White waters of Abo

Also a thick enough atmosphere will prevent tidal locking, which is something else to note I suppose lol.

Well, had it been a diamond-nails hard sci-fi, I would agree with you, but it's not.

Though, it's first time I heard about how thick atmosphere preventing tidal lock. I mean, there are instances of a tidally locked gas giants. Typical hot Jupiters would like to have a word with you.

No, thankfully not. White waters of Abo are named so because of fast running waters that look white.

In certain regions, though, water isn't very drinkable. But you can tell one from another by colour - white and murky water typically has acids, while clean and clear does not. There is a notable exception: a dayside lake that locals call "Uwa Ichit" or "Lake Don't {Drink That}".

Local oceans, though, have an unholy amounts of filter feeders, some of which are spicy little shits who host these pesky extremophiliac bacterial colonies who will happily break down acids, for fun and food.

Solution in water comes from aerial organisms, who just probably hate everyone else. While alive and/or consumed when still fresh they are perfectly safe to eat and not acidic. But once they are dead and after their soft tissue decomposed, their shells and/or skeletons start slowly turn into something like calcite. Then after you apply a lot of pressure, some animal waste & lighting, chemistry will happen and aerocalcite will break down into an weak acidic solution.

Sorry folks still no pictures. But I'd better heal properly.

So the most common type of relief you will see just about everywhere is a fracturescape. Fracturescape is created when you mix a plateaus, canyons, caves, and acidy solution with some wind/water erosion and some very stubborn sedentary and borrowing lifeforms. And upon it everything else is built.

Second - such thing as "aerial plankton" exists.

Third - cardinal directions are zenith (~north), nadir (~south), dawn (~east), dusk (~west). Nightwards - go to the edge of the map till you hit Nightside. Same with Dayside. Edge of something means borderlands between of light zones.

Concentric nature of this world might be strange but as is.

Cyclelands

Most frequent feature are gigaforests that can go as high as 2 kilometers up (or ~1.24 miles).

Colossal "trees" that compose them, the irminsuli, are not true plants. They are closer to earthen coral but again, it's a very loose comparison. Ediacarian fauna might be closer. But regardless, their petrified and extant exoskeletons provide living space and evolutionary opportunities for life for uncountable amounts of actual plants and animals.

Also irminsuli have an interesting (but also completely understandable) preference for seismically calm regions. And they tend to stay away from the coasts. Well, given that a single individual might weight tens of thousands of tons I can hardly blame them.

Shallow seas of the Cyclelands are brimming with life due to being fully in the photic zone and having constant addition from cold currents that form in those parts, that exist in the Duskwastes. Line between coast and shallow water is blurry on Marmakul as it's are covered with sunken forests filled with smaller and a lot less "finicky" relatives of irnimsuli called laeradi. They grow to be "only" about a 100 or so (~330) meters high and tend to move a lot more. And they do great in water too. Underwater and aerial biodiversity in this region is unrivaled.

Polar eye (if it is a tiny insulated ocean or a big insulated inland sea is up to debate), on the other hand is a whole different kettle of tea. It's dark and deep and surrounded by a ring of fire. It's a highly active regions in term of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Creatures, plants, algae and fungi that live in there are adaptive and opportunistic.

Dayside

Moonstrike canyons are a very interesting feature. Well, remember how I said that this world has 2 moons? The gravitational pull is several times stronger than on earth and waters tend to rush in and out twice a day, creating wast and deep labyrinthine semi-fjords semi-canyons that stretch well and far into dry land. Their walls are typically covered with holes from borrowing animals, vines hanging mosses and plants, colourful lichen and fancy mushrooms, that apparently like to flex on each other whose fruiting body's are weirder and/or prettier and/or explode louder.

On top of these narrow chasms entirely covered with predatory grass (which is in fact a type of land-dwelling algae: Marmakul doesn't have any sort of grass analogue) with rare spots of sinkhole lakes. This biome revolves entirely around titular algae, it's preys, parasites, symbiotes and generally those creatures which don't bother it much and themselves aren't to its gastronomical liking.

Away from canyons, fjords and strange grasslands lays an inland sea surrounded by swampy plains which in turn surrounded by Crown Ridge or, how folks here call it "Cradle of Lightnings". Essentially, it works as one colossal storm generator: winds blow across the sea and the surrounding swampy plains. These air masses meet the high mountain ridges that are about 4 kilometers high and enclose the plain from three sides. The heat and moisture collected across the plains create electrical charges and, as the air masses are destabilized by the mountain ridges, result in thunderstorm activity.

In the Centralian Sea life is no less abundant despite it being much hotter and highly unpredictable. Lush algae mats grow big and thick, providing hiding places and food. Storms might tears them apart or even set on fire the upper layers but hey, it only makes things more interesting!

Rule of thumb again: the more active the suns are, the bigger the eternal storm become, the more ozone this place generates. Keep in mind, eternal storm never ceases, it just shrinks.

Duskwastes

At the Edges of Dawn and Dusk there are familiar gigaforests and parts of Crown Ridge. But gigaforests are lower here, and if you keep moving nightwards, they will start giving place to open spaces more and more until forests turn into colossal stone steps called the Dreaming Veld, it's a beautiful place with still enough light from two suns and large amount of bioluminescent plants, lichens, algae, fungi and animals. But we have to leave the Veld with it's red and purple flora, picturesque waterfalls and high energy storms behind us.

Lower we go and lo! Behold the purple meadows of twilight. Beautiful rolling hills as far as eye can see. Ethereal-looking plants float in the midair. Fungi that decided that cosplaying jellyfish is cool thing to do. Are those rocks or a colony of feathertongues?

We will leave purple meadows (at Dusk) and it's sister biome of pink steppe (at Dawn) behind and go further nightward. Vegetation turns darker and darker until it's all just different shades of violet and black. Strange creatures lazily stack us but keep their distances. Bioluminescence is everywhere.

Down to the White Mirror we go. Poetic name for a large region of salty flats. Once here was the sea. But now it's long gone. Water in the rare springs we might come across has a strong taste of minerals.

Wind rises. And so does the earth below as we go up again. There is a short stripe of meadows again but stop almost abruptly. We are entering the Lapidarian heights. Their upper parts are covered with crookedwoods . Valleys below are mostly open mosslands with patches of mushroom scrubs.

Lapidarian heights are full of holes and caves. Underground petrified tunnels left ages ago by giant creatures long gone, made even bigger by acid solution. They stretch long, so long, who knows to where..? Fresh water tubeworms filter boiling hot streams, strange eyeless fungibeasts lurk around hydrothermal vents in the lakes, walls are covered with bio- and chemoluminescent algae, something makes strange noises in the darkness of lower levels... The less said about these tunnels, the better. They are no place for sane sapient creatures.

Nightside

At the edge of the night hurracanes are frequent and violent, as cold and hot air masses move and collide.

In the center of Nightside there is an ice shield, that also grows or shrinks depending on activity of the suns. Crown Ridge cuts through it. Around it there is a freezing blind tundra lit by aurora nyxis, stars above and light reflected from the neighbour gas giant planet.

Further from it, there are icy waters of Sunless Ocean, dark & deep but fruitful and a lot calmer, compared to it's dayside counterpart. Continental shelf is very small here. But various kinds of hot spots are frequent.

Chaoticae chasms that cover all of the Nightside are very deep. As deep as 2 kilometers or so. Rumours say that their walls are composed of petrified shells of irminsuli ancestors. Who knows, who knows... Regardless, at the very bottom of chasms hot hydrothermal waters boil and rush through the narrow passages.

The on the walls of chasms hanging gardens devour all light available, no matter how dim, and bath in the hot air that ascends from below. Mushrooms evolved to rival trees. Some plants have embraced their predatory urges. Feathertongue grow giant, they love to feast on all and any flying creatures that migrate using the warm air currents from Day to Night and back.

But the greatest of all chasms, The Marakot's Claw, is a sight to behold. Marakot's Claw is extraordinary deep, narrow, flanked by mountains and looks like an almost perfect arc, curving for over whooping 4000 kilometers (that is about ~2485 miles). It's 30 to 220 kilometers wide (18,6 to 136,7 miles) and about 3-4 kilometers (1,8 - 2,4 miles) deep.

To clarify how big it is, I made a similar arc on the map of China.

I will tell about it more in-depth later.

Evolutionary-wise, early life on Marmakul had three unrelated ancestors for animal life. So it resulted in three main brunches.

Decapods (10 limbs)

Tetrapods (4 limbs)

Asymmetrical pentapods (5 limbs)

Compared to Earth, Abo vegetation (plants on Ged are often endemic) range from black to blue to purple-red in coloration.

This has to do specifically with the fact that both stars are red dwarfs. They are dim compared to the sun, thus plants need to gather either all possible specter of light available (black/dark violet) or from specific ranges or because they they simply never invented green chlorophyll or chlorophyll at all (blue, purple-red and red).

Bellow are the examples of earth plants of similar coloration:

Black/violet

Blue/violet

Blue/black

Blue

Purple/red

Red

Rule of thumb: The less light, the darker the plants are.

So, plants in Duskwastes are black and violet, Cycles lands have mainly red and purple, while Dayside have lots of blue with other colours here and there depending on biomes.

Blue colour comes from phycocyanin (it also has the side effect of being a good anti-venom). Red from - phycoerythrin.

Purple ones are more ancient type, relying on iolantophyll. On Earth chrolophyll-phototrophs evolved to take the part of spectrum not taken but more ancient retinol-phototrophs and thus are appear green (and use only certain and not the most beneficial part, not to mention that it's pretty narrow). On Marmakul the opposite thing happened. So lots of plants are purple or red.

Black plants are typically some variation of mentioned above with some adjustments, but there are true black plants that use iridiscentum. It's unique to Marmakul and basically allows plant to do photosynthesis on steroids, using all light possible for maximum effectiveness. This, however, has a side effect of being relatively costly energy-wise compared to all mentioned above. So given that they tend to grow in regions that are rather poor in resources, true black plats evolved to hunt, mostly in passive manner, akin to earthen jar plants or venus flytrap. But there are those who prefer active lifestyle, so to speak. Because if you want to survive on the edge of dusk, you must know how to spin.

But this is a story for another time.

If we compare both Zolok and Yaria to our Sun, you will see that they both of them are quite small in comparison.

This is because our Sun is yellow dwarf star. Yellow dwarfs are somewhere in the relative middle of the main sequence stars of dwarf type, so to speak. Red dwarfs are on the smaller end of star size scale.

More so, it is the binary star systems that are found in abundance, as opposite to the singular star systems like our Sun. What else is different?

Red dwarfs have periods of violent energy outbursts and periods when they are very calm and their brightness dims greatly.

Sure it means that it will take longer for life on a planets of such stars to conquire land. But lifespan of sun stars greatly exceed that of yellow dwarfs, such as our Sun.

So if anything, life here is going to have a gift of time, something bigger stars cannot afford. But what else smaller size of the stars mean to the development of life?

Here we have Marmakul, which is a tidally locked planet with two suns and two moons. The planet has only one giant supercontinent, the titular Abo, with a horribly fractured relief. There is also a minicontinent Ged (or a big island, take it as you will).

Also, don't be fooled! Marmakul is locked towards two suns at once. What results in a rather amusing situation.

In the center of a Dayside a giant storm is always raging. It can grow as big as a whole Dayside, if both stars are in the active phase. Or shrink back to the area shown on the map under sub-stellar point.

You can read general biome overview here and general overview of plant life here.

This is a spec evo / worldbuilding blog that is dedicated to my head world inspired by... omegaverse of all things.

Don't worry, we will have a map, a guide and a place to stay)

I'm not an early bird but the Zolok is rising, we need to start moving.