A nigh-exhaustive sheet of illustrations I’ve made of some of the various Kami or nature spirits that inhabit the magical island continent home of Keiko Yamamoto and her friends, complete with scientific names as if they were described by an inter-dimensional team of paleontologists and zoologists. All these creatures, which were once revered by the animistic Ancient Aetherosians for centuries and possess both positive and negative traits and can be either helpful or harmful to humans, aren’t known by their binomial names in-universe and are found throughout Aetherosia’s forests, wetlands, mountain valleys and deserts, and many of them are the tutelary spirits of their lands, such as the horned, Fire-breathing theropod Julius being the tutelary guardian of their Hills of Fire. These Kami (none of which are shown to scale here) come in a variety of shapes, sizes snd abilities, and will be touched upon in future posts. But for now the most common nature spirits that occupy the herbivore niche are Lophosaurus and Megapodosaurus, the piscivorous Phoenicopterusaurus is found near rivers and lakes, and the dominant top predator is the horned Carcharodontosaurus relative Ceratovenator ferox, which was once widespread throughout Aetherosia but was heavily hunted by goblins and humans alike for its horns, which were said to have medicinal properties, during the 50-year-long Arpan-Thuban War, and was thus driven to extinction with the last-surviving members of the species such as Julius himself hiding in the Hills of Fire. It is only with Keiko’s magical assistance and her affinity with the natural world that these creatures come to her aid in preventing the Arpanians and Thubanians from seizing the Golden Orb, the most sacred possession of the Dynasty of Trians which once ruled nearly the entire world for over two millennia, during the final Battle of the Forest of Hope.
