome points given its heritage: it is one of the last remaining vivas, which dominated in the Cryocene, and having them reclaim their role as top carnivore is in a way quite badass in itself.
• The saga of the Daydreamer is amazingly detailed and worldbuilt: it delves deep into the idea of a civilization based on thought alone, explains their unique Bizarre Alien Psychology as a side effect of their half-brain sleep like cetaceans, depicts multiple races and cultures within the same species, and even goes into their beliefs, religions, and their society, and conflicts, shaped around such beliefs.
• Brighteye saves Blaze from a dire bumblebear by imitating the alarm call of a bumblebear cub, drawing her away and then pushes back a herd of razorbacks trying to bite a chunk out of the wumpo. Incredibly brave for a bird risking his life for a stranger he barely met, against animals that outweigh him several hundred times.
• While it all ends in tragedy, Whitecrown uses what he learned from his brother and the wumpo family in order to become a great leader amongst the bluetails using the power of fire, despite his albinism marking him as a pariah, allowing them to hunt on a scale impossible for them before.
• With his dying breath, Brighteye manages to make the observer feel shame, convincing what is effectively Serina's god that the sea stewards shouldn't have to suffer for its own mistakes.
• A pillar of light, curving into the sky. The observer in the foreground doesn't know what it is or the implications, but life on Serina will not die with the planet, this time on their own two feet.
• All in all, the very idea that one small unassuming bird can eventually give rise to such an amazing and diverse array of species of all shapes and sizes is an amazing thing to behold.

---