Animals of Teraell

File:Dorath ring.jpg

A Dorath team closing its ring around a stopped wagon.

The animals people keep in the Known World, by what they do. Every English name here is a translation, not an identification — see eta:Conventions. What lives outside the walls and wants to kill you is under Dangerous Fauna and Flora.

Thirteen animals do most of the labor of the world; seven are kept for what they produce; five kinds of fish are taken from the water and one great creature is hunted in the northern deeps.

Hidden truth — not known in Teraell

Most of the kept animals are not native to this dimension. They descend from stock the old world's scientists pulled through from our world as early tests of dimensional transfer, and later engineered in desperation as their civilization collapsed — some to feed people, some as weapons and counter-weapons, and some so that essential work would go on when the power stopped. The native animals of Teraell carry bone in the skin; most of the brought-through ones do not; the exceptions were copied deliberately. Nobody alive knows any of this, and no one in nine centuries has had a reason to wonder. Each page says what is true. See What the Old World Left Behind.

Working animals

Haulage

• Dorath — the great draft beast, on which all overland trade depends
• Brosdh — the small draft beast that pulls everything else, and the Brosdhun of the mines
• Draebaech — Clearhold's pack animal for the high paths
• Wallach — the beast of the flooded Ireis fields

Riding

• Vaelith — the riding animal: fast, armed, and never approached from behind

On the ground

• Vennek — the guard animal that kills Svaekoil and sleeps between the wagons and the dark
• Wysk — the herder that sees the Draech before the herder does
• Neska — the granary hunter, and the Gyrska that became a pet

In the water

• Slyva — the harbor animal of Eldershore, too clever by half

Birds

• Broek — the message bird that flies fixed routes and refuses strange faces
• Kaeva — the walking hunting bird
• Skae — the diving bird of Stormharbor's shallows

Food animals

• Baechri — the highland ruminant; Fleisk, milk, and meat
• Chichei — the farm bird that lays all year
• Eledh — the beast that eats the city's waste and is eaten in turn
• Nywich — the pollinator, and the source of Nyona
• Serwy — the insect whose cocoon is Shilkra
• Fraeska — the reef colony that sweetens seawater in a ship's hold
• The Dorath as food — see Dorath#As food
• Fishing and the Sea Harvest — Haerl, Taedh, Zhoena, Volka
• Kravoen — the Hunt

The rest

• Pets and House Animals · Vermin · Insects · Birds
• Wild Animals of the Frontier — Roeva, Waeva, Rava, and the small ordinary things
• What Is No Longer Here — the Fellwyr